By Carrie Haderlie
Wyoming Tribune Eagle
Via- Wyoming News Exchange

CHEYENNE — It’s been 15 years since the Wyoming Legislature was able to agree on a new calculation for providing money to the state’s 48 public school districts.

This year, though, the Legislature has agreed on an updated funding model for the cost of an equitable education for all K-12 students. On Thursday, lawmakers signed and sent their recalibration bill to Gov. Mark Gordon for review. 

Recalibration is a process by which lawmakers settle on a formula to allocate education funding across the state, taking into consideration teacher salaries, the cost of supplies and technology, administrators, school lunches, security officers and more.

“It’s a huge deal,” Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, who sat on the Select Committee on School Finance Recalibration, said in an interview with the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.

Past attempts, teacher salaries increase, class sizes stay small

Past efforts to pass recalibration legislation did not fail due to a lack of interim committee or stakeholder effort, said Sen. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie. Rothfuss has been a member of three other Select Committees on School Finance Recalibration.

“This is my fourth recalibration process … and this is the first time a bill has gone through,” Rothfuss told the WTE Thursday after the Senate voted to concur on the House changes to Senate File 81, “K-12 public school finance-2.”

“Each of the times I’ve done it, we put a lot of work in the interim, but there were a variety of reasons why bills didn’t come forward,” Rothfuss said.

In 2015, the recalibration model would have led to less education funding, and nobody wanted that, he said.

“And then, ironically, the next two times, it would have led to higher funding, and therefore nobody wanted it,” Rothfuss said.

As it heads to the governor, this year’s recalibration bill includes a net increase of $125 million each year of the 2027-28 biennium for education spending over an evidence-based model recommended by consultants during the interim, allocated across every district.

The total recalculation for education funding included in SF 81, spread over two years, is about $250 million, resulting in nearly $2 billion in total spending. Money will be allocated not as a block grant, as districts have received in the past, but as categorical funding — much of which is earmarked for classroom use.

Along with concerns over increasing class sizes, the change to siloed categorical funding was one of the biggest concerns expressed by the public during the session.

Yin lives in Teton County, where it costs more to live than any other place in the state. He advocated for adequate funding for teacher salaries in his area, and, across the board, teacher salaries increased to 85% of the market value.

“We did increase teacher salaries quite a bit, and we will have to see how it plays out, but I think it will be good for both educators and kids. And, it’ll end up with smaller class sizes on average, which is good for kids as well,” Yin said.

Sen. Wendy Schuler, R-Evanston, also sat on the recalibration committee and said teacher pay was a huge priority for her.

“We know teachers work long hours. They do clinics, they do professional development, they work summers,” Schuler told the WTE. “So we felt that was important.”

A class size ratio of 22 students for each teacher for grades 4 through 8 will remain in place after an amendment to the bill by Schuler, which she said was also a priority.

This year, lawmakers did not come to the conclusion on their own that they must update the model. In February 2025, Laramie County District Judge Peter Froelicher found in a lawsuit brought by the Wyoming Education Association that the Legislature had been unconstitutionally underfunding the state’s public schools, ordering Wyoming to go through the recalibration process.

Given Froelicher’s ruling, this was the first time lawmakers truly understood the model was so far off they had to do something, Rothfuss said.

“We obviously had the court decision guiding us and telling us that we were unconstitutional, and that we had a lot of issues we needed to address,” he said. “We took that very seriously and worked on all of those issues during the interim.”

Schuler said it’s exciting that both chambers agreed on a bill. Inflation has caused educational costs to rise over the last 15 years, and education funding did not keep pace.

“It costs more to buy supplies, it costs more for people that are teachers and bus drivers and nutrition folks to be able to survive, and without this, they have less in their pocketbooks,” Schuler said. “That’s really what recalibration is about. Take a look and see, in the funding model, if we are funding things adequately.”

Rep. Ocean Andrew, R-Laramie, who also was a member of the recalibration committee, said the bill overall represents a good change for education in Wyoming. It’s difficult to get people from all across the state to adopt one model, when each community is very different in its needs, costs and size, he said.

“Everybody wants their schools to be funded very well, in the best way possible. But there are always ups and downs to someone, somewhere, in a model,” Andrew said.

Schuler said constant communication with educators from across the state helped while she made her decisions on the bill. The additional funding was added by the Senate to the bill, and remained in place as the House debated it.

