Should black remain a school color?

Posted by ivy dunn on Mar 26, 2012 in Telegram Past News

If you have kept up on the gossip around Dixon lately, you have probably heard about the DHS school colors incident. A few weeks ago, rumors started spreading around Dixon High School that Principal Barsotti was going to take out the color black in our school colors because black was a “negative” color. As soon as students heard even the slightest rumor, they began freaking out. Many different things were being said about the situation even though only a select few knew the truth.

Have you ever heard about the “Constitution of the Associated Student Body of Dixon High School”? This is a document that has supposedly been around for a few years now, and it states all of the roles of the ASB officers. Quite clearly in Article 1. Section 2 of this document, it states: “Green, white, and black shall be the official school colors.” Seeing as not many people have this document and hardly anybody even knows about this document, this is a big deal.

Notice that in this part of the document that states DHS’ true colors, black is last in the order of the three colors. When you go to a football game at DHS, what color are the uniforms of the players? Black. When you see the cheerleaders outfits, what color are they? Black as well. How about the Track and Field team? Once again, black remains the main color. Most of these uniforms are very new, especially the football uniforms which were used brand new this year. One rumor that has been going around is that our principal just wants black to be an accent color just not a primary color. Once students heard this, they began to worry, since our sports jerseys are mostly black. Then there began another rumor, saying that we were going to have to buy all new jerseys that were mostly green and white. However, this is not the case. Then another rumor began about how we were going to be spending so much money buying new uniforms. Everything was like a domino effect. One rumor after another.

Blackout Friday occurred on March 9, 2012. This was a day for students to show how they really felt about changing our school colors to make black just an accent color. So, during the school day, students wore all black to school to show their opinion towards the subject. This event, created by Will Staiger, was supposed to show DHS staff how students felt about the color black and how it is very important to our school. Amy West is a biology teacher at DHS, and she thinks that students definitely over reacted about the color incident. “I think students are generally very upset with Mr. Barsotti in general because he has been making some big changes,” said West. “I feel like it was way over dramatized, but I feel like it was an excuse for students to not like him even more.”

Erich Baur is a Junior at Dixon High School. “I am pretty neutral about the whole situation,” said Baur. He thinks that if the school has to spend money to make one simple change in the color scheme, then it is ridiculous. He thinks that if people are reacting just because they don’t want that certain color, then that is overreacting. He thinks that the situation will eventually just die down and that the school will get new uniforms only when they need them.

Overall, this has been been the main talk at Dixon High School for the past few weeks. Hopefully the situation will get verified publicly at some point in the near future and that everybody will learn to appreciate and support our new principal.