Welsh Valley Middle School

Welsh Valley Middle School
Address
325 Tower Lane Penn Valley, Narberth, in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, 19072
Information
Type	Middle School
Motto	"Corpori Menti Moribus" ("Body, Mind, and Spirit")
Established	1957
Principal	Mr. Scott Eveslage
Faculty	73
Information	+1 610 664 3112
Colors	Green, White
Website	LMSD.org

Welsh Valley Middle School is a public middle school located in Penn Valley, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania.

Welsh Valley hosts grades 6, 7, and 8. Students filter to Welsh Valley primarily from Belmont Hills Elementary, Gladwyne Elementary and Penn Valley Elementary schools. It is one of two middle schools in the Lower Merion School District; the other is Bala Cynwyd Middle School on Bryn Mawr Avenue in Cynwyd. Most students who attend Welsh Valley continue their education at Harriton High School.

History

The Welsh Valley campus was carved out of Pencoyd Iron Works baron Percival Roberts's five-hundred-acre estate, "Penshurst", whose 75-room main mansion once stood on the land bounded by Tower Lane and Hagy's Ford, Conshohocken State, and Hollow Roads; vestiges of the estate's "hanging gardens" remain visible today through a gate at the bend of Conshohocken State Road north of Hagy's Ford. Until 1980 or so when it was condemned and torn down, the most visible edifice in the area was not the school itself but a 150-foot-tall, red brick water tower that had belonged to the estate's working dairy farm and that stood on the ridge overlooking the baseball and football fields where the spectator stands traditionally have been. It was this water tower that had given Tower Lane its name and that is not linked thematically to the school's "Waterbound" program.

The school's original address was 1320 Hagy's Ford Road, Penn Valley, Narberth, Pennsylvania. That address was changed to 325 Tower Lane in part to memorialize the time of day (3:25 p.m.) at which school had always closed at Welsh Valley.

When Welsh Valley opened in the fall of 1958, it consisted of five separate buildings, connected only by covered walkways and designed fashionably in what was then called "the California style" of school construction. Its three main classroom buildings, 7th, 8th, and 9th, had been designed so that each of the five major academic classes--English, mathematics, history, foreign language, and science, in that specific order—could be taught in two cohorts for each graduating class, one on each floor of a building from left to right. Each homeroom was labeled with one of the letters for the words "STUDY" (top floor) or "LEARN" (bottom floor). For example, the fourth room from the left on the top floor of the eighth grade building was 8D and its homeroom teacher taught eighth grade foreign language; the third room from the left on the bottom floor of the seventh grade building was homeroom 7A and its homeroom teacher taught seventh grade history. The "seventh grade building" was at the bottom of the hill across from the gym entrance facing Hagy's Ford Road; the "eighth grade building", next to the seventh, was up the hill from it; and the "ninth grade building" at the top of the hill was connected by hallway to the main office and overlooked Tower Lane. The gymnasium and dining hall/auditorium buildings rounded out the original plan.

During the first thirty or so years of its existence, students were "tracked" by intelligence and achievement across the STUDY and LEARN spectrum; that is, those students with the highest elementary school grades and scoring highest on IQ and achievement tests were grouped together in S and L classes; those with the lowest measures of intelligence and achievement were tracked into the Y and N classes. Although teaching such classes was widely thought by teachers to be more convenient than teaching classes characterized by inclusion, tracking was also accused of inadvertently causing de facto segregation and fomenting other ills, such as elitism and social ignorance.

Welsh Valley Junior High School and the other Lower Merion public schools were desegregated by court-ordered busing in the fall of 1965.

Boys in this same era were required to wear ties and jackets to school every Wednesday, the day of a weekly all-school assembly held in the auditorium, and the school's dress code required girls to wear skirts or dresses at all times. The Parent-Teacher's Association (PTA) sponsored an annual series of five "canteen dances", held every other month in the gymnasium on Friday evenings from 7 until 10 p.m. For the privilege of attending these dances, at which local bands played rock standards, a student plunked down $5.00 for the year. Mother and father chaperons from the PTA served up soft drinks for a quarter apiece, and many a budding junior high romance blossomed at mid-court to the tunes of the Beach Boys, Beatles, and Rolling Stones. (There was a Wednesday dress code at these dances: ties and jackets were required for boys and dresses for girls.) At the final dance, held the first Friday of every May, the canteen's "king" and "queen" and their "court" of five girls and five boys were crowned, elected the previous March by a ballot of their dance-attending peers.

Even though Welsh Valley was built well into the era of television--indeed, the late 1950s are considered network television's "golden age"--the school was remarkably slow to embrace technology; the televisions that had been installed in each classroom were rarely if ever used during the school's first decades and were never used for communication between administration and students. Mornings began with audio-only announcements over the loudspeaker system, delivered for the most part by the principal or assistant principal, with occasional announcements added by student leaders, such as officers of the student council and sports teams. There were, of course, no personal computers at Welsh Valley until the 1980s.

"Echoes" yearbooks from that earlier era were much like those available today, except that in addition to the usual random photos, portraits of students and faculty, and activities group photos, there was a section called "Boys of Sports" and "Girls of Sports" in which seven or so elite athletes of each gender were selected by the athletic director for oversized portraits on a separate page. Faux leather yearbook bindings gave way to spiral-bound paper in 1968.

In 1979, Welsh Valley was converted from a junior high school to a middle school. With its library historically inadequate and a pressing need for more classroom and computer space, the school was expanded and remodeled by the Lower Merion School District at the turn of the 21st century and was rededicated in April 2001. The former seventh and eighth grade buildings were connected by a classroom addition, and a large library and technology addition to the former ninth grade building extended it in an "L" shape along the former walkway that had connected the ninth grade building to the gymnasium building. The color scheme of the school's additions evoke grape-colored "Welsh" ("Welch") and the green of "Valley" in glass and exterior wall panel.

Six principals have served the school in the half century of its existence; its current chief is Scott T. Eveslage.

External links

• Welsh Valley Middle School webpage, Lower Merion School District website