Dear Families and Staff,

This spring our Helena Public Schools Trustees are continuing a discussion that began more than a decade ago.

In the spring of 2017, Central School had been closed for four years, ever since an engineer’s report identified dangerous structural weaknesses in the historic building. That risk, coupled with the poor condition of the old Bryant and Jim Darcy facilities, prompted Trustees to seek a construction bond to demolish and replace the three elementary schools.

Community leader Rick Hays was among those who helped lead the successful, grassroots campaign to pass the funding measure later that year.

Even then, Hays recalled in a conversation this week, it was painfully obvious that there was another school in “dire straits”: Helena High was slowly sinking into the swamp on which it was built in 1955.

The discussion at that time, he recalled, was that the new K-5 schools were just a start on addressing the district’s facilities needs, to be followed by work on both high schools.

“The message was, “This is the first step,’” Hays said.

The new Bryant, Central and Jim Darcy schools opened in the fall of 2019 – the first time the district had opened new schools in 40 years.

Then, about six months later, came COVID.

Steam and silverfish 

Among the many things the pandemic derailed, was the district’s forward momentum on replacing and repairing its old buildings. Our facilities team does an incredible job of maintaining our buildings with the funding available and works wonders with carpet and paint to make them look good.

But our buildings’ average age, if you subtract the three new elementaries, is now about 75.

As any homeowner knows, the older a structure gets, the more you have to spend on replacements and repairs. Over the years, the district’s backlog of “deferred maintenance” – repairs and maintenance that have been delayed due to cost – has grown to $100 million districtwide. About half of that backlog is at Capital High and Helena High. At the district’s current rate of annual facilities funding, it would take 34 years to catch up – that is if inflation did not increase and if our facilities stopped aging.

Meanwhile, the most urgent needs are quickly becoming emergent.

The biggest of these is at Helena High, which continues to sink into the swamp beneath it.

The battle against silverfish, ants and rodents is constant. Writers with the student newspaper, “The Nugget,”even captured the creepy, crawly omnipresence of the silverfish in a tongue-in-cheek column last year.

But the bigger problem is the school’s antiquated steam heat system, which is in imminent danger of failure.

Each year, the leaky system loses about 10,000 gallons of water into the school, causing erosion and deterioration of the foundation and structure.

The three boilers in the school basement – dubbed the Queen Mary after the iconic British steamer – look like they belong in a steam engine museum. One of the three is beyond repair and used for parts. The boilers run at 45 to 55 percent efficiency.

During last year’s cold snap, one of the two remaining boilers failed, leaving just one to heat the entire school for the duration of the deep freeze. Meanwhile, the system’s old-fashioned, black metal pipes are so brittle that one shattered recently as an HVAC technician worked on it.

Helena High’s old-fashioned steam boilers are dubbed the “Queen Mary.”

A wintertime failure of the system would force closure of the building, creating an immediate, costly and highly disruptive emergency.

Repairing the system to operate reliably for the next five to seven years would cost anywhere from $1.5 million to $2.5 million. Replacing the heating system would cost upward of $7 million – a huge investment in a substandard building. The total deferred maintenance backlog at Helena High is $21 million.

Capital High, meanwhile, faces $14 million in deferred maintenance needs of its own for things such as heating and ventilation, roofing, safety and security needs and electrical upgrades. But the bones of the school, built in 1965, are good. With a significant investment, CHS can be brought up to 21st Century standards and continue to serve the community for decades to come.

A failed condensate return pipe in the Helena High Library.

Long-range planning

We’re able to put numbers to the facilities needs at our schools because in 2022, as we emerged from the pandemic, the district launched a comprehensive master facilities planning process to quantify the deferred maintenance backlog, assess future facilities needs and recommend potential paths forward.

Led by SMA Architects & Engineers, the work culminated in the draft Master Facilities Plan (MFP) document presented to the Board of Trustees last spring. You can view the MFP here.

The plan brought critical needs into focus at three schools, recommending significant renovations and improvements to Capital High, replacement of Helena High and replacement of Kessler School.

