Campbell County is now considering a bringing a lawsuit against the state if budget cuts related to education prevents the county’s school district from providing a quality education to its students.
“We’ve tried to keep as many of the cuts as far away from students as we can,” Boyd Brown, superintendent of Campbell County School District (CCSD) said. “We’ve gone through a prioritization process with our administrators going back to the schools, talking to the staff in the school, bringing things forward.”
Brown said the school will end up cutting around $6 million from the budget after already cutting $1.8 million last year. The school is currently working to try and keep students from being affected by the budget cuts.
“From our standpoint, it’s important to know that there’s a tension that superintendents have,” Jubal Yennie, superintendent of Albany School District #1, said. “We certainly don’t like reduced budgets but we understand, when states have reduced revenues because of the mineral extraction industry, that things happen.”
Yennie said while budget cuts are sometimes a necessity, education is a right afforded by to all Americans.
“However, education is protected by the constitution and is one of those things that we need to provide a basket of goods for all the students in Wyoming, and the equity we provide as a result of that is sensational.”
Brown is on the board for the External Cost Adjustment coalition (ECA), a group spearheaded by CCSD that lobbies legislators to help them understand the needs of Campbell County and other districts around the state.
“The purpose of [the ECA] basically is to gain research on the funding models to be able to consider whether or not we really needed to consider litigation in light of cuts that would come down from the legislature that may be unconstitutional,” Yennie said.
Brown said that the legislature hasn’t adjusted for inflation, and their models weren’t lining up with the actual models that the school uses. A couple of years ago, the coalition lobbied enough that the legislators gave them an external cost adjustment that was eventually reversed and zeroed out.
Although it’s currently just an option, litigation to obtain funding is a possibility, and the school has begun the process of setting it up in case it needs to be used.
“I asked my board and they just passed a resolution to pass litigation if we felt like we needed to, but then again we’re not saying that we will but the resolution gives us that opportunity to,” Brown said. “We’re coming through some very unsure times.”
Yennie said that the budget cuts haven’t affected ACSD#1 very much, and that the district has actually gained around 30-50 students. He said that this coupled with the move to the new high school is probably why the school hasn’t suffered much. Some school districts, however, have been hit hard by the downturn in the minerals economy and the resulting cuts.
“One of the superintendents said that if they were cut any more they weren’t sure they were going to be able to run their district,” Brown said. “The disparities about how the cuts affect districts is one of the issues. Constitutionally, the legislature needs to fund not only adequately, but equitably for all students across the state.”
