Developers propose adaptive reuse of William Penn school as vocational hub; community task force, board members press for details

A team assembled by the Pennsylvania Social Equity Investment Fund presented a plan on June 17 to adaptively reuse the William Penn property as a vocational training and community hub, pitching classroom and maker-space uses to the Harrisburg City School District Board of School Directors and the receiver.

"This building was the primary location for CTE and vocational training," said Rob Schof, identifying himself as a Harrisburg resident and a member of the social equity fund team. Architect Paul Lang of Carina Wood Design, who inspected the building in November 2024, said the structure is "in remarkably good shape" for reuse and that typical structural defects seen in comparable projects were not evident.

The presenters described William Penn as a roughly 168,000–184,000-square-foot asset built in 1926 with an estimated "embodied value" of about $24 million. The team proposed a multi-phase redevelopment that would preserve the building’s core and shell and program vocational trades (carpentry, plumbing, welding), an MIT-style FabLab makerspace, culinary spaces, rehearsal/theater production areas and classroom space oriented to the OIC (Opportunities Industrialization Centers) workforce-training model.

Why it matters: presenters framed the proposal as a way to restore an underused historic asset while…