By Daniel Bendtsen
Riverton Ranger
Via Wyoming News Exchange

RIVERTON — A bill the Wyoming Legislature approved this year saved Fremont County School District 2 in Dubois from a more than 3 percent reduction in funding.

The district still will suffer the largest cut in the state, however: The Legislative Services Office says FCSD 2 is the only district set to face a reduction of more than 1 percent next year.

House Bill 140 – school finance amendments – capped annual funding cuts for small districts at 2.5 percent.
Without that measure in place, and with the three-year rolling average of enrollment at Dubois High School having dropped below 50 students, FCSD 2 could have faced a 3.2 percent funding reduction.
“(That’s) going to literally destroy my small school,” Rep. Tim Salazar, R-Dubois, told his fellow lawmakers during a speech on the final day of the legislative budget session last week, criticizing the bill for its failure to keep Dubois from falling off the “funding cliff.”

As one of the most conservative members of the Wyoming House of Representatives, Salazar acknowledged that his position on HB 140 was “ironic.” But within 24 hours of his speech, he said he received about 60 emails from constituents expressing support for his stance.

“I was not elected to hurt my small school in Pavillion and Dubois,” he said, adding, “It’s not possible to cut when you have only one first-grade teacher.”

FCSD 2 superintendent Martha Gale said the funding issues in Dubois go beyond HB 140. Instead, she said, the problem has to do with the size of the district, which, like other small districts in the state, faces a disproportionately high funding drop when enrollment drops below a certain level.

For Dubois, that level is 50 students per school – another unique attribute of the district’s funding formula, which is based not on district-wide enrollment, but on individual school populations.
That means Dubois has three times as many funding cliffs to worry about: Once the 50-student threshold is surpassed at the high school, middle school or elementary school, Gale said, the loss can amount to more than $300,000 out of a $4.6 million annual budget.

She said it’s helpful that HB 140 included the 2.5 percent cap on funding cuts in order to provide some security to smaller schools.

“I have a consistent target now,” she said.

The other good news, Gale said, is that her school board anticipated the funding problem and has prepared to address the issue by cutting employment over time through attrition, so no programs will have to be eliminated to absorb the loss.

“We’ve always had this in the back of our minds,” she said. “We’re sitting in a positive place.”
Regardless, Gale said she’s hopeful that legislators will eventually address the funding problem through recalibration in coming years.

This past year, the Dubois district went without any instructor facilitators after the sole employee in that position retired in 2017.
Salazar told The Riverton Ranger he plans to work on legislation to address the issue during the next legislative session, assuming he’s re-elected this fall.

A coalition of small schools was supportive of a recommendation the Legislature’s consulting firm for school finance put forward for addressing the funding problem in 2017, Gale said.

Ultimately, legislators abandoned the school finance report they paid $800,000 for because it recommended that Wyoming should actually be providing $70 million more in funding to schools.