From Hangar to Classroom:

The Making of Helena College and Montana’s Vocational Education Tradition

Origins in the Air Age, 1931-1939

Long before Helena College became the comprehensive two-year institution it is today, its roots took hold not in a classroom but on an airstrip. In 1931, the Helena School District established the Helena School of Aeronautics and Related Trades, a specialized program tied directly to the newly developed municipal airport east of the city. That same year, aviator Ralph Edwin “Red” Morrison arrived at the Helena Airport, and he and his colleague Bill Fahner were soon credited with helping to found what the Helena Regional Airport’s own institutional history would later describe as the first accredited school of aeronautics in the country (Helena Regional Airport, “Airport History”). By 1938, the school had constructed an airplane hangar at the airport to deliver specialized training in aircraft mechanics, navigation, meteorology, federal air regulations, and flight safety, establishing a working relationship between the city’s educational infrastructure and its transportation hub that would endure for generations.

The formalization of this effort into a broader state-sanctioned institution came through the 1939 Montana Legislature. That body authorized the State Board of Education to designate applicant high schools as vocational training centers, permitting students between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one to attend such centers on a nontuition basis. According to a 2007 legal memorandum prepared by staff attorney Eddye McClure for the Montana Legislative Services Division, the Board quickly moved to designate Glasgow, Custer County, and Helena High Schools as the first such centers (McClure, “A Historical Perspective on 2-Year Postsecondary Education in Montana,” Montana Legislative Services Division, 2007, archive.legmt.gov/content/Publications/Legal-Opinions/Committee-info/0901077253EMDA.pdf, accessed 12 Apr. 2026). The Helena center, drawing on the already-functioning aeronautics school, was the first to receive formal designation, in 1939 — and institutional records from Helena College itself note that it was “the only one to accept the challenge” when the Office of Public Instruction designated five potential training centers across the state (Helena College University of Montana, “About Helena College,” helenacollege.edu/abouthc/, accessed 12 Apr. 2026).

The legislative and federal policy context shaping these events was national in scope. The Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act of 1917 had established a continuing federal appropriation for vocational training in agriculture, trades and industry, and homemaking, encouraging states across the country to build out their own secondary and postsecondary training programs (Britannica, “Smith-Hughes Act,” britannica.com/topic/Smith-Hughes-Act, accessed 12 Apr. 2026). Montana’s 1939 legislation built on that federal foundation, representing what McClure characterized as the second of three distinct phases in the state’s engagement with vocational education, a phase that moved training beyond the secondary level and into genuine postsecondary territory.

War, Veterans, and the Expanding Curriculum, 1940-1967

The onset of World War II immediately transformed the institution’s mission. According to Helena College’s own institutional history, during the war years the vocational center trained thousands of workers for shipyards, aircraft factories, and Air Force bases throughout the country. Simultaneously, the school conducted preflight training for students at nearby Carroll College under a formal Navy training contract, deepening the relationship between Helena’s educational community and the wartime federal government (Helena College University of Montana, “About Helena College”). The Helena Regional Airport’s records similarly confirm that during the 1940s, Carroll College and Morrison Flying Service collaborated on Army and Navy flight training programs at the airport facility, underscoring how thoroughly Helena’s wartime aviation activity was intertwined with both civilian and military institutions (Helena Regional Airport, “Military,” helenaairport.com/military/, accessed 12 Apr. 2026).

Aviation remained the central programming focus throughout the 1940s. As the Independent Record reported in a later retrospective on the institution, the first program was aviation maintenance, and it was this curriculum that trained thousands of production workers before and during the war (Helena Independent Record, “UM-H Broadens Offerings, Stays Focused on Mission,” helenair.com, accessed 12 Apr. 2026). The end of the war brought a new wave of students: returning veterans from across Montana who needed updated skills to enter the postwar civilian economy. In response, the curriculum expanded substantially. Courses in auto mechanics, machine shop, welding, and electronics were added alongside the continued aviation program.

The expansion continued into the following decade. During the mid-1950s, the vocational center added diesel mechanics, building trades, and pilot training. By the 1960s, the institution’s offerings had broadened further to include practical nursing, agricultural mechanics, data processing, and an array of business and office courses. To house these growing programs, the institution constructed a new building at 1115 North Roberts Street — the facility that would eventually become known as the Donaldson Campus, named in honor of Gene Donaldson, a long-time advocate for education in the Helena area. A portion of the original airport hangar, meanwhile, remained in active use and would continue to serve the aviation maintenance technology program for decades.

