Helena resident Jack Evans remembers attending Hawthorne Elementary as a child in the late 1990s after moving from California. The teachers and other students became like family to him, he said, and he’s still in contact with the best friends he made there.
Nestled on a small hill in Helena’s westside mansion district for more than a century, Hawthorne has offered scores of Helena elementary school students a similar home away from home.
“Neighborhood schools are the bedrock of successful communities,” Evans said during a school board meeting last year. “Helena couldn’t be a better example of that, and we shouldn’t be taking steps to diminish the critical foundations of our community.”
Evan’s comments were just one of many that night from community members, students, parents and teachers who shared their personal ties to Hawthorne, all urging the board not to close the school that, as one of the district’s oldest buildings, needed millions in repairs to continue operating as a school. The board, facing a dwindling enrollment and a burdensome budget, ultimately voted 6-1 to close the school.
At the time, it seemed Hawthorne had perhaps worn out its usefulness. After all, what’s a community to do with a decades-old school, even a beloved one like Hawthorne, that had fallen into disrepair?
Enter Bob Schmitt, whose family has lived across the street from Hawthorne for the last quarter-century and whose own children attended school there. Couldn’t the storied building have a new life, he wondered? Wasn’t there an option other than leaving it empty? Other than tearing it down?
The school district had similar questions, and when Superintendent Rex Weltz announced last year that the district was seeking proposals for the Hawthorne property, Schmitt knew he had to act.
“ I started asking around people I knew in the community and around town, and no one seemed to know who was gonna propose anything for the school,” Schmitt told Montana Free Press in a March interview. “I kind of felt like I should maybe propose something.”
He settled on the idea of repurposing Hawthorne into a community center, a solution adopted by other Montana cities to save their own historic school buildings.
Schmitt envisions a community center offering space for after-school programs, child care, music studios and space for artists and performers. It all sounds like an ideal solution, one that could follow the lead of centers in Bozeman and Livingston and Red Lodge. But, as Schmitt has learned, establishing a community center isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Key questions about the process remain, including how much will all this cost and whether the community would get behind such an effort.
‘WHAT THE COMMUNITY WANTS’
In March, the Helena School Board of Trustees entered an agreement with Schmitt, whose proposal was the only one the district received. However, the agreement didn’t greenlight the community center project.
The district’s short-term contract with Schmitt expires this July, but until then, the board has agreed not to sell or lease Hawthorne as Schmitt works to establish a nonprofit organization to manage the center.
“[Schmitt] needs to be able to show investors that we are on board,” Weltz told the school board before its members agreed to the contract. “It would be really difficult for Bob and his team to go out to investors and say we need money, but the school board may or may not be in it. So we really need to be able to say, ‘Yes, we’re in it. We’re committed to this endeavor.’”
Preliminary estimates by Schmitt and the district indicate that it will cost project organizers between $9,000 and $10,000 a month to lease the building and hire a building manager, Schmitt said. Additionally, the district told Schmitt to expect the utilities and maintenance to cost about $52,000 a year.
“We just have no clue about the appetite of people to support this center,” Schmitt told MTFP. “The way I think about this is this: This is an experiment, and we’ll see whether people are willing to actually pay money to keep the school open. The other options for this land and the facility aren’t good. We’ll just see what the community wants and is willing to support.”
Helena is not the first community to consider repurposing a school building. It’s not the second or third either. Several cities across the state have successfully established centers in old school buildings, but not without serious fundraising, generous donations and a lot of renovation.
Organizers behind the repurposing of Hawthorne said they have taken notice of other cities’ strategies, examples that could serve as inspiration and as possible roadmaps on their journey in Helena.
THE EMERSON, BOZEMAN
The Emerson Center in Bozeman is one of the first organizations to turn a closed school into a home for the arts and culture. The Emerson school was a part of the Bozeman Public School District and was built in 1918. It operated as a school until 1992, when the district sold the building.
That’s when a group of community members established a nonprofit and purchased the building without really having a clear plan for what they wanted to do with it, said Susan Denson-Guy, executive director of the Emerson Center.
“ The building was gonna be condemned for public school use, but just because it wasn’t suitable for being a public school didn’t mean that it still couldn’t be used for public use,” Denson-Guy told MTFP in a May interview.
The building was repurposed with the vision of providing space for arts- and culture-related businesses, along with affordable studio, theater and gallery spaces available for community use. The Emerson hosts between 700 and 750 events a year and has about 57 studios rented and occupied, Denson-Guy said.
Playing a major role in the center’s success has been understanding how the Emerson could meet the needs of Bozemanites, Denson-Guy said.
“ One of the things that I think is important to realize, too, is that arts add value to a community,” Denson-Guy said.
The center’s business model relies in part on the revenue it brings in. Emerson’s 2024-2025 total income was $1.7 million, with nearly two-thirds of that coming from rental and public space leases, according to its annual report. About 18% of its income comes from fundraising, grants and donors.
“ Folks used to think that because you were a nonprofit, that earned income was a dirty word,” Denson-Guy said. “It’s really not. Nonprofits are amazing and awesome, but they’re also a business.”
She added that starting a non-profit is tough, and it’s difficult to say whether Helena’s attempt will prove fruitful.
“ That’s kind of the million-dollar question, right? Will they be successful? I don’t know,” Denson-Guy said. “But I think there’s some steps they can take to maybe set themselves on solid footing for success, and it’s gonna take a while, and it’s gonna have to be some cushion for the push and pull of when revenues are strong and when they’re not.”
