LANSDALE — North Penn School District officials are considering a cool project — quite cool, as it happens.
District officials heard details last week about plans for a new freezer staff are looking to build at a district support building in Lansdale.
“This freezer would help School Nutrition Services to better store and order products,” said district Director of Facilities and Operations Tom Schneider.
“The other item to consider is that, through the master planning process at the high school, we do have a large exterior freezer at the high school, and that may be impacted in the future,” he said.
Every day, district School Nutrition Services department staff are responsible for providing meals to students across the district, and since the arrival of COVID-19 in March 2020 the SNS department has also handed out free meals to families in need, passing over two million meals served in early September.
Schneider told the school board’s facilities and operations committee last week that, with a master plan currently being developed for the high school campus and possible expansion there, SNS has proposed creating a second walk-in freezer, located at the district support services center on Eighth Street in Lansdale. A design contract for district architectural consultants Schrader Group Architects to plan out that freezer has been put forward by staff for the committee, with a cost of just shy of $10,000 to develop the plans, and estimates of a 12-by-48-foot size and completion by July 2022.
“It’ll be a quick turnaround on the design, because the walk-in boxes have such a long lead time,” Schneider said.
Board member Jonathan Kassa asked how the new SSC freezer space would compare to that at the high school, and Schneider said the new freezer would be slightly smaller due to space constraints at the SSC site.
“It will be constructed in the back of the building, so no one will be able to see it from the front. It’ll be under an overhang, so it will be very well secluded,” Schneider said.
“We’re more centrally located in the school district than the high school is, so it would really help School Nutrition Services with delivery of food, and also getting deliveries. We have a loading dock here; at the high school, they don’t have a loading dock,” he said.
District CFO Steve Skrocki added that the design and construction costs would be covered by the SNS department’s enterprise fund, with no impact to the district general fund, and added that the new freezer space will give the department extra capacity.
“There are opportunities with additional walk-in freezer space, that the School Nutrition Services program can actually take on additional commodities. And these are foods that are provided by the U.S. government, free of charge,” he said.
“We’ve had situations in the past where extra food has been made available, but we just didn’t have the capacity to take on some of that food. So this will give us that opportunity,” Skrocki said.
Kassa added that he and fellow board members visited SNS staff in late summer and heard how their meal distribution is “just far beyond what other school districts are able to do,” but could be expanded further.
“To add this capacity is a significant step forward,” he said, especially when combined with a new refrigerated box truck the department recently acquired with grant funding secured in late 2020.
“We’re actually building out School Nutrition Services to better meet the needs of the school district. So this seems like a well worthwhile project,” Kassa said.
The facilities and operations committee then voted unanimously to approve the design contract for the SNS freezer, and the full school board could do so at a future meeting. North Penn’s school board next meets at 7 p.m. on Dec. 16 at Pennbrook Middle School, 1201 North Wales Road in Upper Gwynedd. For more information visit www.NPenn.org and for more on the SNS department website follow @NorthPennSNS on Twitter.