In the autumn of 1959, the doors of Columbia Falls High School opened for the first time. Across town, the aluminum plant was barely four years old. A brand-new building, modern for its day, filled up with Wildcats.
Generations have passed through it since. Parents who once walked these halls now send their own children down them.
The building has been added on to more than once over the years. But additions are not the same as renewal.
Underneath the additions, the original heart of the school kept running: the same boiler, the same pipes, the same wiring, the same single-pane glass set in 1959.
One by one, the district modernized its other schools. The high school waited. Sixty-five years is a long life for a building, and the only question now is how much longer the town can ask it to wait. Every year of waiting, the price of the basics climbs.
Walk the building today and its age shows in ways a fresh coat of paint cannot hide.
Start with heat. The original boiler still runs the school, at just seventy to eighty percent efficiency, where a modern one would reach above ninety-six.
And the bigger loss is the building itself. More than half of the heat the school makes escapes straight back out, through single-pane windows and walls with almost no insulation.
New glass and a sealed shell would cut that loss by more than eighty percent. Put together, the fixes could let the school stay warm on roughly a quarter of the energy it burns today.
Water tells the same story. The school runs through more than 1.2 million gallons a year, much of it lost to 1959 fixtures. Toilets that use seven gallons would drop below two, and faucets to a fraction of what they pour now.
New plumbing alone could save up to four hundred thousand gallons every year. Above it all, the roof leaks, and in some halls the ceilings already sit open, waiting for the wiring and ductwork a remodel would bring.
The wear reaches every corner. The gym floor has been sanded down so many times the nail heads show through. It cannot be refinished again. It can only be replaced.
The bathrooms still run on fixtures from the early 1960s, too few and spread too far apart. Small things, until you live with them every day.
And then there is safety. The building has roughly thirty-two exterior doors, with no single secure way in or out. It has no fire sprinkler system anywhere inside it, and no modern way to reach every room at once when seconds matter.
Fixing any one of these would be a real project. The school needs all of them at once.
In November of 2025, the district asked voters for $84.8 million to renovate and expand the high school. The town said no. Sixty-eight percent voted against it.
A no that loud is the start of a conversation, not the end of one. The board went back and listened. The biggest objection was size: the old plan was built to hold up to a thousand students, when about seven hundred attend today.
So the expansion came out. The board cut $8.9 million and kept what the building truly needs. The plan on this ballot was shaped by that no.
On September 29, 2026, Columbia Falls votes on a $75.9 million bond to remodel the high school, designed by Jackola Engineering around what the building needs most.
It starts with safety. Thirty-two doors become seven secure entrances, with a buzz-in vestibule guarding the front door. Fire sprinklers go in throughout, and a new system can reach every classroom at once.
Behind the walls, the heat, the pipes, the wiring, the roof, and the windows are all replaced, the failing 1959 systems finally retired for good.
And the plan is careful not to pay twice. The classroom wing already received a new roof and repairs after the water damage a few years ago, covered by insurance and a short levy, so this remodel touches it only lightly.
Then it gives the school room to teach. About thirty thousand square feet of instructional space is added. The art classes, long split into a separate annex, come back under one roof, and students stop walking outside between classes.
It is not glamour. It is the plumbing, the wiring, and the walls, done once and done right.
Two new shops open for machining and automotive work, science gains separate lab classrooms, and a commercial kitchen anchors the consumer science program.
The theater, undersized for years, gets a regulation stage, new lighting and sound, and room for about two hundred more seats, so concert nights stop spilling into the hallway.
A single wellness suite brings nursing, counseling, and mental health support together in one private place, where a student can find help without an audience.
A bond is a promise the whole town makes together, and it is fair to ask what it costs.
The work is paid for in two steps rather than all at once, to ease the load, and the district has published the exact number for a home at every value, so you can see yours before you vote.
And as this begins, an old cost ends: the short roof levy from 2024 comes off tax bills in 2026.
The building pays part of it back, too. The new systems are projected to save up to five million dollars over twenty-five years, compared with limping the old building along.
They cut the energy needed to heat the school by as much as seventy-three percent, and save up to four hundred thousand gallons of water a year. That is money that stays in classrooms instead of leaking out through the walls.
Every town eventually decides what kind of place it wants to be. Columbia Falls has always chosen its kids.
This is that choice in a new form. A vote to fix the last old building, and to give the next class of Wildcats a school worthy of them.
Vote by September 29, 2026.
The election is by mail. Ballots go out September 11 and return to the Flathead County Election Department by 8 p.m.
Paid for by [Committee Name], [Treasurer Name], Treasurer, [Mailing Address], Columbia Falls, MT.