School Narrows Its Choices for Colors, Mascot

Santa Susana High School is ready to show its true colors. As soon as students and staff pick them.

Simi Valley’s new performing arts and technology magnet school has been without a mascot or school colors since opening in September, but that is about to change.

On Wednesday, the school community will decide how best to represent itself. In keeping with the school’s somewhat nonconformist mission, the choices are a bit unusual.

For the school’s main color, the choices are teal or turquoise. Mascot options are the Dolphins, Stars or Explorers. And accent color combos--yes, accent colors--will be silver and white, white and black, silver and purple or purple and white.

A school committee narrowed the range of mascots by eliminating submissions that were already taken by other schools in the area. Out went the Badgers, Wolves and Eagles.

Winnowing color choices was tougher--a yellow, blue and silver color grouping was tossed “because no one really likes to wear yellow,” Principal Pat Hauser said. A navy and forest green duo was ditched because the colors didn’t contrast enough. A rainbow-striped suggestion was also eliminated, said magnet coordinator Judy Cannings.

“Any color that anyone would wear would have been Santa Susana colors,” she said. “It wouldn’t have been too unique.”

To help students and staff make informed choices, administrators have created two display windows in a school corridor--one showing graduation invitations, balloons and mascots in turquoise and another showing the options in teal. Different renderings of mascots are also on display--from a leaping, graceful Dolphin to a cartoon of a smiling rocket man wearing a jet pack.

Because Santa Susana has no marching band or football team to call its own, the color discussions have centered on graduation gowns and invitations.

Bottom line: The school walls probably won’t be painted with a mascot until graduation time.

It’s a lengthy process, but worth the wait, Cannings said. “Students are setting traditions for the rest of the school’s history,” she said. “They’re taking it very seriously.”