State leaders are making big changes to the way Wyoming funds public education. Wyoming Public Radio’s Jeff Victor explained where lawmakers have landed right before the budget session to News Director Kamila Kudelska.
Editor's Note: This story has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamila Kudelska: Let’s get caught up with the most recent news. State leaders have been talking a lot about how they want to fund public schools. As our education reporter, you’ve been following that closely. What can you tell us?
Jeff Victor: Honestly, more than you probably want to hear. But let’s take a look at the big picture.
Right now, Wyoming is going through its recalibration process. That’s scheduled every five years and it involves reevaluating how we fund the K-12 education happening across all 48 school districts in the state.
The Wyoming Legislature establishes a school finance committee of lawmakers and they work with private consultants to come up with a revamped school funding model. That revamp takes the form of a bill, and then follows the normal lawmaking process.
KK: Where are we at in that timeline?
JV: The committee just approved the school funding bill. So now the full Legislature can deal with it when they meet in Cheyenne for the budget session in a couple of weeks.
KK: What does that bill look like? What did the lawmakers and consultants come up with?
JV: The consultants came up with one model, and then the committee of lawmakers changed it, so they didn’t always agree on what the final product should look like.
KK: What did the consultants come up with?JV: They called it the evidence-based model. Basically, pulling together research, feedback from listening sessions, the letter of the law and even court rulings to say: Here’s what it would take to fully fund Wyoming public education, in their professional opinion.
KK: What does that take?
JV: Their model added $100 million to the school funding model. It boosted average teacher salaries from around $60,000 a year to a little over $70,000. But it also aimed to pay for that boost in part by cutting more than 100 school employees, mostly teachers, from across the state.
So more funding and higher teacher pay, but also fewer teachers.
But this is where it gets really complicated, because the school funding bill doesn’t just say, “Here’s one dollar amount for one school district.” It has a ton of different measurements. For example, it sets target class sizes and then reimburses schools for the number of teachers it would take to maintain those class sizes. But even that’s not so straightforward, because we have some very small schools in the state and you can’t easily hire half a teacher. So the model also sets minimum numbers of teachers per school based on enrollment. But then you have to decide how to measure enrollment. And the model tackles all of these variables. As they made edits, the lawmakers touched on all of them, too.
KK: I don’t want to get us lost in the weeds. How did the lawmakers' version differ from the consultant version?
JV: I think the topline is this: Lawmakers scaled back what the consultants recommended.
The evidence-based model would increase school spending by more than 7%. The lawmakers put forward a model that would increase it less than 1%.
The evidence based model would have cut 120 positions. But the lawmakers’ model would have originally cut more than 700, most of them classroom teachers.
KK: But big picture, the consultants recommended a big increase in spending with layoffs, and the lawmakers suggested a smaller increase with more layoffs?
JV: Yes, and that brings us to this month.
The recalibration committee met to finally hammer out the school funding bill it’s going to send to the full Legislature. They ended up making several changes to their own model.
The two biggest changes were made to class size and the number of minimum teachers.
Basically, the lawmakers reduced class sizes from what they were originally recommending, though we’re still looking at class size going up from what we have right now. Take fourth grade classes for example. Right now, the target class size is 21 students. The lawmakers were going to raise that to 25, but have now come back down to 22. And different grades have different targets.
The lawmakers also boosted the number of minimum teachers small schools will get.
Taken together, these changes will probably add $30 million back into the bill, as well as something like 300 teachers.
KK: That’s a lot of numbers going up and down. Where do we stand now?
JV: I have to describe the up and down because we don’t have final figures for the number of teachers being cut or the final price tag for the full bill. Legislative staff need to crunch the numbers again and we’ll get a clearer picture soon.
However, what we can say is that the school funding bill, in its present form, would still cut hundreds of teachers and it would increase class sizes from what we have today. That means more students per teacher. As far as how much it costs, the final dollar amount will land somewhere between the evidence-based model and the committee’s original recommendation. And one way or another, it’ll be a bit more than the current model.
Committee Chair Sen. Tim Salazar (R-Riverton) said it was all an exercise in compromise.
Tim Salazar: We had a lot of individual discussions. There was a lot of give and take. There was compromise.
KK: Is it the sort of compromise where everyone’s happy, or no one is?
JV: It’s hard to say where lawmakers stand, since so much will really be decided in the session. But certainly, the entire committee, including Freedom Caucus leaders, libertarians, moderates and even two Democrats, voted unanimously to endorse the school funding bill.
As for school officials? They’re less jazzed.
Albany County Schools Business Manager Trystin Green said teachers weren’t going to be very thankful for the salary bump when, in reality, it means they’ll be asked to do more.
Trystin Green: Those teachers aren't coming up here saying thank you for the 11% or whatever the raise ends up being, because they know, more than likely, they're going to lose some friends, they're going to have to work harder.
JV: Now, she was saying this before the committee marked up the bill. But we know educators still take issue with the current version. The Wyoming Education Association that represents them said the committee had failed to provide “real fixes” and was instead “dangling scraps.”
KK: Listeners might remember that a court recently found the state was massively underfunding schools and that it needs to fix that. My understanding is that a big part of that court order was making sure to fund counselors, nurses, school resource officers, school nutrition, etc. How does that fit into all of this?JV: Good question. And you’re right. That court order basically told the lawmakers on the committee to boost funding for all the things you just listed. As we reported last fall, that court order was hanging over the recalibration process. And the private consultants worked it into their evidence-based model.
KK: But, as I understand, lawmakers did not address everything in that court order in their funding model. How is that possible?JV: The ruling got appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court, which has now halted the lower court’s order while the whole thing plays out. So where we’re sitting now is that lawmakers do still have a constitutional obligation to adequately fund public schools.
However, the specific directions about how to do that, from the court order, have been paused. In practical terms, it means lawmakers don’t have to boost funding for school resource officers, or school nutrition or mental health counselors, at least not yet.
KK: So they’re not going to?
JV: They decided to kick most of those decisions to next year. The recalibration bill will fund mental health counselors to the level called for by the evidence-based model. But lawmakers are going to reevaluate that after this year’s budget session and maybe after they have a final ruling from the Supreme Court. They’ll probably make decisions then about school counselors, school resource officers and all the rest.KK: Sounds like we have a good idea of where lawmakers are headed, but nothing’s set in stone. What are the next steps for this recalibration bill?JV: Now it’s all up to the Legislature, which will consider the bill during the budget session. Just like all those school administrators and teachers, I’ll be watching to see what happens with recalibration.
