After being open for three years, Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School has announced its new mascot and logo.
The Royals - in purple and gold - will promote the school's desire for excellence and leadership and the Phoenix will symbolize something new and powerful.
The announcement came on a video posted on the school’s Facebook page this week.
“Scholars and families, we are so excited to be represented by Phoenix as our mascot,” said Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School executive director Amanda Johnson in the announcement. “The Phoenix represents rebirth and renewal and we’re so excited about the renewal that is taking place over at Clarksdale Collegiate and in our community. And so we are the Royals. You all know that our scholars are kings and queens and we are excited. The purple represents royalty, so we are the Clarksdale Collegiate Royals. We hope you love it.”
Principal Latasha Capers expressed similar sentiments.
“We are so excited,” said Capers in the video. “We’ve waited three long years. We counted all your votes. We got teacher input, student input, family input, so we are so excited to tell you that we will be the Clarksdale Collegiate Royals.”
Johnson said the vote was decisive and the reaction to making the Royals the mascot was positive.
“I haven’t really talked to any of our families directly, but through Facebook, there seems to be a lot of excitement about it,” Johnson said. “I think people like the design and just from the interactions with our families, it feels like they are pretty excited about it. I know that having a mascot was one of those things that came up multiple times in the past year as far as one thing that they wanted our school to have. We spent time on it at the end of last year. We had our teachers nominate different mascots and we let our scholars vote on mascots.”
Facility updates
The school enrolled kindergarteners through second graders in its first year. It will add a grade each year until there are kindergarteners through eighth graders.
There will be kindergarteners through fifth graders in 2021-22.
Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School purchased St. Paul’s United Methodist Church at 1012 West Second St., but the building only accommodated kindergartners through fourth graders. In order to accommodate fifth and sixth graders, two new buildings are being added on the school’s property. Those two buildings and the old church will be used next year.
The modular classrooms will be taken out of the parking lot.
“We’re pretty close,” said Johnson of having all of the facilities ready for next year. “They’re still going to be working on it up until the day before school starts as far as minor things, but we are confident we will be ready to open for the start of the school year on August 2nd.”
New teachers were given a tour of the new buildings.
“We’re pretty much focused on getting our team ready for the school year,” Johnson said. “We’re in our three weeks of professional development and so that’s been our focus over the last week and will be over the next two weeks.”
Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School also decided it was interested in acquiring the old Clarksdale High School on School Street. Having the old Clarksdale High School will help Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School accommodate kindergarteners through eighth graders in the next couple of years.
“We still have a long way to go with the old high school, so we just said that that’s the building that we’re interested in and we’ll be connecting our lawyer with CMSD’s lawyer in order to start working out the details,” Johnson said.
Johnson did say she was glad to know where all of the school’s facilities would be.
“It feels great,” she said. “It feels good to have a permanent home, a direction for our next move.
“It’s nice to be able to be where we are right now after three years going into our fourth year. It just feels like a lot of things are really falling into place.”
