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.
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.
(Gianforte Foundation discusses donation to Helena Christian School)
This expansion and building project has been a dream for the Helena Christian School community for a long time.
“We have been trying to, or talked about building for years, many years” Mark Brownlee said.
Mark Brownlee and his wife, Bethany, both graduated from Helena Christian School, and now their three children are students at the school.
Helena Christian 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.
“It’s exciting to see God moving,” Bethany Brownlee said. “It’s really exciting that our kids are going to be a part of it.”
There is a lot to do between now and when the project breaks ground.
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.”
Click here for more information about Helena Christian School’s capital campaign to raise money for the new school building.
Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional quotes from Helena Christian School parents.
