As the 2025 Legislative Session comes to a close, we at WEA want to thank all of you – our engaged members, educators, parents, students and advocates – who shared your voice throughout this session. Thanks to your sustained efforts, WEA helped defeat a wide variety of anti-public education legislation.
Unsurprisingly, the fight is far from over – and the last thing that public education needs is to lose engagement from its supporters. That’s why WEA will be working hard in the coming months to sustain and grow our engaged members and education advocates, including efforts around the recalibration process and the Joint Education Committee meeting on May 28-29 in Casper.
During the interim, that committee will discuss topics that will result in bills for the 2026 session – including student mental health, CTE, charter schools, and student discipline. We’ll have more information about these and other topics in the coming weeks.
But back to the final week of the current session, which featured successes and setbacks for education. The Governor unfortunately signed the voucher bill, and he let the “repeal gun-free zones” bill pass without a signature. However, the Governor also vetoed a number of detrimental education-related bills, including SF103 – Terminating and Defunding DEI as well as a bill that would have removed the cap for charter schools authorized through the new state charter school authorizing board.
The impact of property tax relief from this session will have substantial consequences for education funding at the local level, mandating that the state pick up the tab from what locals have lost with that revenue. Given the highly favorable court ruling in the WEA’s school funding case, the cost of education is set to increase while our revenues are down, due in large part to that property tax relief. While education funding has a backstop in our rainy-day account (the LSRA), those resources are finite. If the state or the nation were to experience a significant economic downturn, this would have severe and immediate consequences for education funding.
So, though we may feel battered and bruised, we can still celebrate the victories public education had during the past eight weeks. You absolutely should take a rest, recover, strengthen your resolve, and prepare to venture into the fray again. In the coming months, we will need all of our voices to ensure we strengthen and protect Wyoming’s students, education professionals, communities, and public education.
