Murrieta Mesa mascot named

By: LORELL FLEMING - Staff Writer | Thursday, August 16, 2007 11:03 PM PDT ∞

MURRIETA ---- After about five months of discussion and debate, school board trustees reached a final decision Thursday on a mascot for the yet-to-be-built Murrieta Mesa High School ---- the Rams.

"Well, no one can accuse us of rushing into anything," board President Kris Thomasian said after the 4-0 vote for rams. Trustee Margi Wray was absent from the meeting.

The Murrieta Valley Unified School District board made the selection after revisiting the previous options of Mavericks, Golden Eagles and Spartans.

Murrieta Mesa, which will be located on 62 acres at Los Alamos Road east of Interstate 15, is scheduled to open in August 2009. Grading at the site is almost completed, said district Assistant Superintendent Bill Olien.

The board members didn't butt heads with one another Thursdsay on the mascot issue. But Trustee Paul Diffley said rams are not indigenous to the region.

"The sheep that were here were domesticated," Diffley said, adding that the board could go with a mascot with no direct tie to the region.

Thomasian said that Juan Murrieta, for whom the city is named, was a sheep rancher.

"It may not have been bighorn sheep. But they are about an hour away in Anza," the board president said, referring to Anza-Borrego State Park.

Selecting rams as the mascot would be a tribute to the area's history, Thomasian said.

In picking a mascot, the board took another step in anticipation of the school's opening. Estimated to cost $116 million, Murrieta Mesa will have 82 classrooms and hold as many as 2,400 students. Other features include a 775-seat theater, a football stadium and a swimming pool, Olien said.

Construction is funded with developer fees, money from the state and proceeds from the sale of bonds. Murrieta voters passed two bond measures.

Groundbreaking for Murrieta Mesa took place in March 2007.

Leaders of the school district had been talking about building a third high school since 2002 because of the large amount of population growth projected for the area, district spokeswoman Karen Parris said.

School boundaries have not been set for the new high school. But Murrieta Mesa will likely lower the enrollments at the district's two other high schools, Vista Murrieta and Murrieta Valley, by about 600 each, according to Paris.

Vista Murrieta has about 3,600 students, while Murrieta Valley has about 3,100, Olien said.

Around the time of the Murrieta Mesa groundbreaking, trustees started talking mascot possibilities.

The district had posted an online survey in March, and residents offered about 200 distinct mascot suggestions among 450 submissions.

The survey had said trustees were going to select the mascot in April, but they pushed back that decision until May, and then cancelled that vote as well. At the end of May, the trustees whittled down the list of suggestions to eight.

On June 6, they continued to discuss the issue but no favorite emerged.

Trustees appeared to be leaning towards the Rams during a July 3 board workshop.

Contact staff writer Lorell Fleming at (951) 676-4315 Ext. 2621, or lfleming@californian.com.