State College Area School District officials are evaluating several potential capital projects, some of which are driven by capacity demands as well as the future of the Fairmount Building.
During Monday night’s school board meeting, Finance and Operations Officer Randy Brown provided a brief update on the planning for the projects. While the district is determining what to do with the Fairmount Building, it’s also looking at renovations to part of the high school’s North Building that was not included in the State High project, Panorama Village Building and Mount Nittany Elementary School, and a major overhaul or rebuild of Park Forest Middle School.
Continuing to maintain the Fairmount Building, 411 S. Fraser St., beyond 2022-23 “is expected to be cost prohibitive from an operational and financial perspective,” Brown and Director of Physical Plant Mike Fisher wrote in a memo to the board, and finding parts and replacement equipment for the century-old facility is becoming increasingly difficult.
The long-ago home of State College High School’s most recent major use was for the Delta Program, which moved in 2018 to the renovated high school North Building on Westerly Parkway. Since then, it’s continued to serve as a home for several programs that are already expected to relocate or would be accommodated in other renovations.
No future use of the building has been identified and before next summer the district intends to determine whether it will be remediated and repurposed or disposed, Brown said. If the district decides to part with the building, State College Borough — which has long expressed interest in acquiring it for the proposed Fairmount Civic District Redevelopment Area — would have right of first refusal to purchase it, per contractual agreements between SCASD and the borough.
Some of the current programs at the Fairmount Building would move to the high school North Building, where renovations to former Career and Technical Center spaces are proposed (CTC moved to the new South Building in 2018). The HEARTS program, meanwhile, is already scheduled to move to Corl Street in 2022-23, and the CenClear Child Services pre-school classrooms are expected to relocate to elementary schools after an upcoming facility capacity and student enrollment analysis is completed.
The North Building renovations would provide space for the Reclaiming Individual Talent (RIT) program and secondary Virtual Academy, both currently located at Fairmount, along with the district’s information technology department, which is currently housed in the Panorama Village Building.
“Locating RIT and the virtual academy in the North Building provides proximity to the high school and Delta buildings for these students,” the administrators wrote in the memo.
Moving the IT department to the North Building would provide a more centralized location on a campus with the most students and technology, including the district’s data center, as well as offering better storage and access for equipment deliveries.
Brown said administrators hope to bring plans for the North Building renovations to the school board by the end of August.
The IT department’s move to the high school campus would then allow for more efficient alignment of offices at Panorama Village with “minimal renovations,” Brown said.
It would create a student services center, including special education, equity and inclusivity, gifted and learning enrichment services and federal programs. Special education curriculum, which is currently located at Fairmount, would then be within the special education administrative office at Panorama.
Mount Nittany Elementary renovations
Because of increased student enrollment, three Mount Nittany Elementary School classrooms moved to the nearby Panorama Village Building for the 2021-22 school year. One will move back to the elementary school this year, allowing school board and committee meetings to return to Panorama Village in the fall after spending the last year at the College Township Municipal Building, Brown said, but two will remain.
The facility assessment and enrollment analysis, which Brown said the district hopes to have underway by September, will help determine if the classroom space at the elementary school is a long-term issue. If it forecasts continued high enrollments in the long-term, an addition to the school may be needed.
In the meantime, administrators plan to bring to the board in the near future plans for renovating three group instruction spaces to accommodate a dramatic rise in need for programming space that is not expected to decline, even if a building renovation or addition is completed.
Park Forest Middle School project
Park Forest Middle School is the last of the district’s school buildings that has not undergone major renovations or new construction.
“We’ve had that on the docket for the 2020 decade,” Brown told StateCollege.com. “Back when we started the high school project we hoped that it might be in 2022, 2023, but with various things — pandemic, finances — it’s now slated for around 27-28. Hopefully that’s a break ground, but before that happens that’s going to require some strategic planning at the district level.”
Unlike the renovations and addition at Radio Park Elementary, one of three completed in 2019, the Park Forest Middle School site is small and doesn’t provide much room for additional building.
Brown said the district could still potentially find a way to renovate and add on to the existing Park Forest site, but it also owns a tract on the other side of Valley Vista Drive that could provide another option, something that will be the subject of future discussions.
“Some people are going to be disappointed if we do that because that it would not necessarily be the neighborhood school that it is right now,” Brown said. “There wouldn’t be as many walkers; it would be a further distance. And it would have a different feel. It would be almost like a Mount Nittany [elementary and middle schools], before the housing development came just a few years ago.”
Funding
The Park Forest Middle School project would be eligible for reimbursement from the Department of Education’s PlanCon process, assuming the current moratorium on PlanCon projects is lifted by the time it moves forward.
The North Building and Panorama Village wouldn’t be eligible for reimbursement because PlanCon requires projects to be for primarily instructional purposes, while Mount Nittany Elementary would be ineligible because it has already received PlanCon funding.
Brown noted, however, that the district has been planning for future capital expenditures for more than a decade. A 2019 bond issuance included $3 million for North Building renovations and the district budget regularly commits money to the capital projects fund for deferred maintenance and renovations.
A preliminary projection shows $6.5 million available in the capital projects fund balance from transfers and the unspent 2019 bonds, according to the memo.
“This balance will be updated along with the capital reserve funds projection in order to present financial capacity for capital project spending,” the administrators wrote.
