Wyoming Lawmakers Tinker With Charter School Rules and Take Another Swing at Student Discipline

The original story by Allison Allsop for Casper Star-Tribune.

Wyoming’s education wonks wrapped up their last big meeting of the year with two familiar hot buttons on the table: charter schools and student discipline. One bill sailed through. The other barely cleared the runway.

With the next charter school application window coming up, the Wyoming Charter School Authorizing Board is asking the Legislature for a little more breathing room — basically, fewer rigid calendar checkpoints and more flexibility to handle what could be a busy year.

At the Joint Education Committee’s Nov. 14 meeting, lawmakers considered a draft bill (26LSO-0194) that would overhaul the charter application timeline. Right now, the process has several separate deadline markers built into law. The board wants to scrap that patchwork and replace it with one clean 120-day window covering the whole review process.

Board Executive Director John Wahler told the committee this would give the state “a degree of flexibility” when reviewing applications. And he wasn’t subtle about why now: he says there are signs Wyoming could see “quite a few” charter applications next year.

That expectation isn’t coming out of nowhere. In the last legislative session, lawmakers removed the cap on how many charter schools the state can approve in a year. So the pipeline could get crowded fast — and the board doesn’t want to be boxed in by timeline rules that were written for a smaller, slower system.

Wahler framed the change as quality control:

“These revisions are critical to the mission of thoroughly vetting charter school applications to ensure that the approved schools are academically sound, operationally viable and aligned with the needs of Wyoming students and communities.”

Not everyone was instantly convinced. Sen. Charles Scott (R-Casper) asked why this couldn’t wait until the 2027 general session. Wahler’s answer was basically: because the wave is coming now, not later.

After some back-and-forth, the committee amended the bill so the changes would kick in immediately after the governor signs it, instead of waiting for a future school year. The Wyoming School Boards Association backed the bill — partly because it would also apply to charter-school applications submitted through local districts, not just those going straight to the state board.

End result: the charter timeline bill passed with no opposition.

Then came the thornier stuff.

The committee also revisited a student discipline bill draft (26LSO-0088) that’s been bouncing around since August. If you’ve been following this debate, you know the vibe: everyone agrees schools need better tools to handle disruptive behavior, but nobody agrees on exactly how far those tools should go — or who should get to use them.

Since the August meeting, legislative staff were told to rewrite the bill to include recommendations from the Wyoming Department of Education and Sheridan County School District #1 Superintendent Jeff Jones. Jones had warned lawmakers earlier that the bill wasn’t clear enough about who, exactly, could punish a student and under what authority.

The education department came with its own wishlist, including changes to pull pieces of another proposal — the Teacher Bill of Rights — into this discipline package. So by November, the bill had already turned into a bit of a legislative Frankenstein: discipline rules plus teacher-protection language all stitched together.

Even with changes, concerns didn’t go away. Sen. Chris Rothfuss (D-Laramie) said he still had issues similar to the ones Jones raised earlier, meaning the bill still risked being vague about power boundaries in schools.

The committee hammered out a stack of amendments, including one aimed at answering Rothfuss’ worry. But the vote showed how split lawmakers remain: the discipline bill advanced 8–5.

The charter school piece was easy because it’s procedural: most lawmakers seem comfortable letting charters expand, and tweaking the timeline is just a way to keep the application machine from jamming.

Student discipline is not procedural. It’s culture, authority, safety, teachers’ rights, kids’ rights, and the lived reality of classrooms — all rolled into one fight. So unsurprisingly, it stays controversial and close.

Both bills now move forward in the legislative process, but they’re on very different tracks. Charter schools are in a “let’s streamline and prepare” moment. Student discipline is still in the “we’re not sure we’ve got this right, but we’re pushing it anyway” phase.

And come the next session, you can expect both topics to be back — because in Wyoming education politics, nothing ever really stays settled for long.