Last year, Wyoming lost 1,069 students. The year before that, 1,343. Both felt like they might be the worst of a post-energy-boom slide that started when enrollment peaked at 94,002 in 2016. The decline was steady but not dramatic — the kind of slow erosion that lets budget planners imagine it will level off.

It did not level off. WDE's 2025-26 count came in at 86,745 students, down 2,483 from the prior year — the single largest decline in the state's 26-year enrollment record. Larger than the COVID drop. Larger than the early-2000s energy bust. Wyoming is now just 3,040 students above the all-time low it set in 2006, and at the current pace of loss, it will reach a new floor by 2028.

Whatever stability people thought they saw in the mid-2020s was not a bottom. It was a plateau before the next drop.

What the numbers open up

The record year is worse than it looks. The 2,483-student loss exceeds the COVID-era drop of 1,894 in 2020-21 and the energy-bust decline of 2,168 in 2001-02. Forty-one of 51 districts shrank. Seventeen are at their lowest enrollment ever recorded. The four largest districts — Cheyenne, Casper, Rock Springs, and Gillette — together lost 1,379 students, more than half the statewide total.

The boom decade has been completely erased. Between 2006 and 2016, Wyoming added 10,297 students on the back of the coal, gas, and oil expansion. Every one of those students is now gone — and then some. The energy counties that drove the boom are losing students at triple the rate of non-energy districts. Campbell County's business manager has directly attributed the losses to energy sector job departures.

Cheyenne is planning to close 8 schools. Laramie #1^↗, the state's largest district, peaked at 14,261 in 2020 and has lost 1,402 students in six years. The district's phased plan to close eight elementary schools through 2035 is the most dramatic consolidation in the state's history. Parents sued in December 2024 to stop it. A March 2025 court ruling that Wyoming unconstitutionally underfunded K-12 education has added a new dimension to the fight.

By the numbers: 86,745 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 2,483 from the prior year, a 2.8% decline and the largest single-year loss in the 26-year enrollment record.

The threads we are following

One student. Glendo High School in Platte County enrolled exactly one student this year. It is one of five Wyoming schools operating with two or fewer students. Sixty-three schools — nearly one in five — enroll fewer than 50 students. The state has lost 46 schools since 2001, and the pace of closure is accelerating.

Kindergarten is down 25%. Wyoming's K enrollment peaked at 8,141 in 2014 and has fallen to 6,064, the lowest in 24 years. For the first time in two decades, twelfth graders outnumber kindergartners. The pipeline math is unforgiving: today's small kindergarten classes become tomorrow's empty middle schools.

Only 6 of 48 districts have recovered from COVID. Wyoming was among the first states to reopen classrooms, but a 12.5% COVID recovery rate tells a different story. The post-COVID decline is 2.7 times larger than the initial COVID drop, suggesting the pandemic did not cause this crisis — it accelerated a structural one that started with the 2016 energy bust.

What comes next

This is the first in a weekly series examining what Wyoming's 2025-26 enrollment data reveals about the state's schools. New articles publish Thursdays through early July.

Data source

Wyoming Department of Education, Data & Reports. Enrollment counts reflect the 2025-26 school year.