School board approves annual budget amid state uncertainty, federal chaos
The budget had to absorb up to $1 million in uncertainty following Trump’s abrupt pause on some grants. Despite that, the district is still bumping salaries and funding free breakfast and lunch.
The Albany County School Board approved a $94 million budget for the current fiscal year, granting teachers raises and a one-time bonus, fully funding a school resource officer program, and providing free breakfast and lunch to all students throughout the district.
The benefits of the new budget come alongside significant uncertainty as long-standing debates about the future of public education funding play out in Wyoming and as the Trump administration in Washington, D.C. enacts its vision for federal education grants.
Albany County Schools CFO Trystin Green provided a run-down of the FY25-26 budget during a work session July 9 and a follow-up regular meeting July 16. At the latter meeting, school board trustees voted unanimously to approve what Green called a “very robust” budget.
“This budget is an ambitious budget, and accomplishes many things,” she said during the regular meeting. “It provides a $4,000 raise to certified and professional staff, a $3 an hour raise to classified staff, as well as covers the entire health insurance increase so nothing was passed on to the staff member. It allocates money for expanded learning, and that provides more opportunities for students as well as helping with some extra planning time for staff.”
The pay bumps this year come on top of last year’s raises. Both are part of a concerted effort to make teacher and other employee salaries more competitive.
Green said the new budget also allocates funding for out-of-state travel for professional development, sets aside $175,000 for a school resource officer program through the Laramie Police Department, and a $1,200 one-time bonus for all benefited staff.
“And then finally — I don’t want to say it’s one of the most important things, but it’s another huge thing, just like the staff raises are — is that we’re going to be able to provide a free breakfast meal and a free lunch meal to every student in our schools in the district, for every school day that they attend and that we are open.”
The budget notes $1.5 million for the demolition of Old Slade, which has been approved by the state and is scheduled to happen in the coming months. The demolition could make space, literally, for affordable workforce housing.
The budget also sets aside more than $5 million for major maintenance projects, including roof, playground and tack and field replacements at schools across the district.
Because of recent property tax cuts, local and county revenue sources are projected to be lower than they were in the previous fiscal year. However, because of the state’s commitment to backfill those losses, state-level revenues are projected to rise, covering the loss from local and county sources.
Over the past few years, the school board and its district staff have worked to right-size the budget. Sometimes this has meant eliminating positions. Sometimes this has meant closing a school. But Superintendent John Goldhardt said Albany County schools are finally seeing the benefits of those “difficult times.”
“You have had to make some tough decisions the past two years with the size of our district, enrollment, buildings,” he said. “And those tough positions and decisions have allowed you to now have the funds to do this type of thing.”
Trustee Nate Martin agreed the district had done “a lot of belt-tightening.”
“But I think the most impactful thing was the ECA [External Cost Adjustment] that we got from the legislature,” Martin said. “And we got the ECA from the legislature because we sued the legislature, and the people leading that lawsuit are the Wyoming Education Association.”
Martin advocated supporting the WEA.
“If you’re not part of your local education association, [with] the material benefits that you were gaining, you’re kind of getting a free ride,” he said. “So I would just encourage anybody who’s listening to sign up to get involved, because that’s how we actually win the resources that we need to educate our communities.”
While CFO Green touted the significant gains in the upcoming year’s budget, she also took time, especially during the board’s earlier work session, to highlight the difficulty of crafting that budget — and the uncertainty that will plague the crafting of future such documents.
At the state level, Wyoming is reexamining its school funding model. Recent court rulings, legislative action and competing visions for the future of public education will play into that recalibration process over the next year.
At the federal level, as the Trump administration begins to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, its last-minute pause on some crucial federal grants left school districts across the state trying to plan for payments that might or might not be coming. As of this story’s publication, it appeared those grants, or most of them, would be unfrozen and released.
Yet on both the state and federal fronts, local school leaders doubt that their elected representatives will stand up for their interests.
Federal chaos hits Wyoming
Nationwide, Trump’s education department announced it was withholding $6 billion in funding for schools while it “reviewed” those previously appropriated funds to ensure they aligned with the president’s vision.
The announcement came just one day before the funding was set to be disbursed and just two weeks before the Albany County School Board was scheduled to pass its budget for the upcoming year.
