Wyoming reworked the way it funds public education earlier this year, adding $123 million to public schools and raising teacher salaries across the state.
But it left a few thornier topics for next year’s session, like how much to give each school for student lunches, school resource officers and laptops.
The Legislature’s Select Committee on School Finance Recalibration met last week to get its bearings during a two-day meeting in Lander.
“It’s a little staggering,” Sen. Tim Salazar (R-Riverton), the committee’s co-chair, said of the workload. “But at the same time, we’re going to have to figure it out.”
Wyoming lawmakers also want to fix a problem caused by this year’s overhaul of public education funding.
The overhaul made it harder for some school districts to fund student activities, leaving many to worry they would have to start cutting teams or programs.
Both the leftover topics and the matter of activities funding could be sorted out in one big public education funding bill the committee hopes to craft in the months ahead.
The lawmakers are set to meet again on August 25 in Cheyenne, where they will start shaping that bill for the 2027 general session next winter.
Activities funding imperiled in some districts
The overhaul passed by lawmakers this year was seen as a win in many regards by folks across the education space. Notably, it sought to raise the average teacher salary in Wyoming from around $60,000 to more than $75,000 by better reimbursing districts.
To ensure that money went toward paying teachers and giving them raises, lawmakers restricted it to the so-called “instructional silo.” That provision forbade districts from using reimbursements for teacher pay for any other purpose.
This represented a break from historical precedent.
The state estimates how much various educational components cost and then reimburses districts based on those estimates. But in reality, district budgets are complicated and vary by county, so local school leaders move money around to meet local needs.
Historically, some of the money now locked in the instructional silo had been used to support activities.
Now, the districts that relied on those transfers can’t make them anymore.
This led some district leaders around the state to worry about the viability of their sports teams and other student activities.
“There was never any intention to damage or cause any harm to activities or communities,” Rep. Scott Heiner (R-Green River) told district superintendents and other stakeholders during the committee meeting. “I’m grateful for the citizens that brought this to our attention during these past couple of months.”
The solution won’t be as simple as reversing course, however, because the districts that lost activities funding are in the minority.
A majority of Wyoming districts saw their activities budgets go up because of a new funding formula also included in the overhaul.
Before this year’s legislation, the state calculated activities funding at the school level. The overhaul means Wyoming will soon fund activities at the district level instead, and further complicate the calculation in other ways.
The end result is that activities funding fell by about $3.9 million, from just more than $46 million to just more than $42 million, when moving from the old model to the new one approved in this year’s overhaul.
Some of the state’s largest districts lost activities funding, including Laramie #1, Campbell #1, Albany #1 and Lincoln #2, which all lost between 12-30% of what they received previously.
But some of the state’s smallest districts gained funding, including Fremont #2, Big Horn #4, Fremont #6 and Fremont #21, which each gained between 2-20% over what they received previously.
Lawmakers have not settled on a solution, but in August, they will weigh taking a “greater of” approach.
That would let districts keep the new formula if it benefits them or return to the old formula if that would be better for their district. Legislative staff estimated taking the “greater of” approach would see about 23 school districts out of Wyoming’s 48 total districts choose the old formula. It would cost the state an additional $5.3 million.
“We’ve narrowed the focus a little bit, there’s still some loose ends, some rough edges,” Heiner said. “But we’ve got an idea that may solve the problem and be a win-win for all school districts, so there’s no school districts that actually lose money for activities.”
The rest of the recalibration committee’s work will come into better focus later this summer.
2027 bill will also tackle lunches, SROs and laptops
A district court judge ruled last year that the state had to better pay teachers and invest more in mental health counselors, school nurses, nutrition for students, safety in schools and classroom technology like laptops for students.
That was the result of a multi-year lawsuit brought by the state’s teachers’ association, which the teachers initially won.
But the state has appealed the decision to the Wyoming Supreme Court, and that appeal is ongoing.
Just before the legislative session this year, the Supreme Court issued a stay on the lower court’s ruling. That meant that while lawmakers still had a constitutional obligation to adequately fund public education, they did not yet have to commit to the specific provisions regarding counselors, nurses, laptops and more.
Regardless, the Legislature included the new mandated funding for counselors and nurses in the recalibration bill they ultimately passed.
But it left the other topics for further study in the interim between the 2026 and 2027 sessions. The recalibration committee began that work during its meeting this month in Lander.
There are no concrete proposals for these topics just yet. But the committee gathered testimony from its consultants, the Department of Education and various stakeholders about the ins and outs on all the issues.
“We started out very broad in this first meeting,” Heiner said. “This hopper is huge, and we’ve been trying to get the input so that we can narrow the focus down in this hopper. And so, by the next meeting, [there] will be a much narrower focus, and finally by the last meeting, we’ll be working on a bill draft to bring to the session.”
The committee directed its hired consultants and legislative staff to bring back new breakdowns, data and options to the lawmakers’ next meeting in August. There, the committee will begin crafting a bill to address all of these areas and more.
