FUN FACTS
In 1980, as State College Friends moved into their new Prospect Avenue meetinghouse, a small group of members and attenders actively began considering the creation of a Friends School in State College.
By that fall eleven students, their two teachers and one administrator had begun holding classes in the lower level of the new meetinghouse, renovated in rapid time over the summer.
Over the next decade enrollment grew to seventy students, from kindergarten through fifth grade, with six teachers and a full-time head.
During the 1990s the growing school began renting additional classroom space from the Baptist and Brethren Church, and then purchased land for a proposed school building of its own. After a fire of the barn on that property, the school’s trustees purchased a property on University Drive, next to Foxdale, on which an attractive new building was constructed and occupied in September of 1998.
By the next year the school had expanded to include grades 7&8, and its 120 students were served by twenty-one faculty and staff, with purposely small class sizes averaging seventeen students with two teachers.
During its forty-five years of existence the school has had fifteen Heads (primary administrators), and nearly two hundred educators have taught as lead teachers, assistant teachers, or teachers of special subjects.
School K-8 enrollment peaked in 2003 at 140 students, and as its enrollment declined over the following years pre-kindergarten offerings were added, which continue to the present.
To read more about the State College Friends School (Chapter Nine) click on this link to D. Douglas Miller: Quakers in Centre County, Pennsylvania.