History Project Foreword
My name’s Austin. I grew up in Scott Township and went to Chartiers Valley K-12. I graduated in 2013 and went to the University of Pittsburgh for Computer Science. I lived in Seattle and Boston before returning Pittsaburgh in the 2020s. Since then, I've had the unique opportunity to explore the community from which I came.
I began my education at Chartiers Valley Primary School in the early 2000s. On my first day of school, my excited parents put me on the wrong bus which delivered me to the Chartiers Valley Intermediate School. The students looked at me on the bus, noted my comparatively small size, and asked “what grade are you in?” I sheepishly replied, “I’m not in a grade, I’m supposed to be in kindergarten.” When I got off the bus, I found a staff member outside and tearfully told them my dilemma. They coldly told me to go to the office to figure it out and walked the other direction. In retrospect, they’re lucky I don’t remember who they are, else I’d have circled them in a yearbook for this project. The office kindly got me on my own private short bus to the Chartiers Valley Primary School where my mother, now in tears, apologized profusely. To this day it’s still one of my fondest school experiences.
In middle school I helped in the library and befriended the librarian at the time Robin Howard. I learned the ins and outs of library management, asset management, and learned the stories of the senior prank which released thousands of crickets into the library sometime in the 80s. Occasionally, you’d open books to find a dead insect, even in the late 2000s. I remember seeing some of the old yearbooks that I’d come to scan and need for this project, some 17 years later. They sat on a shelf covered in dust, seldom looked at. From my understanding, the library was later replaced with the DMC (Digital Media Center) to adapt to the changing times. To my surprise, the school had a good portion of the yearbooks when I began in 2024, almost 100 years after some of the schools in the collection began.
Over several winter months in 2024 and spilling into the summer, I tracked down (read: aggressively annoyed) members of the district, community, and local historical societies for any old yearbooks they had. There were 10 page spreadsheets tracking the history of 15 schools from the 1800s through 2023, countless Facebook posts, hundreds of miles of trips picking up and dropping off yearbooks, a trip to Harrisburg to visit the state archives, and a lifetime of memories.
What started as a passion project has spiraled into a full scale historical preservation project and pseudo masters thesis. It has been the pleasure of a lifetime. I’ve had the distinct privilege of talking with quite literally hundreds of local residents who grew up here and share an even stronger passion for history than I. I cannot thank enough all of the individuals who sat down to speak with me, trusted me to show up at their house to take their yearbooks, allowed me to borrow irreplaceable documents, and believed in me enough to encourage me when I needed it the most. You’ll find an expansive list of those who helped me on the site.
This project wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. I’d like to specifically thank my partner who not only put up with me having at times hundreds of books covering our apartment, but assisted me in legal research on the district’s history.
I hope the opportunity to view these yearbooks and documents are as special to you as they were for me to discover.
I’d like to remind you that while this site covers the history of the Chartiers Valley School District, it is not endorsed, affiliated, managed, monitored, nor does it represent the current district, their staff, or the administration. Please remember that the history portrayed in these historical documents are a product of their time and cannot be changed. There are some offensive and unfavorable depictions found in older texts. They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now. They will be presented to you in the same way they were published. I don’t believe in censoring texts, and I refuse to do so with these.
Finally, if this project touched you in any way, if you have any comments or questions, please email me and let me know. I’d love to hear any memories you have, or assist in any historical projects you may be embarking on.
Thanks for checking this out.
Austin
apilz[aht]cvtheatrefoundation.org