Life of Beth=:) (Some necessary background on PA schools)

I was going to jump right into Chapter 8 here, but I realized that I needed a whole post on some background information about Pennsylvania schools, especially mine.

I'm not sure how all the other states in the country district their schools, but Virginia schools (where we are now) are districted *very* differently from Pennsylvania schools (where I grew up.) Virginia makes each whole county a school district, with a few exceptions like the city of Manassas, which is its own entity.

In Pennsylvania, school districts were apportioned more, well, organically for lack of a better word. First established around the major cities, then apportioned (I'm guessing here) as needed in the suburbs. The result was that our tiny suburb of the city of Reading (3 small boroughs) had its own school district, the smallest in the area. We had approximately 900 students in the whole school district when I was in high school. So if one of our classmates' families had to move to another part of town, they ended up in another school district. There had, therefore, *always* been a rivalry with our neighboring (larger) school districts.

When I first started school, Antietam school district had 3 elementary schools (k-6) and one high school (7-12). When I wrote about being switched elementary schools after 2nd grade, what had happened was that they turned one of the elementary schools into a middle school (5-8), my former elementary school into a special ed. center, and sent everyone to the biggest elementary school. By the time I was ready for 5th grade, I went right into the middle school. But towards the end of my time in the middle school, there were rumors that now the middle school would close, and we would have one elementary school, and the high school (7-12 again).

Now, the thing you need to understand is that one of our biggest rival schools was Central Catholic High. Up until that point, it was a mostly friendly rivalry. Most of the kids who went there had entered the district as kids at St. Catherine's, and just went right on up through the high school. As kids we only rarely had occasion to think about anyone's religion. We were a mix of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish kids who really only thought about that when one of us celebrated a holiday that someone else didn't. Until 8th grade.

In 8th grade, the rumblings of discontent began. All of our classmates who were Catholic suddenly started talking about how their families were seriously considering pulling them out after 8th grade and enrolling them at Central because their parents were sick and tired of Antietam's antics (there was much more going on behind the scenes.) And we would joke with them and all, but towards the end of the year, we realized they were serious.

There were around 100 kids in our 8th grade class. I started 9th grade with maybe 80 classmates. Yes, we lost about 1/5 of our classmates to our rival school. From that moment on the rivalry turned very, very bitter.