Saranac Lake’s Addison Dann, right, and Ticonderoga’s Gabby Dedrick fight for possession during a home matchup in September 2022. The Red Storm will now compete with a new mascot: A Red-Tailed Hawk. (Enterprise photo — Parker O’Brien)

SARANAC LAKE — What’s that up in the sky? It’s a Red-Tailed Hawk, the Saranac Lake Red Storm’s new mascot.

More than 1,600 Saranac Lake Central School District community members have spoken and definitively voted for the fearsome winged predator to represent the Red Storm in voting that ended on Monday.

School board member Justin Garwood, who reintroduced the idea of designing a mascot for the district last year, said the bird was the “overwhelming choice” from the voters.

SLCSD has been the Red Storm since 2001. Before that, school teams played as the Redskins, a name that was retired by the school board more than two decades ago. The culturally insensitive slang term for Native Americans was deemed offensive at the time.

In all, 1,619 students, employees, alumni and community members voted last week. That’s four times as many people as the number of voters who cast ballots during the school budget and board election vote in May and 400 more people than voted in Saranac Lake’s latest mayoral election.

In fairness, board Chair Mark Farmer pointed out they don’t let children vote in those elections. Students were all but required to vote in this mascot decision, and Garwood’s data shows 80% of the SLCSD student body voted.

The vote used ranked choice voting, and the winged bird soared above the competition.

Red-Tailed Hawk came away with 60% of people’s first-place choice. Moose came second with 23% and Storm Hero came third with 18%.

“This was a landslide,” Garwood wrote in an email. “For one option to get 60% in a three-way race is overwhelming.”

This was consistent across the different voter subgroups, with between 57% and 68% of students, employees, alumni and community members making Red-Tailed Hawk their first choice.

Out of the three options, voters chose Red-Tailed Hawk as their second-favorite choice 28% of the time and as their third choice 12% of the time.

Moose came next and was 22% of voters’ first choice. Out of the three options, voters chose Moose as their second-favorite choice 42% of the time and as their third choice 36% of the time.

Storm Hero was 18% of voters’ first choice. Out of the three options, voters chose Storm Hero as their second-favorite choice 30% of the time and as their third choice 52% of the time.

Garwood once again reiterated this is not a new logo and not a new name, but just a mascot to represent the Red Storm spirit, which it hasn’t had before. He compared this to his alma mater, the University of North Carolina’s Tar Heels, which is named after the working class term the state bears, but has a ram as its mascot. Plenty of professional teams have mascots that aren’t related to their team names, he said.

Students have submitted concept art for what the mascot could look like, which will inform the final image, but the final image will be created by a professional artist. The process of finding a professional to do the work starts now.

This voting caps off an eight-month process by the SLCSD Board of Education’s Mascot Subcommittee, which included two public hearings and three rounds of community submissions.

Through this process, the school board chose to remove its initial Fox mascot option and replace it with Storm Hero after public input. Last week, though, Stormy the fox wrote a poem in the Enterprise submitted by Vanessa Pillen, standing up for better perception of foxes.

In 2001, SLCSD changed its team name in a 6-1 vote with a lot of input from the community, as well as local Indigenous people. The district then selected a new name in a student poll, with the Red Storm earning 39% of the vote.

The district was not the first to make the hotly debated change, but it was ahead of the curve in terms of replacing racially or culturally insensitive sports team names. In July of this year, the New York state Education Department will officially ban all Native American mascots for schools in New York.