The 1963 designation landscape had shifted considerably from its wartime configuration. In anticipation of changes in federal criteria for area vocational schools, the State Board of Education had rescinded vocational center designations from Glasgow, Custer County, Havre, and Cut Bank, leaving the Helena center as the sole remaining officially designated vocational training facility in the state (McClure, “A Historical Perspective”). This consolidation underscored Helena’s central role in Montana’s vocational education structure and gave the institution a measure of institutional stability and state significance that would inform its subsequent development.

Governance Struggles and the Path to Higher Education, 1967-1994

The question of who should govern Montana’s vocational-technical centers became one of the more contentious administrative debates in the state’s educational history. For most of their existence, the centers operated under a shared arrangement involving local school districts, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and various state boards. The 1967 Legislature broadened the categories of institutions eligible to apply for vocational-technical designation, and the 1969 Legislature, responding to the federal Vocational Education Amendments of 1968, took up in earnest the twin issues of system size and financing. The legislative debates were often fractious. Proposals to restrict center designation to communities with a minimum tax base of seventy-five million dollars would have allowed only three centers to survive; ultimately, the threshold was reduced to forty-five million dollars, which preserved all five previously designated centers, including Helena (McClure, “A Historical Perspective”).

A protracted governance dispute over whether vocational-technical centers should fall under the Board of Regents or the Board of Public Education played out across multiple legislative sessions in the 1970s. The Montana Supreme Court in 1975 struck down one attempted legislative resolution as unconstitutional, finding that the State Board of Education’s constitutional mandate was limited to long-range planning rather than direct administration. After further debate and interim studies through the late 1970s, the 1979 Legislature placed state administration of the vo-techs under the Superintendent of Public Instruction while allowing local school districts to retain certain duties. It was not until 1987 that the Legislature finally transferred governance of all five vocational-technical centers — in Billings, Butte, Great Falls, Helena, and Missoula — to the Board of Regents of Higher Education, ending decades of split governance and making vo-tech employees employees of the Board of Regents (McClure, “A Historical Perspective”). That same transfer moved the funding generated by the local vo-tech levy under the Board of Regents’ control, a significant practical shift in financial accountability.

The 1987 transfer set the stage for a more fundamental restructuring. In 1993 and 1994, the Board of Regents engaged in a comprehensive review of the Montana University System, ultimately deciding to adopt what was called the “Two-University Model,” integrating the five vocational-technical centers as “colleges of technology” within the university system rather than creating a separate two-year postsecondary system. Supporters of a stand-alone two-year arrangement had argued that absorption into the university system risked “mission drift” — a loss of emphasis on applied, occupational, and technical education — and that it might perpetuate a perception of two-year coursework as less prestigious than four-year university work (McClure, “A Historical Perspective”). The Board of Regents proceeded nonetheless, and the 1995 Legislature enacted the enabling legislation, affiliating the Helena center with the University of Montana and renaming it the Helena College of Technology of the University of Montana. The Butte and Missoula colleges similarly joined the University of Montana, while those in Billings and Great Falls affiliated with Montana State University (Montana University System, Comprehensive Two-Year Mission Expansion Plan, mus.edu/2yr/CityCollegeImplementationPlanFINAL.pdf, accessed 12 Apr. 2026).

Campus Growth and the Broadened Mission, 1994-2012

With formal entry into the Montana University System came expanded resources and a gradually broadening academic mission. In 1996, Helena College completed construction of a student center at the Donaldson Campus, a project initiated by the Student Senate that added food service, a bookstore, and student lounge facilities — amenities signaling the institution’s evolving identity as a genuine campus community rather than a purely utilitarian training facility. As the Helena Independent Record noted, workforce training remained the core of the college’s mission, and administrators worked closely with the Helena Chamber of Commerce and local business development organizations to ensure that programs produced graduates able to fill specific positions in the regional economy. Dean Daniel Bingham, who led the institution in the mid-2000s, was explicit that Helena College would remain a two-year college while also pursuing partnerships with four-year institutions through “two-plus-two” articulation agreements that would allow place-bound students to complete bachelor’s degrees in Helena without transferring (Helena Independent Record, “UM-H Broadens Offerings”).