THE SHANE CENTER, LIVINGSTON
In Livingston, a town of about 9,000, the Shane Lalani Center for the Arts also uses funds generated by tenants, rental spaces and other fees to supplement almost half of its annual revenue, according to the center’s artistic director, Russell Lewis. The remaining half consists of fundraising and donations.
The Shane Center was formally established in 2010, when Lewis and his wife were looking for a larger space to house their theater company and learned that the town’s old East Side School building was for sale.
“ It was one of the most ideal properties for us acquiring a larger space, and we also wanted to move our organization to the heart of downtown Livingston, out of the outskirts, so we would be near the businesses, near the schools and near the residential neighborhoods,” Lewis told MTFP. “ It was this enormous 28,000-square-foot building that was just sitting more or less dormant.”
The city of Livingston owned the old school after a swap with the local school district. Instead of selling the property to Lewis outright, the city issued a request for proposals, inviting nonprofits to submit potential plans for use, similar to what Helena Public Schools did with Hawthorne.
Lewis said the city commission approved his proposal to turn the school into a community arts center focused on youth education and theater productions. But instead of selling the property, city officials said if Lewis invested the property’s worth, about $400,000 at the time, back into the building within 10 years, they would sign the school over to him.
Within a year, Lewis owned the building, but not without a lot of work. Lewis said they first renovated the gym into a theater, turned old classrooms into dressing rooms and addressed the school’s aging infrastructure and asbestos abatement.
“We had budgeted 10 years, but it only ended up taking one, and that was due to the generosity of a number of people who contributed to the early campaign,” Lewis said. “But most significantly [from] Sal and Carol Lalani, who were a couple out of Bozeman.”
The Lalani family initially donated about $750,000 to the campaign to honor their late son, Shane, for whom the center is named. Lewis said that over the last 16 years, the center’s annual revenue has increased along with inflationary costs, but its revenue has maintained a 60/40 split between earned income and fundraising.
And his advice for the Hawthorne project? Show donors and the community the need for what the center could provide.
“ If you think of all these wonderful old school buildings that are no longer up to modern standards as far as schools go … what better way to keep those buildings as a part of the public trust than to form some sort of community center, whether it’s arts-oriented or otherwise, keep these buildings at service to the community,” Lewis said.
THE ROOSEVELT CENTER, RED LODGE
The Roosevelt Center was Red Lodge’s former Old Roosevelt school building, built in 1921 and operated as an elementary and middle school until the early 2000s, according to the center’s building coordinator, Mitch Lagge.
The school then sat mostly empty for about a decade before the building was bought and revitalized by the nonprofit Red Lodge Area Community Foundation in 2017. Similar to both the Emerson and the Shane centers, the Roosevelt offers spaces for arts, performances, conferences, education programs and other gatherings.
The Roosevelt also has tenants who rent business space from the center.
“Many of the classrooms were turned into long-term rental areas for small businesses to begin and thrive, and for artists, small nonprofits and small community projects,” Roosevelt Center events manager Jennifer Romeijn told MTFP.
Romeijn said the center leases space at a nominal fee, but ongoing renovations cause those fees to fluctuate year by year. Additionally, while rent generates some revenue for the building, the center’s revenue doesn’t yet cover its operational costs, so it relies more on capital campaigns, grants and donations.
But keeping costs low for tenants is intentional.
“ Many of these small business owners, whether they’re artists who are operating other stuff, they wouldn’t be able to make their books pencil out at any other rental location in Red Lodge,” Lagge said.
Both Lagge and Romeijn said the Red Lodge Area Community Foundation did well to collaborate with the city and the community in researching how the Roosevelt would benefit citizens. The foundation surveyed both residents and tourists and identified a need for performing arts spaces and to help small businesses thrive.
“ Anyone who wants to take an older building and continue to use it for community interests and needs wants to make sure that they have a strong understanding of what that is and work with the city and local stakeholders,” Romeijn said. “That is encouraged by anyone doing that in any small or large community. So I truly hope that that is able to be done and that Helena embraces those efforts.”
WHERE DOES HAWTHORNE COMMUNITY CENTER GO FROM HERE?
During a warm afternoon in late May, graduating high school seniors gathered outside Hawthorne for a tradition known as a “walk-through,” during which students take to the halls of the elementary school they once attended.
Since Hawthorne has been closed for a year, the seniors instead paraded around the property before gathering together with their families and former elementary teachers.
The event was also an opportunity for Schmitt and the rest of his recently formed board of directors to announce their plans for the Hawthorne Community Center to the neighborhood. Schmitt and other organizers set up a table at the graduation celebration and spoke with neighbors about the project.
Since entering into a tentative agreement with the school district in March, Schmitt told MTFP that the project’s proponents have since created an official website for the community center and filed the necessary paperwork to become a nonprofit organization.
Additionally, the group launched a website survey to gather information on what Helenans want the old school to become.
Schmitt said the organization’s board of directors has also reached out to the Montana Historic Preservation Office, which will help them apply for preservation grants.
Schmitt has also spoken to Denson-Guy with the Emerson Center in Bozeman about the Hawthorne project.
“ She had lots of advice about how much work it was and how tricky the finances can be,” Schmitt told MTFP.
The organization’s short-term goal is to raise $10,000 by August, but it won’t set a further goal until it negotiates a lease with the school district.
“So our hope is that we will have a lease by the end of the summer,” Schmitt said. “I don’t know if that’s possible, but that’s our goal.”
And for Hawthorne alumnus Evans, saving the building is foremost, even if it doesn’t continue as a school.
“If it can’t be a small neighborhood school, I think second best would be a community center that helps support the needs of the community,” said Evans, whose son also attended Hawthorne. “I think anything that serves the Helena community and makes a difference in people’s lives, absolutely, I would be super supportive of that.”
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