SACRAMENTO — Calaveras and Gustine high schools are going to keep their Redskins mascots.
Gov. Schwarzenegger Tuesday vetoed a bill that would have prohibited Calaveras, Gustine and three other high schools from using the name considered by some American Indians to be racial slur.

“I figured it was a done deal,” Calaveras principal Mark Campbell said. “We seem to do this dance every few years, but this is the closest we’ve ever come to losing the Redskins.”

In a message accompanying his veto, Schwarzenegger said local school districts should make their own choices and that the bill “takes more focus away from getting kids to learn at the highest levels.”

The Redskin will remain in Gustine as well.

“There’s so much town pride in that mascot,” Gustine Principal Karen Larsen said. “We’ve never seen the Redskin as something bad.”

At Calaveras, Campbell said they found out about the veto after school was already out, although a teacher told the football team and cheerleaders at practice.

“They were pretty excited about it,” he said. “Our student body is overwhelmingly in support of the Redskin.”

Donna White, superintendent of Chowchilla Union High School District in Madera County, said school officials were “extremely excited.”

In the Sacramento-San Joaquin valleys, Tulare Union High School and Colusa High School also use the Redskin mascot.

Schwarzenegger’s veto marked the second defeat on the issue in two years for Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles.

Goldberg, who tried unsuccessfully last year to ban a longer list of Indian names from school teams, called Schwarzenegger’s insistence on local control a flawed argument.

“Well, if local control was the issue in civil rights, we’d still have slavery in the South, wouldn’t we?” she said. “In this case he chose to treat it as a non-civil rights issue, which disappoints me. He knows better than that.

“It’s a matter of record that the word is listed in most dictionaries as a derogatory reference to Native Americans.”

Although she told colleagues last month it was her “last time” bringing up the issue, Goldberg said Tuesday that was based on the assumption Schwarzenegger would sign it.

Now, to paraphrase an old Schwarzenegger movie line, Goldberg said she’ll be back.

The bill, which was to go into effect Jan. 1, 2006, would have let schools continue using uniforms bearing the name Redskins until the uniforms wore out or the school selected a new mascot name. The bill also proposed a ban applying to school publications, marquees and signs. Schools that violated the new law could have faced lawsuits and court orders to comply.

All of that was “political correctness rum amok” to state Sen. Rico Oller, a Republican from San Andreas whose district includes Calaveras High School. He praised Schwarzenegger for the action, saying, in a statement, that the bill “would have cost schools thousands of dollars in unnecessary expenses.”

State Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Merced, said “this is a measure best left for locally elected officials. The Legislature should be focused on improving public education, and not on micro-managing school athletics programs.”

Gustine’s Larsen said the bill’s veto will mean one club will have to make some changes, though.

“Our yearbook theme was ‘The Last of the Redskins,’” she said. “It looks like we’re going to have to get a new yearbook theme.

“I don’t think they’re going to mind.”

Bee staff writer Will DeBoard contributed to this report.