If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

You’d think he had said the m-word right out loud. Merger.

Actually Assemblyman Marty Causer didn’t come right out and say school districts need to merge, but you’d think he had said something almost as shocking as that at a recent appearance.

Mind you, I have been a merger-urger in my day. And I lived through a major merger right here, first as a student and then as a community member while various aspects of that merger were being played out.

Merging was how we got this school district. That’s why it was called the Port Allegany Union School District, for years. Now it has reverted to Port Allegany School District (PASD), and the junior-senior high school is referred to as Port Allegany High School (PAHS) once again, as if the system and the secondary school had always had the same geographical territory and grade-range they do now.

But no, for generations there were neighborhood “grade schools” or “grammar schools” throughout the five municipalities presently in PASD, and each municipality had its own school system.

Some of us remember when we “moved up” to a more distant school, a larger one, and rode a bus to get there. Or when the school we attended was closed through a limited consolidation affecting the grade schools of our township.

We would not be allowed to go to the “town school” until we were in junior high. Until then we experienced a kind of cultural segregation, country kids not mingling with town kids at least in schools.

Even in high school there were still some barriers between country kids and their age contemporaries who lived in town. We bus kids did not participate in after-school activities as much, because we would not have a way home if we stayed at school for practices and rehearsals instead of catching the bus. Some families did have a parent and vehicle available to make the extra trips, but some did not.

Liberty Township kids did attend the borough high school, and  junior high as well by the late 1940s.  After all, the township surrounds the borough. It had neighborhood grade schools on all sides of the borough. It had consolidated all but one of its neighborhood schools into Liberty Consolidated and arranged for students to attend the town high school.

It wasn’t that the little school systems were utterly independent of outside rules, and isolated from one another. There was a County School Superintendent. At least once a year this august personage visited each school in the county. I remember Mr. Lillibridge and Mr. Barnhart.

Port Allegany didn’t have its own superintendent? No. So who was in charge of the town school system? That powerful individual was known as the supervising principal. Fred N. Hardy served for many years. There was a high school principal as well, for many of those years, and an elementary principal. Some of us remember Edison Bates as a teaching principal, but Albert R. Skelton was the first full-time high school principal I remember. Clyde Lynch was the building principal of the Church Street school (elementary and junior high), and later the elementary principal.

Another wave of consolidation swept across Pennsylvania, and affected this area strongly. Our new local school system included Port Allegany Borough and the townships of Liberty and Annin—and also crossed the county line to include Roulette and Pleasant Valley townships.

The Roulette High School closed. Turtlepoint school, which had 12 grades at one time, closed, as did any remaining neighborhood schools. Liberty Consolidated became the Mill Street Elementary school in the new union school district, and the Arnold Avenue High School was repurposed as another elementary school. (It had a new wing built after the Church Street School burned.) Roulette got a new elementary school for the Potter County kids K-6.

At no time during the changes did I notice much of any dismay on the part of children. It was an adventure to go to the next school, a bigger one, farther from home. It was exciting to meet more kids, to be in a building with older students, to be assimilated into a bigger student body.

Later as a parent and adult community member and a journalist, in western New York, I covered many attempts at school mergers, and saw some succeed and others fail.

There was a seven-district effort, then a five-district plan, and those didn’t fly. But Cuba-Rushford made it, and Bolivar-Richburg, and Alfred-Almond, and Belfast-Angelica-Belmont. Eventually all the districts had been combined somehow except Friendship, which had not liked any merger at all, and Scio, which had narrowly rejected merger with Wellsville.

But years later Friendship— practically a ghost town, graduating a dozen or so kids a year, unable to field teams or afford teachers for all subjects, relying on distance learning more and more heavily—proposed a merger with Scio. Scio acknowledged that it did need to partner up somehow, but the district boundaries made for awkward bus routes. And, well, Scio seemed to think Friendship was too provincial. It rejected the joinder by a strong majority.

Every time, it was not the students who resisted mergers, or thought the community would evaporate, or lamented that the school colors would be different, or they might not have the same name for the year book, or that a different mascot or team name would adorn their uniforms. They felt able to sing a new alma mater. They were up for change.

It was the parents, especially the ones who had grown up in the community, who were nostalgic for their own school days and wanted their kids to replicate those experiences in detail.

Would today’s parents want to go back to the pre-merger conditions? Likely they know the education of then would not be adequate for the students of today. There is no going back.

There also is no standing still! Combining a layer of administration isn’t such a radical notion. It has happened before.

Peace.