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CONSTRUCTION HAS begun on an expansion to Stillwater Christian School. (Brenda Ahearn photos/Daily Inter Lake)
Construction has begun on an expansion to Stillwater Christian School.(Brenda Ahearn/Daily Inter Lake)
WORK IS underway on a 3,500-square-foot expansion at Stillwater Christian School.
Stillwater Christian School is in its second phase of expansion, driven by an uptick in enrollment at the private school located south of Kalispell.
The 3,500-square-foot addition off the back of the school includes three classrooms, bathrooms and storage. One of the classrooms will serve as a middle-school science lab. The school is working with a $600,000 budget.
Currently, the middle-school science lab is housed in a regular classroom. The new science lab will have sinks and counters, something middle-school science and math teacher John Clement is looking forward to as it will be better equipped for conducting science experiments.
“There’s a lot of things we can do,” Clement said, noting that much of middle-school science has water-related lessons or experiments mixing chemicals. “But also, clean up [will be easier].”
A hallway will connect the new addition to a 10,800-square-foot addition completed in 2015 that added six high-school classrooms, lobby, conference room and offices that cost approximately $1.8 million to build.
Makowski said that addition has changed the school environment so students have a place to gather besides hallways. It has also allowed the school to enhance arts, music and preschool programming.
The expansion projects are primarily a response to growing enrollment, according to Stillwater Superintendent Dan Makowski. “This is a year earlier than we thought because of enrollment,” Makowski said about the current construction project. “We were thinking this would be next summer, but we’ve had a higher demand with more students so we went ahead this year.”
Stillwater has an enrollment of 370 students.
“Right now we have 25 more students registered than we had last year at the same time,” Makowski said.
With the elementary experiencing some of that growth, the school has had to add classes.
“The elementary is growing and so we have some high-school classes in that elementary building. We’ll move those over, which will open up the rooms for elementary” after the new addition is completed, he said.
He said growth is a good problem, but decisions may lie ahead in weighing continued expansion according to the master plan, or capping enrollment.
“We have a good problem, which is growth, and trying to manage our growth. Part of that is this new building,” Makowski said.
Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.