Facility plans mulled for Muldown Elementary

A community forum will be held Thursday, Dec. 1, to discuss facility plans for Muldown Elementary School in Whitefish.

The public is invited to discuss the needs and challenges of the 50-year-old building at 7 p.m. at the school. Options presented range from only addressing serious needs to building an addition.

Some of the areas identified as in need of repair or replacement include the heating system — original to the building — along with roofing, insulation, vapor barriers, parking lot drainage and irrigation.

The facility options are a result of six months of work between a school district task force and architect and engineering firm L’Heureux, Page and Werner. The task force consists of Whitefish School District staff, trustees, parents and community members.

The task force began meeting in the summer to discuss traffic safety. That discussion evolved into addressing heating systems and resulted in hiring CTA Architects and Engineers to do an analysis. In the report, it was discerned that the heating system couldn’t be addressed without significant structural work in the original part of the building.

Muldown was built in 1965 and the last major construction project for the school was an addition completed in 1992.

Based on the report, task force members and administrators believed an in-depth review of the school as a whole would be beneficial. Instead of spending millions to address heating only, “we could do two things at once — impact the learning environment and meet deferred maintenance needs,” Whitefish Superintendent Heather Davis Schmidt said in an earlier Daily Inter Lake article.

The last major construction project in Whitefish School District was when Whitefish High School underwent new construction and renovation, completed in 2014 for $23 million.

For more information, visit www.whitefishschools.org.

Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or by email at hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.