El Dorado County school, one of California's smallest, changes name following state law

Corey Schmidt, The Sacramento Bee on Jul 22, 2026

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California’s ban on certain Native American names in public schools has reached one of the state’s smallest school districts.

Indian Diggings Elementary School District will now be known as the Omo Ranch Elementary School District to comply with California’s Racial Mascots Act.

The district’s only school, Indian Diggings Elementary, also will be renamed Omo Ranch Elementary, according to Superintendent, Principal and sole certified teacher Grant Coffin. The school is expected to have 10 students this fall and serves transitional kindergarten through eighth grade.

Coffin said the new school name comes from the unincorporated community where the school is located, near Somerset. The former Indian Diggings name was also a geographic reference.

“Our school was founded in 1856 in the town of Indian Diggings that was named by the miners, the gold miners that were up here,” he said. “The town was founded about three miles away from where we are now. That town died out in the 1940s, and there was a sawmill across the street here in Omo Ranch, and they asked the school to move up to this location.”

The Racial Mascots Act, signed into law in 2024, prohibits K-12 public schools from using certain Native American terms, including “Indian,” for athletic team mascots, names or nicknames, according to previous Sacramento Bee reporting.

Marysville High School also made changes to comply with the state law. The school removed its Indian mascot and the phrase "You're in Indian country" from the walls of its gymnasium, according to previous Sacramento Bee reporting. Marysville has not announced plans to adopt a new mascot.

While changing a mascot and updating facilities to remove former symbols or names can prove costly, Coffin said he does not expect it will cost Omo Ranch Elementary School District more than about $3,500.

He said the relatively low cost is because the school does not have athletic uniforms to replace or a gymnasium to renovate. Instead, the expenses include business cards, letterhead, consultant fees to complete the name change and replacing the sign in front of the school.

“It could be expensive for most schools to make a change like that, but for us, it was not,” Coffin said.

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