Wyoming Supreme Court jumpstarts education choice funding

Wyoming families scored a major victory May 14 when the state’s highest court unanimously lifted the injunction against the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act.

This means that the Department of Education can begin to award families up to $7,000 per student per year for private school, homeschooling, tutoring and other enrichment activities. It does not mean the lawsuit against the scholarships is over, only that the injunction is lifted and families and students will be funded while the legal issues are being decided.

The two main issues in the case revolved around the constitutionality of the funding model and whether the plaintiffs would be irreparably and personally harmed.

First, the Wyoming Supreme Court found that Act did not violate the state constitution’s provisions in Article 3, Section 36, which forbids the state from granting funds to individuals, corporations or communities that are not “under absolute control of the state.” The reason is simple—while money eventually flows to families, it first flows into an account under direct control of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

In the second financial matter, the court found that it did not have to apply “strict scrutiny,” the most rigorous type of judicial review, to this case like it would in school funding cases, because it wasn’t in fact a school funding case. The scholarships are funded through the general fund and do not impact public school finances. The ruling said, “…there is no possible injury to Plaintiffs simply because the legislature could have spent this money on public schools—the same could be said of any legislative appropriation that does not go toward public education.”

In the second matter, the court found that the plaintiffs could not prove that they would be directly impacted by the law nor that it couldn’t be remedied. As the justices reasoned, since the plaintiffs did not plan to remove their children from public school, they would never face the alleged discrimination they feared from certain private schools. The court also found that not being able to retrieve money distributed to private schools if the law was found unconstitutional didn’t infringe on plaintiffs’ rights, as they would be enrolled in public school.

Because of all of these issues, the court found that the district court abused its authority by putting an injunction on the funding of the Act, which passed in 2024, and lifted the funding ban.

This ruling builds on the recent education choice victory in the Idaho Supreme Court, which unanimously found its state’s parental tax credit legal for very similar reasons. Thousands of parents signed up for the scholarships prior to the Wyoming Education Association cruelly suing to block them in June of 2025, just before the beginning of the next school year.

Parents and students should be hopeful that the court’s reasoning bodes well for the constitutionality of the case overall. Given recent results showing Wyoming students struggling compared to students in other states to regain math and reading skills lost during the pandemic, this decision should give parents hope that they can choose the course of learning most suited to their children and with the best chance of academic achievement.

Education choice in Wyoming and throughout the United States has the potential to usher in an era of learning focused on student success, tailored to their individual needs. This decision is a great start towards that goal.