I agree with your point, but I'm not sure Jeannette is within a 25 mile radius of Pittsburgh. West Greene, Avella and Mapletown certainly are not.
Jeannette is....if you are drawing a true radius. Road wise, it is 27 miles...so yeah, it is 25 miles away as the crow flies.
Would love to see a bill passed which doesn't allow school districts with less than 100 kids per grade. What kind of class offerings can a school realistically offer if you have like 50-60 kids per grade? Like someone said, in Pennsyltucky, fine, you probably cant avoid that, but Greene County HS would be 5A and could offer everything that a Bethel Park or Moon could offer. Jeannette kids, Sto-Rox kids, etc, would have access to so much more in larger districts.
Exactly. And wouldn't serve all concerns better? Better class selection, more competition, likely better taxes, more extra curricular activities including sports?
A lot of it is legacy. People don't exactly grow up and leave. They just move into grandma's house when she passes and the cycle continues. There has also been a steady diet of self determination fed to people out here. Merging might cause a kid from your own town to sit the bench or worse yet, you might have to adopt a curriculum that involves something your town has already deemed unworthy. Mostly, it's geography. Schools might look close on a map but there is a dangerous mountain road in between.
They won't and with current politics (and I don't mean the people in office right this moment but they are part of it) no one, it is not like the 50's and 60's where there was real leadership and they forced mergers. And it should be sold as a way for some tax relief abatement, and also the future of the kids. It does no good for a kid going to a run down, no advanced or good college prep course at Ampipe HS just because they won the state championship in 1954 and people want to still cling to that.
We will see if that same gentleman is saying the same thing 5 years from now when the Jayhawks continue to dress 20 - 25 kids a game and have a 5-5 record every year. Listen I completely understand where he is coming from , hail to the Har Brack Tigers and the Tarentum Red Cats with Cookie Gilchrist and Chris Warner, but if industry leaves your district and the population shrinks you have to adjust. They finally did it in Armstrong County with Kittaning and Ford City. Both schools had very solid sports programs, but they looked beyond that and did what was best big picture wise for the area. The state needs to grow a set and force more mergers like they did in the late 60's. Is this sad , absolutely, but until industry brings back the population it should be done.
But it takes leadership to push threw this. To tell these people to grow up and move along, those days are over.
As we both come out of that merger, I was shocked to learn at one point in time, Har Brack, had more college football players than any other HS in the US. Those times change. Cookie Giilchrist ain't busting through here anymore. I graduated with a class of what, 450 people? Highlands now graduates maybe 220?
Wow. Looking at those townships and school districts, talk about gerrymandering? Jeannette could reasonably be absorbed by GS, Hempfield, Penn Trafford or Norwin and it wouldn't be out of line with how those districts were mapped.
They are crazy. There are houses in Hempfield that are within a minute of another district's schools yet they go to Hempfield.
To be honest, I never realized how those districts were mapped until the discussion in this thread. Like I said, I am familiar with Kiski Area, which is probably one of the largest land area districts in the WPIAL as I can see houses over the horizon which is in Kiski, as can people out in like Blairsville or Saltsburg which is 40 miles away from me.
It's hilarious that Jeanette even has a school district. It's a tiny dot surrounded by multiple much, much larger districts.
Again, I bring up tiny, tiny Austin School District with 12-14 kids..PER CLASS, and like 50% of the teachers are not certified probably because they don't pay anything. How is this helping anyone?
South Allegheny? I've lived in the south hills of pittsburgh most of my life and have followed wpial sports since the 80's and i dont recall ever hearing of a school named south allegheny..Here we go
1) Riverview and Plum.
2) Wilkinsburg and Woodland Hills
3) Split Springdale (Allegheny Valley) Harmar Twp kids go to Fox Chapel, Springdale/Cheswick to Deer Lakes.
4) Northgate and Avonworth
5) Montour and Sto Rox
6) Moon and Cornell
7) Carlynton and Char Valley along with Keystone Oaks 1
8) Keystone Oaks 2 and 3 and Mt Lebo
9) Brentwood and Baldwin
10) TJ and Clairton (yikes!)
11) East Allegheny and Gateway
12) South Allegheny and McKeesport
Come to think of it, it might be the single most anonymous high school in the WPIAL. Never good in anything sports wise, not rich, not hearing much trouble from there....it is like they are the generic brand of the WPIAL.
Been around since 1967 or so; merger of Glassport and Port Vue-Liberty. (PV-L had one of the shortest histories of a school district that I know of; those boroughs were once part of McKeesport Area, but somehow broke away in the early 60s to form their own district.)
That's when my high school was also formed. Interesting it was all formed out of McKeesport probably because back then, again the height of the boomer birth rate by the time they were in high school, McKeesport was huge.
It's politics and prejudice. Sometimes it's ethnic or economic but I'm shocked by how narratives about other school districts become long standing prejudice. "Oh, that school is a mess. Really behind the times." In reality, they have a first rate technology program that would be the envy of many huge schools. "Those people over there are just trash." Their academic foundation hustles and raises enough money that every kid is given an iPad when they graduate and every kid in the district had a computer to take home before any other school district was doing it.
it wasn't my idea. We had no room in the school. The lower shore schools are hit/miss.
