The ceiling is slowly caving in above the Aliquippa High School gym where Mike Ditka once played basketball, and the band room where Henry Mancini played the flute has a strange, moldy smell.

Both soon will be gone -- lost to the wrecking ball.

The Aliquippa School District is converting its middle school into a high school, and it will tear down the gaunt, rambling, now-nearly-empty high school that has housed Aliquippa teenagers since 1924.

"The goal is to have it complete by September '09," business manager David Wytiaz said, "or at least enough to get students into the space."

The district plans to renovate its elementary school, adding a wing to house grades five and six. The middle school will house grades seven through 12. It will get a new entrance, an expanded library and a simple performance space, or black box theater, filling what is now a courtyard.

Mr. Wytiaz said the project, which will start this summer, will cost $40 million to $43 million. But the actual financial impact will not be large, he said, because the district's debt is low, it will get extra reimbursement for instituting environment controls and it will be able to use staff more efficiently in the new configuration.

The plan also creates one other significant savings.

"It takes a quarter of a million dollars a year to heat this place," Mr. Wytiaz said, walking the main hall of the high school.

A number of other factors weighed into the decision, he said.

First, the old building may be historic, but it is in deplorable condition.

The boys' gym has yellow police tape cordoning off sections of the bleachers because of masonry falling from the ceiling. Cracked concrete floors are everywhere, and the walls are festooned with exposed pipes and conduit. The bathrooms and locker rooms look like sets from a 1970s prison movie.

The girls' gym has had two ceilings replaced and enough is falling down that parts of the third are exposed. It also has a black stripe running down a wall from the constant reapplications of tar to the roof.

"We may be the only school district in Pennsylvania that owns its own tar machine," Mr. Wytiaz said.

He said the district did a feasibility study before settling on the coming project and looked at renovating the high school. "The cost was something like $60 million."

And the simple fact is that the district does not need the school. Aliquippa's enrollment was 3,810 in 1971 and larger in the 1950s and 1960s.

But the student population has been in decline for four decades, dropping to 1,221 this year, according to the Beaver Valley Intermediate Unit. Fewer than 400 students are in the high school, which once held 1,500, and entire wings of the building are closed down.

Finally, Mr. Wytiaz said, "if we're looking at a merger in the future, we really have nothing to offer right now."

After the renovation, though, "we're going to have two newly redone school buildings that would be attractive," he said.

Aliquippa is not engaged in any merger talks, but school consolidation has become a looming subject in Beaver County. The county has 15 school districts serving an dwindling student population of about 25,000.

Aliquippa is the third district in the county to announce a school closing this year. Rochester is closing its middle school, and Hopewell is closing Raccoon Elementary. Meanwhile, Center and Monaca are wrestling with a consolidation plan.

It's a sad situation for a city and a school with a history as proud as Aliquippa's.

"It will be an emotional day when they tear this down," football coach, athletic director and retired English teacher Mike Zmijanac said. "I spent 50 years in this school building."

Along the way, he coached many players who later played in the National Football League and taught many students who became famous in other fields, such as music legend Henry Mancini.

Mr. Zmijanac credits a vital ethnic melting pot in post-war Aliquippa, along with a work ethic born in the steel mills, for producing such achievers.

"Name an ethnic group, and I had a friend in it," he said. And there was a sense of equality because all of them -- Greeks, Italians, Jews, Slavs, Poles, Irish, African-American and others -- did the same jobs in the same mills and made the same amount of money.

In a way, Aliquippa was like Pittsburgh in microcosm, and it bred the same kind of fierce, tough, underdog pride. The city crashed hard when the steel industry collapsed in the 1980s and is beset now with the classic urban problems of poverty, joblessness, drugs, gangs and troubled race relations, but in some ways the pride has just gotten fiercer as the underdog role has intensified.

"People from Ambridge say they're from Pittsburgh," longtime teacher and native son Dave Casoli said. "People from Aliquippa say they're from Aliquippa."

And they take it seriously: He moved to Center to raise his family and wouldn't let his children wear Aliquippa shirts when they were young.

"I'd tell them, 'I'm from Aliquippa. You're not,' " he said.

Mr. Zmijanac also moved out of town, to Mount Lebanon at his wife's request.

"After I moved there, I met a guy in a bar, and he said, 'Aren't you the Aliquippa football coach? I didn't know you were from Mt. Lebanon.' I said, 'I'm not -- I just live here,' " Mr. Zmijanac said.

"Once you're from here, you're from here."

Too many people have followed their trail, however: too many are from Aliquippa but are not there anymore.

Both teachers acknowledged the necessity of change, however.

Mr. Zmijanac noted that a planned merger with Hopewell in the 1950s was shot down by Aliquippa. He'd like to see the same plan now, with a school in the Sheffield area, just where it was proposed then. He even has a name: Woodlawn High School, which was Aliquippa High School's name in the 1930s and 1940s.

But Mr. Casoli won't be there. He's retiring at the end of next year, just as the old building closes for good.

"It couldn't have worked out any better," he said. "I can tell people I went out with the school."