Kudos to our new attorney general, Keith Kautz. Yesterday, he hit the ground running by swiftly appealing the outrageous preliminary injunction against Wyoming’s Steamboat Legacy Scholarship program.
Nearly 4,000 Wyoming families spent tens of thousands of hours weighing educational options, evaluating curricula, calculating household budgets, and completing all the requirements necessary to receive a scholarship to help educate their children. Then, only days before receiving the promised help, the Wyoming Education Association (WEA) batted it out of their hands with a court challenge.
Suddenly, parents expecting reimbursement for their investments in their children’s education faced a deficit.
Others, who had enrolled children for the fall and taken jobs out of the home to make ends meet, were tossed into educational limbo.
Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder told Cowboy State Daily that the malicious timing of the WEA lawsuit created “utter chaos.”
She was not exaggerating. I know. Because my household was affected.
Contrary to WEA dreams, Wyoming parents who choose alternate education are not well-to-do and living in gated communities. They are middle-class parents who willingly and habitually sacrifice for their kids.
After their household income is taxed to pay for the education of others, they sacrifice to find enough money to educate their own kids.
They drive older cars. They live in smaller houses. They work longer hours. They go without the boats, snowmobiles and RVs that their neighbors can afford.
All this they sacrifice cheerfully to be involved personally in the education of their children. And for every family already making these sacrifices, there are others who would like to do so, but can’t figure out how to make ends meet.
The Steamboat Legacy Scholarships were just enough of a boost that some of these families were finally able to fulfill that longtime dream.
I am grateful to the legislators who saw the injustice and sought to correct it. These visionaries pored over Wyoming’s Constitution, statutes and jurisprudence to find a solution that returns some balance without affecting our uniform system of public instruction.
The Wyoming Steamboat Legacy Scholarships program is so clearly constitutional that nearly a third of elected legislators sponsored it, and two-thirds voted for it.
But, while parents sacrificing for alternative education were willing to continue full funding of the public education system, the WEA was not willing to return the favor.
As the state’s reply to the WEA lawsuit wryly put it, The WEA’s “position appears to be that once the Legislature has provided a public education system, it is prohibited from creating any other program that provides educational benefit to Wyoming residents.”
So much for live and let live.
In their obsession to snatch scholarships out of the hands of sacrificing parents, the WEA convinced Judge Peter Froelicher both that the scholarships are likely unconstitutional and that even a single scholarship would cause irreparable harm to the teachers’ union.
The great irony is that in defending their monopoly over a system that manifestly does not serve all Wyoming students, the WEA claimed that alternate systems hypothetically might not serve certain students.
There is no indication in the WEA complaint that these students either wanted alternative education or were refused admittance to it. Rather, the WEA, in its anti-Christian bigotry, merely assumes that they would be refused.
When considering a preliminary injunction, judges are supposed to weigh the hardship of the requesting party against the hardship of the party being enjoined. From where I am sitting, that didn’t happen.
What, exactly, are the parents who joined the WEA lawsuit losing if my son gets music lessons? After reading the WEA complaint, I still don’t know. But I do know the specific educational opportunities that they took from my kids.
And what irreparable harm, exactly, would the teachers’ union suffer? Even if we knew the answer to that question, how does that compare to the cost of the utter chaos that Judge Froelicher’s injunction caused in the Wyoming Department of Education?
Kudos to Attorney General Kautz and Superintendent Degenfelder for their swift and aggressive defense of the Steamboat Legacy Scholarships. They are on the front lines against a national organization that will stop at nothing to deny parents the right to educate their own children.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