The chaos handed down from D.C. meant that, as late as July 9, CFO Trystin Green didn’t have a workable budget document she felt she could share with the trustees.
“My wonderful, ‘Hey, I’m ahead of the game’ crashed and burned over the course of the week,” she said during the board’s work session earlier this month. “We’ve had to do a lot of reworking of the budget because we don’t have a solid promise of federal funding for our Title II, III and IV grants. And so I’ve just gone back to the drawing board and feel like I kind of had to restart the budget from scratch.”
Green emailed a draft of the revised budget to trustees just before the work session. A public version of the budget was made available with the board’s materials for the followup regular meeting last week.
According to WyoFile, the $6 billion withheld federally translated to about $24.5 million withheld in Wyoming, including almost $11 million for professional development for teachers and more than $13 million between student support, academic enrichment and after-school program grants.
What the federal pause could mean for Albany County schools
Locally, the district stood to lose up to $600,000 in Title II funds, which support teacher salaries, plus about $20,000 for multilingual learner support in Title III funds, and about $125,000 for school safety and enrichment programs in Title IV funds.
“You’re at about $750,000 for those three grants,” Green told the board. “And then a couple allocations came in a little bit less. So overall, we had to absorb about $1 million in federal funds in this budget.”
Green said at the time it was not entirely “doom and gloom” because the funds had not been canceled but had instead been paused.
“But we are taking this stance and preparing for the doom and gloom,” Green said. “Later on, [if] we still receive some of those funds, we can then take the funds that we absorbed in the general fund and push them back to federal funds … So I’m still hoping that — because it’s not a definite ‘no’ as of now — that this is just temporary.”
Even though it’s hoping to receive the paused payments eventually, the district still had to rework its budget to absorb the shortfall as if it were a certainty.
Because the pause was so last minute, Green said ACSD No. 1 is already locked into paying a lot of what that money would normally cover. It’s too late to back out of established software upgrade contracts, for example, and it’s too late in the season to let teachers or other staff go with a new school year just around the corner.
“We had no choice but to absorb it all,” Green told the board. “So that’s kind of what we’re up against when you’re dealing with salaries and benefits.”
If the pause caused a $1 million shortfall, but the district reasonably believed it would eventually get that money anyway, why not pass a budget with a $1 million deficit?
Green said she didn’t want to publish a public document showing such a deficit because it would be difficult to communicate with the public that what they’re seeing on paper isn’t what they think they’re seeing.
“I didn’t want us as a district to receive any scrutiny by what a number implied on a piece of paper for those that didn’t pay attention or didn’t read the narrative,” she said.
Superintendent John Goldhardt said there was another good reason not to go that route.
“I’m philosophically, adamantly against a deficit budget,” he said. “It just doesn’t settle well with me.”
So how did the district plan to cut a potential $1 million from its budget? The short answer is by being prepared to delay technology upgrades and by leaning on some higher than expected revenues that could have been used elsewhere.
The longer answer is that the district’s work in recent years to sort out its budget and establish special reserves to get ahead of problems like technology degradation could shield it from some of the more disastrous effects of a last-minute $1 million shortfall.
“The one thing that we did have to come off of in the budget is that technology equipment, that line item that was … for your staff computers and your student computers,” Green told the board. “The reason why we took that down to zero is because you have a special reserve fund that, at the end of this year, will be $1.5 million that has been allocated to technology. So that was the easiest thing to remove at first glance that helped us accomplish our goal, that we can [do] that really won’t cause any harm to students or to technology replacement cycles or anything like that.”
In the days since the Albany County School Board passed its budget, the Trump administration has signaled it will unfreeze at least some of the paused $6 billion. Officials say there are “guardrails” in place to make sure the funding aligns with presidential priorities, such as combating DEI, but there is no publicly available information about what those “guardrails” look like.
Trump’s education department could still cut some of those Title II, III and IV grants.
If that happens, cutting special reserves by $1 million will only work as a solution for the upcoming year — “a year to sort through any federal crisis,” according to Green.
Going forward with less federal funding would send the district back to the drawing board. The trustees and their staff would have to figure out how to cover those costs going forward, because they won’t have a fresh pool of special reserves in perpetuity.
