Jul 22, 2002 By Steve Ostrosky 6 min read

CARMICHAELS – If a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, imagine the stories that high school yearbooks can tell. Like bound time capsules, yearbooks capture more than just memories. They unlock the door to days gone by that some may remember with fondness and others would choose just to forget.

Ensuring that those memories – good or bad, embarrassing or exciting – are never lost has become the summer project for a dozen Greene County high school and college students working at three local school districts.

The Greene County commissioners have hired students to work on special projects for the past several years, but, this year, Carmichaels Area School District Superintendent James Zalar came to them with an idea they could not ignore.

“We have alumni from Greene County high schools that are out in society and the world and have achieved great things, but we have no idea what they are doing or where they are located,” he said. “It would be nice to have a database of alumni to know where they are, what they have done and what they might offer their home districts in terms of support, technical knowledge or financial support.”

Collecting yearbooks, he said, is the first phase of this attempt. Students are spending their days scanning the pages from all of the yearbooks that have been loaned to the county to date and will spend the rest of the summer putting the pages onto PageMaker design software before the pages are burned onto CDs.

The CDs for each district will be available at all of the high schools in the county, and master CDs of all district yearbooks will be kept at the Eva K. Bowlby Library in Waynesburg and Flenniken Memorial Library in Carmichaels.

After all of the books have been scanned, some work will be done during the school year to track down reunion lists and other databases to start developing the countywide alumni database, but most of that work will have to be done next summer, he said. Each of the districts’ Web sites will have a link to allow alumni to send information about their location and what they have done since their high school graduation or to request CDs of yearbooks they may have lost.

Zalar said Carmichaels has learned of the importance of tracking alumni, especially after the district received a $100,000 donation from alumnus and California state resident George J. Prodan late last year to upgrade technology equipment in the high school.

But, for now, the important part of this project is getting as many yearbooks as possible so that all of them can be scanned this summer. Ann Bargerstock, county director of planning and development and one of the county’s coordinators for the project, said the list of yearbooks still needed gets smaller every week, and she assured people that the books will be returned once they have been scanned.

She said the project can be beneficial for people who may have lost their high school yearbooks and want to be able to look back.

“Yearbooks really are a one-point stop of all the history of these school districts,” she said. “You can see which students were in that school, what activities were popular and even the mode of dress for any given year.”

Bargerstock credited Zalar for being the “sparkplug” that got this project rolling, and she commended the district’s technology administrator, Mark Batis, for providing the software, technical support and assistance to the students throughout the summer.

She said yearbooks will never have to be scanned again after this summer, because the yearbook vendor in all of the districts has agreed to provide a CD of each yearbook starting with the 2002-2003 edition so that it can be archived.

“Once we capture all of this information, every high school will be up to date,” she said. “Some people have graduated 40 and 50 years ago and others may have lost books when they moved or in fires or floods, but it now will only take a matter of clicks to get it.”

Zalar said the project has been a cooperative effort between the school districts, which provided the hardware and software and the CDs onto which the books are burned, the county, which hired the students, and the libraries, which have provided assistance on rebinding the books after they have been scanned.

Eight college students and four high school seniors are working from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. every week through mid-August at Carmichaels Area, Jefferson-Morgan and West Greene high schools to complete their yearbook project.

Margaret Kelley of Waynesburg, a student at Dickinson College, said that the seven students working in Carmichaels are getting 14 yearbooks scanned every day, and she admitted that looking back – especially at some of the fashions and hairstyles -has made the project fun.

Christina Kline, a senior at Carmichaels Area this fall, said the project has definitely brought the group its fair share of laughs over the past few weeks.

“This was my first time looking at some of my teachers when they were in high school, and it was definitely fun to see,” she said.

All kidding aside, Zalar said the students have worked hard to preserve the past for the future and said this work has been the foundation of the entire project.

He and Bargerstock said some data will be collected over the school year, but the real push begins next summer.

For now, the county and school districts will continue to field requests from alumni all over the country interested in recapturing a lost piece of their past.

“It is a lesson in local history for everybody,” Bargerstock said. “What better way to preserve the history of these students?”

“The happiness it brings to people who have lost their books is amazing,” Zalar added. “There is just something about a high school yearbook that people just relate to.”

The county is still looking for more yearbooks from all five school districts.

From Carmichaels Area/Cumberland Township, yearbooks are being sought from 1932, 1933, 1955, 1961, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1975 and 1978.

Only one yearbook from Waynesburg Central, 1924, is still missing from the county’s growing archive, while Jefferson-Morgan yearbooks from 1938 through 1941, 1944, 1955, and 1978 through 1982 still have not been scanned.

For West Greene, yearbooks from 1950, 1952, 1953, 1976, 1984, 1987, 1988, 1991 and 1994 are needed, along with the 1992 and 1995 yearbooks for two pictures.

In Southeastern Greene, a large number of books still have not been located: 1912 through 1940, from 1943 through 1947, 1955, 1965, 1974, from 1975 through 1977, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000 and 2001.