Natrona County School District asks state to go back to block grant funding model
GILLETTE — Wyoming lawmakers are trying to work out some of the kinks in the state’s new funding model for public education, which changed from block grants to a silo funding model.
And one of the largest school districts in the state wants Wyoming to go back the block grants, claiming the silo has created a long list of problems.
During a meeting of the Select Committee on School Finance Recalibration Tuesday, an official with the Natrona County School District told legislators the district will not hire more educators, despite receiving state funding to do so.
Matt Flett, the Chief Financial Officer for the district, described that as the state moved to fund school districts based on average daily membership, the district’s declining enrollment and instructional silo restrictions have forced the NCSD to operate at a loss of $3 million a year.
His district was forced to reduce its number of full-time employees by 53 — some of whom retired after two schools in the district closed their doors — to recuperate the loss.
On top of the tricky position the state puts the district in — either use the money or lose it, per the mandate of the silo — the state’s most recent regional cost assessment makes NCSD’s salary offer uncompetitive to the biggest school districts in Wyoming, including Campbell County.
He and NCSD Superintendent Angela Hensley want the block grant school funding model back, he said.
Sen. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, said the NCSD was meant to hire more teachers under the silo. He wasn’t sure how Flett’s math worked after the state projected and budgeted for the district to hire more teachers according to the model.
“I simply go back to the math in a failure to understand, candidly, why you didn’t hire 50 teachers instead of get rid of 50 teachers,” Rothfuss said. “I don’t have the exact numbers, but my expectation is that you’re in the ballpark of probably 50 to 100 teachers short of what I would expect you to have based on the instructional silo.”
Flett responded that there practically aren’t 50 new teachers out there.
“I didn’t hear you say that you struggled to hire more teachers,” Rothfuss said. “I heard you say that because of SF81, you had to let 53 teachers go. That’s what the press is going to pick up and that’s what we’ve been hearing. It just doesn’t math out to me.”
Flett was insistent that, without staffing cuts, the district would not be able to meet its budget. If it had not restricted teacher hiring, the district would create an unsustainable $9 million increase to its general fund budget.
Rothfuss later continued to question how NCSD was battling against the silo. If state money is designated to be spent on teacher salaries and not anywhere else, what else could the district do with the money?
“You literally can’t spend the money on anything else. So I don’t know why you’re making a trade-off,” Rothfuss said. “I just am really struggling to see the advantage of not following the law when there’s a lot of money that is going to be left on the table in that reserve account and you choose to let go of 50 teachers.”
Flett told Rothfuss and Sen. Tim Salazar, R-Riverton, that the district needs a slow approach to responsibly implementing the silo as it confronts a declining ADM and possibly diminishing revenues on the horizon.
“We are not going to hire 50 more teachers just because a mathematical equation told us to,” Flett said. “Will we get to a day where we hire 50 teachers? Maybe. But it’s not going to be hiring 50 new teachers in the spring before the July 1 effective date of the biggest change in school funding in 20 years in this state. That to me, is reckless. We just want to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars.”
Legislators bite back
Some legislators became argumentative after Flett’s testimony, pointing to how school districts had previously used money the state thought allocated for teacher salaries for other projects.
House Speaker Rep. Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, called the discussion “revelatory.”
He said it was interesting to see that after the state was called out for underfunding teachers, NCSD came back to say that it won’t spend the money it was granted to pay more teachers.
“Evidently, we are offering more money for more teachers than what is really necessary based on this district’s discussion,” Neiman said.
Sen. Troy McKeown, R-Gillette, also chimed in to claim that NCSD’s was made up of 56% administrators and 44% teachers, and he questioned how much money to schools was dedicated to not teaching students.
Flett said he wasn’t sure about the ratio, but imagined it was much lower than what McKeown alleged.
An explanation
Before fielding questions from legislators, Flett explained that before the state told the NCSD how much it should pay teachers, the district had already been paying teachers that threshold.
Now, it feels a strain coming down from the state. His district needs the flexibility of the block grant back, he said.
“It’s hard to ride for the brand after getting punched in the face,” Flett said. “We are very optimistic on where Senate File 81 may end up and we definitely want to be part of the discussion to help make changes that would make it a little better for Natrona County.”
The restricted budget flexibility harms his district even more as his district calculated a 400-student loss in average daily membership for FY26, but instead it found a drop of 600 students with fewer than three months to prepare for the future loss in school funding.
Much of school funding is based on average daily membership. Flett and district officials feel it is now too risky to hire the state recommended amount of teachers at risk of next year’s funding falling.
Flett told the committee that the state’s regional cost adjustment handicapped NCSD’s salary offering to between $3,400 to $4,100 less than the three other largest school districts it competes for talent against, including school districts in Campbell, Laramie and Sweetwater counties.
NCSD’s starting teacher salary is $56,600 CCSD‘s starting teacher salary is $62,500 as of this current fiscal year.
The previous three fiscal years allowed the district to offer the highest average teacher salary of the big four districts. Recalibration made it so NCSD’s salary offer went from highest of the four to lowest “with the stroke of a pen,” Flett said.
Flett told trustees that he and his district tried to request information from state consultant Picus Odden & Associates, which has played a pivotal role in helping lawmakers propose a state school budget, to explain the new unfavorable RCA to NCSD employees.
Flett questioned where lawmakers and its consultants get cost of living data.
Under the Wyoming Cost of Living Index, Flett explained, economists only examine the cost of rent and other seemingly miscellaneous items such as a VCR and a 12-pack of 12-ounce Coors beer.
“We’re just going to call our liquor stores and tell them to report to (Wyoming Administration & Information) that Coors are $40 a case to boost up our WCLI,” Flett begrudgingly joked.
The state’s bill granted the district $750,000 in new revenue — which NCSD was able to stretch to $1 million total revenue with federal grants — but it also dictated the district spend about $4 million on new teacher salaries, leading to a funding difference of $3 million for the district.
To make up for the money lost, the district had to separate from 53 full-time employees, Flett said. That number includes retirements from two NCSD schools which closed this year: Bar Nunn Elementary and the Woods Learning Center.
Not refilling those 53 positions helped the district recoup $4.5 million.
While fitting current teacher salaries into the current model, Flett said, the district now experiences wage compression where teachers who could be promoted to assistant principals or principals, make too comparable a salary to make the promotion enticing.
“Teachers are becoming uninterested in becoming assistant principals because their annual salary is closely aligned to our assistant principal salary schedule,” Flett said. “Because of the instructional silo, it is hard to recruit teaching staff into admin roles.”
Committee will get a shake up
More than half of the 12-person committee will be leaving the legislature by the start of the next session.
Of the committee members who were up for election, all but one representative, Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, lost their seats.
All representatives in the committee who lost in the election are members of or aligned with the Freedom Caucus, including Neiman, Heiner, Reps. John Bear, R-Gillette, Tom Kelly, R-Sheridan and Ocean Andrew, R-Laramie.
Many of the lawmakers listed have also been some of the most vocal defenders of the controversial instructional silo.
Sen. Bo Biteman, R-Ranchester, alleged that the NCSD was hoping for the block grant model to return after the primary election booted half of the committee out of the legislature. Biteman will be out in January after falling short in the race for Secretary of State.
The rest of the two-day meeting that started Tuesday morning discussed updated proposals to school nutrition, School Resource Officers, technology and school activities.
Yin told the committee he would be working with other officials in Cheyenne to draft a proposed bill to help remedy much of the school activities funding turmoil since recalibration like the rest of the interim.
The recalibration committee agreed to progress draft bills to present next session during its meeting on Oct. 21 and 22 in Casper.
This story was published on August 28, 2026.
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