Chapter 50: Wyoming

The Wyoming Constitution, Article 7, Section 1 delegates to the Wyoming Legislature the task of delineating and financing the state’s education system:

For its first century of statehood, beginning in 1890, local property taxes provided the majority of funding for Wyoming’s K-12 school districts. Problems with this approach developed, though, beginning with the onset of World War II. From the 1940s onward, sustained high national demand for Wyoming coal and other in-place minerals created large disparities in per-pupil local property tax revenue across Wyoming school districts.

The current system of school finance stems from a series of four legal challenges started in 1971. The initial effort² focused on a state constitutional provision (Article 1, Section 28) requiring that “all taxation shall be equal and uniform.” In response, the Wyoming Supreme Court directed the legislature to provide each Wyoming school district with an equal per-pupil share of local property tax revenue derived from county-level ad valorem taxes.