Kila School got a little bigger this fall, thanks to the addition of a new classroom.

The 1,250-square-foot room houses special education and Title I students during the school day. After the final bell rings, however, it houses Kila’s Latch-Key (after-school) Program.

It’s a significant upgrade for the program, said Renae Johnson, who runs Latch-Key.

When she took over the program four years ago, the handful of kids who were involved fit comfortably in the library.

But as the program grew — 106 are registered this year — the library became inadequate. Children instead had to stay on the stage in the gymnasium, an impractical solution when volleyball and basketball practices were taking place on the gym floor.

The new classroom provides much-needed space and will improve the program’s ability to help students with education, Johnson said.

While there are opportunities for children to play outside and eat snacks, Latch-Key is first and foremost about helping kids learn, she said. The program provides math, science and reading pods to help students with schoolwork.

The new classroom “is a huge change for the Latch-Key program,” she said. “We’re going to be able to take some kids into the hall [for individual or small-group attention] and give them more education, basically.”

The new room likewise provides more opportunities during the regular school day, Principal Renee Boisseau said.

“We are very, very excited about it,” she said. “Our parents and board members have worked very hard over the last four years to get something built to alleviate a little bit of our crowdedness. ... They have put a lot of time and energy into the process of getting this one classroom built.”

The classroom was built over the summer after Kila voters rejected a $150,000 building reserve levy in May. Had it passed, the money would have been levied over three years and would have been used to build a second classroom.

The levy’s rejection marked the third time in four years Kila taxpayers had denied a building-related request from the school. More than two-thirds of voters shot down a $147,500 building reserve levy in 2007, and a $2.1 million bond issue failed in 2009.

After the bond issue’s rejection, the district abandoned plans to ask for enough money to build a major addition to the school. Instead, board members and staff adopted the motto, “One classroom at a time.”

“If this is the way it has to be done, this is the way we’ll continue to do it,” Boisseau said. “It will be more expensive in the long run.”

The district was able to build the special education classroom using one-time-only federal stimulus money and money from various other funds, Boisseau said. Construction began in early July and wrapped up this fall.

The classroom was part of the master building plan the district presented to the public before the bond election last year. The district will continue to follow the plan as it tries to add one classroom at a time, Boisseau said.

She had nothing but praise for the architects who designed the master plan, Don Counsell and Michael Kohl of Architects Northwest, and the contractor, Davidson Construction.

“One thing that we were really avid about is that it all be local, Flathead Valley” workers, she said.

Next on the master plan would likely involve the library or creating a better computer lab that would double as a math classroom, she said. Then the school probably would focus on building a multipurpose room.

That room would be “more of a cafeteria,” Boisseau said. Moving lunchroom tables out of the gym would free up space for recess, particularly when the weather doesn’t allow students to play outside. A multipurpose room would also be a better place for the after-school program, she said.

But those projects are likely a long way off, Boisseau said.

“I don’t see us being able to do that [in 2011] with the way the Legislature looks like it’s going to fund education,” she said. “I doubt that we’ll have any extra monies to do that anywhere from three to five years, unless we pass a building reserve levy where we could build up $150,000 to $200,000 over a series of years.”

Despite the results of the last few elections, it’s possible the board might consider running a levy in the next few years, Boisseau said.

“We’re out of space. We have no extra room,” she said. “We’ve still got people teaching in hallways. This has alleviated some of it, but every single period, every classroom is full.”

The school is full despite having 20 fewer students than last year, according to fall enrollment counts. That’s because crowding happens only in certain grades, Boisseau said.

“If we have a kindergarten or any class over [state-mandated] class size, we have nowhere to put them,” she said. “We have been at 25 [students in one class] before ... but there is no [extra] classroom to split it into two kindergartens.”

This year’s second-grade class is nearly as big, Boisseau said, but those students are in the same situation — there is nowhere to put an extra classroom should the school get more second-graders.

In addition to impacting the school’s ability to meet accreditation standards, large class sizes defeat Kila’s goal of maintaining a low pupil-to-teacher ratio, she said. And if there was some sort of crisis, such as a broken pipe in a classroom, there would be no place to move those students, she said.

“We have no room for margin of error. We have nowhere that gives us flexibility,” she said.

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.