In Wyoming, the State’s legislature passed and the governor signed legislation to create school choice for the State’s parents and children.

Wyoming lawmakers created the state’s first K-12 education savings account (ESA) program in 2024, effective in the coming school year. This spring they expanded eligibility to families of any income. The $7,000 accounts can be used for private-school tuition, tutors, homeschooling, or other education expenses. Nearly 4,000 students applied for them this fall.

In the first year, those 4,000 students amount to about 3.5% of the State’s K-12 population (some arithmetic involved), a pretty rapid start to the take-up. The main teachers union in the State, the Wyoming Education Association, is busily objecting and hailing the State into court to get that legislation overturned. The union is claiming that the State’s constitution requires the Legislature to maintain a “complete and uniform” public school system, the State cannot fund “private education that is not uniform.”

This is a distortion of the facts, including of what the State’s constitution says. This is that constitution’s Art 7, Sect 1, in its entirety:

Legislature to provide for public schools. The legislature shall provide for the establishment and maintenance of a complete and uniform system of public instruction, embracing free elementary schools of every needed kind and grade, a university with such technical and professional departments as the public good may require and the means of the state allow, and such other institutions as may be necessary.

That’s the short and sweet of it. There’s nothing in there that would preclude the State from establishing, supporting, or merely funding alternative means of education. Indeed, that last clause, and such other institutions as may be necessary, being separate from the clause mandating a system of public instruction, explicitly authorizes alternative means of education structured entirely differently from, or the same as, the public system.

This is just another example of a teachers union trying to deny parents their right to see to their children’s education in their own way. It’s the union way or nothing. That’s just union abuse of education and of the students in it out of its own greed: those alternative means would not be controlled by the union.

The Wyoming constitution can be read here.