Columbia Falls Elementary School District

It never has a ZIP Code to itself

Fewer than three homes to the square mile: Columbia Falls Elementary covers 2,621 square miles of mostly open country. A district this thin holds a small share of any ZIP Code it touches, however much ground it covers, which is exactly why share by land area would mislead here and share by homes does not.

• Homes inside the boundary7,558
• Residents15,761
• ZIP Code areas it reaches10
• Where it is the only district0
• Where it shares with another district7
• Where it holds under half a percent3
• Land area2,621 square miles
• Homes per square mile3

The ZIP Code areas it reaches

The spread is the thing to notice. In 59919 this district holds 100% of the homes; in 59916 it holds no homes at all. Same district, opposite answers, and a lookup that names it without the share tells the second household the same thing as the first.

• ZIP Code 59919 · Hungry Horse, Montana100% of the homes
• ZIP Code 59928 · Polebridge, Montana100% of the homes
• ZIP Code 59926 · Martin City, Montana100% of the homes
• ZIP Code 59913 · Coram, Montana88% of the homes
• ZIP Code 59912 · Columbia Falls, Montana87% of the homes
• ZIP Code 59936 · West Glacier, Montana2.9% of the homes
• ZIP Code 59901 · Kalispell, Montana0.7% of the homes
• ZIP Code 59937 · Whitefish, Montana13 homes, under half a percent
• ZIP Code 59911 · Bigfork, Montanano homes at all
• ZIP Code 59916 · Snowslip, Montanano homes at all

What one name misses, and what changes later

Columbia Falls Elementary is the largest district in 4 ZIP Code areas. Answer with its name alone and the answer misses 903 of the 7,930 homes those areas hold — though in 3 of them it holds every home there is. The count is homes, not addresses, and it is the number no lookup prints.

Columbia Falls Elementary is one of 7 districts the file names for ZIP Code 59912 · Columbia Falls, Montana at that level. It holds 5,917 of the 6,820 homes there; the rest is 903 homes with Deer Park Elementary, Whitefish Elementary, Fair-Mont-Egan Elementary and 1 more district. One name for that area is not a simplification, it is a different answer for 903 of the homes in it.

In ZIP Code 59919 · Hungry Horse, Montana the single-name answer is the true one: Columbia Falls Elementary holds all 481 homes counted there, and no other district holds a share worth naming.

ZIP Code 59926 · Martin City, Montana is another area where one name covers everything — 247 homes, all of them inside Columbia Falls Elementary.

Columbia Falls Elementary reaches into ZIP Code 59913 · Coram, Montana with 336 of its 384 homes; 3 districts there hold a real share of it, and Columbia Falls High leads them. The familiar answer for that area is one of the others, and it is wrong for those 336 homes.

Columbia Falls Elementary is not the name anyone would give for ZIP Code 59901 · Kalispell, Montana — Flathead High leads it — and Columbia Falls Elementary holds 171 homes there all the same. Answer that area with one name and that is what it is wrong about.

ZIP Code 59936 · West Glacier, Montana is another area where Columbia Falls Elementary is present without being the answer: 11 of its 377 homes, behind Columbia Falls High.

Most of it goes on to a single high school district

Most of the territory Columbia Falls Elementary covers — 87% of it by homes — goes on to Columbia Falls High for high school, with Flathead High taking the remainder. The elementary boundary and the high school boundary were drawn by different bodies and do not have to agree.

• Columbia Falls High School District87% of Columbia Falls Elementary's homes go here
• Flathead High School District9.4% of Columbia Falls Elementary's homes go here
• Whitefish High School District3.4% of Columbia Falls Elementary's homes go here
• Bigfork High School Districtunder 0.1% of Columbia Falls Elementary's homes go here

The names in this list are exact: the federal file gives the district of each band for every census block. The percentages are not. They spread each shared ZIP Code area's homes across the other band in proportion to the share each district holds there, because the file names the two districts of a block and not how a household moves between them. Read them as the size of the crossing, not as a count of houses.

Who it shares ZIP Codes with

Columbia Falls Elementary shares ZIP Code areas with 20 different districts. The most frequent are Columbia Falls High, West Glacier Elementary, Cayuse Prairie Elementary and Fair-Mont-Egan Elementary. In a neighborhood this crowded the question is not which district serves the ZIP Code but which side of which street an address is on.

• Columbia Falls High School District7 shared ZIP areas
• West Glacier Elementary School District2 shared ZIP areas
• Cayuse Prairie Elementary School District2 shared ZIP areas
• Fair-Mont-Egan Elementary School District2 shared ZIP areas
• Flathead High School District2 shared ZIP areas
• Whitefish Elementary School District2 shared ZIP areas

Where this district sits

• School districts in Montana313 of 368 ZIP areas split
• Every district with a page here260 districts listed

What to do next

Ask the district office to confirm your street address. A district settles that question on its own site: look for a school locator, a find my school tool, or an attendance zone map. Where there is none, ask the office itself.

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not a boundary: in 7 of the 10 ZIP Code areas Columbia Falls Elementary reaches, at least one other district holds a real share of the homes as well, and the line between them runs along streets. Only the district can say which side of that line an address is on.

This site links to no district website. None of the federal files it is built from publishes one, and a guessed address is worse than none. It is the district office, not a search engine, that settles an address.

If a house purchase depends on the answer, ask the district itself for written confirmation of that exact address. A listing is not a district record, and neither is this page.

What this cannot tell you

The homes were counted in the 2020 Census and the district lines are the 2026 boundary file. Nothing on this page adjusts one to the other. Where houses have been built or cleared since the count, a share here describes the place as it was counted rather than as it stands today, and in the fastest-growing ZIP Code areas that gap is the largest single source of error on this site.

A share on this page is a share of the homes in the ZIP Code area, not a probability for any particular address. Enrollment is decided by street address, and a district may run magnet, charter or choice programs that ignore the boundary entirely. If a decision depends on the answer, the district office is the only authority; this page shows what the federal boundary files say and when they were published.

A district boundary is not a school attendance zone. This site never says which school an address is assigned to: no current national dataset of attendance zones exists, and the district draws them itself. Nor is anything here endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau; we use their published files, and that is the whole of the relationship.

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not an area. What is mapped here is the Census Bureau's ZIP Code Tabulation Area, the closest published approximation to it. The two are not identical, and a handful of ZIP Codes used only for post office boxes or single buildings have no tabulation area at all.

Where these numbers come from

School district boundaries come from the Census Bureau's Census Geographic Relationship File, current 2026 vintage, which assigns every census block to a unified district or to an elementary and a secondary district. Homes and residents in each block come from the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (PL 94-171), H1_001 and P1_001. The ZIP Code areas come from the same Geographic Relationship File, block to ZIP Code Tabulation Area. District names and grade ranges come from the Census Gazetteer 2025, with 2020 for districts no longer listed.

The place name printed beside a ZIP Code comes from the Census 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area relationship files: place, county subdivision and county, taken 2026-09-06. It is a label rather than a measurement: the Census Bureau does not publish which post office a ZIP Code belongs to, so the place named is the one covering the most land inside the area, not the city the Postal Service prints on an envelope.

Everything else on this page — the shares, the counts of districts per ZIP, the comparison between the two grade bands, the rankings — is computed here from those files. The source publishes none of it. Snapshot taken 2026-09-03.