Patton Township OKs final Park Forest Middle School plans. When will construction start?

The Patton Township Supervisors approved final land development plans Tuesday for the new Park Forest Middle School, clearing the way for the long-planned project to break ground in the near future.

The unanimous approval of the three-story, 278,000-square-foot school’s plans came after two years of collaborative work between the township and State College Area School District. The two entities have navigated hurdles like fitting everything on a tight, 18.23-acre parcel of land, pedestrian and traffic concerns and more.

Located along Little Lion Drive next to Circleville Park, the new school will sit directly across Valley Vista Drive from the existing 54-year-old middle school, and the overall project is estimated to cost roughly $112.2 million. In total, the new school — including construction, planned alternate bids, road improvements and soft costs — will fetch the district $137.5 million, according to a bid report from Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates, the project’s architect.

Dillburg-based Lobar Inc. was named the project’s general contractor in April, following previous work the firm did on several other SCASD projects, such as the district’s new high school.

“This was an unbelievably complicated plan,” township manager Amy Farkas said Wednesday. “I would like to commend my staff — we’ve gone over and above to help the school district through this process. We’ve been meeting with them since 2024, pretty much monthly, to try to get through the various elements of this plan.”

The new school will nearly double the footprint of the existing school built that was built in 1971, which SCASD officials said in April the district has outgrown, with storage rooms, circulatory areas and even hallways being used as educational spaces. It has not received significant renovations since 1995, and has mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems that will soon reach the ends of their useful lives.

At the new school, students will physically “move up” through the sixth, seventh and eighth grades, with each new grade level corresponding to the first, second and third floor of the building’s three-story classroom wing.

The building’s gymnasium, library, cafeteria, administrative offices and 800-seat auditorium will be located on the opposite side of the building, each having a centralized location on the first or second floor.

Plans also include 384 parking spaces at the new school and 68 off-street parking spaces at the existing school, along with a bus drop-off and pickup area just north of the new school. Staff parking and parent drop-off/pickup locations will sit south of the building, and the project will keep tennis courts and a soccer field on the parcel’s eastern side.

Primary access to the school will be from an extension of Amblewood Way, and a stoplight will be installed at the intersection with Valley Vista Drive. The school will have a second entrance at Little Lion Drive, although that entrance will be closed off by a gate during student drop-off and pick-up times to keep all traffic funneled through one entrance, in an effort to enhance pedestrian safety.

Additionally, an existing rapid flashing beacon will be relocated from School Drive to Little Lion Drive to help pedestrians cross at its intersection with Valley Vista. SCASD, the township and potentially Ferguson Township will also soon be engaged in a traffic-calming study for the Valley Vista corridor, from Carnegie Drive to Devonshire Drive.

“Our section of Valley Vista Drive is very pedestrian-aggressive because if you drive on that road, you think you’re on a highway,” Farkas said, noting that the roadway is technically labeled a limited-access highway, and was once supposed to have four lanes due to its designation as the “outer loop” in a major highway project that took place in the 1980s and ‘90s.

She continued, “It’s a very wide road, and we have our shared-use path which provides safe passage for people on bicycles and walking that is off the road, but our speeds on that road are very high.”

As part of the plan approval, Farkas said the district will conduct a post-construction traffic impact study to evaluate traffic flow during drop-off and pick-up times for future pedestrian safety-related upgrades.

Moving forward, SCASD Finance and Operations Officer Randy Brown and Physical Plant Director Mike Fisher told the Centre Daily Times that the project could break ground in mid- to late-August.

“As far as breaking ground goes, there’s a lot of setup to do with that, such as putting fencing up — that sort of thing,” Fisher said.

Brown added that the district would be working with the township to tidy up “a lot of remaining paperwork” before ground could be broken, and that the overall project would be completed in “about 2 1/2 to 3 years,” with an end goal of having the building occupied in January 2029.

When construction does begin, the township and district estimate that about 200,000 cubic yards of fill will need to be removed from the site, in roughly 14,000 truckloads. It was unanimously approved at the meeting that Hawbaker Engineering will transport the fill to a dump site along Curve Hill Road, and potentially other approved sites outside the municipality if needed.