By Win Hammond
Gillette News Record
Via- Wyoming News Exchange

GILLETTE — This year, the Wyoming Legislature revamped the state’s education funding model and gave public schools more money than ever before, but it also put more restrictions on how that money could be spent.

Now many school districts, especially smaller ones, are staring down the barrel of budget shortfalls as they struggle to balance their budgets ahead of a July 1 deadline.

Crook County School District and Weston County School District 7 are both facing more than $200,000 budget shortfalls in activities funding and employee benefits.

Both districts’ administrations are having to move money around in order to not cut staff and other programs because of the Legislature’s new “silo” model, even after legislators passed the restrictions to take care of teachers.

They’re not alone. Many school districts and the Wyoming High School Activities Association have discussed cutting student activities to make up for budget shortfalls created by the biggest, and most restrictive, school funding bill in Wyoming history.

Students involved in extracurricular activities develop better social skills, engage more in class, perform better academically and are more likely to graduate, a plethora of academic studies show.

Districts fear that as funding for sports or other extracurriculars hang in the balance, schools will see those benefits to students disappear.

Wyoming may be the Equality State, but recalibration hardships aren’t created equally, as smaller school districts take a harder look at program cuts than some bigger districts flush with funds.

Crook County School District and Weston County School District 7 are relatively small districts, with fewer than 1,200 students and a little more than 800 students enrolled this past school year, respectively. The two districts both face a double whammy. They receive less money from the state, which pegs money to enrollment, and they also generate less property tax revenue for the sparsely-populated districts to fall back on.

Neighboring Campbell County School District is, by comparison, a giant with almost 8,200 students enrolled for 2025-26, according to the Wyoming Department of Education.

Campbell County School District Superintendent Alex Ayers said that even though the Legislature’s new silo approach means no money for his district’s activities, Campbell County won’t have to cut programs. Under the new model, the district will make up for about $2.5 million in activities funding by tapping into local funding sources without necessarily dipping into the district’s reserves, he said.

Feeling the pinch

But some smaller districts are finding they have less room to maneuver. School administrators in Crook and Weston counties said they feel the way they manage their districts is now out of their control after lawmakers voted to silo teacher salaries and employee insurance.

WCSD7 Superintendent Clark Coberly said the state has “siloed everything” by restricting how districts can spend money from the state on salaries and insurance.

“By siloing the insurance piece, it essentially voided the benefits package that my board has used for over 20 years,” Coberly said. “We’re trying to see how we can take money from other areas to pump it into there.”

Coberly said that he isn’t aware of a single school district that feels that the silo has been good for it.

“We find ways to give teachers raises. (Legislators are) trying to push a narrative that teacher raises were not funded two years ago,” he said. “Teachers could have got raises without the silo, and it would have also been less restrictive on other instructional things we could have funded.”

Crook County School District Superintendent Mark Broderson applauded raising teachers’ pay, saying it was “a long time coming just to keep up with inflation.”

But the Legislature’s new silo funding model also resulted in a 26% cut, about $250,000, to his district’s activities budget compared to the previous year.

Now it’s up to the school board to decide what to cut to make up that shortfall if they decide to cut anything.

Chase Williams, chair of the Crook County School Board, said that making up the budget “wouldn’t come out of thin air.” Some options his board is considering include limiting the number of sports uniforms for kids, cutting down on meals on sports trips and not paying for overnight stays for away games.

“That would have to come directly out of the parents’ pockets,” Williams said. “Or don’t allow that kid to play in that sport. It’s going to come out of uniforms and equipment. Stuff that I don’t feel like we were buying that often anyway.”

Williams doesn’t see where else his school district could cut. He’s also skeptical that the recalibration committee even wants to continue to fund public schools.

“You guys say you’re going to fix (school funding), but I don’t see what needed to be fixed to begin with,” Williams said. “You need to go back to a block grant and let the local school boards dictate where the local dollars go. Having the state of Wyoming dictate how we spend our money is just more big government.”

Lawmakers acknowledge some hiccups but argue that the silo approach will benefit schools in the long run.

For now, the silo approach could mean teachers get pay raises but lose benefits. To balance the budget under the new rules, Williams said Crook County board members are considering cutting teachers’ benefits packages, which doesn’t help the district remain competitive in hiring teachers. His board also is considering renegotiating the district contract with a virtual education provider, Braintree.

He hopes that’s all his board will have to do to make up some of the shortfall.

