North Penn High School renovation and funding phases could be finalized by September

LANSDALE — Kids are back in school, buses are back on the road and September could bring a major breakthrough in long-discussed plans to renovate North Penn High School.

District officials gave an update in late August on next steps, including details the public could see and hear beginning later this month.

“We really feel like we’re going to have a good handle on a lot of the phase one construction, and also the phase two construction — how it’s going to be phased and how we’re going to move through the building,” said Tom Schneider, the district’s director of facilities and operations.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, district staff and the school board advocated for a voter referendum that would have approved the tax increases needed to fund an expansion of the school to move ninth-graders there. After voters rejected that referendum in January, the district changed course and submitted a new plan beginning in March that would add a new wing to the current high school, small additions to two other classroom areas, and completely renovate and upgrade the rest of the complex.

In July, administrators said the renovations would not include moving the district’s transportation center to another site in the district after talks about two potential sites fell through over costs, and in late June the district gave Towamencin supervisors an update on the latest versions of the plans.

During the school board’s facilities and operations committee meeting in late August, Schneider gave another update, saying that earlier that month district staff gave an updated presentation to the Towamencin planning commission, which had questions about on-site parking and the location of the transportation building.

“Overall, it was well received and we are planning to present a preliminary plan to the municipality for the next steps in the territorial planning and development process,” he said.

Ongoing meetings are underway between district administrators, the architect and the project construction manager to finalize plans and review the construction schedule, which will likely include an early contract for renovations to the school’s 1990s-era K-pod first, possibly as early as summer 2025, prior to construction of the new wing and major renovations to the school’s remaining pods.

“A lot of the things we’ve been talking about recently include how many classrooms can we take offline at a time to refurbish the pod. Where can we have temporary classrooms? For example, possibly in the auditorium, or having classrooms in the auditorium, things like that,” Schneider said.

The first bid package “is on schedule” to be completed by December, bids will likely be opened in January and the contract could be awarded in early 2025 in time for renovations to be done at K-pod that summer — because those renovations don’t require formal land development approvals — then a second bid package would address the rest of the school.

In a live online broadcast in late August, Superintendent Todd Bauer provided a behind-the-scenes look at the planning underway now and what that construction could look like.

“We have department heads, for example, from the math department, or the special education department, or the science department, who come in and help us design those rooms. What kind of furniture they need, what kind of furniture they need, all of those things,” Bauer said.

“I think a lot of the set will be located on the WNPV property. Even that building itself, that small building,” which until 2020 housed WNPV’s broadcast studio and offices, “could be used as an office for the construction manager. We’re working through all those logistics,” he said.

The latest plans for the high school renovations call for a new wing of the building to be added between the school’s current A and H modules, to enclose a courtyard and provide more ways for students and staff to navigate the building — and all of those building materials, vehicles and workers, Bauer said, have to go somewhere.

“When you do something like this and you do an extension, and obviously we are trying to connect, to increase circulation on campus, you have to bring in a lot of things, a lot of materials. And you have to organize them somewhere,” he said.

“Our campus is pretty compact, so there’s not a lot of room to put materials, like steel. Think about what it looks like when you build a house, now imagine a school and all the assembly that would be required. That’s where we see it currently,” Bauer said.

North Penn informs Towamencin about high school renovation plans

Beginning in September, Schneider added, staff plans to have the project’s construction manager give presentations to the public during facilities and operations committee meetings, similar to the several years of monthly updates the project’s construction manager gave when major renovations were underway at Knapp Elementary from 2020 to 2022.

Work has begun on three subcontracts approved in early August for infiltration testing, utility scanning and site borings, Schneider added, and building scanning and above-the-roof imaging have been completed and compiled, while underground scanning revealed a surprise.

“We had the stormwater lines in the parking lot inspected with a video camera and a robot, and it was a huge success. We actually found more lines than we had anticipated and a couple more manholes,” Schneider said.

A first round of infiltration testing was conducted, and additional test wells will likely be needed, with “about 20 to 25” additional test wells needed to determine how water will infiltrate into the soil across the site. Some drilling may be needed after school starts, Schneider told the committee, and about that amount was anticipated in the contract with the company that will do that work. Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMurtrie asked whether doing that would incur any additional costs, and Schneider said probably not, because the consultant doing the drilling is familiar with the conditions in the area.

“The soil conditions we experienced when we made the infiltration wells are very favorable for building. It’s shale, it’s clay, it’s very favorable. And that’s why it doesn’t infiltrate: the water doesn’t run through it, because there’s so much shale and clay,” he said.

“It’s not such a big problem that it costs us more money. We basically just have to build large underground and surface basins, so that they hold water and slowly release it into the stormwater system around the high school property. We have to hold volumes of water, whereas if we had infiltration, it would just seep into the ground,” Schneider said.

McMurtrie then asked if administrators and the engineer could involve high school students in planning those measures, and Schneider said they would, likely with rain gardens near the school’s current bus loop and/or on the former WNPV property north of the school.

“The basin outside the bus loop would be really beneficial if we could turn it into a sort of rain garden and teaching tool,” she said.

District Finance Director Steve Skrocki added that in addition to presentations by the project’s construction manager beginning in September, the district’s financial adviser will likely present to the board’s finance committee in October about the loans needed to fund the project.

“Representatives from our PFM financial advisory team will attend the October finance committee meeting to discuss the funding timeline. There will be just two weeks between the two meetings,” Skrocki said.

The North Penn School Board will meet again at 7 p.m. on Sept. 10 and Sept. 19, the Finance Committee will meet again at 6 p.m. on Sept. 10 and Oct. 8, and the Facilities and Operations Committee will meet again at 7 p.m. on Sept. 30; for more information, visit www.NPenn.org.

Originally published: September 4, 2024 at 18:40