Traffic, safety concerns raised for State College’s new Park Forest Middle School

Preliminary plans for State College Area School District’s new middle school were discussed at a Patton Township Supervisors work session Wednesday, with officials from various entities raising some traffic and safety concerns.

The work session was held to discuss preliminary plans for the new 270,000-square-foot Park Forest Middle School, and was attended by several of the project’s stakeholders, including township supervisors and planning commission members, members of SCASD’s school board and the project’s architects.

The new school will be located along Little Lion Drive next to Circleville Park, directly across Valley Vista Drive from the existing 54-year-old middle school. The project is estimated to cost between $127.9 million and $136.9 million.

Designs for the project were presented to the school board in May, and include a three-story classroom wing where students will physically “move up” through the sixth, seventh and eighth grades. The school’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.

Access to the building will be from Little Lion Road and an extension of Amblewood Way, with staff parking and a dedicated lane for parents to drop off and pick up their students located on the school’s south side. Buses will drop off and pick up students on the building’s north side, creating a system that the Patton Township police chief hopes will help avoid some current issues.

“One of the biggest complaints that we get for the current middle school — that we’ve tried to fix the best we can — is parent drop-offs and pick-ups interfering with bus traffic,” Chief Tyler Jolley said. “We try to separate those two the best that we can, but it became a major safety issue.”

While he liked the idea of the parent and bus receiving areas being on different sides of the building, Jolley raised a concern about the safety of students who live in the Park Forest neighborhood and walk to school.

If those same students were to walk to the new school, they’d have to cross the busy Valley Vista Drive.

“Valley Vista is, unfortunately, just not a safe road for kids to be crossing at any point of the day,” SCASD board president Amy Bader said. “I can’t even control staying at 35 [mph] going down that road. The nature of the way the road is, and the way it works, is really challenging.”

Solutions like a foot bridge over Valley Vista Drive and traffic lights with crosswalks at the road’s intersections with Little Lion Road and Amblewood Way — which was the most popular idea among attendees — were suggested, although a permanent solution was not settled on.

Any necessary changes to the site’s traffic flow to mitigate safety concerns would be determined after the results of a final Pennsylvania Department of Transportation traffic study are received, although the project’s architects were unable to provide a timeline for when that may happen.

In addition to the traffic safety concerns, township officials also took issue with the new school’s parking situation, which Jolley said is also a problem at the current middle school.

According to Jolley, the new school is required to have 464 total parking spaces, but right now only 441 parking spaces are planned — 255 on-site, 117 more when the buses clear and 69 spaces across Valley Vista Drive at the current middle school.

“When you have a special event like a musical, and that school is packed with parents and grandparents and kinfolk, they’re going to park everywhere,” township manager Amy Farkas said. “Where we don’t want them to park is on the shared use path along Valley Vista Drive, which is already in our ordinance for no parking, and we’re concerned that there isn’t enough parking to accommodate on site.”

While SCASD Facilities Director Mike Fisher recognized the “very, very close” 23-space deficit, he said that the school’s planned parking lots are capable of handling “99% of what’s going to happen.”

Inside the school, township planning commission chair William Burnett shared his concerns with the layout of the auditorium, which has no exits leading directly to the outside.

“Auditoriums are very bad for fire and very bad for emergency response, and when you have something happening in that auditorium, you want to get people out of that auditorium as fast as possible and as safe as possible — especially when you have ranked seating,” he said.

But Jeff Straub, with project architect Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates, said that not only was the auditorium’s layout in line with Centre Region code, but that the auditorium at the district’s high school had a similar layout.

Moving forward, the township’s staff is currently reviewing a conditional use application for the school, along with its preliminary development plans. Farkas expects both the conditional use permit and official land development plans to be voted on by the township in January, following the completion of the traffic study and finalization of the site layout.

Once the final plans are approved, construction on the new school can begin — a process that is estimated to last for about two years.

“I’m really appreciative that we were all able to get together to sort through some of this stuff,” township supervisor Sultan Magruder said. “I know we’re playing a waiting game, but we have a lot of really smart minds looking into this stuff. We are all coming from our own different perspectives, and I appreciate all the suggestions that were shared.”