The front pages of newspapers with headlines from World War II, the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy, the 2002 rescue of the Quecreek miners and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks cover the walls of a social studies classroom in Cornell High School.

"The students are fascinated" by the floor-to-ceiling newspaper collage, teacher Amy Kerr said. "They're reading, they're commenting and they're asking questions."

Many of the headlines were written long before the high school students were born. Some of the events occurred when they were very young.

Some of the papers were published before Mrs. Kerr was born. The 27-year-old teacher is not collecting newspapers because she teaches social studies and current events.

She says she's a social studies teacher because "I'm a lifelong news lover. I was always interested in news, even in high school."

Newspapers from the Kennedy era were saved by Mrs. Kerr's grandmother, Frances Jaskolski of Glassport. Her mother, Sheila Jaskolski, also saved and donated papers.

Last year, Dave Hinesman, a district employee who was retiring, gave her a box of World War II-era newspapers.

The newspapers are the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the defunct The Pittsburgh Press and Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph.

Some of the older newspapers were yellowing and cracking, so Mrs. Kerr spent part of her summer laminating them. Then she called the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh to learn about preserving old papers.

"They said lamination is not good for them," she said, and they gave her some preservation tips that are available online.

This is Mrs. Kerr's fifth year teaching in the Cornell School District, which serves Coraopolis and Neville Island.

She graduated from Norwin High School and Penn State University, where she majored in education. Her interest in news was helped by Penn State's policy of providing students with copies of The New York Times, USA Today and local papers.

As news keeps happening, Mrs. Kerr expects to keep adding to her newspaper collection, which includes about 100 newspapers that have not been mounted on her classroom wall yet.