At the start of the school year Gonzaga University gave Bowie a cease and desist order for plagiarizing their bulldog logo. Any products created for the school from now on will have to be with a new logo but any current products may still be used to represent the school.

Since November the mascot and logo team, made up of seven staff members, has been working alongside design company Varsity Brands to create a new image for the school to use. They plan on keeping the original ‘Bowie B-Star’ as well as creating a full body bulldog, a bulldog head, and a set of fonts that the school may use interchangeably.

“The ‘B-Star’ is going to stay the same, that’s one of the ones we’ve had forever,” football coach and member of the mascot and logo team Sam Miller said. “It’s specifically to us and is not copyrighted; it’s just one of those things that people identify Bowie with.”

So far teachers have been receiving emails with polls to update them on the process and allow them to give feedback.

“If the logo will be standing for many years to come to represent the staff as well as the student body, then letting the vote be for the whole school would be neat,” sophomore Robyn Andrews said. “Once we all get on the same page it will better unify the school publicly.”

The mascot and logo team has yet to decide if a poll will be available for the students to be able to vote on their favorite design, but they are still taking into account what the community will want.

“People have an emotional connection to the bulldog that we’ve been using so there’s a sense of nostalgia and so anything other than that image doesn’t seem like a fit,” school improvement facilitator Ruth Ann Widner said.

The new logo package is estimated to be finished next school year and the athletic programs will soon be using logos from that package since currently they all use different ones for their products.

“Being a basketball player I see a lot of the bulldog head that we have now since it’s in the middle of the court, and I would be a little sad if it got completely changed forever,” Andrews said.