A statutorily required revamp to the way Wyoming funds its public schools has faced significant setbacks in the House. Across the hall, the Senate is aiming to salvage the proposal.
The recalibration bill, as it’s known, would boost the average teacher salary, but also cut hundreds of teachers across the state and up class sizes.
The Wyoming Education Association (WEA), which represents teachers, has rallied against the bill for some of those reasons, as well as changes it would make to the way Wyoming calculates enrollment and the mandate it includes for every school district to join the state health insurance plan.
On the first day of the Legislature’s 2026 budget session, members of the Wyoming House voted 41 to 21 for the school recalibration bill. That’s just short of the two-thirds vote it needed to be successfully introduced.
The WEA celebrated the House’s failure to introduce the bill, its president writing “Educators, parents, administrators, counselors, experts, and students testified for months. None supported this bill as written.”
Then on Friday, the deadline for bills to receive a favorable introduction vote, Rep. Robert Wharff (R-Evanston) asked the chamber to suspend its own rules against reconsidering dead legislation. His colleagues denied him, voting 38 to 22 to reject the suspension, again falling just short of the necessary votes.
In the Senate, it was a different story.
Sen. Tim Salazar (R-Riverton) asked his own chamber to introduce identical legislation, also on Friday, saying he was dismayed by the House’s votes.
“I thought we had an agreement,” Salazar said. “We had a unanimous vote coming out of the recalibration committee. And, quite frankly, I'm surprised about this. Nevertheless, we as the Senate can correct whatever happened down there, keep recalibration alive.”
The Senate obliged, voting unanimously to introduce the bill and assign it to the Senate Education Committee, where it will face further public comment and lawmaker discussion.
Wyoming is required to recalibrate its school funding model every five years.
Wyoming State Statute 21‑13‑309(t) says the state will undertake a “recalibration” of the education block grant model “to determine if modifications are necessary to ensure it remains cost-based in light of changing conditions and modifications to law.”
Work on this year’s recalibration bill actually began in 2025. For months, a dedicated legislative committee, co-chaired by Salazar, worked with hired consultants to make decisions on everything from teacher pay to target class sizes to the minimum number of teachers guaranteed to small schools.
They received hours of input from teachers, school administrators and education advocates from across the state — many of whom criticized the committee for failing to raise teacher salaries more, cutting teacher positions and asking the teachers who remain to teach larger classes.
If the state fails to pass a recalibration bill this year, it will be the second consecutive time it has failed to do so.
In 2021, the last time recalibration was required, the committee process played out, with the same private consultants. They recommended an evidence-based model, legislators amended that model into a bill that would have cut more than $130 million from Wyoming schools, and then considered it briefly during the 2021 general session.
That bill died when the House and Senate could not agree on the provisions within.
In 2022, the Wyoming Education Association sued the state, alleging lawmakers had failed for years to adequately fund public education, as they are required to by the state constitution.
In 2025, Laramie County District Court handed the teachers’ organization a sweeping victory, directing the state to better fund schools and to provide specifically for more nurses, mental health counselors and school resource officers, while devoting more funds to school nutrition and technology.
The state challenged that ruling in the Wyoming Supreme Court. In the fall, the state’s highest court halted the lower court’s ruling while the case played out. That meant the specific provisions of the district court’s ruling, about everything from nurses to nutrition, did not have to be included in this year’s recalibration bill, though they might be required later.
While the Senate will have the first opportunities to mark up the recalibration committee’s proposals, the bill will ultimately need to find support in the House.
If lawmakers fail to pass a recalibration bill, Wyoming’s public schools will continue to be funded using the model most recently passed. That means target class sizes, reimbursements for teacher salaries and more will remain as they are, so far unaffected by either the ongoing lawsuit or the work of the last two recalibration committees.
