From Depot to Campus:

The Making of Flathead Valley Community College

Origins and Context

In the years following World War II, higher education in the United States underwent a fundamental transformation. Propelled by the GI Bill, the postwar baby boom, and a federal policy consensus that linked educational access to national prosperity, the community college model spread across the country with remarkable speed. Opening at an average rate of one per week during the 1960s, community colleges absorbed a considerable portion of the baby boom generation and pioneered a revolutionary open-doors admission policy  that would redefine who could reasonably expect to attend college. By the late 1970s, community colleges had become predominant features of American higher education, with enrollment climbing from 1.6 million students in the early part of that decade to more than 4.5 million by 1980. 

Montana, a vast and sparsely populated state with limited infrastructure for distributing educational opportunity beyond its university centers in Missoula and Bozeman, was not immune to these pressures. In the Flathead Valley in the northwestern corner of the state, a timber and agricultural economy sustained tight-knit communities whose young people faced a stark and largely unspoken choice: stay in the valley and forgo post-secondary education, or leave for a university city that many families could not afford. For most of the 1950s, staying was the default. The absence of a local higher education institution was not primarily understood as a political or policy problem; it was simply accepted as geography.

That acceptance began to crack in the late 1950s through the determined observations of a single high school counselor.

The Problem and the Vision

Bill McClaren had been working as a counselor and mathematics teacher at Flathead High School in Kalispell for more than a decade when he began systematically tracking what happened to his graduates after they walked across the stage. As McLaren recalls, most of the boys said they planned to stick around the valley and find work in the timber industry or in some other blue-collar endeavor. Most of the women planned on becoming stay-at-home mothers or work as secretaries or in other administrative positions.  The data he accumulated through the 1950s and early 1960s painted a disquieting picture. Only 20 percent of Kalispell seniors planned on attending college, and among those, only about 7 percent were graduating with a four-year degree. In comparison, in Missoula, where the University of Montana was located, roughly 40 percent of students were attending college. 

McClaren presented his findings to the local school board, chaired by Owen Sowerwine. The response was immediate. When McClaren gave his report, Sowerwine was visibly shaken and declared, “We’ve got to do better than that.” Sowerwine, a well-known conservationist and community figure, recently retired, spent the ensuing years traveling the country studying what other communities similar to the Flathead Valley were doing to improve their residents’ livelihoods through higher education. 

At first, Sowerwine considered lobbying for a junior college, which would primarily prepare students for four-year university transfer. But across the country, a different and more ambitious model was gaining ground. In the early 1960s, the community college model was a new and rapidly expanding movement that focused on post-secondary education linked to a community and its specific economic characteristics. By 1965, there were nearly 900 community colleges in the United States. Instead of focusing on research, faculty members were principally tasked with providing high-quality instruction. Students could either gain two years of schooling that would vault them on to a four-year university, or they could take specialized courses that trained them for occupations right out of school. 

Sowerwine returned from his travels convinced. “Owen came back and said, ‘We don’t want a junior college. We need a community college. We need to take care of all of the students in our community, not just college transfer students,’” McLaren recalled. 

The Original Five and the Campaign for a College

Sowerwine organized a core group of advocates who would carry the college concept from idea to ballot. Known thereafter as the “Original Five,” this group included Bill McClaren, Thelma Hetland, Les Sterling, and Norm Beyer, all determined to create a local higher education option for Flathead Valley students.  Hetland represented the Federated Women’s Club, Sterling owned a local radio station, and Beyer directed the state employment agency — together they brought civic reach across the professional and social spectrum of the valley’s community.

Over the next few years, the group rallied support throughout the community, visiting with men’s and women’s civic groups and other residents to explain why a two-year college could have an immediate and lasting impact on locals of all ages and abilities.  Sterling broadcast daily announcements about the proposed college over the airwaves. McClaren, with his background in high school counseling, made the rounds of valley prep schools. The campaign was grassroots in character, built on personal persuasion rather than top-down political sponsorship.

A majority of Flathead County voters needed to approve a funding measure for the college to exist. The decision arrived on April 1, 1967, with news coverage from across the state reporting on the results. Late in the night, the tally came in: 3,013 in favor and 2,308 opposed.  The margin was comfortable but not overwhelming — a reflection of genuine ambivalence among a population accustomed to managing without institutional supports they had not requested.

