In 2024, the Wyoming Legislature created the state’s first private school voucher program, taking money from public schools and diverting it instead to private and religious institutions.
This year, with the so-called “Freedom Caucus” in charge, the program is going to expand.
The state’s current voucher program provides qualifying families with $6,000 per child in public money that they can use to send their children to private or religious school or to homeschool them.
Gov. Mark Gordon trimmed back the program that the Legislature tried to create, using his veto to limit who can qualify. He allowed only the very poorest of Wyoming’s families to participate.
Wyoming’s constitution prohibits the government from just handing out money to whomever, but it does allow for support for the poor. In his veto letter, Gordon explained that limiting the program to only the very poor made it less unconstitutional than the Legislature’s initial version.
Now that the Freedom Caucus controls a majority of the Wyoming Legislature, however, lawmakers are looking to dramatically expand the state’s voucher program in 2025.
Freedom Caucus leaders have already taken their first step, removing from the Legislature’s education committee any lawmakers who oppose privatizing our state K-12 school system. These veteran lawmakers and educators will be replaced with inexperienced newcomers who will rubber-stamp the Freedom Caucus’ agenda.
Rep. Ocean Andrew (R-Jelm), a public school opponent who scored of 11 out of 100 on the Wyoming Education Association's legislature report card, will be the chair of the House Education Committee.
The program passed last year already cost the state $20 million, and we can fully expect the Legislature to expand the program—and the cost—in 2025.
The only questions will be whether Gordon continues to exercise his veto privilege to rein in the voucher program, whether the Legislature has enough votes to override his veto, and whether such blatantly unconstitutional policy will survive a challenge in court.
National agenda supports wealthy families
The push for private school vouchers does not come from Wyoming families or communities. Our public schools regularly rank among the nation’s best and they enjoy broad public support.
Recently, Wyoming scored highest in the nation on ACT tests among states that require all students to take them.
Since implementing its costly voucher program, Arizona has cut public education funding across the board—including teacher pay, school construction, and buses.
Instead, the push for vouchers is part of a national campaign to replace public education with a private system.
The Wyoming Freedom Caucus is part of the national State Freedom Caucus Network, a Washington, D.C.-based group that pushes far-right policies in legislatures across the nation, including school privatization.
Wyoming is following 33 other states that have private voucher programs, including 12 “universal” programs that do not set any income limits on who can qualify.
These states include Arizona, which made its voucher system universal in 2022.
Since implementing its costly voucher program, Arizona has cut public education funding across the board—including teacher pay, school construction, and buses.
Arizona parents have quickly learned to game the system. Even though vouchers are supposed to make private school accessible to students who cannot otherwise afford it, it turns out that 80 percent of vouchers in Arizona go to families whose children already attend private school.
Even worse, these families tend to sock away the voucher money—more than $350 million in voucher funds have been allocated but not spent—in order to send their children to expensive private universities after they graduate high school.
Rural conservative voters defeat vouchers
Vouchers are a bad fit for Wyoming for several reasons, but particularly because they mostly benefit students in urban areas who have access to private schools where they can use them.
Since the state is almost entirely rural, very few Wyoming families will benefit from private school vouchers, but the entire state will be stuck paying for them.
It makes sense that rural voters have led recent defeats to the voucher agenda in other conservative states.
Very few Wyoming families will benefit from private school vouchers, but the entire state will be stuck paying for them.
In Kentucky, roughly two-thirds of voters backed Donald Trump in the recent presidential election, but roughly the same percentage voted against a constitutional amendment to allow public money to be spent on private schools.
In Nebraska, voters repealed a portion of the voucher law their Legislature had passed, barring public funds from going to private schools.
Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers from rural Tennessee continue to fight against vouchers in their state.
Whether vouchers will come before voters in Wyoming or whether they can be stymied in the courts remains to be seen. But they will certainly be a focus of the new Freedom Caucus leaders taking the reins at the capitol next month.