State College Area School District’s plan to renovate and expand Mount Nittany Elementary School to meet enrollment needs is moving closer to fruition.
The school board on Monday voted 8-0 to grant permission to bid the project, which will include a 38,575-square-foot addition and renovations to 2,000 square feet of the existing building.
Earlier this year, architect Crabtree Rohrbaugh and Associates estimated the total project cost at $20.93 million, including site work, construction, furniture and equipment, soft costs, financing fees and anticipated cost escalation factors over the design and construction periods.
An Act 34 public hearing required by the state for substantial school construction projects will be held at 6 p.m. on Sept. 30 in the Panorama Village Administrative Center. District administrators and project architects will present financing and construction details at the hearing, and the public will have 30 days to submit comment.
The board is expected to receive and review bids on Nov. 18 and award contracts on Dec. 2, according to a memo from district administrators. Construction is anticipated to begin in December or January and take 18 months to complete.
Primarily intended to alleviate capacity issues at the elementary school in College Township with an enrollment of more than 400 students, the expansion and renovation will add six classrooms, special education rooms, a large group instruction room, STEM and music room and a dedicated cafeteria. Work also will include a bus drop-off loop and parking lot accessible from the existing parking area shared with Mount Nittany Middle School, a new main entrance and playing fields on the east side of the building.
Mount Nittany Elementary’s 18 existing classrooms are typically at full use, and in recent years that has necessitated moving two fifth-grade classrooms to the nearby Panorama Village building.
It is the only of the district’s eight elementary schools identified as having immediate capacity concerns that need to be addressed, based on an analysis of enrollment trends and projections over 10 years conducted by Crabtree Rohrbaugh, with additional projections provided by school enrollment analytics firm DecisionInsite.
It’s not the only major school construction project in the works for SCASD, however. The district is planning to replace the aging Park Forest Middle School with a new three-story, 200,000-square-foot building on a a district-owned parcel along Valley Vista Drive. Construction on the new middle school is not expected to begin until late 2025 and will take more than two years to complete..
