Billings Catholic Schools halfway to $18M goal for new school

Billings Catholic Schools Foundation hashed out details of the future home of its kindergarten through eighth-grade students following an end-of-school Mass on Thursday.

Rita Turley, chair of the foundation’s steering committee for the project, addressed a collection of parents, grandparents and interested community members at St. Bernard Catholic Church.

The foundation already raised more than half of the estimated $18 million price tag of the new facilities, largely from donations to the foundation, Turley said.

The new school remains in the planning stages, and an architectural firm has only been recently contracted. But the project has a location and a lot of support from the community, Turley said.

“As we went fundraising to build this budget, we committed to hold, to not increase, tuition,” she said.

The $18 million figure doesn’t include a land purchase. The new elementary and middle school will be built on the same property as St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church on Colton Boulevard between Woody Drive and 21st Street West.

The 27-acre plot is already owned by the foundation and is large enough to accommodate future growth, Turley said.

Turley said the school building will be a multistory building, probably with a mixture of one- and two-story sections.

She said the architecture will be a departure from traditional schoolhouses because modern design allows rooms to be adaptable to different uses. The new school will incorporate technology into the classroom and use space more efficiently than existing facilities.

The area around the school will include a playground in addition to fields for football and track and field practice. The size of the parcel allows for future building projects and could accommodate a high school in the future.

“We looked at it from a campus perspective, and there’s enough land there,” Turley said.

Turley said Central High’s building is the best of Billings Catholics Schools, and there are no plans to replace it. Any similar project would be decades in the future.

“We’re going to make this happen,” Turley said. “It’s going to be fabulous and fantastic. We have the best start ever.”