District board approves State High parking expansion. When will construction start?
The State College Area School District has finalized plans to expand one of the parking lots at the high school to address part of a larger parking problem.
At its Monday night meeting, the district’s board of directors approved a $186,815 bid from State College-based Ameron Construction to expand State High’s North Campus parking lot. The project is expected to add 49 parking spots and “relieve parking pressure,” according to a district memo.
The expansion for the lot — located across the street from the Weis market on Westerly Parkway — should help alleviate parking problems on borough streets around State High. The school campus currently has 821 total spaces and makes 340 spots available to students. The expansion, set to begin near the end of the school year, would bump that total up to 870 spaces.
While presenting preliminary project plans to State College borough officials in August, Matt Harlow of the ELA Group —the engineering group that designed the expansion — said parking concerns at State High had grown in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic. He noted more students are driving to school rather than taking the bus.
“The students that can’t find spaces out there, they’re finding them somewhere, and it’s on borough streets,” Harlow said in August. “So with this, we have accommodations already in place to make it an easy project to get 50 relatively easy and inexpensive parking spaces.”
Back in December, borough officials approved an amendment to the district’s conditional use permit originally granted during State High construction a decade ago. The permit allowed the district to originally construct just over half of the 1,330 parking spaces required for its high school campus.
Adding 49 spaces to the State High campus will bring its parking deficit to around 36%, down from about 40% before the expansion.
Harlow presented final plans for State High’s parking expansion back in January. The district remains on track to begin the project toward the end of spring or the beginning of summer.
“The end of the school year, I think, is what we’ve decided on,” Harlow told the borough planning commission on Jan. 23. “Even though we could do it during the school year, we think we’ll have better weather and better conditions for what we need to do out there. It’ll probably start right after classes are over in early June.”
Roughly 50 parking spaces were once planned for the eastern side of the North Campus commuter lot, but they were scrapped from the project by the time construction began.
Final plans for the project call for the planting of four new trees around the parking lot. Crews will also move seven native trees from elsewhere on the high school campus and place them near the expanded lot.
Construction will not require closures on nearby sidewalks or roadways. For that reason, the project did not require a traffic study.
Reporter Keely Doll contributed to this report.
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