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TEN SLEEP – During a special Ten Sleep School Board meeting Monday evening, the board decided after a brief executive (closed) session to hire Michelle Arnette as the 2017-2018 vocational technical teacher.

On April 3 during another special Ten Sleep School Board meeting, the board listened to recommendations from a special 14-member task force created by Ten Sleep School Superintendent Jimmy Phelps to address the negative effect of $282,000 on the 2017-2018 budget due to state and federal cuts along with an increase in health premiums. The task force was divided 7-7 on filling or eliminating the open vocational technical position.

According to Phelps, there were some task force members who were against filling the position but the board never made the decision to eliminate the position. “They never really discussed it, so I went forward and filled the position because I was never given any direction not to.”

Other business during the special meeting Monday evening was to go over the proposed estimated 2017-2018 budget of $3,217,000 put together by Ten Sleep School Business Manager Janet Collen in a budget workshop. Before getting into the budget, the board heard from salary committee member Georgia Stocklin. “One thing that we want you to know is that we would ask that our insurance premiums stay the same for staff and that is still plan B and the contributions would still be $25 for a single and $75 for a family. That’s about an approximate cost of $3,000 to the district. However, the out-of-pocket increase this year for in network is about $800 and out-of-network costs could be up to $24,000 per year.

“We would also like to ask for movement for all staff on the salary schedules and that comes to a cost of $19,025 and we ask that the retirement contributions remain the same and considering the fact that the insurance increase was .6 percent rather than 10 percent and all of the other things that the task force was able to come up with we just ask you to consider our recommendations.”

The board made no decisions about the budget at the meeting.