For the 1959-60 school year, there were 2277 school districts in Pennsylvania. There was the School District Reorganization Act of 1961, the School District Reorganization Act of 1963, and the School District Reorganization Act of 1968. For the 1969-70 school year there were 669 school districts in Pennsylvania.
http://mrea-mt.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PA-psba-merger-consolidation.pdf
During the 1960s, there were many proposals concerning which school districts would consolidate with each other. There was talk that Throop, Olyphant, and Jessup would be one school district; Dickson City, Blakely, and Archbald would be another. There were numerous political factors, but I would imagine they may have also considered how they were going to shoehorn the students into the existing schools.
The former Dickson City Junior High School became the Mid-Valley Junior High School. The former principal of the Dickson City High School, Edward Munley, was the principal, and the former principal of the Throop High School, Joseph Regenski, was the assistant principal. In the new environment, students and teachers from the former Dickson City and Throop schools had a familiar administrator in the building, but not those from Olyphant. I would imagine that initially, the seventh through ninth grade students, as well as the teachers from Olyphant and to an extent Throop felt uncomfortable in Dickson City.
The former Olyphant Junior High School became the Mid-Valley Senior High School. The former principal of the Olyphant High School, Stanley Kucab was the principal, and an Olyphant High School science teacher, Frank Rolka, was the assistant principal. In the new environment, I would imagine that initially the tenth through twelfth graders as well as the teachers from Dickson City and Throop felt really uncomfortable in Olyphant.
In about 1977, I remember a teacher telling us that she believed that immediately after the consolidations, the school districts should have planned for the construction of new secondary schools (grades seven through twelve), but continued to operate as they did with separate secondary schools until the new schools were completed. She was fully aware of the initial friction in the newly consolidated secondary schools.
If a new school was built soon after the consolidation, and they waited until it was completed before the students from the three boroughs started attending classes together, things would have gone more smoothly. Instead of “we’re going to their school”, it would have been our school for the entire student body, right from the beginning. Taking this one step further, if a new school were built in the beginning, they would not have needed to consider the utilization of existing schools, and perhaps they could have made larger consolidations (i.e. Dickson City, Olyphant, Throop, and one or two more boroughs).
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