TEN SLEEP — While the Washakie County School District No. 2 board of trustees in Ten Sleep continues to deliberate land acquisition, a request for design funding is moving forward.

Wednesday marked the monthly Ten Sleep School board meeting, which immediately started with a closed session to discuss land acquisition for the new K-12 school. The board was faced with a deadline to come up with a priority list of land sites in order for the Joint Appropriations Committee to present that information in time for their funding appropriation meeting in early 2016.

The closed session lasted one hour before the public meeting was reconvened.

“The School Facility Department will be requesting funding for design in the upcoming legislative meeting in 2016. We will be able to break ground on the school in July of 2018,” said Superintendent Jimmy Phelps. “We do have to have the land purchased before we start the design.”

He added, “We do not have the option to make a decision tonight. Even if we picked a site today, there would be no difference in the time line if we chose a site in October.”

“We have the money at present to purchase the land,” said Troy Decker, the planning coordinator for the Wyoming School Facilities Department. “The state supports the board in their due diligence to take their time in choosing a site. Some of the land the board is dealing with is private land at this time. Once the state purchases the land, then the land is public land and information regarding the land is no longer private.”

“I want to make sure that I do this right. I do not have the information to make a right, good choice. We are all new at this, we are doing something that hasn’t been done for 50 years,” said Board Chairman Terrill Mills.

“I look at it and see that we wouldn’t have done anything different,” said Board member Dan Rice.

The board spoke with the attendees briefly about the closed session once the meeting was reconvened, moving on to other agenda items.

There was some discontent regarding the news the board was doling out and some attendees displayed visible frustration.

In not providing a conclusive priority list of land purchase sites to the state, the board will now tentatively move forward with a July 2018 groundbreaking schedule, nearly two years later than the original schedule.

State Rep. Mike Greear (R-Worland), a member of the Joint Appropriation Committee said, “The fact is that we are not quite done with planning. All our agencies are moving into their budgeting processes right now. I got the impression that maybe they could have sped things up and maybe been more ready. I don’t know if that’s particularly the case or not. I don’t think there is really anybody to blame for that. I think it’s probably better to do proper planning and not push the design and then the construction and make a mistake or do something that is not within what the community wants to do.”

2015-16 budget approved

Among the other items on the school board agenda was the approval of the 2015-16 fiscal school year budget. The board motioned and then approved the 2015-16 tentative budget of $3,250,000, which is down $10,000 from the previous year’s budget, according to Janet Collen Business Manager for the Washakie School District No. 2.

There were no major changes to the budget except for an allocation of collective $1,500 raise to the teachers’ base salary, and they covered the insurance increase, according to Collen.