Roosevelt School is a little bit an old school and a bit a relatively new school, but mostly a non school. The newer section was built in 1990, while the older section was built in 1920. In 1938 the WPA funded improvements to the 1920 school.
In 2010, a year after the new high school opened, Old Roosevelt School was abandoned and is, at present, partially utilized by several businesses and organizations who rent space in the newer (1990) building. At present the
is in the process of raising money to have the school converted to an arts and culture venue.
KTVQ News posted an informative story on the former school in January of 2017, excerpts from which can be read below.
In Red Lodge, big hopes
for Old Roosevelt School
Posted: Jan 12, 2017 10:18 AM PST
It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the transformation of Old Roosevelt School into the arts and culture hub of Red Lodge.
The original three-story school, built in 1920 at 518 S. Broadway Ave., has numerous classrooms lined with big windows, flooding the rooms with natural light. In an even larger room on the third floor, there is a raised stage, its velvet curtain still intact, flanked by pilasters ornamented with painted scrolls.
A two-story addition, built in 1990, has a gymnasium that is to be converted into a multipurpose performance space and conference center. Six small businesses, several of them arts-related, are already renting classrooms in the new building.
In front of the school, flanking Broadway, Red Lodge’s main street, is a spacious, tree-shaded lawn that supporters of the school envision as a picnic ground, performance area and sculpture garden. They envision the whole complex as an economic generator and a welcoming beacon for the southern end of this tourism-dependent mountain town.
“We don’t have an arts ‘place’ in Red Lodge anywhere,” Tracy Timmons told
Last Best News. “We’re really going to open a niche in our community.”
Timmons is the director of the
Red Lodge Area Community Foundation, the agency leading the effort to raise millions of dollars for the conversion project.
Timmons said the short-term goal is to raise enough money by April to buy the school from the local school district and then, if engineers determine that the heating system in the new addition can be extended to the original building, to start using portions of the old school by about this time next year.
“We’ve been waiting a long time in Red Lodge for a performance space,” said Betty Hecker, a former president of the
Red Lodge Public School Foundation, another partner in the Old Roosevelt School project. As for the rest of the school, she said, “We have way more uses for the building than we have space.”
Read on at KTVQ TV