Officials, residents ride ‘Bus to the Past’
District tours current and former school sites to celebrate 50th anniversary
Several dozen North Penn School District alumni, staff, and residents spent Friday morning reliving half a century — and more — of the district’s history.
They took part in the district’s first-ever “Bus to the Past,” a mobile tour of 18 current and five former schools that North Penn students have attended throughout the years.
“I’ve been to a few of the schools, maybe half of the elementary schools, but it’s just amazing how gigantic the district is,” said Victoria Fogel, mother of two students at Pennbrook Middle School.
Among the district officials, past and present, on the tour were Don Venema, assistant superintendent and principal at several North Penn Schools; Al Kohler, another retired principal who still fills in as a substitute throughout the district; John Strobel, recently retired manager of Support services; Burt Hynes, principal at North Penn High School until his retirement last year, and Pat Rieker, a former North Penn teacher and member of the Lansdale Historical Society.
They were driven by 50-year district bus driver Jim Allebach past each of the district schools, where current students — and
quite a few mascots — waved as district staff told past and present shared stories.
Penndale “was the former Lansdale High School, that became North Penn High School in 1955, before we moved to the new high school in ‘71,” said Venema.
“In 1995 — I can’t believe this was 20 years ago — I was here when this was a ninth-grade-only school. They did that to have space to divide the school in half: for half a year, we had the kids on one side of the building, and on the other half we shifted them back to complete the renovations,” he said.
Just south of Penndale is the former Hancock Elementary, which was built in 1964 and renovated in to the district’s Educational Services Center in 1990, where district administrative staff now have their offices. Just east on Hancock is Pennbrook Middle School, whose middle school band led by conductor Peter Neu played the theme from “Rocky” as the bus passed.
In North Wales Borough, North Wales Elementary was built in 1927 as North Wales High School, and became part of North Penn in 1966; according to Rieker, students had previously attended school in what is now the borough municipal building on School Street. Students from the entire borough walked to that school until the mid-1970s, according to Kohler, who spoke as the school’s sixth grade class sat on the steps in front of the school and the rest of the school waved from inside windows.
Gwyn-Nor Elementary was built by Upper Gwynedd Township in 1966, and Rieker pointed out a former one-room schoolhouse just west of it on Hancock; district Superintendent Curt Dietrich explained how recent renovations there and at several other district schools have installed secure entry ways connected to the Raptor security system which scans drivers’ licenses of those who visit.
Heading up Line Street, the trip passed the Williamson Square development constructed over the past several years by developer W.B. Homes on the site of the former Line Street Elementary, which had bene built in 1951 and closed in 1979. According to Rieker, Line Street and two other elementary schools in Lansdale initially remained separate as their own school district when the high schools were consolidated in the 1950s. That project is one of several that Dietrich said is leading to slight fluctuations in the district’s enrolment figures, which had dipped to roughly 12,500 in recent years and is now back over 13,000, and prompts occasional talks on redistricting certain schools to better balance populations. On the border between Montgomery Township and Lansdale is Knapp Elementary,
which the district officials said was initially built in Montgomery but was annexed by Lansdale after its construction in 1955 to connect to the borough’s utilities. Several bus riders commented on the open spaces around Knapp, and Dietrich said he thinks of the school often, but for a different reason.
“One of the interesting things for me as superintendent is the frustration I feel when we have storms that bring down electrical lines, because it seems that Knapp is generally the one that is out of service the longest,” he said.
“The electrical lines that feed Knapp go through the back yards of quite a few of our residents, so it’s difficult to have the trees properly trimmed,” Dietrich said.
As the bus headed through Montgomery Township, the district officials explained how in the 1970s and ‘80s, the district initially tried to purchase the Knapp Farm property as a spot for a second district high school, then eventually bought 125 acres on Lower State Road near Kenas Road as a potential high school site, The district’s school board even debated selling the current North Penn High School in Towamencin and building two smaller high schools, according to district Communication Media Coordinator Bob Gillmer, before those plans failed in favor of keeping the current school.
Montgomery Elementary off Stump Road was built in 1965 and temporarily closed in the 1980s when district enrolment dropped, according to Kohler; Dietrich detailed how Montgomery, the largest elementary school in the district at 680 students, will begin a $25 million renovation project at the close of the current school year which will run into 2017, and the school board plans to begin talks in the near future on possible expansion of kindergarten classes from half- to full days.
