The third of the city’s three schools will also bear the name Summit, after the school district board voted Monday night.
At the end of a three-month process to narrow the field of names for the former Rossland Secondary School—now a kindergarten to Grade 9 institution—the board chose Rossland Summit School out of a final list of three names.
It now joins the Seven Summits Centre for Learning, the city’s independent school, and L'École des Sept-Sommets (Seven Summits School), the French school, as the sister schools of the summit.
Although it will keep its initials of “RSS,” there was enough support for the name for the motion for Rossland Summit School to pass.
Some trustees felt there would be confusion in branding the K-12 school with summit, considering there were two existing schools with the name.
“To me, I think it might be a disadvantage to us because they might see the other summit school, rather than the public school,” said Trail trustee Lorraine Manning. “You may lose students if people are searching on the website.”
But calling the school summit was the simplest choice, said Castlegar trustee Jen Carter.
“Some of the fiscal, the financial things that are involved in the name change may not be necessary if we go with the RSS initials and I think that it's important that we choose something that's going to make the transition as easy as possible,” she said.
It was Rossland trustee Gordon Smith who gave insight into the choice of the name, noting that the name reflected the mountain nature of the Golden City.
“Rossland Public School, in my opinion, was submitted quite a bit because it's the obvious choice,” he said. “But I think the community was trying to generate something that would do a little bit more than just an obvious name . . . we're trying to capture the imagination of the residents and build some positive spirit back into that school after the reconfiguration changes.”
Rossland school principal Karen Lavender had told the School District 20 board of trustees on Feb. 24 the school’s name should represent the community, reflect that the school was a public school, be familiar, realistic, connected and easy to say.
The other two choices were Rossland Summit Public School and Rossland Public School.
The former Rossland Secondary School—which now houses kindergarten to Grade 9 students—was in need of a new moniker after School District 20 chose to severe the senior grades from the facility and ship the students to Trail last year.
When the committee of eight was formed in October the call went out to the public for some ideas on what to call the school. Several hundred submissions were collected through ballot boxes at the library, the credit union and other places downtown, as well as online.
A total of 48 unique names were collected by the committee from Dec. 1 to Jan. 15.
— with files from Val Rossi, Trail Times
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