Who’s Afraid of School Choice—and Food Trucks—in Wyoming?

Teacher unions are racing to stop greater education choice from spreading to Wyoming.

But parents there already know that more education options would be valuable for them, and special interest groups’ latest dirty political tactics only make them look desperate.

“It’s either, you support families or you don’t,” says Mary Schmidt, a Wyoming parent in Natrona County, 40 minutes outside of Casper. “We want kids educated, and we have to acknowledge that education comes in different forms,” she said in an interview.

Schmidt is a parent who homeschools her children and a member of the local Moms for Liberty chapter, but she also takes advantage of services provided by local public schools.

She supports a new proposal from Republican state Rep. Ocean Andrew that would make the state’s education savings accounts available to all Wyoming students, removing the current income cap on the program.

Lawmakers adopted education savings accounts last year for children in low-income families, but state officials have not started awarding scholarships yet. Legislators are trying to expand the new law’s provisions, which would make Wyoming’s accounts similar to those in neighboring Utah and those in Arizona, as well as in Florida, West Virginia, and many other states where lawmakers have adopted expansive education savings account options.

With an account, the state deposits a portion of a child’s education spending from the state into a private account that parents use to buy education products and services for their children. Parents can find tutoring services for their students, pay private school tuition, and more.

Lawmakers have added online classes as eligible expenses in this year’s proposal.

These options are popular: Lawmakers in nearly a dozen states have adopted accounts or account-style education opportunities that are available to all students in their states. In Florida, 330,000 students are using accounts this school year. More than 83,000 students are participating in Arizona.

The new Wyoming proposal would increase the account awards available to students from $6,000 to $7,000 and would empower parents to determine how to measure their child’s academic success.

These changes are crucial. The average private school tuition for an elementary school in Wyoming is just under $6,900, which means the new account figure would put those schools within reach for families.

Wyoming taxpayers spend nearly three times that figure per child in assigned schools ($19,938 according to U.S. Department of Education data).

Schmidt explains that Wyoming families would benefit from the accounts because some students are completely “cut off” in the winter and “can’t get into town” to their public school. Families that live on ranches or in rural areas must be creative when the snow sets in.

Some have asked state lawmakers for more resources to start their own schools or learning pods that would serve just a few families who are in closer proximity to each other than to the nearest town, Schmidt explained. “This [new proposal] would allow for that.”

“They are property owners. They are taxpayers,” she added. “Why should they not have access [to their own tax money]?”

Teachers unions and their allies, meanwhile, have resorted to personal attacks on lawmakers. Special interest groups are compiling a list of enemies: school choice, parents, and now, fried fish.

Andrew, the sponsor of the new savings account proposal, operates a set of food trucks called On the Hook Fish and Chips. Opponents allied with unions have declared seafood off-limits and are posting messages to social media telling people not to patronize the trucks. They have not explained how avoiding wild Alaska cod will improve student achievement.

Unions want students to remain in assigned schools, even if reading scores among fourth graders have not changed in Wyoming since 1992. More eighth graders are scoring below grade level in reading than 30 years ago.

“The school system is what is being supported, and it is not the children,” Schmidt says. Wyoming lawmakers should be in a hurry to change that this year.

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