Kootenai readies for centennial celebration

KOOTENAI — The children in the elementary school office Tuesday were not sullen students meeting with Kootenai Principal Betsy Walker to be reprimanded for playground transgressions, food fights or lack of manners.

These students were auditioning for Friday’s centennial celebration and they were jacked.

“I would like to be a guide,” a red-haired boy wearing a martial arts T-shirt said.

Walker, who retires this year, encouraged him.

“I think you would make a wonderful tour guide,” she said.

After approximately a year of work, the $6.8 million elementary school expansion that includes the addition of 11 classrooms, a library, tech room, offices, a kitchen and gym will be finished this spring in time for the community’s centennial, which corresponds with 101 years of education in Kootenai.

The school plans an open house from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday that includes a PTA dinner, historical information and a guided walkabout.

In addition, interviews of former students, administrators and school employees will be part of a video series played in each classroom.

The first school here was a one-room building at the corner of Shingle Mill Road, which was replaced in 1908 by a three-story structure that was the mainstay for almost 80 years.

Clint Campbell, whose father was a principal at Kootenai until 1947, and whose daughters attended the brick building in the 1970s, graduated from Kootenai in 1951.

 “It was a nice place to go to school,” Campbell said.

His family lived in the Selle Valley, and later moved to Oden Bay where he still lives.

He remembers Kootenai for its sports program, basketball in particular.

“They had a county league,” he said. “We didn’t have a gymnasium, so we practiced outside.”

His team won the first league championship against teams whose schools had gyms.

“It was so much easier playing inside than playing in the mud,” he said.

Campbell is among former students interviewed for the video stream, a project the grade-schoolers are excited about. The video will give visitors a first-hand account of the old school while newspaper clippings and other school memorabilia covers hallway bulletin boards.

The old pictures, clippings, letters and documents includes the first contract of the patriarch of local education, Charles Stidwell.

“He started his career here,” Walker said. “That makes Kootenai famous in a certain respect.”

It also includes an article from 1927 that tells of a Kootenai teacher who was canned for getting married.

“Board ruling holds marriage violates teacher contract,” according to the headline.

  The latest expansion was part of a $14.1 million plant facility levy that passed by a 4 percent margin in 2008, the first building levy approved by patrons since 1987.

The expansion at Kootenai will ease overcrowding at Kootenai and Farmin-Stidwell. The remaining $7 million was distributed throughout the district with part of it earmarked for upgrades at Sagle, a $1 million contingency and for health, safety and differed maintenance.

The three-story structure Campbell attended was destroyed in the 1980s.

“I really liked it there,” he said. “But, of course, that’s progress.”

Opening ceremonies on June 4 are scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. in the new gymnasium.