"Our Facilities & Operations Committee continues to focus on the NPHS renovation project. There will be two bidding phases to the project."
(The following is a submission from North Penn School Board President Tina Stoll. The views expressed within are her own.)
Dear North Penn community,
Welcome back- the 2024-2025 school year is well underway!
All 18 of our schools have hosted their Back To School nights. The feedback from students, staff and parents has been overwhelmingly positive, especially with regards to the cell phone policy. North Penn has joined the many other districts throughout our nation, recognizing the harmful effects phones can have on all of us and will enforce restricting the use of them during the school day.
Our NPSB Committee meetings have resumed after the summer break. These meetings are all available to view on NPTV live and then saved for later viewing. I encourage you to tune in and remain informed as to what is happening in our district. The meeting schedule can be found here.
Our Facilities & Operations Committee continues to focus on the NPHS renovation project. There will be two bidding phases to the project. The first bid request will begin this December, with bids being awarded in February 2025 and construction beginning in June 2025. While this is a multi-year project that will inevitably cause some disruption, the goal is certainly to minimize it and to do as much work as possible over the summer months.
This first phase will include renovation of K-Pod. While K-Pod is not as old as the rest of the original structure, it is easier to start the construction there while still finalizing the design and bid specifications for the second phase of the project. Also included in the earlier phases of the renovation will be the construction of additional classroom space, as opposed to putting up any modular units. This will be able to serve as swing space during renovation of the remainder of the building.
In the meantime, our facilities team is also working on other buildings, including conducting a comprehensive playground assessment at all of our elementary schools for safety, accessibility, and consistency. This assessment is due back at the end of the month.
Our Safe Schools committee approved our new visitor management system, Navigate 360. We currently use Navigate 360 in some other applications and transitioning will allow us to better streamline our system, digitize our platform for drills and give greater redundancy with notifications.
I would also like to remind everyone of the Safe2Say program – the app is included on our student’s Chromebooks and is accessible online here. It gives you the ability to notify the district anonymously if you see or hear anything concerning. It has been very helpful to make district officials aware of potential issues since its inception and we encourage anyone who “sees something, to please say something”.
Thank you!
Sincerely,
Tina Stoll
President, North Penn School District Board of Directors
Term Expiration: 2025
