‘Budgets are getting tight’: Lander School Board discusses alternative funding options for local aquatic center

(Lander, WY) – Fremont County School District 1 officials plan to approach the City of Lander in the coming months to discuss potential cost-sharing options for the Bruce Gresly Aquatic Center – a facility that is primarily utilized by the public. 

The cost to operate the pool exceeded $510,000 last year, Superintendent Mike Harris reported during a Lander School Board meeting last week, and for fiscal year 2026, expenditures are estimated to reach almost $540,000.

Originally, Harris explained, those expenses were meant to be shared between the school district and the city, but when Lander decided it was “no longer able to contribute” its portion, the school district began “shouldering” the cost “100 percent,” despite statistics showing that 80 percent of pool users are members of the public.

“It’s a huge part of our community,” Harris said. “Having grown up in Lander, I remember … getting that new pool and how cool it was, and to be able to go to swim lessons there and have my kids learn from Bruce. (I’d hate) to see anything negative happen with it, and I think that’s probably a pretty common sentiment around Lander.”

Regardless, Harris said, “budgets are getting tight,” so he asked the school board whether they could suggest any strategies to “reduce expenditures (at the pool) without compromising the quality of the facility and what it means to this area.”

Funding support

School officials could present the situation to the city and ask them to consider “helping with some of this burden,” Board Chair Taylor Jacobs said – or maybe the Lander District Recreation Board could help cover some of the funding.

Trustee Aileen Brew pushed back on the Rec Board idea, however, calling it “a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.” 

“The Rec Board provides hundreds of thousands of dollars to other programs in our community that are enormously important – for not just our kids, but our adults and all of our community,” Brew said. “So … establishing a little more information about the city’s perspective on this and their ability to contribute (is) what I prefer to see as the first step, versus applying for a Rec Board grant.”

Trustee Scott Jensen agreed that “we can’t ask the Rec Board to cover that cost.”

“That would devastate our community in other ways,” he said. “But we need to approach the city and ask them to step up, (because) that’s a significant amount of money that … is being siphoned off of (our students’) education to subsidize these adults and other recreational uses of the pool. And to me, that seems like that’s an inappropriate use of money. That’s not where that money should be going.”

Jacobs echoed Jensen’s “very valid point” later.

“For a school district, education should be our priority,” she agreed. 

After approaching the city, the school district could consider asking the Rec Board to redirect any funding that currently supports adult programs to the pool, Jensen noted – but again, Brew pushed back.

“The Lander District Rec Board … provides programming for our entire community, and it does amazing things, and it really should be able to continue to do that,” she said. “Those monies would be available, in part, for desperate, desperate needs. But it really does a lot of extraordinary programming for all of us and for all of our families. So it would be terrible if we tapped that simply for our pool, in my opinion.”

Fee increases?

Trustee Jared Kail asked whether usage fees could be increased at the pool in order to help cover costs, predicting that “the problem we’re going to run into” when asking the city for help “is that, with property tax reductions, the municipalities are getting pretty hard, too, so they are not going to be exactly flush, either.” 

“If the city would like to subsidize (pool) fees so that we don’t have to raise them … then I’d say the city should do so,” he said. “But if they don’t, I think we need to find a way to make the pool … as self-sustaining as it can be. (And) it is not very expensive to use that pool.”

Fees and club dues currently contribute about $110,000 to the overall cost of operating the pool, Harris said, directing trustees to a flyer on the district website that outlines the current fee structure.

Reviewing the flyer, Jacobs pointed out that the cost of pool admission $4 for adults, $3 for children in grades 7 through 12, and $2 for children in preschool through sixth grade, while swimming lessons are $36 – “which I don’t think have changed in 10-plus years.”

“That could be an option,” Jacobs said. “And if (the city) would like to help … subsidize those increases, that’s one of the ways the city could help.”

For more information, contact FCSD 1 at (307) 332-4711.