SerpApi.Org
A $21 million project to renovate and expand Mount Nittany Elementary school is nearly finished and is expected to be ready in time for the start of the 2026-27 school year, according to a presentation to the State College Area School Board on Monday.
Since the start of work in early 2025, the project has been delayed by a total of 33 days, but “we’re doing final clean, so we fully plan on being in and not really having any impacts to kids inside the school,” Mike Fisher, director of the physical plant for SCASD, said.
The project includes include 36,627 square feet of additions and 2,939 square feet of renovations to the 15-year-old elementary school at 700 Brandywine Drive in College Township.
It will add six classrooms, special education rooms, a large group instruction room, STEM and music room and a dedicated cafeteria. Work also includes a bus drop-off loop and parking lot accessible from the existing parking area shared with Mount Nittany Middle School, a new main entrance and two grass playing fields on the east side of the building.
Flooring is more than 98% complete, while roofing, siding and soffit are more than 95% complete, Fisher said. An electric vehicle charge has been installed, factory startup of all equipment is completed and landscaping is about 50% complete, though Fisher said the latter is intended to be the last item finished.
Grass is coming in well in on the north soccer field, and the south field will be sodded in the coming weeks, Fisher said.
“Some of these downpours have kind of pushed us back a little bit, but we hope that the kids can get on that this fall,” Fisher said. “We still have the field that we kind of refurbished between the middle school and the elementary that kids can continue to use.”
Parking lot paving is expected to take place this week.
Final clean of the addition began the week of July 15, and will move to the renovated space the week of Aug. 3. Pending final inspections, the district anticipates an occupancy permit in early August.
A ribbon cutting ceremony will be held on a date to be determined before the start of school, Fisher said.
The expansion and renovation was approved by the school board in 2024 to address capacity issues at Mount Nittany Elementary.
With a student capacity of about 450, Mount Nittany Elementary’s 18 existing classrooms were typically at full use, and for several years that necessitated moving two fifth-grade classrooms to the nearby Panorama Village building.
It was the only of the district’s eight elementary schools identified as having immediate capacity concerns that need to be addressed, based on an analysis of enrollment trends and projections over 10 years conducted by Crabtree Rohrbaugh, with additional projections provided by school enrollment analytics firm DecisionInsite.
The completion of the Mount Nittany Elementary School project comes just as the district is gearing up for an even bigger building project: replacement of the 54-year-old Park Forest Middle School.
After a complex planning and development process, Patton Township on July 8 conditionally approved plans for the 270,000-square-foot school to be located off of Valley Vista Drive, across from the current Park Forest Middle.
The district has since been authorized to begin site prep work for the $137.4 million, but with final approvals still to be completed, a building permit likely won’t be issued until some time in August — about three months later than the originally anticipated late spring start.
Completion previously had been projected for occupancy in January 2029, but that is no longer the case.
“We were kind of talking about moving in the winter of 2028-29,” Fisher said. “There is no way that’s going to happen at this point. It will be the start of the school year for ’29.”