The College Begins: Improvisation and Early Growth

The newly elected board wasted no time. Within a week of the vote, the board hired a president, Dr. Larry Blake, a Flathead High School graduate who had led other community colleges in the region. Blake’s first decision was to hire a dean of students, and he selected McLaren.  Blake’s rationale was characteristically practical: McLaren knew the valley and its students, and that knowledge was worth more than formal administrative credentials.

The institutional infrastructure was, to put it charitably, minimal. State funding was not scheduled to arrive until July 1, and the college was to begin classes in September. A Kalispell businessman donated $13,000 — enough to pay the staff. Glacier Bank sent one of its officers, Leo Shepherd, to handle accounting, with the bank paying his salary. The three men — Blake, McLaren, and Shepherd — met in the upstairs of the county library with a typewriter, a few folding chairs, and the vision of a new community college. 

Space was another obstacle improvised through community goodwill. The administrative office was established inside the former train depot building downtown, near Depot Park. Blake and McLaren set up their offices upstairs and converted the downstairs into a bookstore and gathering space for students. Flathead High School allowed the use of its classrooms at night. Sessions were held in the VFW hall and in church basements.  The following year, the college borrowed space in the old Elks Building and, by local accounts, conducted several morning courses in taverns, which conveniently sat empty before their 2 p.m. opening. Forestry courses were taught at the county fairgrounds. An automotive program took shape in a county shop building. Whatever the Flathead Valley had available, the college used.

The first semester’s enrollment confounded all projections. McClaren, as newly-appointed dean of students, had expected approximately 200 students to enroll in the fledgling school. More than 600 signed up. “Almost every hour I’d have a new student come in to my office who heard about it on the radio,” McClaren later recalled.  Among those students was McClaren’s own wife, Lois. A stay-at-home mother with four children who had hoped someday to earn a college degree, she enrolled and became part of the second graduating class at FVCC. Roughly 40 graduates that year marched through downtown and held a commencement ceremony in the former Liberty Theater. 

Tuition that first semester was sixty-seven dollars. The college started with nine faculty members and a curriculum that stretched from forestry and business to general interest courses in homemaking, home repair, and dance — a deliberate effort to make the institution useful to the broadest possible cross-section of community residents. In 1968, the Anaconda Aluminum Company donated the first computer, a machine that occupied an entire room. Blake secured regional accreditation and struck agreements with Montana’s four-year universities so that credits earned at FVCC would transfer.  By 1969, the college had moved into the historic Central School building, trading its scattered borrowed quarters for a more coherent home.

Building a Permanent Campus

For two decades after its founding, FVCC operated out of temporary and downtown facilities while plans for a dedicated campus matured. In fall of 1990, the college moved to its current 200-acre campus on U.S. Highway 93 on the north end of Kalispell  — a site that allowed for genuine campus planning and the construction of facilities tailored to the college’s educational mission. The move represented a coming-of-age moment for an institution that had spent its first twenty-three years adapting to whatever spaces the community could spare.

In the mid-1980s, the college added the Glacier Institute program in Glacier National Park and the Lincoln County Campus, which provides classes to the residents of the Libby and Troy area. These programs are fully accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities.  The Lincoln County expansion, in particular, demonstrated the college’s understanding of its geographic mission: northwestern Montana’s communities were separated by mountain ranges and long highway distances, and educational access could not be taken for granted even within the college’s broader service area.

Throughout the 1970s, the college’s athletic programs briefly attracted statewide attention. According to college records, the Mountainettes track and field and cross-country teams won national championships during that decade — an achievement that drew attention to an institution still establishing its identity and fighting for recognition in a state where four-year universities commanded most of the higher education prestige.

Recession, Resilience, and the Campaign for a 21st-Century Campus

The economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 provided one of the most revealing tests of the community college’s founding purpose. As the recession reached the Flathead Valley — where the timber industry had already been weakening for years — displaced workers flooded back to FVCC in search of second careers and new credentials. The community college dramatically increased its programs in response to a 55 percent enrollment growth that saw the student population spike to nearly 2,800, making FVCC the fourth largest of any college or university in Montana.  The college graduated its largest class ever, with 340 students earning a total of 358 degrees and certificates. Among the graduates were laid-off workers who had spent many years in the same profession before seeking second careers. 

