The leader of a chapter of the NAACP in Suffolk County, N.Y., is suing a local school district over its new sports team mascot, which he claims is “racially problematic” and discriminatory.
Brentwood Union Free School District changed its teams’ names to the “Spartans” from the “Indians” after New York State banned public schools from using Native American mascots.
The district took a vote last April to choose a name to replace the Indians and selected the Spartans after “an inclusive process that involved input from students, staff and the broader community,” schools superintendent Wanda Ortiz-Rivera told Newsday.
The district’s then-superintendent estimated in 2023 that changing its teams’ names from the Indians could cost more than $400,000.
Now, the district is set to adopt the Spartans name at the conclusion of the 2024-25 school year after the school board voted unanimously in November to approve the new moniker.
However, William King Moss III, the head of the Islip-Smithtown branch of the NAACP, claims in a new lawsuit that the new name is problematic because the Spartans were a group of white people who enslaved others and did not allow women to serve in the military.
Moss, a former teacher in the Brentwood school district and a father of two girls who are students in the district, filed the lawsuit in state court earlier this month claiming the team name is a “symbol of White supremacy.”
The suit also says Moss’ two daughters “must not be subjected to a symbol of female exclusion” from the military.
He alleges the district and school board violated the state constitution and state civil rights and human rights laws when it adopted the Spartans name.
The school board “could not possibly believe that this was the best, sound educational choice for all the students in the Brentwood community,” Moss told Newsday.
Moss also took issue with the fact that the school chose the winner based on a plurality of votes, rather than a majority, arguing it was the “worst and least effective way” to decide on a winner.
The name won with 2,079 votes out of 9,258 votes cast by students and community members.