Your May 2026 letter to Green River parents opens with a glaring contradiction that is hard to ignore. You begin with claiming to “celebrate” the largest teacher salary increase in 15 years and the new “Instructional Silo” that locks those dollars strictly for classrooms and educators. In the very next breath, you complain that this same silo is a “rigid framework” that prevents you from diverting the money wherever you please.
In plain English?: the legislature finally forced you to put classroom teachers first, and your complaint is that you can no longer redirect those funds to support an already bloated non-instructional bureaucracy—administration, maintenance, custodial services, and the other overhead. That is not prioritizing teachers. That is resenting the fact that teachers can no longer be treated as a piggy bank for everything else.
Equally absurd is your treatment of declining enrollment. By your own admission, the district lost 94 students this year, automatically reducing state funding by roughly $1.2 million. Fewer students means fewer classrooms to staff, fewer buses to run, fewer meals to serve, and less square footage to clean and heat. In any rational organization that would be grounds for a smaller budget, not a demand for more money. Yet you present the enrollment drop as a crisis that somehow justifies political mobilization for additional funding. The logic is pure administrative self-interest: the bureaucracy must be preserved even as the student population shrinks.
But the closing pitch really exposes the letter for what it really is: an official school-district communication using taxpayer resources, official letterhead, the district website, and parent contact lists to advance a political agenda and steer voters toward one special-interest political scorecard right before the August 18 primary.
You instruct parents to “Research: Review the 2026 WEA Legislative Scorecard to see which legislators support public education” and then “advocate” by contacting regional legislators. That is not neutral budget information. That is directing citizens to the Wyoming Education Association—the state teachers’ union and the DC based NEA affiliate—whose scorecards systematically rate lawmakers on how well they deliver the union’s preferred funding outcomes, collective-bargaining priorities, and opposition to reforms the union dislikes.
You did not point parents to the actual bill text, the Legislative Service Office analysis, independent fiscal scorecards, or even the district’s own detailed budget documents. You pointed them exclusively to the union’s political rating tool. In an election year, with candidates already filing, that is electioneering by proxy.
Wyoming Statute § 9-13-105 is unambiguous: a public official or public employee “shall not use public funds, time, personnel, facilities or equipment for political or campaign activity” unless specifically authorized by law or properly incidental and reimbursed. Your letter was produced on district time, distributed through district channels, and signed in your official capacity as superintendent.
School-district policies across Wyoming routinely bar the use of facilities, equipment, or supplies for campaigning or political activity and require neutrality on candidates and contested issues. Directing parents to a single partisan scorecard so they will pressure (or replace) lawmakers is textbook political activity. It is not “incidental” to explaining a budget shortfall. It is the budget shortfall being weaponized to mobilize a constituency behind the union’s preferred politicians.
The selective framing is equally revealing. You complain that the state has “restricted your local School Board’s ability to make local decisions” and “locked our local reserves,” then immediately outsource the solution to the WEA scorecard. That is not a cry for local control. That is an admission that the real power center is the teachers’ union that pulls the strings of the bureaucrats who run the district. When the only “research” tool you recommend is the union’s own report card, the claim of independence collapses.
Parents and taxpayers fund this district. They are not a captive audience for WEA’s political operation. Using the official apparatus of a public school system to amplify one interest group’s electoral scorecard is unethical on its face and runs headlong into the statute that exists precisely to prevent public employees from turning government machinery into a campaign arm. If the district truly believed in transparency, it would publish the full recalibration numbers, the precise trade-offs, and multiple independent analyses—not a single union-curated ranking timed for primary season.
The proper response is simple: stop. Retract the political directive. Issue a corrected communication that sticks to the actual budget facts without the scorecard. And recognize that when a superintendent’s official letter reads like a WEA press release with a district logo slapped on top, the public is entitled to conclude that the union, not the elected board or the parents, is calling the shots. Green River students and parents deserve administrators who manage scarce resources, not political operatives who treat the parent email list as a get-out-the-vote machine for their preferred legislators.
Sign the petition today demanding State Superintendent Megan Degenfelder take immediate action to stop Wyoming schools from being used as campaign tools.