Wyoming Says Judge's Order Gives Schools More Power Over Money Than Lawmakers Have

Wyoming’s executive branch has told the state’s highest court that if it doesn’t reverse a judge’s order expanding the legislature’s public school funding expectations to include a computer for every student and other provisions, it’ll amount to letting schools, not the legislature, determine school funding in Wyoming.

The Tuesday filing by the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office in its appeal of the Wyoming Education Association’s school-funding lawsuit is the latest in a three-year saga.

WEA sued in 2022. A handful of school districts joined the lawsuit.

A bench trial spanned weeks in the summer of 2024.

Then Laramie County District Court Judge Peter Froelicher ruled in February that the Wyoming Legislature isn’t adequately funding its schools, and he ordered lawmakers to do so.

He also ordered the state to start funding gaps in school lunch programs, hire elementary-school counselors and pay for school resource officers. And for the state to provide every child access to a computer.

The state appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court, where the matter is now pending.

“(The schools’) strategy appears designed to pick off every objective method for estimating (education) costs until the only remaining option is the expenditure-based system they pretend not to ask for,” says a Tuesday argument brief by the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office. “(Froelicher) credited this strategy, putting (the schools) one step away from avoiding any method that would offer an alternative to their own opinions about what Wyoming’s schools need.”

Essentially, the state is arguing, Froelicher’s order will let the schools dictate their own, expense-based appropriations to the legislature, the high court reverses it.

The schools also are arguing for a high level of judicial scrutiny that would "amount to a novel framework that would effectively allow courts to appropriate education funds by fiat," says the argument.

Why This Argument

The dispute revolves around whether the Wyoming legislature in recent years has funded public schools to a standard the state Constitution demands.

The plain wording of the Constitution, which calls for “complete and uniform” public education, has been subject to dispute and further explanation across a series of court cases the Wyoming legal world calls the Campbell cases.

That’s because the Campbell County School District sued Wyoming repeatedly over school funding.

The result of these cases is that every five years, the Wyoming legislature must reassess what education costs, to build a cost-based funding model. In the intervening years, it must adjust for inflation as needed.

Yeah But

Wyoming has not been doing its duty, the WEA argued in its Sept. 8 brief.

“Interestingly,” the state did not call its current primary education cost analyst as a witness at the trial in this case, the association noted.

When the state switched recalibration analysts in 2017 in the hope of cutting costs, the supposed cost-cutting analysts asked for $4 million more than already projected, says WEA’s brief.

“Even when these cost-cutting consultants concluded schools need more money, the legislature did not consider or act upon their own consultant’s study,” the document says.

Witnesses for the schools at trial testified of concerning, sometimes harrowing conditions within schools – and a pervasive teacher shortage.

In 2010 …

Wyoming’s executive branch countered, saying personnel funding in 2010 was over-inflated, according to “every expert who analyzed this issue.”

The WEA did not sue then, when the legislature’s projected budget for schools didn’t match the costs the analyses yielded, the state noted.

“They sat on their hands and only now allege the State misused the monitoring process to systematically violate the Constitution for more than a decade,” says the brief.

The state claims it didn’t ignore cost pressures between 2018 and 2022, but that the cost pressures didn’t become consistent until 2022 – “at which points adjustments were made and have continued every year since.”

The state also disputes Froelicher’s judgment that to stay within constitutional parameters, the legislature must supply one technological device for every student.

No one asked for that outright: the judge “decided this issue after the close of evidence,” and the schools have run with it in a burst of “opportunism,” says the Wyoming Attorney General’s argument.

We Need Them, Schools Say

WEA and the schools in the lawsuit with it had given an opposite reasoning, saying the case record has “firmly established that the state has failed to maintain a constitutionally compliant school finance system by not including funding for these components.”

By “these components,” the plaintiffs mean one-to-one-ratio provision of tech devices – and mental health counselors for elementary schools, funding of school resource officers, and more state funding for school lunches.  

Froelicher had agreed, ordering all of those provisions before the appeal.

Mental health needs among students, for example, have “increased substantially in recent years and… access to qualified counselors at the elementary level, while insufficient, is essential to providing a constitutionally adequate education.”

The state’s counter on this is that provisions not directly tied to education are more of a policy call, for the legislature or the “ballot box” – not judges – to decide.

Accreditation

Another barbed argument from Wyoming is why the schools claiming they can’t afford to provide a constitutionally approved education say they do just that when making attestations toward keeping their state accreditation.

“It appears that when the Appellee Districts need to maintain accreditation and avoid further scrutiny or accountability, they assure the State that all is well,” reads the filing. “But when it is advantageous to securing more funding, they present a dire tale of deficient schools failing to educate kids… Both stories cannot be true.”

That’s not so, the WEA and schools argue.

In signing assurances that schools deserve accreditation, they’re not addressing equal opportunities for quality education across different regions, according to the WEA’s brief.

The signed assurances don’t measure the lack of substance necessary to determine whether a quality education is being provided; they don’t certify the level of rigor of one teach or another, the association added.

“Districts must sign the form or risk loss of accreditation and funding,” adds WEA’s argument.

Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.