Ten Sleep School Board discusses district strategic goals

TEN SLEEP – Ten Sleep School Superintendent Jimmy Phelps reviewed the five district strategic goals and what had been done so far to achieve each goal, during Tuesday’s regular school board meeting.

— “We will provide a safe, orderly and caring environment.”

Phelps said, “We implemented quite a few things this year, especially in the area of providing a safe school. We put in new security doors in the hallways so we can shut those hallway doors. We put in new security locks on all the doors, so that we can lock down in case of emergency. We put the protective film on the windows. We implemented new standard response protocols. We wrote a new emergency plan, we got new radios, a new intercom and phone system last summer. We ordered new cameras which we should be getting, hopefully, around September, so there was an awful lot done in the last 12 months to increase the safety of our students.”

— “We will provide relevant and authentic learning opportunities in order to address each student’s unique needs, strengths and goals.”

He said, “Some of the things were are doing; we offer dual enrollment classes, teacher evaluations that Mr (Russ) Budmayr does emphasizing the student-teacher relationship, he goes over that and talks about that with all the teachers. Some of the new things that we have done this year, our counselor, she has really emphasized counseling going into each classroom and doing some counseling that hasn’t been done in the past to address some issues.

— “We will strengthen technological skills to enable the students to be competitive in the 21st century.”

“New things that we have done: implemented google docs to help us to identify students and to meet their needs. Of course we will continue to upgrade our computers, servers and laptops as needed in the classroom,” Phelps said.

— “We will monitor the effectiveness of strategies in performance of individual students by utilizing differentiation of instruction, multiple assessments and feedback.”

He said, “What we are doing to identify the high achievers and low achievers is part of doing differentiated instruction. We have tutoring programs to meet these needs and just our small class size is a big plus for us because we notice students having problems.”

— “Foster our relationship with stake holders focusing on developing as a student centered learning community.”

“One of the things that we started last year to help with that was we began using the Ten Sleep Tribute so that our stakeholders would know more about what’s going on. Another thing we started was the new website. Other things that we do, that we have been doing for some time, parent teacher conferences, we have the newsletter and we have our standard response protocol,” Phelps said.

Other Business

The board also discussed student testing results. “We give the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) test to all our K-11 graders twice a year, once at the beginning of the school year once at the end of the school year. Our K-11 students are all tested in math and reading, our second and 11th graders are tested in language and our seventh and eighth graders are tested in science,” Ten Sleep School principal Russ Budmayr said. “Since MAP is a national test we are able to compare our scores with the rest of the nation. Ten Sleep scored higher than the national average in all 36 categories by an average of 18 percent. I am very satisfied with our MAP results and congratulate our students and teachers on a job well done,” he added.

The board also decided to change their designated newspaper of record from the Northern Wyoming Daily News to the Ten Sleep Tribute. “We’ve used the newspaper in Worland for years as our designated newspaper of record. I recommend that we use the Ten Sleep Tribute as our newspaper of record. Last year we started, I talked to Betty Jo Stiffney, she said that they have about 120-125 subscribers. We pay them $60 per month, entered into an agreement with them last fall, and they will put in their Tribute whatever we ask for, for that fee, so we can put in things that are legally required, like notice of budget hearings and staff salaries,” Phelps said. “There will be certain things that we will want to continue use the Northern Wyoming Daily News for like advertising for employees and bidding projects,” he added.

The annual budget hearing was also held in the midst of the regular meeting. The board approved the 2016-17 budget. “The 2016-17 $3,250,000 budget is basically the same as the previous year,” Ten Sleep School Business Manager Janet Collen said.

Food services remained the same and while there was a change in insurance, the change is saving money. “The plan changed. The plan we were on, they discontinued, so we went to a higher deductible plan, so it is saving the school some money,” Collen stated.

Teachers did not receive raises but the board did allow movement on salary schedules. “We allowed movement, they really didn’t get an increase or anything, it’s just for your years of experience, you get to allow move up to the next pay rate with your years of experience,” Collen said.