Longmore Academy opened in the fall of 2000 and is governed by the Mars Home for Youth. The home, which is 130 years old, provides residential and community-based services to at-risk youth and families. Martin Harris is executive director.
The school's building sits on the Mars Home for Youth's 140-acre campus on Route 228 in Adams. The home, and its foundation, spent $1 million building the school.
Here are some other facts about Mars Home for Youth and Longmore Academy:
• Mars Home for Youth began in 1878 when parishioners of the Fourth United Presbyterian Church of Allegheny City, now the North Side, stepped up to help dying widow Isabella Nelson Longmore. Ms. Longmore went to her minister with concerns about what would happen to her children after she died.
The United Presbyterian Orphans' Home on the North Side was born in 1878. It moved to Butler County in 1929 and changed its name in the 1950s to the United Presbyterian Home for Children. In the 1970s, the home went from focusing on children from broken homes to concentrating on the needs of troubled and abused children. It once again changed names in 1996 when it became the Mars Home for Youth.
• More than 1,000 students have passed through the school's doors since it opened.
• Since opening, staffing and enrollment have doubled.
• Students who are residents at the Mars Home for Youth and children from the following public school districts attend Longmore by referral: Blackhawk, Butler, Deer Lakes, Fox Chapel, Hampton, Mars, North Allegheny, Seneca Valley, South Butler, Pine-Richland, Moniteau, and Shaler.
• Mars Home for Youth residents who do not attend Longmore Academy are educated through Intermediate Unit classrooms on campus.
• In addition to expanding Longmore's reach to more Beaver County districts, the Mars Home for Youth intends to start a 28-day Adolescent Diversion and Acute Stabilization Program that will offer juveniles an alternative to inpatient hospitalization. Instead, they will be able to temporarily stay on campus while they receive treatment.
First Published: May 22, 2008, 4:00 a.m.
