Bethel Park woman looks back on 50 years at The Pathfinder School
Rita Havran was secretary at The Pathfinder School from its opening in 1966 through this February.
Harry Funk / The Almanac Rita Havran applied for a job when she saw a new school under construction more than 50 years ago.
A few years after she moved to Bethel Park, Rita Havran noticed a school being built near her home.
“I’d say to my mother, ‘I’m going to apply over there,'” Havran recalled. “And she’d say, ‘You’ll never get it, Rita. It’s political.'”
Neither knowing nor caring all that much about politics in those days, she put in her application and promptly was hired.
That was in October 1966, as the first secretary at the new The Pathfinder School – yes, she’ll tell you the article is necessary – for children with special needs.
More than half a century later, Havran finally stepped down from her position Feb. 15.
“If you’d ask me, ‘Why did I stay so long?’ Because I loved my job. I know that sounds fake, but it isn’t,” she attested. “I loved every minute I was over there, and I’d go back tomorrow if I could. Mentally, I think I could still do it.”
Ambulatory issues, though, have precluded her from continuing, even with the school’s proximity to the house that she and her late husband, Robert, had built in 1957.
“I’m so glad I came out this way. We lived in Squirrel Hill, and I could have gone to Penn Hills, Monroeville, out that way. But because my husband worked for Westinghouse,” she said about his job at the Bettis laboratory in West Mifflin, “we came here and got the lot. We were lucky.”
Her tenure with The Pathfinder School actually began by working in Carnegie for a month or so before the new structure was ready for any kind of occupancy. And even after she started reporting to Bethel Park, construction continued under the direction of a clerk of works whom she fondly remembers by his nickname, Harry the Hat.
“When we moved into the building, we came in the back door and worked our way down to the first floor,” Harvan recalled. “I sat in the woodshop, and there was an office in there.”
At the time, children with special needs attended schools in their own districts, often under substantially less-than-optimal circumstances. And so it came as a relief to educators when a centralized location specifically for that purpose opened.
“For the first 10 years, about, everybody was so energized and so happy to be there,” Havran said.
Parents also were happy to have such an option.
“In those beginning years, the calls that came in from all over the areas, wanting placement,” Havran recalled. “Even real estate companies would call and come in with parents to see the building.”
She remembers enrollment reaching a capacity number of students, and beyond.
“The maximum we had was 485,” she said. “There were a couple of years that we had to rent space for them, we were so crowded.”
In 1975, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, with a mandate that all students in special education be taught with typical peers to the greatest extent possible.
Enrollment at The Pathfinder School since has been a fraction of what it once was, with 70-plus students attending this year, but the facility at the end of Donati Road continues to provide a variety of educational services with the benefit of a high staff-to-student ratio.
Initially, a consortium of local school districts called the South Central Area Special Schools Committee shared the costs of constructing, equipping and furnishing The Pathfinder School. Today, the committee is responsible for the physical maintenance of the building.
Since a 1973 agreement, the Allegheny Intermediate Unit administers, supervises and operates the educational program at Pathfinder.
Havran has worked for both entities, retiring from the AIU in 1993 but continuing for the committee until this year.
As a self-admitted jack-of-all-trades, she handled a wide variety of responsibilities that transcended what she thought she’d be doing as secretary, from taking care of financial matters to writing specifications for a second gymnasium for the school. For many years, she also handled rentals for groups using space in the building.
A business background working for Mobay, Crucible and other companies helped her get acclimated with her new job in 1966.
“It was a good thing, because there was nobody to teach us at the school. I winged it,” she admitted. “I had no one to ask.”
Helping along the way always has been a healthy dose of common sense.
“You know what? I would say that is the word that would describe me, with what I went into over there,” she said. “I was sensible.”