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 .