The overhaul of Bigfork High School is overdue

We all like to think we have the best of everything in Bigfork.

We have the best lake, the best views, the best restaurants, the best golf course, the best art galleries, the best little main street, the best people, and the best place to watch a play. It might not be entirely true, but we make the best of what we have and will eagerly do everything we can to make those things among the best.

But there’s one thing in this great little community that is glaringly sub-par—the high school building.

I graduated from Bigfork High School 20 years ago and was fortunate to take on a full-time job last year as the Activities Director. Prior to that, I spent about 10 years coaching various sports at Bigfork. Now that I’m working in the school every day, I am reminded that this is a 50-year-old building that is not meeting the needs of our students and our community.

If you were to come see the school (and I hope you will), you would not need someone to convince you that something needs to be done. Classrooms are inadequate, the library is outdated, science labs are not safe, handicapped students and visitors are not properly accommodated, the building as a whole is not fire safe, locker rooms are abysmal, and the space that is available is poorly appointed.

This building desperately needs attention, and that’s not a small task. That’s why you’re being asked to vote in the upcoming bond election.

There is one misconception I keep hearing about the scope of the bond that I want to address. As the person in charge of Athletics at Bigfork Schools, I can personally vouch that this project is not about making our gym bigger or more fit for volleyball or any other kind of tournaments.

I don’t know where that rumor came from, but I can assure you it was not from me. We have lots of goals and visions for Athletics at Bigfork High School, but hosting tournaments does not make the list.

When a school brings its girls’ and boys’ basketball teams to play here, they share one locker room. One team can’t use the locker room until the other one is completely out. Teams end up using classrooms to change, yet our teams don’t have to do that when they visit other schools.

Our locker rooms need to be replaced. Our gym does not. I like our little gym. I played (poorly) in this gym back in the 1990’s. It’s a tough place for visiting teams to play, and that’s good for us. Having said that, we could use a little more space.

We don’t necessarily need more seats, but we need a little more room to walk. Currently, fans walk in front of the bleachers and onto the basketball floor to reach their seats. They track in snow, which is dangerous to the athletes when it’s inside the boundary lines of the gym. We have the space to accommodate one person in a wheelchair, but they must sit inches from the court.

The gym floor itself must be replaced. Gym floors don’t last forever. This one is nearly half a century old and is showing its age. Imagine a floor, sitting on joists, that takes 50 years of basketball games, volleyball games, wrestling matches, practices for each, graduations, PE classes, dances, and community events. You’d be hard pressed to find a room that gets more hours of use in all of Bigfork.

We’ve gotten some great use out of the gym and the rest of the building, but an overhaul is overdue. When this project is finished, our gym will still be smaller than every other high school gym in the Valley, and that’s OK. These are not extravagant upgrades to our gym or any other part of the school; they are updates that have been needed for quite some time.

Bigfork’s teachers have endured small classrooms, drafty windows, and cramped storage spaces converted into offices, yet they’ve still turned out exceptional students in droves. These students dutifully pile into these small classrooms, eat their lunch in hallways, and share locker rooms with other teams without a peep of complaint, but that can’t last forever.

Families that want the best for their kids move to communities with great schools. Those families walk through this school when they’re considering where to move and they have a distinct look of concern on their faces. And aren’t those the kind of families we want living here? Don’t we want people here who care about their kids and care about education and care about producing great citizens to be our neighbors?

We owe it to ourselves in this community to invest in our young people. Don’t kill this project because you want to spend a few cents less a month, or because you have another idea, or because you don’t like somebody who works at the school, or because your input wasn’t solicited in the planning process. If you even remotely like the idea of a building, I hope you’ll vote for the bond to pass.

Bigfork has the best of everything. Don’t try and convince me otherwise. If I thought it didn’t, I’d live somewhere else. I see a lot of kids from all over Montana, and I know that ours are every bit as exceptional as our views.

Don’t let this die. Our kids—your neighbors—don’t deserve that.

This is the right thing for our community.

Dave Creamer, Bigfork High School Activities director