By Chandler Inions

SALISBURY — “We have a new name for our school.”

Rowan-Salisbury School Board Chair Kathy McDuffie Sanborn remarked those words on Monday in reference to the former Knox Middle School, after the board approved a new name and mascot.

The Salisbury-based school, which will no longer just be a middle school but serve students from 3rd grade through 8th grade, will be known as the J.H. Knox Intermediate School moving forward. The school will retain Trojan as its mascot.

A new name has been in the works for some time. Seeking to gauge local input, the school system contracted assistance through a community design team that conducted surveys and interviews before consolidating the data and presenting a complete picture of what stakeholders desired.

“I am really excited that this is a step forward, a very public step forward,” RSS Superintendent Dr. Kelly Withers said on Monday. “If you have not gone by, lots of progress is being made and this is a different form of progress on that project.”

The history of the name

J.H. Knox was the superintendent of Salisbury City Schools before the school district merger, serving in that role from 1934 to 1968.

“I had to get (Executive Administrative Assistant to the Superintendent) Sonya (Mulkey) to go back and check that because I thought there is no way someone did that job for that long, but it is in fact true,” Withers said.

It later changed from Knox Junior High School to Knox Middle School.

Knox died in 1983 and left an endowment to build nearby Horizons Unlimited.

“That was a unique endowment,” Wither said. “If you have never read the story of that, you should. He left an endowment to build it but said that the endowment was only good if the community could also raise X amount of dollars to go towards the project because he wanted it to be a community investment.”

Today, Horizons Unlimited serves students in Rowan County as well as surrounding districts for different projects in science, social studies and innovation.

“We are grateful for that endowment and (his) service for many years as superintendent,” Withers said.

Renaming process

Withers indicated that the reason RSS wanted to engage with an external consultant to do this work was “to hear the voice of the community, unhindered by our opinion.”

The superintendent said that the surveys which were conducted involved students and student ideas, adding that there were some mascot suggestions they had to Google.

“There were multiple rounds to the survey and each time they pared down a little more,” Withers said.

While the surveys were referenced on RSS social media channels, they were not readily accessible through that route. Instead, surveys were sent to those that were interested stakeholders by request. Withers said they did not just put the survey out on social media by itself because the district wanted it tailored to that specific community.

“When you put something broadly on social media, this school may have been named by the citizens of China Grove, Landis, New York City or anywhere else that gave us their opinion,” she said.

After that, they brought the data back to the community design team and talked through even some of the mascots that may have been a little lesser known as well as school names and why.

Withers was also interviewed to get some information about the district’s thoughts and feelings in that space.

“The community design team had a healthy dialogue around words like institute and what that may signal in a name,” Withers said. “Other things that might be contained in a name that sounded OK to the person that suggested it but what it may signal to the larger education community as well.”

According to Withers, the community surveys expressed a majority interest in keeping Knox in some form.

“You may remember that that was a debated topic,” she said. “There was a conversation around whether or not it needed to be totally rebranded. Does it need to have the word Salisbury in the name instead of the word Knox? A lot of opinions were floated and there was some healthy banter on social media about that as well but the survey responses show that the majority would like to keep Knox in some form of the name.

“Many former students and community members expressed strong ties to the Knox name and legacy emphasizing that the new school would reflect both the progress and history rather than completely starting over.”

Withers acknowledged that “by the time Knox was closed, there were some issues and things that needed to happen with the physical building as well as the educational experience but that had not always been the case so there was a lot of strong positive memories of the journey at Knox as well, so they wanted to honor both that progress and history as well as where we are going.”

The final two choices for the school name were Knox School of Excellence and Knox Intermediate School. Withers’ recommendation included the suggestion that School of Excellence could be confusing because that title is bestowed onto schools by the state as a recognition for performance, leading RSS to lean with the latter title.

As for the mascot considerations, Trojan was the leading response, with vipers and owls also registering on the scale.

“Community survey responses expressed a strong attachment to the Trojans identity and saw it as part of the school’s legacy,” Withers said. “While the community design team agreed that a new vision and identity for the school is incredibly important, honoring the past traditions is a priority as well.

“Looking at the considerations, this is exactly why we wanted the community design team to do the work because we could have shared our opinions and landed in a very different place and not honored the feeling and pieces of the community.”

In approving Knox Intermediate School, RSS will retain the previous school’s forebear’s initials, J.H. for formal purposes, much like how J.C. Carson High School is more casually referred to as Carson.

School board member Dr. Rebecca Childs made the motion to approve the new name and retain the old mascot. Before making that motion, she said, “Identity is very important and each school in our district has a unique identity and history and I would like to thank the superintendent and community design team for the diligence and care with which you handled this task. Not just attending meetings but also serving as liaisons for that community feedback.”

School board member Dr. Lynn Marsh seconded the motion and it passed unanimously.