Time for Foxboro to decide.

The proverbial feces is about to hit the fan in Foxboro, where the debate over the use of Native American imagery to identify its high school athletic teams will be debated this week, and then decided next week.

The School Committee will have a forum Tuesday night at the Ahern School for residents to offer three-minute presentations on the topic. Then on Oct. 2, at the committee's regular meeting, the issue will be put to a binding vote.

The current Foxboro High sports logo.

There are many ways this can go. Either the town will stop using the logo that was formerly the intellectual property of the NFL franchise in Washington, D.C., or it will also drop the nickname "Warriors," or maybe it will keep "Warriors" and cease any connection to Native American imagery -- something recently done by the King Philip Regional High School athletic program.

The open forum has been limited to Foxboro residents only, although an exception was made for those in the METCO program which brings inner-city youngsters into the Foxboro school system. Would-be speakers had to register to speak, and the School Committee intends to keep a tight rein on the proceedings.

I would have loved to put in my two cents' worth on this issue. I've covered Foxboro sports regionally since the late 1960s and then post-college at The Sun Chronicle and The Patriot Ledger of Quincy from 1977 through 2018. Today, I do occasional work for Foxboro Cable Access, having called several girls' basketball games for Cable 8 Sports including last season's Division 2 state championship game. And I lived in the town from 2002 through 2015. But this is my only forum for personal opinion now, and while I may be as knowledgeable on the subject as anyone that will speak on Tuesday, it's not my place to ask to do so.

Had I the opportunity, however, I may have opened by telling the School Committee that they really botched this process. 

For at least a couple of years prior to the current controversy, Foxboro was already phasing out the Native American imagery. They've done it quietly and without calling attention to it. In most correspondence regarding the athletic program, the former logo of the Washington Redskins, which the NFL team adopted in the early 1970s and didn't appear on Foxboro football helmets until 1983, had disappeared in favor of a stylized blue and gold F. Gradually, the logo also disappeared from the few athletic uniforms that previously had an embroidered version of it. About the only place where the logo was still in use was the football helmets.

This also identifies Foxboro sports.

I have a feeling that an order could have been issued quietly from above to remove the Redskins logo and to replace it with the same logo being used on school correspondence, and no one would have been the wiser. There may have been a few grumbles at first when someone actually noticed the change, but eventually, everyone would have gone on with their lives and dealt with far more pressing issues, and it wouldn't have become a public bitch fest -- which it has already become, given the petitions circulating around town and the signs touting "Warrior Pride" on front lawns.

But no, the school committee brought this up several months ago and had a series of meetings, and public pronouncements of angst attracted the Boston TV stations' cameras to chronicle yet another battle over political correctness brewing in the commonwealth. It now has a life of its own.

Even my former newspaper has chimed in. They've suggested in different editorials to drop the logo, to drop "Warriors," and even to rename the Foxboro teams after the professional football team that calls the town home. Personally, I don't believe there's a lot of sentiment in favor of the latter -- especially now that the Brady-less Patriots can barely beat the New York Jets. 

The fact is, this could have all been handled quietly and with sensitivity to Native American culture by dropping the Redskins logo that was ripped off Washington's helmets in 2020. They could have kept "Warriors," as King Philip has, without the triggering imagery.

I imagine the oratory will be emotional on Tuesday. There will be townies that will decry wokeness and blame Communists and so on, and there will be well-meaning individuals that will try to point out that the younger generation of Foxboro students are rejecting the old stereotypes and trying to show more respect to other races and other cultures.

Foxboro, after all, is changing. Once one of the whitest communities in the commonwealth, the student population (currently about 2,500) is 74.6 percent white, 8.6 percent Hispanic, 7.5 percent African-American and 5.2 percent Asian. The numbers from the state Department of Education also indicate that Foxboro's student population is 0.2 percent Native American. The kids don't do the tomahawk chop at their games and they probably don't have the same feelings for the old logo as their parents did -- or maybe even their grandparents.

Now that this has become a full-blown issue, I don't see a happy ending for those that want to embrace the current logo, and maybe even the nickname. Natick, Barnstable, Nashoba Regional, Taconic High of Pittsfield and several others have either changed their nicknames or dropped Native American imagery, or both. Walpole dropped "Rebels" and Westford Academy altered "Grey Ghosts" to simply "Ghosts" because their nicknames carried the hint of Confederate taint. Stonehill College and Bryant University made clean sweeps of old nicknames and imagery. Others like Tewksbury, Braintree and Dartmouth have battled tooth-and-nail to keep theirs.

My compromise for Foxboro, because it has increased visibility from the Patriots' presence in town, would be to drop the logo and keep Warriors -- and then hope that some attention-seeking lawmaker doesn't again file a bill in the state legislature seeking a complete ban of nicknames and logos with even a hint of Native American imagery. It's already happened four times in the last decade, and one of these days, one of those bills may make it out of committee and force everyone to adopt non-offensive monikers such as "Screaming Turtles" or "River Rabbits."

I feel for Foxboro. I really do. Nobody likes to be told to do something. But maybe we should remember that "Redskins" was a slur from the very beginning, and its sports use originated right in our own backyard, with the Boston Redskins NFL franchise that adopted the name in 1933 and kept it when it moved to Washington in 1937. I would not want the former logo of that team to be associated with my community solely for those reasons.

This Hornet offends no one.

But then again, I don't have to worry about that in my hometown. In the 1940s, one of the more popular serials on national radio was "The Green Hornet," stories of a crusading newspaper publisher named Britt Reid that fought crime at night as a costumed hero, with his trusty Asian sidekick Kato at his side. When Mansfield High School students were polled to adopt a nickname, they voted overwhelmingly for "Green Hornets," with "Marauders" a distant second. 

To date, nobody I know has been offended by "Green Hornets" or the accompanying insect imagery -- although the students of the 1970s embraced The Incredible Hulk as an alternate mascot (well ahead of the curve of Hulk's current popularity) without changing the nickname. But fortunately, the students of the 1940s were wise not to create a mascot based on the Kato character. We'd be in a world of hurt over that, I suspect.

I wish my friends in Foxboro the best of luck in settling this without too many ruffled feathers. I'd have a hard time thinking of the Foxboro Warriors as anything else. And I think there's still time for the art of compromise to preserve "Warriors" for a long time, no matter what the state legislature does. I'll probably tune into Foxboro Cable Access to see how the battle is waged.