The design work for a massive renovation job at State College Area High School is now well past the halfway mark, and school district officials want everyone to know.
“I’m very proud of all the work that everyone has put into this,” district superintendent Bob O’Donnell said Wednesday evening at a public forum to update everyone now that the project design has reached the 60 percent milestone.
“There’s been a lot of effort that’s been put in to get this point, but we have a lot more to do before we finish,” he said.
O’Donnell was one of a handful of district administrators, engineers and architects that briefed members of the public on how the high school project has evolved since the last public forum in October. Though the building layouts and site plans have changed very little, the district has begun filling in a lot of the little details.
“We are basically 100 percent done with things like the floor plan and building footprint,” says SCASD Director of Physical Plant Ed Poprik. “When it comes to things like our mechanical and electrical systems and other technical details, we’re not quite as far along.”
Poprik says the biggest change to the plans involves the high school auditorium. At the 30 percent milestone, it was planned to be a long single-story space. The auditorium has since been re-imagined as a two-story space with a balcony, which actually reduces the square footage and estimated total cost of the building.
“It’s been a fluid process,” Poprik says. “You find that when you move from a sketch to an actual building, some of the details need to be adjusted along the way.”
State College resident Rich Fitzgerald was one of the community members who came out to learn more about the project. He says he supports the project, but notes it will place some financial burden on the community.
The district’s proposed budget for the 2015-2016 school year proposes a tax increase of roughly $173 a year for the average homeowner, most of which will go to the high school project. Fitzgerald says that’s troubling because the State College borough government has approved its own tax increase for the coming fiscal year, which will be a double whammy for area residents.
State College resident Heidi Battista says she’s been trying to “catch up” with the plans for the high school. Though the project was approved by State College voters back in May, Battista says she’s been waiting for the plans to become “more solidified” before making any judgements. While she didn’t have any specific concerns about the project, her son Ryan expressed some reservations.
Ryan Battista will enter the ninth grade next year and will live through the extensive construction, but that’s not what he’s worried about. He’s concerned about the new class schedule that will take effect next year. The proposed block scheduling plan calls for four long classes one day, and a different four the next.
“I don’t know if I can sit through science for an hour and half,” Ryan says. “I definitely think that will take some getting used to.”
Numerous planning documents and building renderings for the renovation project can be found on the district website.
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