Wyoming Big Education Machine Doesn’t Want us to Know Who is Getting Paid What

Despite the clear cut law that names of government servants are public records, Superintendent Jillian Balow thinks she is above the law. School districts across this state will burn through more of our tax dollars hiring attorneys to try and weasel out of a simple public record request by Senator Tom James asking for the names and salaries of those employed in Wyoming school districts.

It is no secret that big education in Wyoming is driving the tax debate. As they ask for millions more each and every year, proficiency rates are anything but stellar and the government-run school machine soaks up students' money in administrator salaries and non-transparent waste.

"There is a big gap between what I'm legally bound to do and what is the right thing to do," said state Superintendent Jillian Balow. "And I have difficulty figuring out and reconciling how the release of names that intrudes on the privacy of citizens in our Wyoming community, that potentially puts their security, safety and other aspects of their lives at risk, is in the best interest of the public."

While Ms. Balow may wish she were above the law, she is not. She's also not the arbitrator of right and wrong and what taxpayers deserve to know about how their money is being spent. Furthermore, names and salaries in no way put individuals at a risk of safety and security. She wishes to placate the people of Wyoming with emotion when she doesn't have facts or law to support her secrecy.

Public notice (what goes into the newspaper each year by title and salary) and a public record request (what allows for a deeper dive) are two entirely different matters. Moreover, these are critical requests to keep Wyoming from being liable in employment lawsuits that allege LGBTQ discrimination or gender wage gap. Additionally, this is the taxpayers' information and they have a right to know.

The Public Records Act has nothing to do with public notices. Whether an entity is required to publish information is a completely different matter than whether a record is confidential and can be withdrawn from public access to records. School districts have attempted in the past to argue that because public notice W.S. 21-3-110 requires them to publish salary lists only by categories and not by specific names, the Legislature intended all the salaries paid specific district employees to remain confidential. The argument was rejected by a state district court in Cheyenne and ultimately by the Wyoming Supreme Court in Laramie County School District No. 1 v. Cheyenne Newspapers (2011) when the Supreme Court said:

"Public employment offers many benefits and imposes some burdens. The Court interprets the language of the above statute and the Supreme Court's comments concerning it to mean that one burden of public employment is that any person who makes a proper request may learn the compensation paid to a public employee, regardless of the level at which he toils for a governmental entity."

"The Court concludes that while the legislature intended that school districts would offer general salary information which was not specific to any employee to the public through annual publication, it did not intend to make specific salary information confidential as to those employees if a member of the public or the press wishes to expend the time and effort to obtain that information by making a proper request."

Although the intentions of Senator James are entirely irrelevant, his quest is pure. Let's bring more money to teachers and students, not administrators, supervisors and waste. "We've got to reverse the funding model," James said. "Get out of the block grant and fund education from the bottom up."