Montrose High recently unveiled the Red Hawks logo with contestant winners Andrew Jutten and Hailey Eldridge at the Montrose High School silent auction held on Wednesday, April 27th in the Loyd McMillan Gym.

The contest held at Montrose High was for students to illustrate a new Red Hawks logo for the school next year. First place winner Andrew Jutten won $500 and Hailey Eldridge won second place with $250.

MHS chose Red Hawks for the new mascot for a few reasons. The red-tailed hawk is the most commonly seen hawk in Colorado and it has fierce features. Each winning contestant had accomplished this Red Hawks image with precision and appealed to the judges.

“You know what, I’m excited for the new chapter. It’s been kind of a frustrating process. It’s not something any of us wanted to do but I think we’ve wrapped our heads around it and we’re ready to move on,” Superintendent Dr. Carrie Stephenson said.

After 90 years of the MHS logo being the Indians, and with recent laws, Montrose was required to change the Indian logo, for which we chose Red Hawks. MHS held a silent auction at the school in order to sell all Indians merchandise and swag in order to fundraise for the new process of the Red Hawks logo. MHS had raised more than $22,000 within the night. The high school sold various items from chairs to Indians pride flags.

With a painful process, many students participated in the logo contest in which two logos were chosen for the McMillan capstone, staff and student apparel, as well as across the school. Jutten’s logo was decided to be placed on the McMillan capstone, apparel, and the Auxiliary gym, while Eldridge had a more text based logo which was chosen to be placed on the football sign, and more sign based items throughout the school. The rest of the logos were designed through a company creating five other logo styles, undetermined where all are to be placed.

“Well I’ve always liked text based designs the most so I knew I wanted to make something with text in it,” Eldridge said. “I played around a lot with different fonts and colors, and it was definitely a process because I wanted it to look perfect but overall it was fun and it’s something I really like doing.” 

Eldridge specializing in text based formats had helped her choose a perfect design for text based logo areas. With much dedication and time, she has been happy with her results and even happier to win the competition. 

“I’m really excited and I’m happy I got $500,” sophomore Jutten said.

Jutten was ecstatic to hear the news of winning and grateful to have earned  $500. After trial and error with looking through many designs, Jutten had found that he wanted a front facing red hawk with mountains. This effort and skill in digital design is what earned him first place in the logo competition.

While MHS had not been ready to part ways with the Indians mascot, the school staff and board have accepted the idea, and are ready to move forward with excitement of new school spirit.  While not finding it ideal to have such a sudden change, MCSD has gotten around to the excitement of renovating the school logo with the images from students, staff, and school board alike.