Kessler Elementary, built in 1936, is one of the district’s oldest school buildings, with a hodgepodge of remodels and additions. Like other older schools in the district, it suffers from undersized classrooms, an undersized kitchen, poor HVAC and temperature control, and a poor fire suppression system. These factors, coupled with demographic trends and the availability of land at the site to build a new school without closing the old one, make it an ideal candidate for replacement.

Our overarching goal is to put the district on a regular schedule of building replacement and renovation in order to avoid expensive deferred maintenance backlogs and facilities emergencies. Consider:

• If our district were to remodel or replace each of our 11 elementary school buildings every 10 years, it would be 130 years before we returned to the first schools replaced or remodeled.
• If Trustees were to seek a bond this spring to include construction of a new Kessler building, our three “new” elementary schools – Bryant, Central and Jim Darcy – would be 10 years old by the time the new Kessler facility opened.

On Tuesday, Trustees will be briefed on the beginning of “pre-bond work” for the proposed CHS, HHS and Kessler projects. To be clear, this work won’t result in building schematics or plans. Rather, it will give Trustees the information they need to consider a potential bond proposal – information such as the general scope of the projects, time frames for completion and rough cost estimates.

The need is urgent.

If Trustees were to seek a bond this fall to replace the Helena High School building, it would be three years before the first class of students could walk through the doors in Fall 2028. In the meantime, we will limp along Helena High’s heating system at high cost and high risk of failure.

And the longer we wait, the higher the cost of these urgently needed projects will grow. District Facilities Director Todd Verrill estimates that construction inflation has driven up the cost of the district’s deferred maintenance backlog by at least 20 percent since January 2022.

In the coming months, the district will hold community tours of the buildings to allow the public to see deferred maintenance needs firsthand.

Levies for learning, bonds for building 

As we consider funding new facilities, it’s important to note that levies and bonds are two different forms of funding. A simple way to think of it is that levies are for learning and bonds are for buildings.

Levies pay for day-to-day operations and expenses.

Bonds are for new construction or major renovations. They are often long-term investments of 10 to 30 years. Bond funding is for construction costs only and cannot be used to pay for operational expenses.

Helena Public Schools has rarely sought bonds in recent decades. The three new elementary schools funded by the 2017 bond measure were the first to be built in Helena in 40 years. Prior to that, Four Georgians Elementary, opened in 1977, was the district’s newest school.

Like most other states, Montana established levies and bonds as tools for communities to pay for their share of school operations and construction as needed over time, often running simultaneously.

“Keeping the tech lights on” 

Last spring, the district asked voters for a sizable levy to fund technology and safety needs.

These are vital needs for our district, and we felt it was our responsibility to ask in order to support our students and teachers and to sustain programs such as music and PE. That said, we knew it was a big ask.

Voters told us they couldn’t afford it. And we listened.

This spring, the district will ask for a third of what we sought last year. Pending approval by the Board of Trustees, who will consider the proposed levy at Tuesday evening’s meeting, the district will seek a technology levy that would cost the average Helenan about $9 a month. This 10-year Technology Levy would provide $4 million a year for district technology needs, replacing our current, perpetual levy, which provides $1 million a year.

The levy would not pay for the district to buy new types of technology. Rather, it would allow us to repair and replace the existing laptops, projectors and other technology that students and teachers rely on every day. It would also cover basic tech operating expenses such as the cost of maintaining the district’s Wi-Fi network and cybersecurity tools.

District IT Director Gary Myers says it best when he states that the technology levy would “simply allow us to keep the tech lights on.”

The proposed Tech Levy would also ease pressure on the General Fund, which the district has been using to help subsidize technology needs. The General Fund pays for teacher salaries and other basic operational expenses; hence the tech levy would help free up more of these monies for their intended purpose.

I encourage you to stay engaged and informed as we continue this important work for the future of our Helena Public Schools in the coming months.

You can find Board of Trustees meeting dates and agendas at www.helenaschools.org/board-of-trustees/ (scroll down to the blue menu at right for a listing of full board and committee meetings).

Enjoy this beautiful snowy weekend,

Respectfully,