Park County School District 1 has a budget for fiscal year 2027, but it wasn’t easy to get to the point of the board vote to approve one. 

At the board’s lone July meeting Wednesday, the five trustees present unanimously voted to approve a budget that includes large raises for teachers and other instructional staff, smaller but still substantial raises for other positions but also tough choices to account for a new funding model that provides much more funding on the instructional side but less on the operations side. 

The overall fiscal year 2027 budget calls for just over $38 million in expenditures, slightly below expected revenues, which is up nearly $2.5 million over last year. 

Superintendent Jay Curtis said in his 17 years as a superintendent, no previous budget season has been quite like this one. 

“I cannot remember any year previous to this that we’ve had as much discussion about a budget as we have this one,” he said. “This budget is special and unique in the sense that we are now operating under a completely new funding model.”

As far as necessary staff reductions, Curtis said they were pleased to be able to make all reductions through attrition, as the one person they had planned to cut, they were able to keep when another employee resigned. 

The recalibration process is required every five years in Wyoming in order to adjust how much the state funds education. How much each district receives is based on enrollment, full time equivalency staffing, salaries, benefits and more. While the past couple of times this process did not result in new legislation, this time it did, leading to a scramble both at the state and local districts to adjust to a new model. 

Curtis and other superintendents, including the other two in Park County, expressed concerns about changes from the beginning, especially in the way funding is now siloed into separate buckets for instruction and operations, where previously the block grant model allowed districts to use the money as needed. 

Legislators have explained their reasoning for the changes in large part by pointing to districts not spending as much on teachers previously as they had hoped the last time they passed a K-12 budget with added funds. 

Curtis previously said some changes were made that did help in making the change better than anticipated, and in the end almost all Park County legislators voted in favor of Senate File 81, K-12 Public School Finance, which sailed through both chambers. 

“We’ve set ourselves up to ride out this new year, this new funding model, as well as any district in the state of Wyoming,” Curtis said.

He attributes that in large part due to Business Services Coordinator Mary Jo Lewis’ long hours spent wading through the new rules to put together a balanced budget that takes into account the fact that exactly how much revenue they’ll be receiving from the state — for a fiscal year 2027 budget that is already underway — remains in doubt. 

She said the picture is fluid — a word she stressed throughout the meeting — in terms of revenue from the state. 

Still, the final budget approval — which included approving 25 mills of property tax revenue from the district, six from the county, one for the local rec district and a half for PVCE BOCES — was much more optimistic than the concerns raised before and during the legislative session. 

“Compared to the conversations we were having last winter, this is a rosy picture,” board member Beau Fulton said.