Last week students may have noticed that the Apex logo on our school’s website. The update in the colors was no sudden shift, but a change that needed to be made to honor our school’s true history– one that many students in recent years do not know.

If you could, can you let me know the story behind our school’s new logo?

The deal with the colors is that when the schools were segregated, you had Apex High School–which was the traditionally white school–and the colors were black and gold. They were the Yellow Jackets. Then you had Apex Consolidated and the schools merged with integration in the mid seventies–I think it was around 1976 when they merged. They met to decide on the colors and everything. Each school got to bring one color in. Apex Consolidated brought the green, and Apex High School brought in the gold, so the colors were then green and gold. Any student who graduated from 1976 through 1999 will say that those were their colors. Uniforms and everything were green and gold. In the late nineties the Student Council approved a change for black to be the trim color for Apex High School. Black was supposed to just be the trim color, but we found that on the black uniforms, the black and gold combination was very popular. The students who graduated from the early 2000’s to 2018 have associated Apex High School with only being black and gold. When you look at what happened the green kind of got pushed out–unintentionally, inadvertently, but we essentially became the colors of one school, black and gold were the colors of the yellow jackets. We have had some correspondence with some members of Apex Consolidated and some alumni who graduated before 2000 wanting to know why we took the green out. This had larger implications because the green representing the consolidated school’s contribution to the merger. We felt like going back to the new school though the colors of the past logo we have been using for years is aesthetically pleasing and everybody likes the black and gold the right thing to do is to add the green back in as our school colors. We aren’t taking away the black because for eighteen years students have associated Apex with that. We are simply adding the green back in. There is no push for all green uniforms or anything. It is to just get the green in there so all the colors from Apex High school are represented. When we were doing the logo we wanted that to represent all of Apex’s history, not just the current history. When you look at the gym floor at the new place or the gym itself, you will see that the predominant colors are still black and gold with added hints of green. We have gotten some backlash for that from current students, but the right thing to do is to include the whole history of our school. We felt like this was the perfect time to rebrand a little bit.

So did the push for the green to come back soley come from those students who graduated in the 70’s 80’s and 90’s?

Yes, it was brought to our attention by those students, but it wasn’t just “where did it go?” It was also, “you should have been better than to let this go this is our history,” and when you look at how probably sensitive and how thoughtful the conversations were when the school was integrating to just completely disregard one school’s color and to essentially and unintentionally go back to one school’s both colors. It was unintentional, but it was something that needed to be addressed. It was brought to our attention and students today probably don’t even know that story. The community reached out to us in disappointment because we seemed to neglect our history, and a lot of people who still live in Apex graduated from Apex Consolidated and their kids, and we wanted to make sure that we did it right. We aren’t trying to overwhelm everyone and change everything; we are just trying to be inclusive of all the colors so that you will see all of them represented. When you walk into the gym at the new school you will not only see black and gold, but the hints of the green in there. This is so our alumni from the past can come back and feel that this is their school as well.

Thank you so much to Mr. Ferguson for giving us this detailed account of the reasoning behind our school’s rebranding. We hope that by bringing attention to the history behind the green in our logo, students will reconsider their automatic contempt for this change.