 - The Lander City Council voted last week to pay $25,000 to Fremont County School District 1 for use of the Bruce Gresly Aquatic Center.){kind=link}
(Lander, WY) – The Lander City Council voted last week to pay $25,000 to Fremont County School District 1 for use of the Bruce Gresly Aquatic Center.
The move comes as the city continues working with the school district and other stakeholders to explore future funding options for the facility, which is currently operated solely by FCSD 1.
Recent changes to the state’s K-12 funding model have made it more difficult for the school district to finance the aquatic center on its own, however, prompting the city council to set aside the $25,000 in its 2026-2027 budget to support pool operations.
Recreational swim
Lander Mayor Missy White said the municipal funding would allow pool staff to provide six more hours of recreational swim time each week, including two two-hour blocks between Mondays and Fridays and one two-hour block on the weekends.
“The pool (director) is working really hard to make sure she can get sufficient staff to make that happen,” White said, noting that “the reduced hours” at the aquatic center this summer impacted the “workforce” that is usually available to staff the facility.
On Monday, Pool Director Angela Hendrickson said she usually hires 10-12 teenagers to work at the pool during the summer months, but this year she wasn’t able to hire any extra staff due to budgetary constraints.
As a result, she said “all my certified lifeguards went and found other jobs” – so in order to add any recreational swimming blocks to the pool schedule now, she needs to hire new recruits.
That process is “in the works,” Hendrickson said, explaining that the job openings have been posted on the FCSD 1 website for more than a week and had garnered three responses as of Monday afternoon.
Two of the people who have applied would need to complete a 26-hour training course before they could start work though, Hendrickson added, so “it’ll be a while” before the additional recreational swim hours are available – and even then, the offering will be limited to 35 swimmers at a time.
“So we will be turning people away,” she said. “All summer we had to do that, too.”
Because she wasn’t able to hire additional staff members to complement her full-time staff of three this summer, Hendrickson said the number of recreational swim blocks available to the public during the summer months was also limited to about four or five per week, compared to the usual 14.
Now that summer hours have ended, she said her full-time employees are able to provide recreational swimming 7:30-9 p.m. Wednesdays and 2-4 p.m. Sundays – but normally, recreational swimming would be available 7:30-9 Monday through Friday and 2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. on weekends.
“We’re doing our best to get the hours open and back up,” Hendrickson said. “(We’re) hoping to get staff that can work the hours we need.”