Community School invests in future

For the Whitefish Community School, doing things different has always been the motto.

The nonprofit preschool started in 2004 after a group of parents decided to fill a need for a different type of childcare in Whitefish. The school is classified through the state as a group child care facility, which places limits on how many kids it can serve at a time.

“We are a smaller setting,” director Jessy Matthews said. “A lot of the places around here are centers and their ratios are a lot different. We can have a six to one ratio of students to teachers, and our mixed age group is not something that many schools do. Since we do have such varied age groups, it kind of comes full circle by the time they start here at 18 months or 2 to the time they’re 5-year-olds and they’re teaching the younger kids what they learned from the older kids when they started.”

While 30 children are enrolled in the school, only 12 can attend at one time to keep that smaller ratio of students to teachers. The school serves children 18 months to 5-years-old.

The students learn together all through the day, and different parts of the lessons are tailored to fit different ages, focusing on skills needed for kindergarten as well as everyday life.

“We encourage the kids to be independent and to be self learners. We’re very nurturing and caring. We help them develop the skills that they’ll need, not just in preschool or school but in relationships with their friends, with the community. We’re big on manners,” Matthews said.

The school recently purchased the building it’s been operating out of for 12 years, located on a 1.5-acre lot off Park Avenue and Eighth Street. Since the beginning it has been a rented space, but when the most recent owner decided to sell, Matthews knew it was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up.

“It’s something that even before I worked here, it was always a goal to be able to own a space, because there’s so much we want to be able to do, but you don’t want to make permanent changes to a place you don’t own and spend the money doing that, especially as a nonprofit,” she said. “It was just an opportunity that happened and we jumped on it.”

The school’s board knew the property provided a unique setting for the school — a large house with several rooms and a big backyard with a sledding hill. The owner provided the school with a short-term loan to enable the purchase of the building and now the school must fundraise $92,000 over the next three years to pay the mortgage.

“To accomplish this goal, the school’s board has started work on several ambitious fundraisers,” said Dave Gatton, the school’s fundraising chair. “We are planning several large-scale events over the course of the year which includes a big outdoor winter event and we have also started our own crowdfunding project to pay down the short-term loan from the owner. It’s a brand new challenge for the school, but one that is worth it to make sure that Whitefish Community School continues to send many future students off to kindergarten.”

While paying off the mortgage for the building is the first priority, Matthews said she has a few ideas for ways to improve the school, including adding a slide in the hill outside, an outdoor classroom, a tire swing and a small bike path around the building. Another work in progress at the school is “Little Whitefish,” a mock downtown where kids can set up their own ice cream shop or retail store to play and learn alongside their friends, who are running other local stores.

Matthews, who is in her fifth year at the school, said the experience of forming relationships with students and their families has been her job’s biggest perk.

“I’ve worked with a lot of different kids and a lot of different families. The kids are happy here, they come from good families that are involved, they care about the school and the kids. Just making those friendships with the parents that at a lot of schools you don’t get the opportunity to do, and since we’re so small we get to know the kids so well. That’s a really fun part of it for me,” she said.

The school is funded through tuition, fundraising and donations, and Matthews said they’ll hold several fundraisers, including their big winter fundraiser in February.

For more information visit whitefishcommunityschool.org.