The newly built Farmington High School in the Davis School District, which will open for the 2018-2019 year, has already chosen its mascot. However, Farmington resident and parent Kyle Fraughton isn't pleased with the school's choice, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Fraughton feels so passionately that the mascot name will be met with mockery from rival students that he started an online petition to change it.
"After first hearing about the mascot of Phoenix, I was practicing some cheers for the upcoming school year with a couple of my neighbors just for fun. We cheered, ‘Go Phoenixes!' However, it didn't sound right to us, so we looked online to makes sure that we were saying the pluralized word of Phoenix correctly. We quickly discovered that although Phoenixes is an acceptable way to say it, another pluralization is Phoenices. So we changed our cheer to, "Go Phoenices!" Which is when the concern began to set in," the petition states.
"We were horrified to hear that the phonetics of the word Phoenices are far too close to the word penises. I don't mean to be crass, but don't want there to be confusion around the point I am trying to make," the petition adds.
"There will be a never-ending barrage of references to male anatomy directed at our children as they participate in any kind of sports against other schools."
As of Wednesday afternoon, 3,133 people have signed the petition.
According to a spokesman for the school, Chris Williams, the phoenix mascot was selected by prospective students.
In addition, in a statement Farmington High School Principal Richard Swanson said that the word would remain singular and would not be pluralized.
"We are one," Swanson said. "We are the phoenix." An elegant solution.
Fraughton claims that when he talked to his neighbors about the mascot name, they quickly came up with crude cheers that could also be likely devised by rival students at athletic events.
"We're a bunch of grown adults sitting around talking about phoenices and how funny that is," Fraughton said.
Williams reached out to administrators of five US schools with phoenix mascots and they all claimed that there was no evidence of excessive mocking or vulgarity related to the mascot name.
"He's entitled to his opinion," Williams said of Fraughton's petition. "We don't agree with it at all."
