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Spotlight placed on education during general session

By
Jasmine Hall with the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, via the Wyoming News Exchange

CHEYENNE – There was a spotlight placed on education during the Wyoming Legislature’s recent general session, as numerous bills were filed, spanning cost adjustments to prohibiting pornography in schools.
 
The Joint Education Committee and the Select Committee on School Facilities filed 19 bills alone, and other committees and lawmakers brought forward dozens of their own in an effort to impact both the K-12 and higher education systems.
 
Although it seemed nearly every legislator had a stake in education during the session, their priorities and approach to addressing them were unique. Even members of the Joint Education Committee weren’t unanimous on what they hoped to accomplish during the session or what they viewed as successes.
 
“For the year — yes. I think long term, no,” Rep. Landon Brown, R-Cheyenne, said when asked whether the session was successful in addressing education. “There’s still going to be a lot of long-term unanswered questions.”
 
This split was based on more than just political party; it was based on what their constituents desired, their fiscal beliefs and experience with the topic. Some were freshman lawmakers dipping their toe into the issues that mattered most to constituents, while others had a longstanding interest and seat on the committee.
 
Rep. David Northrup, R-Powell, joined longtime co-Chairman Sen. Charles Scott, R-Casper, as the leaders of this year’s Joint Education Committee.
 
Scott didn’t respond to requests to comment.
 
Northrup told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle he went into the session with few expectations as he heard there was such a division between the House and the Senate. His priority was to just “hold the line” on funding education throughout the state, because he said there are legislators in both chambers arguing about how much should be spent on students and through the K-12 funding model.
 
He doesn’t want cuts to education and wants to ensure the education package is as equitable and contains as much quality as the state can afford.
 
“I really feel that we should just be keeping the funding at a level where it has historically been, and offering an ECA (external cost adjustment) or regional cost adjustment, either one,” he said, “so that we can make sure to keep everything on par and not end up in further litigation.”
 
Walking away from two months in the session, he said public education in Wyoming is in a good place. He said they have helped a little as far as the underfunding lawsuit filed against them by the Wyoming Education Association, and placed K-12 teachers and faculty in a better position than before.
 
“Students should also be in a better position than they were before,” he said. “Our NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) scores are outstanding, and let’s hope they continue that way.”
 
The Education Committee co-chairman said the largest changes that the Legislature made to education were through Senate File 174. It creates infrastructure for a charter school authorizing board, outlines requirements for funding and operation of charter schools, as well as takes away the responsibility to approve and oversee charters from the State Loan and Investment Board.
 
Only one more charter school can be authorized in the next five years, after three charter schools were approved by the State Loan and Investment Board in the past year.The only exception is if one of the previous schools approved closes for any reason.
 
Brown is another member of the committee, and he agreed the charter school bill was the most significant piece of legislation to come out of the session. Northrup and Brown were wary of how equitable the bill was before it made it through the process, but both were proud of the end result.
 
“It was what I would consider the best compromise I’ve seen in my seven years in the Legislature,” said Brown. “Not everybody walked away loving what the bill did, but everybody walked away knowing that what we did was good policy for the state.”
 
Rep. Ryan Berger, R-Evanston, is a freshman lawmaker on the committee and a high school special education teacher in his community. He recognized school choice as a major issue that will continue to get attention in Wyoming, and he applauded House Speaker Albert Sommers, R-Pinedale; Rep. Jared Olsen, R-Cheyenne; and Brown for their work on the legislation.
 
However, he didn’t vote in support of SF 174 on third reading. He said he wants to wait to see how the charter schools that were already approved run and whether it’s time to invest more money into them.
 
“That’s just something I didn’t feel we need in our community,” he said.
 
Berger was among the majority who were excited by the decisions made when it came to the supplemental budget. He was proud of the Legislature for approving the full external cost adjustment for education that totaled nearly $70 million, and backed by those who said it would support school districts, especially smaller districts feeling the pinch of inflation.
 
Northrup noted it was not a recurring ECA, but he believes it will help with the litigation.
 
“That ECA — I think that is probably something that’s going to have one of the biggest impacts on education this year,” added Rep. Karlee Provenza, D-Laramie, another first-time Education Committee member. “Just given that our teachers are feeling underappreciated, underpaid, stressed, all of the things, and we didn’t do our due diligence last year in making sure that we took care of them when we did the budget process.”
 
