HANOVER - Close on the heels of a hotly contested bond issue vote last week, another potentially controversial proposal has arisen in the Dresden School District: whether to rename the district's high school.

Norwich (Vt.) Selectwoman Alison May is circulating a petition to put on the warrant for Dresden's annual meeting in March the following question: "Shall the name of the Hanover High School be changed, beginning with the 2006-07 academic year, to Dresden High School?"

May, a Hanover High graduate (of "many years ago," she said) thinks changing the name of the high school would knit together Hanover and Norwich, Vt., the district's two towns, a bit more cozily.

"I've been thinking about it for some years," May said. "I just decided, let's find out how people feel about renaming the high school."

The Dresden Interstate School District oversees two schools, Frances C. Richmond Middle School and Hanover High School. The middle school, named for a longtime school librarian, has a neutral name that favors neither town, May said. Not so the high school.

"I thought it might calm some of the friction between Norwich and Hanover if the high school had a neutral name," she said. "The whole point is to reconfirm the interstate nature of the school district."

Judging by a handful of reactions to the proposal, it might serve as another point of contention between two towns that have found themselves at odds at times.

"I'm not exactly excited about it,"said Bill Aldrich, president of the Norwich Historical Society and one of a long line of Hanover High graduates. "It's been Hanover High School forever,"he said.

"It certainly makes more sense to call it Dresden," said Jay Barrett, Hanover High class of 1971 and a town historian. Once the Dresden district was founded in 1963, the high school's name "became at that point obsolete," Barrett said.

If they choose to rename the high school as May suggests, Hanover and Norwich would be strengthening a name from the Upper Valley's Colonial history.

The name Dresden first appeared in February 1778, when the founders of Dartmouth College created a new town of more than 5,700 acres carved equally from the southwest corner of Hanover and the northwest corner of Lebanon, according to a history of the Dresden name by Dick Hoefnagel of Etna and Virginia Close of Norwich, first published in the Dartmouth Library Bulletin in November 1997.

College founders had initially sought to call the new town Dartmouth, but that name had been taken by another New Hampshire town in 1765.

"Dresden may have been a random choice," Hoefnagel and Close noted. But the ancient roots of the name Dresden, they wrote, translate to "'the settlers in the riverside forest,'" a description "fully compatible with that of the early inhabitants of the Hanover Plain."

In 1779, Dresden and 15 other towns joined Vermont, a union that dissolved after only six months. Two years later, 38 towns on both sides of the river joined Vermont, Hoefnagel and Close wrote, but the union lasted only a year.

A couple of Hanover school board members were noncommittal about the idea, perhaps in recognition of the political challenge the name change poses.

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