In a year of transition for Olney High, here’s how one student is connecting the school to its storied past

Olney High School has been a fixture in its community for nearly 100 years — a school where grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles all learned.

But along the way, Olney’s history was often stowed in closets, shoved in storage in the unused library, left to languish at the bottom of a box.

Olney was a Philadelphia School District school from the time it was built, in 1929, until 2011, when it was given to Aspira of Pennsylvania to run as a charter school. But Aspira failed to meet the school board’s academic and operational standards, and the nonprofit lost its charter at the end of the 2021-22 school year.

When it returned to district control this school year, it was, as described by Michael Roth — the veteran administrator who became Olney High’s new principal — “interesting.”

Roth smiles at the diplomatic understatement. That is: On the first day, 750 unregistered students showed up at the school; rosters had to be built on the spot. It took months for credits to be straightened out. The school started the year with 13 teacher vacancies, and the work of building clubs and school spirit and routines is ongoing.

Amid all this, Jason Martir Jr., a senior, had a vision: to put Olney’s history back together.

Every 12th grader at the school worked on a service learning project; Martir’s idea was to locate all the Olney yearbooks and display them. It was a simple enough idea in theory, but given the disarray the district inherited in the building, Martir’s project was a tall order.

“I saw all these yearbooks, and I wanted to put them someplace nice,” said Martir, 19. “This is our history.”

Some were in the library, yellowed with age. Others were found, unpredictably, in different classrooms. It was hard work, but Martir, who attended Olney during the Aspira years, relished it: searching for his mother’s photo, from the 1999 Trojan, helping vice principal Erin Gold track down her mother’s 1978 yearbook, and civics and personal finance teacher Max Kaskey locate that of his grandfather, who graduated in 1957.

And once people got wind of what Martir was doing, they were fascinated. Roth invested in a large glass display case for the grand building’s first-floor hallway, and staff and students started stopping by.

“Every day, we get people asking about it,” said Martir, who envisioned and organized the project with a learning disability. “It makes me happy that people can find their family.”

The yearbooks date to the 1930s. Martir is still missing 23 of them, but he’s hopeful that they will turn up.

Martir plans to attend trade school next year. And he’s proud to join the ranks of Olney graduates, including his mother, sister and aunts.

For the school’s administration, Martir’s project is a way to stitch Olney’s rich past to its evolving present, a way to remember the proms and baseball teams, clubs and traditions of the past and link them to what’s to come.

“It’s so interesting to see the Olney history, to build community,” Gold said.

Roth sees enormous promise in the school of 1,200 students. This time last year, he was trying to hire 200 staff members without a guarantee that the prospective employees would have a job at the start of the school year — Aspira had appealed its charter revocation and Roth knew there was a possibility a court could disrupt the district’s plans to take back Olney.

There were still bumps along the way, especially at the beginning. Transcripts didn’t show up until the week before school began. It took 20 roster specialists from around the city to figure out which classes Olney students needed, and because Olney had only paper transcripts at first, some students had to be re-rostered in December, after credit audits determined what was required to graduate.

But things have begun to smooth out, and projects such as Martir’s have helped reestablish a school identity, a sense of place. Now, the principal has his sights on organizing the school into six majors, including a future teachers’ academy and a health tech track, as a way to help students become further invested in Olney and their education.

“We’re seeing progress,” said Roth. “We’re seeing what this school could become.”