Christmas and the holiday season are upon us, lighting an otherwise dreary time of year with holiday cheer.

But the Grinch is waiting in the wings, and he’s likely to show up in the Wyoming Legislature a week or so after the new year as state lawmakers grapple with serious shortfalls in education funding. 

Gov. Matt Mead submitted his state budget to the Legislature Nov. 30. While the state’s overall financial picture looks more stable than it did a year ago, that’s not the case for K-12 education, he said. 

Last year, K-12 education in Wyoming was largely insulated from the large budget cuts experienced by the University of Wyoming, community college districts and other state government agencies and services. That’s because Wyoming guarantees school districts a set amount of funding through a funding formula that is recalibrated every five years. The formula for funding education in recent years was hammered out by the Legislature in 2011. 

But things are about to change. The Joint Education Interim Committee has been working all year to recalibrate education funding in the state, taking into account some very different financial realities than the ones that were present during the last recalibration. 

“The looming challenge is not the general funding; it is education,” Mead said in his budget message to the Legislature. “Just as we approached the general fund standard budget — inefficiencies, reducing funding and supplementing with savings — we need to address K-12. I have asked the Legislature to work on this issue, and it is time to make it a priority. The projected shortfalls in the school foundation budget are large and call for action now.”

In decades past, K-12 school facilities and most K-12 education funding in Wyoming were paid for by taxing property within each district. But, beginning in the 1990s, that changed as the result of years-long litigation that resulted in a Wyoming Supreme Court ruling that the state is responsible for ensuring equitable funding for all school districts and their students. 

Local property taxes that formerly paid those bills are now supplemented to provide equitable operational funding through the School Foundation Program Account. In addition, the Legislature earmarked coal bonus leasing money to pay for school construction.

The School Foundation Program Account is nearly empty now. 

“The shortfall in the School Foundation Program Account has been estimated at $1.5 billion over the next six years,” Mead said in his budget letter. “We have transferred $567.9 million from the Permanent Land Fund Holding Account into the SFP — taking this account to zero.”

Mead said more than $2.3 billion of coal lease bonus revenue was appropriated for school capital construction over the past decade. The state expects to receive the final $121.3 million in coal lease bonus payments during the coming biennium, then that money is gone. 

Consequently, this year the Legislature is faced with meeting its education funding obligations with dwindling resources, both for educating students and for capital construction. 

One of the ways under discussion to deal with the education shortfall is increasing classroom size. Each teacher would be responsible for teaching more students, thereby reducing the number of teachers needed in each district. 

Wyoming students and teachers have benefited for years from low student-to-teacher ratios. Since 2012, the Wyoming education funding formula has specified a ratio of 16 students per teacher for kindergarten through third grade. 

Locally, the benefits of that low student-to-teacher ratio have been highlighted through federal awards and recognition given to all three elementary schools in Powell in recent years. 

While it would be difficult to move to larger class sizes, financial realities will likely make that a necessity. But we can take comfort in the fact that Park County School District No. 1 has a strong tradition of providing quality education for its students, and that won’t change. 

Financially, the coming months and years could be difficult for education in Wyoming. We believe lawmakers are doing their best to minimize the impacts of coming budget cuts. But we as state and local residents need to work and communicate with legislators to ensure that cuts to K-12 education are made in strategic ways that will allow schools and communities to continue to support quality education for Wyoming students.