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Welty Middle School

315 4th Street N.W
330-364-0645


History

In the early part of the 1920s New Philadelphia's City School District faced the problem of overcrowdedness. The Board of Education began discussing plans for the building of a Junior High School. In September of 1924, the State of Ohio Department of Industrial Relations and Inspector Nichols furthered the cause by stating insufficient air space in the Central High School for the student population.

On October 23, 1925, the Board decided to name the new school Joseph Welty Junior High. Joseph Welty, the Superintendent of New Philadelphia City Schools for twenty-five years, helped shape the district in the mid-1800s. The first to be called a superintendent, he earned $500 his first year. During his tenure he and another man designed and built an addition to the Union School, the only school in New Philadelphia at that time.

Besides supervising and teaching duties, Welty dealt with the maintenance and upkeep of the school and purchasing materials for the system. For three years during the Civil War, two other men unseated Welty at the position but he again took over as superintendent in 1865.

When the school burned in 1877, Welty traveled across the state visiting schools to find a suitable model for New Phila's school. It opened in 1878. In Welty's final year in the position he earned $1300. Because of his years of service to the school district, his name adorns the Junior High

The biggest news for Welty Junior High in this decade was the fire on March 4, 1990, that destroyed the high school library and ten other rooms. While no part of the junior high burned, the building suffered extensive smoke damage. The Uhrichsville firefighters watched the area between the two facilities, making sure the fire did not spread to Welty.

The 1990-91 school year brought another change to Welty, this time in philosophy. Always a junior high that functioned similar to the senior high, Welty made the transition to a middle school---a unique system for educating those students between the ages of eleven and fourteen.

The new philosophy embraces such tenets as the best possible atmosphere and opportunity for the maximum educational experience, developing contributing members of society, promoting critical thinking skills and social-emotional growth, and nurturing a healthy self-concept.

The new middle school has seventeen goals to help achieve the philosophy. The school is organized into small communities of students with 115 to 150 students to a group. Each section has a mixture of achievement levels and geographic locations. Each grade level consists of two of these small groups called houses. The student's academic program includes study of English, mathematics, science, social studies, reading, literature and written composition, and computer literacy.