EAST HELENA — The west corner of Diehl Ranch Drive and Canyon Ferry Road will not be empty much longer—that is the future site of Helena Christian School.
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The pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade school recently announced that it raised $5.6 million and got a $1 million grant from the Gianforte Family Foundation for its expansion project.
“I can’t think of a more exciting time in history to be part of Helena Christian School,” Helena Christian School superintendent Ted Clark said.
The school has leased space at Canyon Ferry Baptist Church for the past 16 years, but soon it will have a home of its own.
“We are so blessed to be able to lease the space that we lease, but we’re just running out of space,” Clark said. “We don’t have room to put more kids in classrooms.”
Phase one of the four-phase expansion project includes a 29,000-square-foot building, complete with 14 classrooms, four labs, a new cafeteria and state-of-the-art security. The new building will allow the school to expand the student body from about 220 students to 336 students.
“I’ve been here 9 years, and I’ll tell you, there hasn’t been a year yet where a class hasn’t filled, and we’ve had to turn families away, and that’s heartbreaking,” Clark said. “And so it’ll be absolutely exciting for those families that have been put on waiting lists, or couldn’t get in a year or two ago, or whatever the case was, to say ‘hey, we have more room, we have more space.’”
Clark said the goal is to break ground this spring and hopefully move into the new facility in fall 2026, but there is a lot to do between now and then.
Over the next 60 days, the school is working to raise another $500,000 for the project, and $1.7 million over the next 12 months to hit the project's more than $8 million price tag.
“Any gift—large or small—matters,” Clark said. “It does make a difference.”
Along with donors, a lot of other people—teachers, parents, committees, the school’s board of directors—have worked behind the scenes to get the expansion project to where it is now.
“Without everybody here working so diligently, we would not be here,” Clark said. “And the Lord really deserves the credit, this is God’s school.”