Bridle Path Elementary sits behind a residential neighborhood because when it was built in 1994, according to Strobel, the district was experiencing a student boom built three identical sister schools: Bridle Path, Gwynedd Square, and Walton Farm.
“The property was acquired in 1967 and it was used for a number of things, mostly with Montgomery Township sports, until ‘94 when we made the school,” Strobel said.
As the tour visited A. M. Kulp Elementary on Cowpath Road, Dietrich said he when he arrived at the district a decade ago, “I remember coming to Kulp and thinking, ‘If there’s one place that really needs a renovation, it’s Kulp.’” Strobel described how two years of renovations completed there in 2009 updated the school’s utilities and eliminated “a sea of modular (classrooms)” behind the school where a new playground is located now.
Between schools, Venema and Kohler described the problem of the “movie lots” — small parcels of
land located north of Welsh Road and west of Orvilla that were given away to customers of a Lansdale movie theater in the early 20th century, In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Kohler said, the district looked at those lots as a site for a new elementary school, but “we simply could not pull all of the stuff together,” and Dietrich said the district currently owns about 34 acres and has a farmer till the land and grow corn and soybeans there.
The Northbridge Alternative School on Penn Street opened in 2008, after six years of operation at the Boys and Girls Club in Lansdale; Hynes described how students who fail behind or otherwise have trouble with the normal school environment can catch up at Northbridge, as students showed off handmade posters outside the front entrance.
“We want them to stay on track, because we want them to graduate on time with their class,” Hynes said, calling the school “a godsend” for students there.
Hatfield Elementary opened in 1971 and recently relocated all of its students to nearby Pennfield Middle School during a renovation project that ended last year. Dietrich said Hurricane Sandy caused heavy damage to much of the elementary school’s roof in 2012, but temporary repairs were done in just two days, and Strobel said if you recognize a similarity between Pennfield and Pennbrook, that’s because the two were built using the same plans but reversed.
Coming back into Lansdale, Oak Park Elementary students stood in the shape of the letters O and P as the bus passed by, and the district officials explained how York Avenue is the district’s oldest, originally opened in 1926 and most recently renovated in 2008. On Allentown Road in Towamencin, Inglewood Elementary (opened in 1963) and Walton Farm Elementary (opened in 1994) reflect population booms in those decades — and students at those two did not visit due to lunch periods when the bus passed.
On Forty Foot Road, the bus passed the pedestrian bridge and nearby Walgreens Pharmacy built on the territory of the former J. Henry Specht Elementary, which opened in 1909, closed in ‘79 and was razed in 2007. On the other side of Towamencin, General Nash Elementary’s full student body lined up on the curb to
wave to the passing bus outside their school which was renovated in 2011, before the bus made its way through the North Montco Technical Career Center on Sumneytown Pike and to North Penn High School.
At the high school, Principal Todd Bauer and Assistant Principal Pete Nicholson greeted the dozens
of visitors, who heard from Hynes how a series of renovations have increased the school’s capacity since it opened in 1971 — look at the rear of the school cafeteria and you’ll notice different colors of brick from when it was expanded to hold nearly 1,000 students at a time.
“Many of the classrooms — not all of them, but many of them — have the original paint. You would never know it was from 1971, because of the top notch materials they used,” Hynes said.
After a brief lunch at North Penn and tour of its gym and natatorium, the bus passed Gwynedd Square Elementary and the site of the former West Point Elementary, now a Merck facility on West Point Pike with a decorative bench facing the roadway to commemorate the school.
“The renovations, the history, where schools used to be, how they modernized, to the period where they had
one room schoolhouses and before — this was amazing, I’m glad I came,” said Barbarann Voron, who rode the bus with her mother Babs.
A photo gallery, video, and interactive map of the bus tour will be produced by the district’s North Penn TV team and posted on the district website www.NPenn. org as part of the district’s 50th anniversary celebrations. Those celebrations will continue with an online auction benefiting the district Educational Foundation, running from April 25 through May 1, the annual Knights of Honor induction ceremony on May 27 at 6 p.m. reflecting on 50 years of district history and honoring the original graduating class, and a North Penn vs Lansdale Catholic High School alumni football game on Nov. 24.
For more on the district and its upcoming events visit www.NPenn.org or follow @NPSD on Twitter.