On June 27, the Wyoming Education Association (WEA), a leftwing advocacy group that represents public school bureaucrats, persuaded a judge to temporarily block the state’s new Education Savings Account (ESA) program from taking effect on July 1. The WEA is a longtime advocate against giving families choice in education, regularly lobbying lawmakers in Cheyenne to keep kids in schools that aren’t working for them. Its latest lawsuit is as predictable as it is harmful to Wyoming students and their parents.
The ESA program, created in 2024 and expanded this year to make all students eligible, provides participating families with up to $7,000 for approved educational expenses, such as tutoring services, homeschooling textbooks, private school tuition, and more. In short, the ESA program gives Wyoming students an escape hatch out of the public school system when it isn’t working for them.
This was something the WEA couldn’t stand, so they sued to shut down the program, leaving nearly 4,000 families in a lurch as the 2025-26 school year looms in August. Judge Peter Froeliche’s block on the program will remain in effect while he decides the outcome of the case.
The WEA claims to represent all stakeholders in the public school system. However, its lobbying efforts reflect the interests of two often overlapping groups—bureaucrats who benefit financially from keeping students in failing public schools and leftwing ideologues who believe governments, not parents, should primarily shape students’ moral upbringing.
Who doesn’t the WEA represent? Families.
The WEA is the state affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest union. The NEA spends tens of millions of dollars each election cycle helping to elect Democratic candidates up and down the ballot who oppose school choice. During last year’s presidential election, the NEA endorsed Kamala Harris, who once said, “When you see our kids, and I truly believe that they are our children, they are the children of our country, of our communities.”
This chilling sentiment helps explain why the WEA is so opposed to policies that undermine the public school system’s near-monopoly on K-12 education. In the WEA’s twisted understanding of education, students exist to serve the public school system, not the other way around.
The WEA claims in its lawsuit that the ESA program violates the Wyoming constitution because it “diverts public education funds to private entities with no meaningful oversight or accountability.” These are the same tired falsehoods the left has unsuccessfully advanced against school choice programs in other states. The accusations about oversight and accountability ring especially hollow to many Americans because public schools continue to receive an ever-increasing amount of funding, even as test scores decline or stagnate.Wyoming, for example, spends over $20,000 per public school pupil—higher than the national average of $17,144. Wyoming’s spending on education continues to increase each year, something the WEA always fails to point out.
Meanwhile, the latest National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) report, known as the Nation’s Report Card, finds that only 29% of eighth graders in the state are considered “proficient” in reading—a percentage that continues to decline each year. To put that figure a different way, 71% would struggle to “identify basic literary elements such as order of events, character traits and motivation, and main idea” in a fictional book.
As public schools have spent more time instructing students on the finer points of DEI, Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), and other progressive orthodoxies, they’ve devoted less time to teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, and other foundational skills. It’s no wonder that public school enrollment is declining around the country.
Let’s walk through a few of the WEA’s deceptions.
For starters, Wyoming’s ESA program takes no money—we repeat, no money—from the education budget. The 2024 and 2025 bills appropriated $50 million in funding only from the general fund, leaving the education budget untouched (roughly $1.5 billion!). The WEA conveniently leaves this fact out of their press releases.
The claim that the program lacks accountability and oversight is similarly—and obviously—false. The program places commonsense restrictions on how families can use the ESA money, ensuring it is put toward legitimate educational expenses, and empowers the state superintendent of public instruction to investigate allegations of misused funds. This is information that anyone could find through 30 seconds of basic research into the program.
Those accountability measures, however, play second fiddle to the program’s most important guardrail—parents themselves. Parents know their children’s educational needs better than WEA bureaucrats, school administrators, or lawmakers, and it is parents who decide where and how to use the funding. Private schools, for example, that fail to provide an excellent educational experience—academically or otherwise—will soon find themselves struggling to attract new students.
This, ultimately, explains why the WEA is so desperate to stop a program that costs less than 2% of the state’s K-12 education budget. In the absence of school choice, public school becomes the default for most families. Since most parents will struggle to afford educational alternatives to the public school system, they’re stuck with the public school to which they’ve been assigned, regardless of quality. This is great for the WEA bureaucrats and public school administrators, who depend on state funding for their paychecks and a continuous supply of impressionable students on which to push their political agendas. But it’s not so great for students or their families, especially when they lack the means to move to a better school district or find an alternative educational arrangement for their children.
Wealthy families have always had a choice in how to educate their children. But poor and middle-class families are too often forced to send their kids to a public school that might not fit their unique needs.
For this reason, Wyoming’s ESA program aims an arrow at the heart of the public school monopoly, providing educational options to all students. Those options could include homeschooling, virtual academies, microschools, and so on. For many parents, the best option will still be the local public school, and the ESA program won’t change anything for them. But for thousands of families, the program will give their kids a lifeline, a real chance at thriving in the classroom.
That includes families like Nicolette and Travis Leck, who reside in Cody, and who have joined the lawsuit in defense of the ESA program. The Leck’s three boys struggled in public school, so Nicolette and Travis enrolled them in a classical school where they have “benefitted from regular feedback, a more structured learning environment, and focused instruction in music and Latin.” Education is so important to the Lecks that Nicolette got a full-time job to help the family afford the classical school’s pricey tuition. The ESA program will go a long way toward helping the Lecks ensure a quality education for their boys.
Isn’t that a win for not only the Lecks but also all of Wyoming? If the WEA cared at all about student outcomes, they’d cheer that the Leck boys found a school in which they thrive. Instead, the WEA is adamant about ending a program that will help so many kids, even though it doesn’t divert a single penny from the public education budget.
The WEA’s priorities are clear—bureaucrats over families.
With school beginning in August, Judge Froelicher’s decision to stop the program from dispersing funds means families are left scrambling to rethink their plans for the next year. We urge Judge Froelicher to issue a quick ruling that recognizes the program is consistent with the Wyoming Constitution. Wyoming’s public school system exists to provide a robust education to students. It is not an end in and of itself or a make-work program for bureaucrats, and its one-size-fits-all approach to schooling cannot meet the needs of every family. Families have a right under the U.S. and Wyoming constitutions to seek the best education for their children, and the ESA program helps facilitate that without diverting funding from the public school system.
The WEA can only prevail at the expense of families. For the sake of Wyoming’s students, let’s hope they don’t succeed.
Learn more about the WEA here: