North Penn Transportation Center Must Move from High School Before Renovations

Dan Sokil | The Reporter•

Propane-fueled school buses are seen parked the North Penn School District transportation center in summer 2023.

Next steps are coming into focus for the long-discussed renovations of North Penn High School, including finding a new home for the district’s buses.

School officials gave an update on those plans on Monday night, including two key meetings in February and a next step that’ll have to be tackled soon.

"The real estate broker is actively searching for a transportation location. There is one possible property that is being investigated at this point,” said Director of Facilities and Operations Tom Schneider.

"Since the ninth graders are not moving to the high school campus, it’s imperative that transportation be relocated offsite prior to the renovations, to allow for the temporary modular campus that has to be constructed,” he said.

On Jan. 16 voters cast ballots in a district-wide referendum asking them to select between two options: a $403 million renovation and expansion project that would have added classroom space to the current high school and moved roughly 1,000 ninth graders there from North Penn’s three middle schools, or a smaller $236 million renovation that would update and modernize the current structure and utilities but with minimal expansion.

A majority of voters chose the "No” option, denying the district permission to exceed the state’s Act 1 index to pay for an additional $97 million in borrowing needed to fund the expansion, leaving the high school’s current 10-through-12 grade configuration in place for the foreseeable future.

Throughout that process, district staff and their architect have said that either version of the renovation project would require moving the district’s transportation center — a maintenance garage, dispatch office, propane tank and fuel station, and parking for roughly 100 district-owned school buses — elsewhere, to free up that space next to the high school for other uses during construction that administrators say they’re aiming to begin in 2025.

Since that vote, Schneider told the school board’s facilities and operations committee on Monday night, staff have continued talks on finding a site to move the transportation center, to free up space for modular classrooms that could be used as various pods of the high school are renovated.

"At this point, the plan is to locate those modular classrooms in ‘Lot A,’ the rear parking lot of the high school. That parking lot is primarily used by the North Penn bus drivers, to park their personal vehicles while they’re doing their bus runs,” Schneider said.

On a typical day, those bus drivers will drive to the site starting at 5:30 a.m. to 6 a.m., park their own vehicles in that lot, then drive buses out on runs to pick up and deliver high school, then middle school, then elementary school students.

"Then they come back, retrieve their personal vehicles, leave the campus, and then at about 1:30 (p.m.) or 1:45 (p.m.) they return to the campus, park in those parking lots, and do the reverse take-home runs for all of the students in North Penn,” Schneider said- "And then after those runs, they come back, retrieve their personal vehicles, and then leave.”

That lot has been identified as a possible area to house the modular classrooms, and as a staging area for construction trailers, materials and equipment, Schneider told the committee, thus the need to move the transportation facilities offsite as soon as possible. Staff have continued to meet with district architectural consultant The Schrader Group and project construction manager D’Huy Engineering, to refine designs in light of the referendum results.

In November the district also approached Towamencin Township to address the zoning below the high school, and the adjacent WNPV Radio property acquired in 2020, and said they planned to make a formal application for a zoning change, modifying the current R-125 and R-175 residential zoning that currently bisect the site to an institutional zoning that would allow different setback and impervious coverage requirements.

That zoning change will be addressed in two upcoming meetings, Schneider told the committee: on Feb. 5 the district will present to Towamencin’s planning commission on that zoning change, then will present the same topic to the township supervisors on Feb. 28. Both meetings will be held at 7 p.m. at that township’s municipal building, 1090 Troxel Road.

Committee chairwoman Cathy Wesley asked if Schneider expected Towamencin’s boards to grant approvals at those meetings, and Schneider said he did, barring any surprises. Wesley then asked if or when the architect and construction manager would show updated plans similar to those shown before the referendum, and Schneider said that’s still to be determined.

"I don’t think we’ll have flybys, like what we did to develop the referendum, so that people would see what the idea of option one was,” he said, referring to renderings and videos that showed an expanded high school in aerial views from outside, and side-by-side videos that showed the current and now-vetoed possible interiors.

"With the systems renovations, there wouldn’t be a wholesale change of the whole structure of the building,” he said.

Staff and the architect typically meet every other week, and are currently working on updating a 2018 facilities study that spelled out the equipment needs and conditions within the school at that time.

"There have been some things that have changed since that 2018 facilities conditions study. We have to look at the building again, and try and prioritize all of the items that were in that study, add or subtract items, and then come up with an estimate again,” Schneider said.

Board member Jonathan Kassa, chair of the safe schools committee, asked if that updated design would also include findings in recent school safety studies, and Schneider said district security staff would be included in the talks leading to a new design. Committee member Juliane Ramic asked if accessibility needs, special education, and/or mobility issues would also be addressed, and Schneider said they would.

Wesley then asked for an informational presentation "of the more important aspects, points, priority areas” for the facilities committee, and Schneider said he and the architect would have more info for the committee by their February meeting.

"We’re actually diving into that option more finitely than we did before. So we’ll have more information coming forward,” he said.

One public comment on the project was made, by resident Jason Lanier questioning whether the 2018-19 cost estimates were still accurate, and why cost figures had grown so much since then. Schneider answered that those estimates did not take into account additional costs such as relocating transportation and connecting modular classrooms to the rest of the school.

"The modular campus has to have utilities such as water, sewer, sprinklers, fire alarms, electricity — all of this stuff has to be added to the campus, we can’t just pull it off of the building,” Schneider said.

North Penn’s school board next meets at 7 p.m. on Feb. 6 at the district Educational Services Center, 401 E. Hancock Street, and the facilities and operations committee next meets at 7 p.m. on Feb. 26 online. For more information visit www.NPenn.org.

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