The State College Area School Board on Monday reviewed final plans for the new Park Forest Middle School as the project moves closer to construction.
The district plans to construct the new 270,000-square-foot, three-story building on Little Lion Drive in Patton Township at an estimated cost of betwen $128 million and $137 million. It will be located across Valley Vista Drive from the existing, 54-year-old Park Forest Middle School, which was last renovated in 1995 and had long been eyed by the district for major reconstruction or replacement.
Jeff Straub, of project architect Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates, presented to the board a fly-through video of the planned building, which was not publicly distributed for security purposes. The design, Straub said, “hasn’t changed dramatically over the last six to eight months,” and the final plan represents “a continual refinement as we’ve pushed towards the completed documents for the building.”
The main entrance of the school will lead to a public lobby and what Straub called a “main street” accessing the main gymnasium, auditorium, music space and cafeteria. A second-floor media center will have a centralized location overlooking the main street with views out onto the campus and surrounding park.
The layout will allow for after-hours use with the ability to lock down the classroom wing.
The classroom wing will be stacked for students to move upward through sixth, seventh and eighth grades. A “student street” design will also include science commons, art and languages spaces and more.
For the building’s exterior, materials will include manufactured stone, ground face masonry, wood grain metal paneling and dark bronze metal paneling.
Those elements will be incorporated in the building’s interior, along with concrete block, and ceiling clouds will be used to help optimize acoustics. The interior also will “Incorporate a color palette that matches sort of districtwide colors but also what is unique to Park Forest,” Straub said.
A parking lot for buses will be located on the north side of the building, with staff and visitor parking lots and parent drop-off and pick-up to the south and a service and delivery area to the west. The plan also maintains the tennis courts and soccer field on the east side of the parcel and locates a stormwater basin at the far eastern end of the site near Valley Vista Drive.
The school board is scheduled to vote on approval of the final plans at its Jan. 12 meeting. As previously reported, the district is moving through the myriad code, planning and permitting processes, and construction bidding will now take place in February and March, with approval of low bidders scheduled for April.
Construction will begin once a notice to proceed is issued to the approved low bidders, which is currently anticipated for May 15,
With a projected 30-month construction period, the new school now likely will open to students in January 2029. Earlier estimates had projected an August 2028 opening.
The school board also will need to make a final determination on financing for the project, which will be bundled with the ongoing, $22.4 million Mount Nittany Elementary School renovation and expansion.
District financial advisor Tom Beckett, of NW Financial, gave an overview of two recommended options at Monday night’s meeting.
One option would finance $85 million and use about $63 million from the district’s capital reserves. The other would finance $105 million and draw about $42 million from reserves. In either case, the district could choose from 25-year, 30-year or wraparound debt service, the latter of which Beckett said layers in principal for a more budget-friendly payback.
The more reserves are drawn down, the more pressure it puts on credit ratings, Beckett said. But he said he expects the financing plan will “maintain and support [the district’s] very, very strong Aa1 credit rating” from Moody’s.
“What I will say is that this board and this community have continually over the past 10 years demonstrated a more important thing than the numbers,” Beckett said. “And the more important thing is the willingness to pay for first-class facilities and to pay for education. That overwhelms the numbers. It really does. I’ve said it before, it’s a tough job to be a school director because you’ve got to make tough decisions about people’s pocketbooks. And the type of long-term planning that you guys have undertaken sets you up well to do this. We are going to try to minimize the impact of … $105 million of financing, But a lot of the decisions you’ve already made have allowed you to do that.”
He added that the district’s debt service on the 2015 bond for the new State High begins to drop off next year. That was done by design a decade ago, knowing that a middle school project would be coming, and so the new debt will have minimal budget impact.