“If they continue down the road and further than what they’re doing, we could definitely have to see some more drastic cuts,” Williams said.

What is recalibration?

The Wyoming Constitution and a series of court rulings require the state to determine the cost of a high-quality education, fund public schools, adjust funding at least every two years for inflation and review the components of the school funding model every five years.

The review is supposed to result in a recalibration bill every five years. This most recent iteration though is the first recalibration bill to pass since 2010, which has landed the state in legal hot water.

Last year, a district judge ruled that the state had been underfunding schools across six areas as set by the Wyoming Supreme Court in 1995. Those areas included teacher and staff salaries, mental health counselors, school resource officers, nutritional programs, technology and funding adjusted for inflation.

School districts confront potential program cuts because of the “instructional silo,” which earmarks certain portions of state money to specific allocations, such as teacher and paraprofessional pay.

It’s more restrictive than the former block-grant model the state had been using, but has also changed school funding from a funding model to a spending model, legislators and school district officials said.

Legislators have discovered that because of the new model’s restrictions, state money given to districts that was meant to go to teacher salaries and insurance was being used to fund activities and other programs.

While funding for school programs was not cut, the school districts’ flexibility was, Sen. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, explained. The silo model’s restrictions, he said, showed ways the state was underfunding schools, and now the state will have to grant even more money to them.

“In my view, the recalibration was highly successful. It is a better funding model than it was before. It fully funds classroom teachers at appropriate levels and that’s what we know has the largest effect on education outcomes,” Rothfuss said. “It might be causing some consternation now and I understand that. I respect the districts and the concerns they have, but we will have a better education system because of this recalibration bill.”

Political forces at play

Williams sees the revamped funding model as part of a larger set of changes, spearheaded by the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, that could weaken public schools. The caucus won control of the Wyoming House two years ago and describes itself as the genuine conservative voice of the Republican Party.

Three Freedom Caucus members are on the education recalibration committee, including Rep. Scott Heiner, R-Green River; Rep. John Bear, R-Gillette; and Rep. Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, as well as legislators that align closely with them such as Sen. Troy McKeown, R-Gillette, and Rep. Ocean Andrew, R-Laramie.

“Do I think that the Freedom Caucus’ desire is to kill public education? Absolutely not,” Williams said. “They know that there’s value in public education… I don’t know if you want to call it infatuation, but they’re very soft on charter schools or homeschooling.”

Recent efforts to strengthen non-public forms of education include the Homeschool Freedom Act, which eliminated the requirement that homeschool parents report their curricula to local school districts. The act was co-sponsored by Andrew, Heiner and Neiman.

Another piece of legislation approved the creation of education savings accounts, which would reimburse families up to $7,000 of state money to help with private school fees, pre-K tuition or homeschool costs. Andrew sponsored the bill last year, and it was co-sponsored by Bear, Heiner and Neiman.

This program landed the state before the Wyoming Supreme Court, which ruled last month that the state could start distributing the money. The Supreme Court ruling only affected an injunction blocking the allocation of funds while courts decide the broader legal challenge against education savings accounts.

Williams said school choice is great, but as lawmakers have pushed for more homeschooling and charter schools, they’ve become more strict on public education.

“I don’t care if they report or don’t report to our public schools about whether the kids are homeschooling,” Williams said. “But when they’re allowed to test our kids to prove we are doing what we’re doing as a school district, and they’re passing legislation that says homeschoolers don’t have to do that, that doesn’t make any sense.”

As his district now wrestles to rein in costs under the Legislature’s new rules, Williams questioned how fiscally conservative the Freedom Caucus lawmakers are, given their penchant for making decisions that land the state in legal trouble.

“They will not meet in the middle on some of these issues, just passing things through, and so now we go to court case after court case,” Williams said. “That is not financial conservatism. That is absolute arrogance.”

Heiner pointed out that Freedom Caucus legislation that has landed in courts has been related to abortion, not education. 

“The legislature will continue to fight for the rights of the unborn,” Heiner said.

‘Let us fix this’

School districts across the state may have to wait until next March to recoup money lost from recalibration.

Heiner and Rothfuss both serve on the state’s recalibration committee. They said school funding is falling short for many districts, but they promise that the committee is working to fix it.

The committee will meet in Lander on June 24 and 25 to try to come up with a solution to the funding shortfalls. It  was originally meant to discuss funding for technology, nutrition and school resource officers, but activities funding was added to the agenda.