“We did feel a little bit like we hadn’t done quite enough to really get the bill where it needed to be, and I think it was helpful to hear from teachers and administrators, staff, bus drivers and cooks,” she said.

Siloed funding, small schools and the work to come

Some lawmakers expressed concern about how the bill — and especially the move to fund education from a block grant to categorical siloed funding — would affect small districts. Rep. JD Williams, R-Lusk, made many unsuccessful attempts this week to bring amendments that would move a percentage out of the silo. His attempt included 15%, 10% and 5%, while other lawmakers went as low as 3% and 2%.

“There are many costs in the classroom that are not salary,” Williams said on the House floor Wednesday when he urged the body to adopt a 10% flexibility from the siloed funding. “For example, enrichment software. Materials for the children that are ahead, and remediation software and materials for the children who are behind. Many of those children who are behind do not qualify for special education, and so that cost must be paid from somewhere.”

Yin said lawmakers will have to see how the siloed funding model plays out, but added that there is additional money in the bill for nurses and mental health counselors outside the categorical grant.

“I think we’ve added money on both sides — the teacher side and the non-teacher side. We added money on the outside of instruction, so districts theoretically should have money to handle things,” Yin said.

On the House floor Wednesday, Rep. Art Washut, R-Casper, argued that, this being the first time in a long time that school funding has been allocated as a categorical grant, he would support flexibility within the model.

“I think the silo approach is the right approach. I’m 100% on board, but I don’t think (removing a portion) hurts the approach. It doesn’t undermine the bill to give a tiny amount of flexibility,” Washut said. “The possibility exists that a rigid approach at this point might put a small district in a pickle.”

Rep. Bob Davis, R-Baggs, told the WTE he was bothered by the lack of flexibility in the funding model.

“The silo, is it great? I don’t know. There is no flexibility. That is my concern. We couldn’t even get room for 2%,” Davis said. “It is too much oversight. Where is the confidence in our school boards and the people they hire as administrators?”

Davis, along with Williams, were two of seven representatives to vote against the bill on third reading.

According to Rothfuss, the evidence-based funding model adopted was designed with categories intended to be “sufficiently funded to carry out all of the assigned objectives and activities,” and “inside the instructional silo we have massively overfunded.”

Andrew said there is plenty of money allocated to districts outside the categorical grant for “everything that is not a classroom resource, everyone who doesn’t directly participate in teaching kids.”

“There is plenty of funding outside the silo,” he said, continuing that he believes it was largely the concept of siloed funding that made recalibration possible.

“I think the silo is what brought all of us together,” said Andrew, who has been on the Joint Education Committee for six years. “We’ve constantly heard that there is growing bureaucracy, that everything is growing within the school districts but teachers’ pay is staying stagnant.”

Focusing extra money on the classroom will help Wyoming attract better teachers, he said, which “boils down to providing better education for children.”

Others worried the bill would have unintended consequences for co-located schools, or schools in very rural areas that serve K-12 students under one roof. While the recalibration bill set a minimum of 17 employees for small school districts, Rep. Marilyn Connolly, R-Buffalo, tried to amend the bill to create an allowable lowest number of full-time employees in rural K-12 schools as well. In her district, Connolly said she is concerned for Johnson County School District 1’s Kaycee K-12 School.

“There needs to be a floor set somehow so these small schools can be able to have the staffing they need,” Connolly said in an interview with the WTE. “I’m worried they could lose core teachers in an isolated school like Kaycee. I think it is going to cause some instability in these small schools.”

Sen. Barry Crago, R-Buffalo, expressed the same concerns on a concurrence vote Thursday. He said co-located schools exist in Albany, Carbon, Natrona, Johnson and Platte counties.

“I don’t think they ever got addressed,” Crago said. “I am going to ask that as (the) Recalibration (Committee) works this a bit more, through this summer, look at that issue. We’ll see how these schools fare under the model over the next year. If there are issues, I will be bringing the issue back to the body.”

Both Crago and Connolly voted for the bill.

The final recalibration bill does require that districts report to the state any variances in spending from the evidence-based model, as proposed in an amendment by Sen. Larry Hicks, R-Baggs. Yin said that reporting will help the recalibration committee as it continues its work in the interim.

“The reporting requirement will be good for us to understand if we still need to work on small schools,” he said.

The recalibration committee will discuss funding for school nutrition, technology and school resource officer funding, per the district court’s decision, over the upcoming interim.

“We still have work to do. That’ll happen in the interim,” Rothfuss said.