By Nathan Winters
Wyoming Family Alliance
President & CEO

Last fall, fifteen families signed up to send their children to Cheyenne Hills Christian Academy. None of them stayed.

“We had 15 families enroll that weren’t able to stay with us once the funds were blocked,” said Dr. Heidi Griffin, the school’s executive director.

Those families had been counting on the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship, Wyoming’s Education Savings Account program, which puts up to $7,000 a year per student toward private tuition, tutoring, curriculum and other approved costs. Then a Laramie County district judge, Peter Froelicher, froze the program while a lawsuit against it played out. The money those families had planned around never came.

In Casper, Powder River Prep opened in the old Jefferson Elementary building with ten families and three licensed teachers. Seven more families had planned to come, every one of them depending on the same scholarship. A school of ten could have been a school of seventeen. That year, it stayed a school of ten.

Multiply those two schools across the state. About 4,000 students applied for an account in spring 2025, and the state had approved 109 private schools and 422 other education providers to serve them. For the entire school year, not a dollar reached any of them.

This fall, the money is finally moving. The Department of Education received 4,915 applications for 2026-27. About 4,460 students qualified, but the $30 million the Legislature set aside covers roughly 4,200, awarded first come, first served.

As with any new program, the rollout has had growing pains. Some families saw scholarship money appear in their accounts and then disappear when Odyssey, the state’s contractor, told them the accounts had been marked “funded” by mistake. Still, for the first time, Wyoming parents are spending scholarship dollars on their children’s education.

How the program got stuck for a year is worth understanding, because the case that stalled it is not over.

The Lawsuit

In June 2025, the Wyoming Education Association, which represents Wyoming teachers and other educators, sued alongside nine public-school parents. They argued that private schools taking scholarship money could turn some students away, and that the program drains money from public schools.

The money argument runs into the way the Legislature built the program. Scholarship dollars come from the state’s general fund, and the Supreme Court noted they “do not affect the school funding model or the permanent school fund.”

A district does receive less when a student leaves. The same thing happens when a family moves to another town or starts homeschooling, and in each case the district also stops paying to educate that child.

Wyoming still spends more per student than most states: about $21,150 in 2024-25, 14th in the nation and well above the national average. A $7,000 scholarship is about a third of that.

And the state has no money of its own. Every dollar it spends belongs to the people of Wyoming, and the program lets a slice of it follow a family’s own child.

The Ruling

In May 2026, a unanimous Wyoming Supreme Court reversed the injunction, holding that the district court had “abused its discretion in granting the preliminary injunction.”

“Their claim of possible irreparable injury rests on the existence of policies they have not and do not intend to encounter.”

Chief Justice Lynne Boomgaarden, Wyoming Supreme Court

The problem was harm. A court can freeze a law while a case proceeds only if someone will be irreparably hurt in the meantime, and the justices found the plaintiffs never showed it.

The parents who sued had not pulled their children out of public school and told the court they did not plan to. Their claimed injury, Chief Justice Lynne Boomgaarden wrote, “rests on the existence of policies they have not and do not intend to encounter.” No private school was going to turn their children away, because their children were never going to apply.

Put plainly, the freeze sided with nine parents who never intended to use the program, at the expense of thousands of families who were counting on it.

What Comes Next

The demand is real. Leaders at Cheyenne Hills Christian Academy estimated they fielded about 100 phone calls “between May when the injunction was lifted and August when the application window closed.”

One Cheyenne family found its place at the academy this fall. “My son was able to go to his school of choice,” his mother said.

The freeze sided with nine parents who never intended to use the program, at the expense of thousands of families who were counting on it.

But the case is not over.

The Supreme Court’s ruling lifted the freeze and let families use their scholarships this school year, but the Court was clear that it was not deciding the case itself. It formed “no final opinion on the merits of Plaintiffs’ constitutional claims.”

That question is back in Laramie County District Court. The WEA has vowed to keep pursuing the case. After an August 31 hearing, Judge Peter Froelicher, who issued the original freeze, said he expects to issue a written decision within 60 days.*

*Sixty days from the hearing falls on October 30, 2026. The court has not set a specific date.

Until a final ruling, the program runs, and every family that uses it does so knowing the ground could shift again.

Wyoming Family Alliance Action is a trade name of Wyoming Family Alliance, a 501(c)(4) organization and sister ministry of Wyoming Family Alliance Foundation.
Wyoming Family Alliance Foundation is a trade name of Wyoming Family Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization and sister ministry of Wyoming Family Alliance Action.

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