The years of World War II put on "hold" many needed school developments in Beaver County. To win the war was the first priority. Although increased population and movement into the suburbs and townships led to overcrowding in the schools, there was little school construction. Building materials were hard to obtain. In the years following the war, however, a beginning was made to meet the needs of the township and suburban districts especially.
By 1951, there were seventeen consolidated schools in fourth class districts, twelve of them elementary schools organized in the 1-8 plan. One of the seventeen, Darlington joint School, a consolidation of Darlington Borough and Darlington Township, was a combined elementary and secondary school with an 8-4 organization. Hopewell Township had two schools that together formed an elementary, junior high school, and senior high school. Two of the consolidated schools, Highland School in Harmony Township and Patterson Central School in Patterson Township, offered an elementary and junior high school program operating on a 6-3 plan."
The 1951 Public School Annual presented the problem facing the county schools: The Annual "reveals the losing battle which an outmoded tax structure wages against present inflationary costs. It shows the wide differences among districts in their ability to buy education and the lack of adequate equalization formulae to compensate for these differences. This condition becomes more and more disturbing as the people move from urban to semi-rural areas while the major part of the wealth remains in the industrial and exchange centers.""
The state finally met the challenge, and legislation was passed "greatly increasing the state appropriation for building construction and also greatly increasing the appropriation per teaching unit in approved jointures and mergers."" The desired result was the formation of larger units of school administration in Beaver County. This movement was to become state-wide, but action was based on individual county plans prepared by the districts in each county.
The Beaver County Plan for the Reorganization of Administrative Units and Attendance Areas, as approved by the Beaver County School Board, May 21, 1953, was published in the County Public School Annual for 1954. For the next nine years, the plan was studied in the local districts, modified, and carried out with county and state approval. By 1963, there were sixteen administrative units, fourteen of them merged school districts. Only Aliquippa and Midland districts remained single units. The plan identified elementary, junior, and senior high school centers and the buildings already constructed and in use, as well as those under construction or planned for future construction.
But as the reader already knows from the school histories recorded thus far, these plans continued to alter and districts continued to re-combine. The Ambridge Area School District enlarged to include Harmony Township and the Baden-Economy District, as well as South Heights. The Beaver Falls Area School District became the Big Beaver Falls Area by including Big Beaver Borough, Koppel Borough, and New Galilee Borough School Districts. Monaca Borough withdrew from a jointure with Center and Potter townships to again become in 1964 a single school district. Northeastern Beaver County Merged School District became in 1974 the Riverside Beaver County School District. Blackhawk School District became official in 1970, a district reorganized under the provisions of the Reorganization Act of 1968. It consisted of a merger of Highland Suburban School District and Northwestern Beaver County District. These two former districts had included Patterson Township, Patterson Heights, West Mayfield, and Chippewa Township and also Darlington Borough, Darlington Township, South Beaver Township, and Enon Valley. What had been the Southern Beaver County joint School System, linked briefly with the Hopewell-Independence-Raccoon School System, became a separate district, the South Side Area School District, comprising Frankfort Springs, Georgetown and Hooktown Boroughs, and Greene and Hanover Townships.
In the individual school histories we have tried to present the building programs of these newly merged districts. We cannot do justice to the many elemen. tary buildings, junior and senior high schools, the beautiful and efficient school complexes that rose in the late fifties through the seventies in the county townships and suburban areas. Such was Beaver County's response to the demand for equalization of school facilities and programs, for better schooling for all the children of the county, a response made possible by the cooperation of the Commonwealth and the individual districts.