Commission rejects larger classroom numbers

CASPER — A state commission voted Thursday to maintain the number of elementary students that can be in a Wyoming classroom after pushback from educators and some lawmakers. 

The School Facilities Committee was considering whether to allow all elementary grade levels to max out classroom sizes at 25 students. Lawmakers and facilities officials said the proposed change was an attempt to let schools maximize their space as the state moves away from its period of constructing new buildings to maintaining its current fleet. 

But opponents, like the Wyoming Education Association, decried the proposal and said it was a way for lawmakers to cut spending on construction in the future. 

“Well (the proposed change) was a way to show that there was no ... capacity need anywhere for the state if you can put 25 kids in every classroom, then we wouldn’t have to fund school facilities,” association president Kathy Vetter said Thursday. 

She added that the decision to vote down the proposal was a “positive.” 

The commission previously moved the capacity to 25 last June, but it had done so outside of its rule-making process and had not been formally settled. Del McOmie, the director of the State Construction Department, said the commission made the decision to go back to the original 16-to-1 ratio for K-3 “based on comment that came in from the public and others.”

Crucially, the capacity question at issue here is ostensibly different from the discussion around classroom sizes generally. School facilities are funded from one stream of money, while K-12 operations — like how many students there should be per teacher — is a separate debate and funding source entirely. So what is decided from a capacity standpoint will not necessarily force a change in what size of classes the state wants to pay for. 

But this debate has lasted more than a year, and opponents have suggested the capacity change could provide cover to a broader funding cut: If the schools were OK to handle 25 kindergartners, why pay to have just 16? 

Educators further said it would hurt growing districts, like Laramie County School District No. 1. That district, the largest in the state, has been over capacity for some time. If the capacity calculation was changed, educators argued, the state would be able to say that the district had adequate facilities for its students.