Supporters of Midgets moniker plan to attend Freeburg board meeting

A group of more than 500 people in support of keeping Freeburg Community High School’s “Midgets” nickname plan to state their case at District 77’s school board meeting Thursday.

Bill Wilson, a Freeburg resident whose daughter is a junior at the high school, said a large contingent of members of a Facebook page in support of keeping the nickname say they plan to show up at the meeting.

“We’re not sure what’s going to happen at the meeting,” Wilson said. “But we want to be sure that no decisions are made before we are able to express that there is another side to this issue.”

Opinions surrounding the nickname surfaced a week and a half ago during a convention of the Little People of America in St. Louis. Members of the organization created an online petition asking FCHS leaders to change the name, because they find it to be insensitive. Members of the LPA presented their petition to District 77 Superintendent Andrew Lehman last week. Opponents plan to present a petition in favor of keeping the name at the board meeting this week.

“I wouldn’t tell you I’m happy with it but I completely understand it,” LPA president Gary Arnold said Tuesday. “It shows that this is generating discussion and people are listening to what we have to say. It’s healthy to generate discussion.”

Arnold said supporters of the nickname probably are right when they say that no one’s ever had a problem with the nickname, but that doesn’t make it right. “For someone like me going into a town that celebrates that as a mascot kind of creates this uncomfortable environment,” he said.

That uncomfortable environment, he said, could affect families who have children with dwarfism—whether those families live in Freeburg or in any other towns where they may play in a game against Freeburg teams.

Arnold said there are no plans for anyone with LPA to attend Thursday’s meeting. But he added, “We don’t want to let it go, we want to keep the issue out there.”

Lehman said he’s not sure what will happen in regard to the suggested change. He said there has never been a serious effort to change the name in the past, and he isn’t sure how board members feel about the issue.

“They haven’t had a chance to talk about it since this came up,” Lehman said. “We’ll have to see what happens at the meeting and determine where to go from there.”

Lehman said he can recall only one person contacting him in the decade and a half he has been superintendent to complain about the Midgets name.

“I would say this situation is absolutely different than anything we’ve had in the past, because we’ve never received a petition before,” Lehman said.

There was an effort about 15 years ago to de-emphasize the Midgets moniker in favor of an unofficial name for FCHS teams, the Blue Rage. But that effort eventually lost steam.

This time the stir is creating national waves. In addition to being picked up on news wires by television stations and newspapers across the country, HBO’s John Oliver mentioned the controversy on his program “Last Week Tonight,” which aired Sunday.

Wilson stressed the gathering Thursday is not a protest or any sort of aggressive event.

“We just wanted to be able to chime in because it’s important the people who live here are heard,” Wilson said. “It’s a shame that an outside group with no ties to the Freeburg area is trying to throw around its influence.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2015 at 2:46 PM with the headline "Supporters of Midgets moniker plan to attend Freeburg board meeting."