Chartiers Valley history digitized and made available by Scott Township native

A new website created by a Chartiers Valley alumnus is a one-stop shop for all things relating to district history.

Austin Pilz, 29, of Pittsburgh, took on the project of scanning and digitizing district yearbooks last winter. The idea arose when he wanted to view records from his grandfather’s time in the Navy, but there are strict regulations to explore those documents in Washington, D.C.

So to get qualified to view the records, Pilz, a software engineer, wanted to practice on something he thought at the time would be a “little less intensive” — scanning and digitizing yearbooks from Chartiers Valley and its predecessors. It also was a way to give back to his alma mater, as he is a 2013 Chartiers Valley graduate.

“Where else do you have such a wealth of information, culture and history in one place?” he said.

Roughly 300 yearbooks and 16 schools later, Pilz unveiled chartiersvalley.com on Sept. 9. The digitized yearbooks span more than 100 years and are free to download online. The project is not affiliated with the district.

“High school yearbooks capture the essence of a community, preserving memories that connect generations, celebrate shared experiences and remind us of the unique bonds that shape who we are,” said Alan Welding, an English teacher at Chartiers Valley High School who helped provide yearbooks to Pilz. “The ability for our community to now access this resource from their own home provides more opportunity for personal reflection and memory preservation, as well as a historical record of our community identity.”

Pilz was able to borrow yearbooks over the course of the project from school librarians, the Bridgeville Area Historical Society and members of the community to begin scanning. Pilz used nondestructive scanning, where he did not damage any of the loaned yearbooks. All yearbooks were returned to their respective owners.

He solicited Facebook pages to obtain yearbooks that weren’t available at the schools. He recalled hours of driving all over Pittsburgh to pick up and drop off yearbooks.

“So many people were not only kind and willing but also trusting to lend their yearbooks to a stranger on the internet,” he said.

In addition to the yearbook scans, Pilz took his project a step further by capturing and documenting files on the education system in Pennsylvania and the merger of Scott and Collier townships and Bridgeville and Heidelberg boroughs to form Chartiers Valley. Eight years of discussions, lawsuits, and partial agreements created the first merger between those districts.

Pilz also took trips to the state archives in Harrisburg to scan documents of the Governor’s Committee on Education in the 1960s never before seen by the public.

“It was so cool to capture that huge piece of history,” Pilz said.

Yearbooks posted online include those from all four current Chartiers Valley buildings; Bridgeville/Lincoln, Carnegie, and Scott/Clark high schools; John A. Wight and John Dewey junior high schools; and John A. Wight, Washington, Henry E. Roberts, E.L. Shepard and Samuel S. Nixon elementary schools.

Other past schools are “coming soon,” which means Pilz will need to obtain and scan the yearbooks so they can be posted. People with information can contact Pilz at history@cvtheatrefoundation.org.

The website has been a hit since it launched.

“People say, ‘I get to see myself grow up. It was a trip down memory lane,’” Pilz said.

Pilz also got to take his own trip down memory lane in the process, as he grew up in Scott Township and attended Chartiers Valley schools from K-12.

“I feel like I grew up in a blink of an eye,” he said. “It’s cool to go back and look at yourself. It gave a perspective I had no idea of.”