The most consequential physical expansion of the modern era came in 2007, when a ten-million-dollar renovation and construction project was completed at both the Airport Campus and the Donaldson Campus. The Donaldson Campus gained twenty-one percent more space, including a new library, lecture hall, science laboratories, student services facilities, and a multipurpose room for continuing education and academic instruction. As part of the expansion, the Montana Arts Council commissioned Helena artist Richard Swanson to create a sculpture titled “Soar” near the new main entrance — a detail that reflected the institution’s enduring connection to its aviation origins (Helena College University of Montana, “About Helena College”). The Airport Campus was simultaneously expanded to house a new facility for the Automotive Technology program and additional space for the Machine Tool program, a further acknowledgment that the skilled trades mission remained central to institutional identity.

Additional legislative investment followed. The Montana Legislature funded a further five-point-one-million-dollar expansion of the Airport Campus in 2011 to provide space for the Welding Technology program, reflecting the continued demand for metalwork and fabrication training in Montana’s energy and construction sectors. The college also began offering second-year options in Welding Technology and Machine Tool Technology programs during this period, gradually deepening the curricular scope of programs that had previously topped out at one-year certificates.

Becoming Helena College, 2012 and Beyond

The final significant institutional identity shift came in June 2012, when the Montana Board of Regents voted to rename the five colleges of technology as part of the Montana University System’s College!NOW initiative, which aimed to expand the comprehensive mission of two-year institutions throughout the state. The Helena institution was renamed Helena College University of Montana — a title intended to signal both its connection to the broader university system and its distinct community-focused identity (Helena College University of Montana, “About Helena College”). The University of Montana Academic Catalog describes the college today as holding full accreditation from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, Federal Aviation Administration certification for its aviation programs, and approval from the Montana State Board of Nursing, reflecting a program portfolio that spans business, health, trades, technical fields, and transfer-oriented general education (University of Montana Academic Catalog, “Helena College University of Montana,” catalog.umt.edu/affiliated-campuses/umhelena/, accessed 12 Apr. 2026).

Today, Helena College operates from two campuses in Montana’s capital city. The Donaldson Campus at 1115 North Roberts Street houses nursing, business, fire and rescue, pre-pharmacy, and general education programs, while the Airport Campus at 2300 Airport Road continues to anchor the institution’s founding identity, hosting Aviation Maintenance Technology, Automotive Technology, Computer-Aided Manufacturing Technology, Metals Technology, and Welding programs. The institution enrolls approximately 1,771 students, roughly twenty-two percent of them full-time, and offers Associate of Applied Science, Associate of Science, Associate of Arts, and Associate of Science in Registered Nursing degrees, as well as Certificates of Applied Science.

The through line from the 1931 aeronautics school to the contemporary two-campus institution is not merely ceremonial. Helena College’s history is, at its core, a record of how a small Rocky Mountain capital city repeatedly chose to invest in practical workforce education — first to serve aviation mechanics during the Depression, then to mobilize for wartime production, then to retrain veterans, and ultimately to serve a diversified regional economy ranging from health care to advanced manufacturing. Each phase of that history was shaped by shifts in federal policy, state legislative bargaining, and the particular economic pressures facing western Montana. What persisted through all of it was the institution’s foundational commitment to applied learning and regional service, a commitment now nearly a century old.

Works Cited

Helena College University of Montana. “About Helena College.” Helena College University of Montana, helenacollege.edu/abouthc/. Accessed 12 Apr. 2026.

Helena Regional Airport. “Airport History.” Helena Regional Airport, helenaairport.com/airport-history/. Accessed 12 Apr. 2026.

Helena Regional Airport. “Military.” Helena Regional Airport, helenaairport.com/military/. Accessed 12 Apr. 2026.

Helena Independent Record. “UM-H Broadens Offerings, Stays Focused on Mission.” Helena Independent Record, helenair.com/news/local/education/um-h-broadens-offerings-stays-focused-on-mission/article_59ef0a16-ae53-11de-bd4e-001cc4c002e0.html. Accessed 12 Apr. 2026.

McClure, Eddye. “A Historical Perspective on 2-Year Postsecondary Education in Montana: ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’” Montana Legislative Services Division, Sept. 2007, archive.legmt.gov/content/Publications/Legal-Opinions/Committee-info/0901077253EMDA.pdf. Accessed 12 Apr. 2026.

Montana University System. Comprehensive Two-Year Mission Expansion Plan. Montana University System, mus.edu/2yr/CityCollegeImplementationPlanFINAL.pdf. Accessed 12 Apr. 2026.

University of Montana Academic Catalog. “Helena College University of Montana.” University of Montana, catalog.umt.edu/affiliated-campuses/umhelena/. Accessed 12 Apr. 2026.

“Smith-Hughes Act.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, britannica.com/topic/Smith-Hughes-Act. Accessed 12 Apr. 2026.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​