All these small river towns outside of Pittsburgh, or some may call it the suburbs, should merge into bigger school districts, such as Oakmont and Springdale/Cheswick, Lower Burrell and New Ken/Arnold, Kiski and Lower Burrell, just to name a few examples.
It’s not like I am asking the United States and China to merge into one superpower to take over the world. These are only small river towns. With declining population in Western Pennsylvania, all these small towns can’t operate financially anymore like they did in the 1950s through 2000. We have to stop pushing up school taxes and real estate taxes on the elderly and low-income residents, before they start moving away also.
Armstrong School District worked out when it merged two schools into one. Let’s use them as an example. Franklin Regional and Fox Chapel seem to be doing OK, but not Penn Hills. We might need to consolidate Penn Hills into the Plum Borough School District.
Who knows how long we can go on like this. The heydays of the Alle-Kiski Valley are over. We need to start merging to stay alive and still find a way to compete in high school sports and, most importantly, education.
James Illinsky
Vandergrift