LONG-TIME RESIDENT RECALLS KERR’ S 90‐YEAR HISTORY
On a recent tour of Kerr School, Doris Bauer Riethmiller found where her office was in the 1950s – it is currently a computer room on the second floor.
A school photo of Mrs. Riethmiller from the 1950s. ox Chapel Area FOX CHAPEL AREA SCHOOL NEWS
LONG-TIME RESIDENT RECALLS KERR’ S 90‐YEAR HISTORY
Local history says that Kerr School opened in 1929. The building, located on Kittanning Pike in O’ Hara Township, included eight grades. It was named after the Kerr family who donated the property on which it was built. It was located about halfway between the one-room Robinson School on Squaw Run and Dorseyville roads and the four-room Seitz School along Kittanning Pike, that were consolidated to make the new“ modern” school. Anyone who walks through the school can see that there have been multiple additions and updates over the years.
Of course, the written history tells the story of Kerr School and how the building changed over the years, but it cannot convey the warmth and substance of the students and teachers who walked the building’ s halls for nearly 90 years. However, when discussions began last year about constructing a new Kerr on the same property, a family of three generations of Kerr School alumni stepped forward, whose presence at the current school spans nearly its entire history, to tell their story. Ninety-nine-year-old Doris Bauer Riethmiller remembers well – she
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attended Kerr the year it opened as a fifth grader, later sent her own children to school there, worked there, and her grandson also attended there. Before there was a Fox Chapel Area School District, Mrs. Riethmiller can remember and tell the story of Kerr School in a way that no written history can!
Mrs. Riethmiller said she moved to the western part of O’ Hara Township when she was a little girl. She had lived in Lawrenceville and moved with her parents to her grandpa’ s
A photo hangs on the wall at the current Kerr Elementary School featuring second graders from the 1936-37 school year.