School Vouchers Get Green Light in Wyoming 

The Wyoming Supreme Court has paved the way for families to use public funds for private schools.

The court last month ended an injunction against a 2025 state law that requires the state to deposit money from its general fund into education savings accounts that can be used by individual families to pay for private school tuition and other educational services. (Applications are now open.) The litigation challenging the law will continue in the trial court, but the high court’s decision clearly telegraphs its view that the law is constitutional.

The ruling in Degenfelder v. Wyoming Education Association found that the injunction issued in July 2025 by a state district court was an abuse of discretion. The lower court said the law, called the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act, likely violated the state constitution’s requirement that the legislature “provide for the establishment and maintenance of a complete and uniform system of public instruction.”

But the Wyoming high court sees it a different way: The law is careful to ensure that funds destined for private schools come from the state’s general fund, rather than funds earmarked or ordinarily associated with the public school system. If private schools are supported with dollars that don’t come from public schools, that discrete support is not governed by the legislature’s constitutional duty to establish and maintain a “system of public instruction.”

There’s no doubt that legislative decisions about public school funding are subject to state constitutions’ education clauses. Degenfelder asks whether these constitutional rules for public school funding have anything to do with allocations of public funds to private schools.

The trial court found this question easy. It held that “there can be no serious dispute that” allowing public moneys to fund private schools “is an aspect of the State’s system for financing schools.” Public funding of private schools therefore must be subject to the same constitutional scrutiny as funding of public schools. This argument, I have noted, has found surprising support even in red-state jurisdictions, not only from the Wyoming trial court but from the Supreme Court of South Carolina.

The Wyoming Supreme Court thought this an easy question too — but came out the other way. Private schools are one thing, public schools another. Here, the court said, the funds used for tuition at private schools do not affect the funds earmarked for public school. Therefore, that discrete support does not conflict with the legislature’s constitutional duty to establish and maintain a “system of public instruction.” Rather, the court explained, appropriations for private education are like “any legislative appropriation that does not go toward public education, ” like those for police, or parks, or prisons.

Given the posture of Degenfelder as an appeal of a preliminary injunction, this argument shows up in the opinion as one about whether plaintiffs have shown “personal and particularized injury, ” which state law requires for an injunction to issue. None of the named plaintiffs in the action used or sought to use an educational savings account to pay private school expenses; instead, they all averred their intention to enroll their children in public schools. They cannot be injured, Degenfelder holds, by a system of savings accounts that they neither intend to use nor that are funded with monies taken from the public schools that they do use. Likewise, an organization made up of public school employees and parents, whose mission is to support public schooling, is not injured by a program that supports private schooling, a distinct genus of state spending. The funds for the savings accounts “come from the general fund and do not affect the school funding model or the permanent school fund.”

Degenfelder’s position is formalist — it looks at how line items in the state budget are named — but also pragmatic. Public school funds have traditional revenue sources, often distinct from the general fund. Certainly, state legislatures, which must balance their budgets, are always allocating scarce resources over competing functions. But every tax dollar that goes to anything other than public education — presumably including every tax expenditure authorized and any taxing opportunity foregone — deprives public schools in a zero-sum budget. The trial court cited a Wyoming school finance case for the claim that “any state action interfering with that right [to public education] must be closely examined before it can be said to pass constitutional muster.” But even the trial court did not read this passage so expansively as to subject every state appropriation to strict scrutiny. Such a reading would prove far too much.

There are possible justifications, however, for increased scrutiny of legislative appropriations for private schools specifically. One is that legislators might be inclined, having granted funds to private schools, to allocate less to public schools. This need not be purposeful or even conscious. Most obviously, vouchers that encourage private school enrollments reduce the public school headcount. This could lead to fewer dollars for public schools — even fewer dollars per student. Such effects would be hard to see, confounded as they would be by other factors, both local and national (notably post-Covid-19 declines in enrollment and declining American fertility rates). But the difficulties of detection do not imply that the effects are illusory. Indeed, these confounding issues could worsen the impact of private school funding on public schools.

More broadly, it can be argued that expenditures for any kind of K–12 education have constitutional status because both private and public schools are part of a single educational system. Private schools are economic substitutes for public schools, and they unquestionably do help the state meet the goal of educating all citizens (including by reducing the number of pupils for whose instruction the state must pay). On this way of thinking, private schools are part of the single “system of public instruction” for which the Wyoming Legislature (like other state legislatures) has the constitutional duty to “provide.” This way of reading seems to push against the word “public, ” but public expenses for private schooling are of course public — and the word “system” is an expansive one. 

If this reading is right, then legislative funding for private schools is about the public schools as well. But that raises a new problem for complainants: If private as well as public schools are part of a single system, then perhaps legislatures are entitled to fund them.

Aaron Saiger hold the Albert A. Walsh Chair in Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law at the Fordham University School of Law and is faculty director of Fordham Law School’s Urban Law Center.

Suggested Citation: Aaron Saiger, School Vouchers Get Green Light in Wyoming, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (July 9, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/school-vouchers-get-green-light-wyoming