When the members of the Center Area and Monaca Borough school boards voted to consolidate the two districts, they weren't thinking much about history.

Already small -- Center has about 1,770 pupils and Monaca only about 720 -- the Beaver County districts were both facing further drops in enrollment, and Monaca in particular was struggling to offer a full slate of academic courses and activities. There were also looming financial problems, with all of Monaca's schools in need of renovation.

"It's about educating kids, and if you look at the enrollments that are dropping and the cost of education going up, you have to consolidate," Center Area school board President Mike Rossi said a couple of weeks before the Oct. 18 consolidation vote.

In other words, it was a logical, pragmatic choice, made because it was best for the communities involved. There was not much talk about setting an example for other districts to follow, and even less about breaking with more than 300 years of Pennsylvania tradition.

But the two districts are, in fact, blazing a trail.

Gov. Ed Rendell gave them $500,000 and promised to seek ongoing funding, and the state Department of Education has a team of experts hacking its way through the legal jungle to help make the consolidation happen.

State officials are clearly hoping some of the other small districts -- 211 of Pennsylvania's 501 districts have fewer than 2,000 pupils, and 65 have fewer than 1,000 -- will follow Center Area and Monaca to the altar.

Three of the 43 school districts in Allegheny County have fewer than 1,000 K-12 students enrolled this year: Clairton City, with 876 students; Duquesne City, 714; and Cornell, 678.

"We are pretty committed to helping this along," education department spokesman Michael Race said. "The things they do could be applicable to others who want to merge down the road."

The two districts are also making history. Their proposed consolidation would be "the first truly voluntary school district merger ever in Pennsylvania," according to consultant Donald Boyer -- and is all the more extraordinary against the backdrop of 325 years of fiercely independent communities in the state.

According to "History and Organization of Education in Pennsylvania," a 1928 publication by what is now Indiana University of Pennsylvania, that tradition goes back to William Penn himself and has had a profound effect on educational systems.

When Gov. Penn founded the colony in 1682, the book says, he threw it open to all Christian religions and all ethnicities, which made it a haven for separatist sects and persecuted groups of European peasants. Newcomers moved into the colony's isolated valleys and built communities based on their own traditions, with little regard for colonial and later, state control.

Churches ran those schools until well into the 19th century, ignoring various attempts at state influence. That finally changed in 1834, when the Legislature, concerned that the poor were getting no schooling at all, offered municipalities a deal: If they would become school districts and the counties would become school divisions, the state would help them fund schools so they could be open to everyone.

Even that lagged well behind what the New England states were doing; it was voluntary and let the churches stay in charge, but "probably was the only system that could have been established in a commonwealth in which the tradition of local control was already so firmly fixed," the 1928 book says.

In many ways, the structure set up then would survive until 1965; the school codes of 1911 and 1949 both specified that each municipality was its own school district, maintaining that strict element of independence and local control.

The tiny school districts did eventually cooperate, banding together to form joint boards and run combined schools -- high schools in particular.

"There were literally hundreds of these voluntary jointures," Dr. Boyer said. He estimates that 75 percent of school districts were involved in them at one point or another.

But they were temporary marriages of convenience rather than true unions, as the history of the first voluntary jointure shows. That one was launched in 1897 by Turtle Creek, Wilmerding and East Pittsburgh when they formed a joint high school board and started a high school.

Pamphlets on Turtle Creek history hail it as the "first school merger ever," but it can't really be compared with the Center-Monaca merger.

When the joint board built a new school -- what is now Woodland Hills East Junior High, which opened in 1918 -- the three towns could not agree on joint ownership. According to a history compiled as part of an application for landmark status for the building, it became the property of Turtle Creek, with Wilmerding and East Pittsburgh paying tuition.

East Pittsburgh later withdrew and started its own high school in 1925; Wilmerding did the same in 1937.

Those are things that could not happen in the case of Center Area and Monaca. When their consolidation becomes official, those school districts and boards will cease to exist. Only the new district and new school board will remain, and it will own all the assets of both previous districts.

The Turtle Creek-East Pittsburgh-Wilmerding example also shows why the state took the action it finally did in 1965. The constant mating dance of the jointure system was chaotic, and it still left many small districts on their own. According to Dr. Boyer, state studies in the late '50s and early '60s recommended that school districts have at least 10,000 pupils, but 90 percent of the 2,361 in Pennsylvania served fewer than 1,000.

Act 299 of 1965 mandated that no school district should serve fewer than 4,000 pupils and ordered districts smaller than that to submit merger proposals. There were loopholes for rural counties and for districts hampered by geography, but the resulting wave of mergers and consolidations -- in a merger, one district absorbs the other; in a consolidation the two join to form a new one -- brought the number of districts in the state down to 505.

Some of those mergers and consolidations were voluntary on the surface, but Dr. Boyer dismissed any comparison between them and the Center Area-Monaca action. Districts knew they could be forced to consolidate if they didn't act on their own, and they had a certain amount of control by acting early.

Since then, the only consolidation was the court-ordered 1981 creation of Woodland Hills out of five districts in the east suburbs.

The Center Area-Monaca consolidation, then, truly does stand alone in the 325 years of Pennsylvania history as the only time school districts have come together on their own and decided, in the interests of their pupils and taxpayers, that they should become one.

Dr. Boyer is among those hoping it is the start of a new chapter in state history.

"If it were up to me, we would have 29 school districts," he said, one for each of the 29 intermediate units. He said they would all run multiple high schools, which could compete with each other and provide a sense of identity.

At the current rate, that might happen in another three centuries.