STATE COLLEGE

Board OKs master plan for school upgrades

By Ed Mahon

STATE COLLEGE — After eight months of public meetings and about $295,890 spent on a facilitator, the State College Area school board unanimously agreed Tuesday upon a vision for its facilities.

Board members voted 8-0 — with Gowen Roper absent — to approve a districtwide facilities master plan and accept the educational specifications document that will serve as a guide for high school construction.

Board members and planners said the documents were created to be revisited as the design and construction projects unfold.

“It’s very likely that we’ll be going back through these again, and probably again and again,” board President Rick Madore said of the educational specifications, which detail the recommended learning environment for a school building, from square footage for classroom spaces to landscaping.

“We’re moving from the ideal to the real,” Madore said later. One year ago, the board

approved Ohio-based planning firm DeJong to facilitate the master plan process. A month later, the district and DeJong agreed on a $276,390 contract. This spring, the board agreed to pay DeJong an additional $19,500, that would partly go toward a fourth community dialogue and an educational specifications review.

The master plan recommendations for the elementary and high school buildings remain the same as when the steering committee approved the document in April.

The document recommends maintaining the current high school setup, with ninth-and 10th-grade students in a building on one side of Westerly Parkway and 11th-and 12th-grade students in a building on the other side.

Monday night’s meeting was lightly attended, with about six people in the audience, aside from administrators. JoDee Dyreson said she wanted to see an option that allowed Lemont Elementary School to remain open as an elementary school. The master plan calls for students who attend Lemont to go to Houserville instead, but Madore said that issue could be revisited.

Ken Walsh and Republican school board candidate Brian Kaleita both expressed concern over the educational specifications document, saying that following them would raise the costs of construction. Kaleita criticized the process of creating the educational specifications, saying they relied too heavily on input from school district employees.

“There was no, virtually no, community involvement regarding the so-called educational specifications, the ed specs committee was comprised almost exclusively of school district employees with only token representation from other community members,” Kaleita said.

William DeJong, CEO of the planning firm, said the group that met to help determine the educational specifications had about 60 members, 35 to 40 of whom worked for the district. The other members included community members and Penn State officials.

“By the nature of an ed spec ... that’s who you involve. It’s kind of like, if we’re gonna build a space shuttle … then obviously people that are working in the space industry are the ones that have to help figure out what that is,” DeJong said, adding that the educational specifications include information focusing on the classrooms, like what kind of equipment is needed and how many types of special education spaces are required.

“There is a lot of information that needs to be derived from the staff,” DeJong said.

In other action, the board voted 7-1 — with Dorothea Stahl dissenting — to approve a 2009- 2010 $109.58 million general fund budget with a 3.3 percent tax increase. Business administrator Jeff Ammerman said the average homeowner would see an $81 increase in their real estate tax bill.

Ed Mahon can be reached at 231-4619.