Kalispell Public Schools Superintendent Matt Jensen updated the school board Tuesday on the damage caused by fires set in Glacier High School and Edgerton Elementary School on Aug. 10 and the district’s efforts to mitigate it.  

Glacier has been the easier of the two to address, he told trustees on the eve of the new school year. The high school primarily suffered water damage from the sprinkler system. Edgerton, on the other hand, doesn’t have a sprinkler system and suffered severe smoke damage as a result. 

“It was pretty devastating to walk into those spaces, but [Glacier High School] is in a good spot,” he said. 

Fire damage restoration at the high school is about 95% complete, he said. 

“There are some windows that are still being replaced [and] there’s some baseboards. Everything else has been taken care of and is pretty much back to normal,” Jensen said. 

Teacher Anthony Lapke’s first-floor math classroom bore the brunt of the water damage, but he was able to partially move back into the classroom Tuesday. 

“I don’t have everything put away, but they got me in the room and we’re going to have students there tomorrow,” Lapke said. “There’s still work to be done but people worked very, very hard to make that happen.” 

The water damage extended into a couple of other rooms, including a history room and a room used for mental health services, Lapke said. 

“Fortunately, the restoration [there] was just extracting the water and cleaning,” Lapke said. “Whereas my classroom, where the sprinklers were going, all the electronics were sprinkled — smart panels, computers, graphing calculators — all the stuff.” 

EFFORTS TO fix the damage from the fire at Edgerton are about 20% complete, Jensen said. 

“Edgerton has been much more complicated,” he said. 

“There's lots of things that have happened but basically isolating the spot of the fire and the ductwork from the rest of the building and then systematically going through and cleaning it so we could bring online other parts of the building while keeping one part of the building closed for all the restoration,” Jensen said. “And then that effort is just comprehensive because of the smoke and ash, so that’s extending the timeline.” 

As a result, the special education pre-K program that was originally scheduled to start after Labor Day could be delayed by a week, but it won’t affect the program’s overall duration, according to Jensen. 

“When you’re talking about those types of programs and the age of the students in those programs, everything goes in somebody’s mouth and everything’s touched, right, so we’ve got to do a thorough job in cleaning that space and it’s going to take a long time to go through all that ...,” he said. 

On Wednesday, Jensen said the district intends to provide a projected start date to affected families soon as more progress is made on the restoration work. 

The district is working with its insurance company to file a claim to cover the damage, with early estimates in the range of $300,000 to $450,000, with the understanding that the work is unfinished and the amount could change. 

“... That number is just meant to give you a frame of reference for the work that’s happening inside those spaces,” Jensen said. 

Kalispell Police officers responded to a fire at Edgerton at about 1:11 a.m., Aug. 10. About an hour later, fire alarms at Glacier drew first responders to that campus where evidence of a second fire was discovered. Investigators said evidence collected at both schools indicated arson. 

At 12:15 p.m. that same day, officers arrested 25-year-old Dalton Andrew Cogar in connection with the fires. He is being held in the Flathead County Jail on felony arson charges and felony extra-jurisdiction warrant. His bail is set at $400,000. 

Reporter Hilary Matheson can be reached at 406-758-4431 or [email protected]. If you value local journalism, pledge your support at dailyinterlake.com/support. 

    Devon Siech with Complete Restoration wipes down surfaces with a soot sponge as part of the remediation process in one of the classrooms damaged by an Aug. 10 fire at Edgerton Elementary School on Thursday, Aug. 27. (Casey Kreider/Daily Inter Lake)
 Casey Kreider