State Rep. Nick Kotik knows the plight of small school districts based in struggling mill towns. He represents all or part of three of them -- Carlynton, Cornell and Sto-Rox.

And he's come to believe that the state's traditional lifelines -- cash infusions and oversight boards -- can't address the triple whammy of falling enrollments, aging schools and tax bases that are weak and growing weaker.

"I just don't see the state continually coming up with large sums of money to keep them going," he said.

Mr. Kotik, D-Robinson, has come to the same conclusion a number of educators have before: Small districts need to merge with larger, more affluent neighbors, achieving economies of scale and creating new districts that can actually fund themselves.

Such efforts, however, have failed repeatedly; typically the larger, more affluent districts don't want to adopt the problems of their smaller neighbors.

That was the case when Cornell sought to merge with Moon Area in the late 1990s, and has also been the case for such districts as Midland, Duquesne and Wilkinsburg.

Mr. Kotik believes the key is providing financial incentives for the larger districts.

"A more stable district is not going to take in a struggling district without incentives," he said.

Exactly what those incentives might be, though, is yet to be determined. Mr. Kotik said he wants to develop legislation to encourage school district mergers, but he is only about a month into the process and has much yet to do.

He said he's met with state Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak and has his blessing, and he will be meeting with education department experts. He also is reaching out to a number of other state lawmakers who represent small districts in struggling industrial areas, such as the Monongahela Valley.

If Mr. Kotik succeeds in getting the state involved, it will be the first such effort since the mid-1960s, when the state allowed the education department to force school districts to merge. The effort pared a mind-boggling 2,300-plus districts down to 505.

Since then, though, the only merger has been the court-ordered one creating Woodland Hills from five east suburban Pittsburgh districts in the 1980s.

And the wave of mergers in the 1960s passed over a number of school districts that covered just one municipality. Some of those -- Bethel Park, Upper St. Clair, Plum and Hampton, among others -- are in suburban areas that have thrived. Others like Duquesne, Wilkinsburg, Clairton and Midland are in older industrial towns that have withered, leaving the districts strapped .

Wilkinsburg has been in and out of state control over the past decade, has the county's highest tax rate by a wide margin and has failed in attempts to merge with the Pittsburgh, Penn Hills and Woodland Hills school districts.

The state Department of Education has appointed a Board of Control to run the Duquesne School District and Pittsburgh Public Schools administrators are managing it. Duquesne has been stripped of almost all nonessential programs and has found no interest from its natural geographic merger partner, West Mifflin.

Clairton was under state control in the 1990s and, more recently, was declared academically distressed.

Midland's struggles led it to close its high school and send students to East Liverpool, Ohio. After a string of failed merger attempts, administrators there launched what is now the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. Despite that school's success, most Midland students still go out of the district for high school.

Not all small school districts struggle, though. Superintendents from several of Allegheny County's smallest districts gave relatively rosy reports.

"There's a lot of research out there that says smaller is actually better," Brentwood Superintendent Ronald Dufalla said. "I would say if you can maintain your school district financially, that's probably the best thing to do."

Brentwood has an enrollment of about 1,350 and a tax rate of 28.27 mills, second-highest in Allegheny County. Dr. Dufalla said while the idea has been raised, "we really haven't talked about a merger formally."

Dr. Valerie McDonald, superintendent of Avonworth -- enrollment 1,350, taxes 18.2 mills -- said there was merger talk in the district in the 1980s when enrollment dropped, but enrollment is now on the rise and there is "absolutely no talk of merging with anyone."

Her counterpart, Dr. Gabriel Ziccarelli, of Allegheny Valley -- enrollment 1,220, taxes 21.5 mills -- said that "when you're small, you do kick it around," but that his district is sound enough economically that there has never been any serious merger talk.

"Our community is very stable, nontransient," he said, noting the tax base has also been boosted by development in Harmar.

And even in Mr. Kotik's back yard, the superintendents at both Carlynton and Sto-Rox said thoughts of merging were not even on the horizon.

"I've talked to teachers who have been here 30-some years, and there's never been a proposal that they know of," Sto-Rox Superintendent Fran Serenka said.

"Philosophically, I believe the goal of public education is to service children within their own communities."

Sto-Rox, covering Stowe and McKees Rocks, has an enrollment of about 1,450, with taxes at 25 mills, third-highest of the 43 districts in Allegheny County.

But Robert David of the Clairton City School District -- enrollment 1,000, taxes 22 mills -- has a different outlook, even though his once-staggering district is back on sound financial and academic footing. Clairton was under state control in the 1990s for financial reasons, and was declared academically distressed earlier this decade, before several years of penny-pinching got it back on track.

"There should be five school districts in Allegheny County," Dr. David said, "North, East, South, West and the Mon Valley," with Pittsburgh as a sixth. "We can no longer afford to have 42 superintendents in Allegheny County, and 42 central offices."

Dr. David, who is not related to the writer, acknowledged that such a change could cost him his job. "The students come first," he said. "What we can do for them is more important than my job."

Despite that conviction, though, he said there have not been any serious discussions of merging within the district. "I don't think the 41 other school districts in the county are thinking about that," he said, and he sees little effort by the state to help.

"People have a great deal of pride in their schools," Carlynton Superintendent Michael Panza said. "You'd be asking people to change their identity."

Carlynton, covering Carnegie, Rosslyn Farms and Crafton, has an enrollment of about 1,580, with taxes at 24.15 mills, eighth-highest in the county.

Cornell, covering Coraopolis and Neville, does better on its tax rate -- at 20.89 mills, 25th-highest in the county -- but struggles with academic programs for an enrollment of only about 735.

Mr. Kotik said he's talked about mergers with people from Carlynton, and he is familiar with Cornell's history of seeking a merger partner. But as a Sto-Rox graduate, that's the district he knows best, and despite his history, he'd be glad to see it cease to exist."Their problems are just insurmountable in some respects," he said. "I really don't see any future for Sto-Rox as a stable district.

"I see these elderly people making $700 a month and paying $3,000 a year in property taxes," Mr. Kotik said."

Mr. Kotik said repeating the forced mergers of the 1960s would result in a wave of protests and lawsuits. But as he sees it, the state created the problems by not taking those mergers far enough, and now it needs to step up with incentives.

"If I was a school director in one of these small districts, I would take the keys to the school and present them to the state," he said. "I would say, 'I can't do it anymore. You do it.' "