She said the initial increase may not be enough, but it is a positive step toward helping them and providing benefits to students.
 
“A lot of people are struggling, and anything that we can do to kind of take that off their plate is beneficial for the state of Wyoming,” she said.
 
Lawmakers also reflected on the $1.4 billion placed into savings during the session, which some argued has a connection to education.There is more money available to handle future economic downfalls like the one that the state experienced five or six years ago.
 
“It has set up our education to not only be funded correctly right now, but has really set us up to be funded in the future with the dump into savings of $600 million just this general session alone,” Brown said. “It has clearly stepped us up, and it has allowed us to make sure that our K-12 system is going to be bolstered.”
 
While members of the Education Committee shared many points of pride during the session, there were still criticisms to be had.
 
Rep. Ocean Andrew, R-Laramie, said he considered this session to be disappointing, and that they “did very little more than maintain the status quo.”
 

 
“Wyoming’s education system is rated as one of the best in the country in terms of federal standardized testing.This is, to some extent, good, but measuring ourselves in comparison to other inadequate and outdated systems lacks context,” he said in a statement. “What a good NAEP score does more than anything else is cause laziness and loss of appetite for innovation and improvement.”
 
He was frustrated that both the bills that would have created the Wyoming Freedom Scholarship for charter schools were not passed and said they would have given parents the funding and ability “to shop the marketplace of education for the option that would have been most beneficial for their child.”
 
“Many bills were nothing but a cry that our current funding model is broken,” he said, adding he was content with the passage of the “School finance-career technical education grants” bill.
 
“For example, HB 33 essentially bribes schools to actually spend money on career and technical education. CTE is something that there is a strong appetite for, and that we give schools money for, but they use it for other things. From the beginning, I saw this bill as a way to experiment with putting controls on school funding so that it’s actually used for what voters want and not wasted. I hope the implementation will provide useful insight.”
 
Other lawmakers were unhappy with infringement upon local jurisdiction or failing to provide an external cost adjustment for community colleges.
 
Northrup said it sent a message that the state didn’t care about how community colleges were struggling, compared to the hundreds of millions in funds sent to the University of Wyoming. He said they are “lucky to pick up the table scraps that are leftovers,” despite funneling students into nursing, welding, mechanics and other CTE specialties.
 
Fellow Laramie lawmaker Provenza was disheartened by the passage of SF 133, which excludes transgender girls from competing in high school sports in public schools. She said it had “no business” making it to the end.
 
“What will come of Senate File 133 will be a lot of money spent on litigation that our taxpayers are already paying for. And it has already caused harm in terms of the mental health of our youth,” she said. “I don’t think that it’s solving a problem, because I don’t think we have a problem to begin with.”
 
Even among the disagreements, there was still belief by members of the Education Committee that steps were made in the right direction. These could be found in the millions spent in the supplemental budget or smaller bills pushed through the Legislature.
 
Andrew said he was excited to see group homeschooling legalized in House Bill 70, and that it has practical significance for hundreds of Wyoming families. Another success was bills such as Senate File 84, allowing parents to request an excused absence for their children.
 
Berger spoke to the overall progress made by lawmakers and said he was amazed by the focus on education in the Wyoming Capitol.
“Whether we vote ‘yes’ for education or ‘no,’ there was not one person in the House ... that did not support education,” he said. “And the general effect is, those legislators really, really want to invest in our young people and the people of our state.”
And there is still much work to be done.
 
“Particularly regarding preschool and early child childcare and early development,” said Provenza. “We had conversations about homeschooling, or just ... trying to deregulate da-ycare — and I think that’s not the route we want to go. I think we need to look toward how we create opportunities for families so that they can utilize day-care and preschool and not break the bank.”
 
Northrup said some of those issues will be addressed, and he is looking forward to the interim session. He said there are many new members of the Joint Education Committee, and time will have to be spent on “educating the Education Committee on education.”
 
“Then, we’ll see if we can come up with a bill or two to help support either early childhood education, mental health or our number three priority in the interim, which is education savings accounts,” he said.
 
This story was published on April 1, 2023.
 

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