“I don’t believe that it’s going to be a final ‘No’ and we’re going to receive absolutely zero funding,” Green reiterated. “I’m hopeful that we’re going to get some. So then once we get that final ‘No’ or ‘Yes’ or partial ‘Yes,’ then we will know how to prepare for next year, for what is going to have to stay within the budget, or what are some things that we can give up … We’ve got to ride it out just a little bit before we can get to our serious talks of what we’re going to do.”
A ‘spineless’ congress, a ‘disappointing’ superintendent
The situation is incredibly frustrating for those putting together the local budget. Superintendent Goldhardt said Wyoming schools have been abandoned by their state and federal representatives.
“I just have a hard time when the United States Congress establishes funds to be used, and then the executive office decides they can’t, aren’t going to use them, and that particular branch of government, on the legislative side, is quite frankly being spineless [by] not saying, ‘We allocated this money for this. It has to be used,’” Goldhardt said. “But if this continues and [the grants] are going away, things will have to go away, because we can’t cover it all with general funds.”
Wyoming’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, like Wyoming’s delegation to Congress, left schools out to dry, Goldhardt said.
In a written statement to WyoFile, Degenfelder responded to concerns about the $24.5 million of education funding Wyoming schools could lose because of Trump’s last-minute pause.
“We are constantly in contact with our partners at the federal level, and while we do not yet know the details of this review of funds, President Trump’s education priorities are Wyoming’s priorities, and I continue to support his leadership,” she wrote.
Wyoming schools, Goldhardt said, don’t feel very supported.
“I think what I’m most disappointed about is reading in the newspaper when our state superintendent of instruction, who should be defending the students of the state of Wyoming and fighting for them, simply said, ‘Sure, I support it all,’” Goldhardt said. “And it’s hurting students, vulnerable students. That’s the hard part.”
Uncertainty surrounds state recalibration process
Federal uncertainty is not the only thing hindering the district’s ability to forecast its future. At the state level, lawmakers, consultants, interest groups and other stakeholders are digging into the fabric of Wyoming’s school financing.
Every five years, the state is required to take on “recalibration” — the process of reexamining the way the Equality State allocates money to its public schools.
Budget discussions frequently involve debates about priorities, and there’s no shortage of opinion in Wyoming about what schools are for, who they should serve and how they ought to be funded.
This year, there’s an added complication.
In 2022, the Wyoming Education Association sued the state of Wyoming over its insufficient public ed funding. The association won that lawsuit in February, with a ruling out of Laramie County District Court declaring the state had chronically underfunded its schools and failed in its constitutional duty to provide a proper education for all students.
Now, as the recalibrators begin their work, they must factor in a legal ruling that specifically orders them to better support public schools by accounting for inflation when it comes to teachers’ salaries and by providing more money for mental health counselors, student laptops, meals for students and the replacement of aging school facilities, among other priorities.
The state is appealing the decision to the Wyoming Supreme Court but while it does, the lower court ruling is influencing the work of recalibration.
A private consulting firm has been tasked with gathering stakeholder input and crafting a funding model that follows the applicable laws and court orders. The firm will produce a draft plan by October, to be reviewed by the Select Committee on School Finance Recalibration at its meeting that month.
The draft will likely be amended and altered by that committee, then amended and altered again during the 2026 Budget Session next winter. Ultimately, decisions about school financing will be made by elected officials.
“I don’t think we’re going to have as big of wins as what some think,” Green told the Albany County School Board. “I think there’s going to be some losses in there, to where we might have a little bit of a gain, but not too much of a gain — where others think we’re going to have a huge gain.”
The recalibration committee includes several high-ranking members of Wyoming’s hardline Freedom Caucus — including former Caucus Chair Rep. John Bear (HD-31), Speaker of the House Rep. Chip Neiman (HD-1) and Albany County’s own Rep. Ocean Andrew (HD-46).
During the most recent session, the caucus spearheaded several pieces of legislation affecting public education and schools. That included a major expansion of the state’s $50 million school voucher program that opponents, including the Wyoming Education Association, see as a threat to the future financial viability of public schools.
Albany County School Board Trustee Nate Martin said he doesn’t have high hopes for the results of recalibration given “the sustained attack on public education.”
“I feel like the recalibration committee is going to put forward something awful,” he said. “And we’re just gonna have to hope that it gets killed.”
Amazing coverage of the issues on funding education that simply are not being discussed by media elsewhere in the state - especially the complicity of elected officials.