Heiner said he’s working on a proposal to “retroactively” fund school activities next legislative session. State law requires Wyoming school districts, all 48 of them, to pass their 2026-27 school budgets by July 1.

“If a school district, let’s say they lost $200,000 because of the new formula, we will give them that $200,000,” Heiner said. “Don’t cut programs because we recognize the problem. Give us a chance to fix it.”

Rothfuss said he hadn’t heard about Heiner’s idea for “retroactive funding,” but he wouldn’t be opposed to it. The meeting in Lander is for legislators and school district officials to come up with solutions to unforeseen consequences of recalibration.

“I think there’s a general sense that we’ll need to fix the funding for activities,” Rothfuss said. “I haven’t heard much about ‘retroactive funding;’ it’s certainly possible. We could do that, but it’s not really been a discussion point yet.”

Rothfuss added that recalibration committee meetings are opportunities to hear from educators to create the best path forward.

“It gives us an opportunity to listen to those concerns and hopefully get some data for what these districts are experiencing and see how we should change it,” Rothfuss said. “I mean should we change it back to the way it was before? Or a better approach to it, a lot of opportunities for consideration.”

Heiner explained that some of the shortfalls in program funding are due to the funding model’s change from funding activities based on school enrollment to district enrollment, per the state consultant’s recommendation.

A slight change to the model like that caused about 18 small K-12 schools in large school districts to have their activities funding drop by 70%, Heiner said.

Cokeville High School, which had 95 students in the 2025-26 school year, is in Lincoln County School District 2, which has more than 2,800 students. Due to the funding model change, Cokeville had its activities funding cut from $2,500 per student to just $830 per student, Heiner said.

“What we’re going to work on this summer is changing that formula,” Heiner said. “I’ve talked to the consultant; I’ve talked to our Legislative Service Office. They all recognize the need to fix that. And I’ve talked to almost all the committee members on the recalibration committee. They all recognize that this is something we can fix. We just need to come up with a solution.”

The silo was a compromise

In the wake of lawsuits between the state and school districts, legislators felt pressure to properly fund public education on top of the pressure from a district court ruling that the state had been underfunding education and a pending decision from the state supreme court.

Legislators were on a deadline and needed to compromise, Rothfuss said.

“There was a lot of pressure and a recognition that we were unconstitutional,” he said. “The district court was pretty clear and accurate at pointing out how we went from being a strong and constitutional model to an underfunded, unconstitutional model.”

The committee was focused on making the model not only constitutional, but also took care of teachers while appropriately funding schools.

“We were already losing,” Rothfuss said of the lawsuit. “It would just be a matter of how bad do we want to lose?”

Before the silo, lawmakers approved an 8.5% pay bump, known as an external cost adjustment, to teacher and school staff in 2024.

Only Sublette County School District 1 was able to grant teachers at least the 8.5% bump, granting its teachers a 10.12% raise, as previously reported by the News Record.

Campbell County Superintendent Alex Ayers explained during a contentious April school board meeting that school districts, such as Campbell County, used the 8.5% external cost adjustment added to districts’ block grants to pay for underfunded school programs and other staff.

Legislators wanted to pay for teacher raises under the block grant school funding model. Not all that money made it to teachers’ pockets, and legislators introduced the silo this most recent session.

“That additional money that was put into the block grant didn’t get to the teachers and so as our consultant looked at the wages of our teachers and staff here in Wyoming, we were vastly underpaying the market conditions,” Heiner said. “So by putting a silo around it, we wanted to fix this problem today.”

Heiner, Rothfuss and educators agree that Wyoming needs to pay teachers competitively to attract talent away from neighboring states that might pay similarly.

But in the process of giving teachers raises with the restrictions of the silo, the state has discovered other parts are being defunded or underfunded.

Rothfuss said that some in the recalibration committee didn’t have the appetite to give districts even more money in the block grant.

“The purpose of the silo, though, and I’ve said this many times, was the key to getting a consensus with other legislators on getting increased salaries to our teachers as well as increasing the number of teachers that would be available,” Rothfuss said. “Many of the select committee members had concerns that if we provided that funding in the block grant, then it would be spent somewhere else.”

Some on the committee needed assurances that the state money would go where it was intended to go, Rothfuss said.

Now the repercussions are materializing in district budgets.

Still, despite political differences, Heiner and Rothfuss say Wyoming’s education is better and teachers are happier because of recalibration.

“I’ve heard a lot of feedback from teachers,” Heiner said, “saying ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for the silo.’”

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