The recession surge underscored both the college’s social function and the inadequacy of its physical plant. Private philanthropy stepped into the gap. In 2012, the Broussard family donated $4 million to the college — at that time the largest gift in the college’s history — to build a nursing and health education center. FVCC raised an additional $1.3 million over the following nine months, and the building, which opened in April 2013, was the first privately funded structure on campus.  The 35,000-square-foot Broussard Center for Nursing and Health Science is designed to harmonize with the existing campus aesthetic and houses the expanded nursing program, with state-of-the-art simulation labs and mock nursing stations. 

The college’s fundraising capacity, which had grown considerably since a modest 2008 benefit dinner raised thirty thousand dollars for student scholarships, now operated at a different order of magnitude. The same annual event raised $200,000 by 2015.  That same year, the board of trustees approved plans for on-campus student housing, a step unusual for a community college and indicative of how much FVCC had grown beyond the conventional two-year model.

The most ambitious recent expansion has been the Paul D. Wachholz College Center, a $26-million building containing a gymnasium and fitness center, a 1,000-seat theater, a small recital hall, a classroom, an art gallery, and an outdoor amphitheater.  The center, which opened in 2022, gave the Flathead Valley its largest performance venue and transformed the campus into a regional cultural hub as well as an educational one. Its construction was funded through a combination of $18 million in private gifts and a $9.75 million loan — a financial model that reflected the college’s deep integration with a philanthropic community that had developed over five decades.

Governance, Independence, and Enduring Purpose

FVCC is one of three two-year institutions in Montana that operate outside the control of the University of Montana System, the Montana State University System, and the tribal college system.  This structural independence, established through the original ballot measure and governed by an elected local board of trustees, has been both an asset and a constraint. It has allowed the college to respond nimbly to local economic conditions — whether the collapse of a sawmill, the return of veterans from overseas service, or a pandemic — without waiting for system-wide authorization. It has also meant that the college must maintain its own philanthropic and political capital rather than drawing on the resources of a larger system.

The college’s accreditation is maintained by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, which conducted its most recent mid-cycle review in 2023 and has scheduled the next comprehensive evaluation for 2026. As of the most recent evaluation, FVCC is substantially compliant with the Standards, Policies, and Eligibility Requirements of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. 

Today FVCC enrolls more than three thousand students and offers over one hundred degree programs, certificates, and licensures. More than fifty career and technical programs, developed through extensive partnerships with local business and industry, equip students with skills aligned directly with regional workforce needs.  The college’s open admissions policy — unchanged from 1967 — means that educational aspiration, not academic pedigree, is the threshold for entry.

The institution that Bill McClaren and Owen Sowerwine conjured in a borrowed county library upstairs room, with a typewriter and thirteen thousand borrowed dollars, has become a durable feature of northwestern Montana’s civic landscape. Its history is not one of inevitable progress or unbroken triumph; it is a history of practical problem-solving, community investment, and stubborn local conviction that education should not require a one-way ticket out of the valley.

Works Cited

Drury, Richard L. “Community Colleges in America: A Historical Perspective.” Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 1, 2003. ERIC Institute of Education Sciences, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ876835.pdf. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.

Flathead Valley Community College. “History and Mission.” FVCC, www.fvcc.edu/about/mission-history. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.

“Flathead Valley Community College.” Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, nwccu.org/institutional-directory/flathead-valley-community-college/. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.

“FVCC Serves Students While Looking Toward Future with New College Center.” Whitefish Pilot, 1 Sept. 2021, whitefishpilot.com/news/2021/sep/01/fvcc-serves-students-while-looking-toward-future-n/. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.

Tabish, Dillon. “50 Years of FVCC.” Flathead Beacon, 21 Sept. 2016, flatheadbeacon.com/2016/09/21/50-years-fvcc/. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.

“A True Community College.” Hungry Horse News, 29 Mar. 2017, hungryhorsenews.com/news/2017/mar/29/a-true-community-college-10/. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.

Brown, Kellyn. “Beyond a Community College.” Flathead Beacon, 8 Mar. 2018, flatheadbeacon.com/2018/03/08/beyond-community-college/. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.

Cushing Terrell. “Flathead Valley Community College: Broussard Center for Nursing and Health Science.” Cushing Terrell, cushingterrell.com/portfolio/flathead-valley-community-college/. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.

“Flathead Valley Community College: Narrative Description.” Encyclopedia of Colleges and Universities, Gale, encyclopedia.com/education/news-and-education-magazines/flathead-valley-community-college-narrative-description-0. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​