The Daily Inter Lake

Kalispell's newest "big thing," Glacier High School, is just seven months away from welcoming its first crop of students.

In August, the 1,200-student school also will usher in a new era for the Flathead's most populous school district that will support a second high school for the first time in history.

Flathead High School, which is seeing its own expansion and facelift with a new gymnasium foyer and commons, will house all four years of high-school students from ninth through 12th grades.

Glacier High is being designed to support students studying under the district's new concept of career clusters, providing a curriculum to usher students into careers, trade schools, community colleges or universities for the 21st century. Flathead High's curriculum follows suit.

The building itself is sporting new technology with its biomass boiler, which was fired up to heat the whole school starting Jan. 1. Its wood-chip fuel will come from the area timber industry, harvested from forest-fire fuel reduction sites for the first couple of years.

The boiler will pay for itself in energy savings within the first year, and is expected to save close to $1.5 million during 10 years.

Glacier High's west classroom wing was completed at the end of November, with the east wing of classrooms scheduled to be finished by the end of 2006.

The performance hall in the east wing comes next, then the central commons area and finally the gym.

The final round of bidding is in February, when bids go out for road work and intersections, and for furniture and equipment.

If everything stays on schedule, the building and grounds will be turned over to the school district by June 15.

School crews are handling the landscaping themselves. Grass is established on the inner oval of the track, and the three soccer and football practice fields are seeded for spring green-up. The school yard will be done in the spring.

Roads and intersections are the biggest remaining chunks of the project.

The access coming off Stillwater Road onto the southern perimeter of the site has been named Wolfpack Way, in honor of the school mascot.

The school will build the first 300 feet of Wolfpack Way, beginning at its intersection with Stillwater Road. Developers will build the remaining segments east to the Reserve Drive loop that Montana Department of Transportation committed to start building during the spring.

The school also will widen Stillwater and design a left-turn lane onto Wolfpack Way.

West Reserve Drive and Stillwater Road's intersection is part of the state-built loop.

If the loop goes through as planned, the school may not need to build a temporary right-only-in/right-only-out access onto West Reserve. Instead, it could divert that budget item to building a permanent access to the east onto Wolfpack Way.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com.