If you’ve heard the word Kiski, it’s usually followed by the word “Area,” or if you’re lucky enough to have spent some time in a kayak or a canoe, perhaps you know it as the lovely river that starts in Saltsburg where the Conemaugh and the Loyalhanna join to run to the Allegheny. I like to think of it as the Yough of the North. A kinder, gentler version.
But Kiski was also a school. Sitting on a cliff right above that river. A boy’s school. Mid-level quality. It wasn’t Shady Side, it wasn’t Sewickley Academy. Think of it as Central Catholic in the woods. Minus the Catholic part. It was a solid, hard-nosed place that focused on what it took to make adolescents into something resembling decent men.
I was one of those adolescents. I went to Kiski. It changed my life.
Did Kiski change the life of every guy who ever went there? Surely not.
Are private schools even something we should be proud of? Shouldn’t we shut them all down, sell the land and give the proceeds to our local public school?
Crazy talk of course, but I’m sure more than a teacher or two, exhausted after another underfunded, unmonitored, ungovernable, cellphone- riddled public school day, has said the same.
Kiski always had strong athletics. At times in its history, it’s had remarkable teachers. But the one extraordinary thing it always had was this: the will to admit a number of young boys whom no other private school was going to touch. The ungovernable ones, the exhausting, angry, brokenhearted boys.
Maybe a few mothers or fathers out there reading this will know what I mean.
Kiski, by choice, decided these boys were worth a chance. And it didn’t just “teach” them. It walked into their angry lives and it promised not to quit. It held them to task, yes, but it held them. And that hold, weirdly enough, got stronger as these “boys” got older. They figured out what had happened — the tough love began to seem more like plain old love.
Perhaps 10 boys a year felt this, sometimes more, sometimes less. Who paid nothing. Not a cent. Out of a class of 50.
Did all of them astonish the world? Were they all success stories?
Let’s say, every year, 10 boys who went to Kiski went from being potential dangers to themselves or anyone they might one day be involved with — a wife, an employer, a lover, a child — to being decent men.
Over a century that’s 1,000 men. Some might call that a pretty small number. I’d call it a village. A place that would never exist otherwise. A place where you can raise a child.
Next year that “place” will no longer exist. No, Kiski isn’t closing. In fall 2024, Kiski will go co-ed.
Is that decision in itself some sort of tragedy? Of course not.
But what it will be is … just another private school.
Because they’re breaking the vessel. The thing built by labor and love over a century and a quarter. The erasure of a particular kind of knowledge. Just because you do one thing very well doesn’t mean you can do another. Go ahead and argue that teaching one gender (or several) is the same as another. I say: Call The Ellis School, call a Catholic girls school and tell them the same. Look yourself in the eye and tell me your son needed the same things your daughter did.
More importantly, Kiski won’t be accepting your daughters to change their lives. They’re doing it to pay their debts. To get full-pay students. Plain and simple. Seats will get filled. Quotas met. “All our graduates will go to college!” Wow.
But yes, in the end, it’s a tempest in a teacup. A small loss out on the educational battlefield.
I can’t argue for private education in general (that’d be like praising country clubs because they use a lot of small electric vehicles). Nor am I making the case for all-boys education everywhere. Just at Kiski. The school had a unique commitment to its students, who happened to be boys. That particular gift will be lost in this transition.
Kiski was mid-level compared to prep-school legends, but it had something I think they lack. Call it heart, call it soul. And go ahead and call that kind of thinking sentimental. You can. Until you have a son or a daughter and they’re one step from going off the rails. And then the number one thing you’ll hope their go-to teacher has is a ton of heart, and a soul.
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So maybe the only tragedy here is how little all this will matter.
Decades of commitment and passion, the highest human expression of our commitment to children — another little example of that, will disappear. Weighed in the balance, those qualities, losing out on the balance sheet.
Which is a problem. Because “great teaching” isn’t a thing you prove with stats.
The “product” you provide as a great school, plain and simple, is the devotion you give. Kids know it. Parents know it. And when a school decides this devotion, this missionary commitment, is an abstraction, a sentimental indulgence … then what do you get? Just another private school.
Who needs it?
David Conrad, Kiski School Class of 1985, grew up in Edgewood. He is an actor and lives and works in London.