High school site plan redraws parking and stormwater; plan keeps bus stacking and reduces net spaces by 10

York Suburban School District’s consultants presented a high school site plan Sept. 29 that reconfigures the front loop and parking aisles to improve traffic flow, preserves dedicated bus circulation and adds two underground stormwater infiltration facilities to meet township and state requirements.

Chad Smith, the civil engineer on the project, said the revised layout maintains bus stacking at the previous location and creates a continuous one-way circulation in front of the building to ease parent pickup and reduce congestion. The plan preserves four primary access points on the site and avoids major frontage work on the state highway to limit schedule risk tied to a highway-occupancy permit, the consultants said.

Parking and circulation: The reconfigured front and flanking parking areas will result in 339 total on-site spaces, down from 349 existing spaces, the engineers said. Much of that loss stems from the new building footprint. Consultants said they will phase construction and manage staging so the school remains operational during work; specific phased parking counts will be developed during the land-development and construction-phase planning.

Stormwater and site work: The plan adds two underground infiltration facilities designed to meet township stormwater ordinance and the state NPDES requirements; the larger facility will handle runoff from the front parking and discharge to a designated existing outfall, while the smaller facility addresses runoff associated with the building expansion. The engineering team reported subsurface infiltration testing found usable soils roughly 100 yards east of the parking area where infiltration rates were sufficient to place the underground chambers.

Landscaping and zoning: Site plans include interior island landscaping to meet zoning requirements (roughly 5% of impervious cover in interior landscaping), and engineers used hatch patterns (instead of full islands) in some rows to assist winter maintenance and plowing while meeting ordinance requirements.

Construction impacts and phasing: Consultants said they will prepare a detailed construction-phasing plan that identifies temporary losses of parking during different phases of the build and that they will consider off-site options, community partners and staging areas to reduce neighborhood parking impacts. The team told the board that an exact estimate of temporary parking loss depends on the sequencing and had not been finalized.

Public questions: Board members and residents asked how many parking spaces would be unavailable during construction and suggested outreach to community sites such as nearby houses of worship for temporary parking. Residents in the audience and commenters later in the meeting reiterated concerns about impacts to adjacent streets and about safe two-way bus movements at the Sundale entry used by the intermediate school project.

Next steps: The engineering team said the plan as presented meets township stormwater and zoning requirements and will move forward with land-development submittals and construction-phase logistics after the planning-review steps and any required permits are resolved.