Part of the Wyoming Graduation Rate series.

Wyoming tracks graduation rates for 16 student subgroups. Students in foster care finish last.

At 51.4% in 2024-25, the graduation rate for students in foster care sits 31.7 percentage points below the 83.1% state average, the widest gap of any subgroup measured by the Wyoming Department of Education. It is wider than the gap for Native American students (21.3 points), for students receiving special education services (20.3 points), and for students who are currently homeless (18.0 points).

The gap would be notable at any point. The five-year record is uneven. The rate moved from 54.8% to 50.5% to 58.2% to 58.2% to 51.4%, with no sustained direction. The 2025 figure sits 3.4 points below where the data started in 2021.

The full subgroup picture

The 2025 subgroup data arranges into a clear hierarchy of graduation barriers. Below the 83.1% state average: students in foster care (51.4%), Pacific Islander students (60%), Native American students (61.8%), students receiving special education services (62.8%), students who are currently homeless (65.1%), students in migrant families (70%), English learners (71.5%), students who are economically disadvantaged (74.5%), multiracial students (75.7%), Black students (79%), Hispanic students (79.8%), and male students (81%).

Above it: white students (84.9%), female students (85.5%), Asian students (91.8%), and CTE concentrators (94.9%).

Foster care sits at the bottom of that table next to homelessness and special education, three categories that plainly overlap in the life of an individual student. Wyoming publishes each subgroup on its own and does not cross-tabulate them, so how many students appear in more than one of the three is not something the graduation file can answer.

Inside Casper

Natrona #1^↗ET (Casper), Wyoming's largest district by cohort size, is one of only three districts in the state with a published 2025 graduation rate for students in foster care. Its rate was 30%, from a cohort of 10 students. That means 3 students earned diplomas while 7 did not.

The small cohort size is itself revealing. Natrona's overall 2025 cohort was 1,151 students, and it graduated 77.7% of them. Ten students in foster care is less than 1% of that cohort, and those 10 students failed to graduate at roughly three times the rate of their classmates.

Casper is the low end of a very short list, not a stand-in for the state. Wyoming's 2025 foster care cohort was 105 students, but only 33 of them attended a district that published a rate. Twenty-four districts had the cell suppressed, and 22 more had no students in foster care in the cohort at all. The two districts besides Natrona that did publish, Sweetwater #1 and Park #6, graduated their students in foster care at 61.5% and 90%. For roughly two-thirds of the state's foster care cohort, the district-level outcome is simply not observable.

Volatility as a signal

The graduation rate for students in foster care moved between 0 and 7.7 percentage points from one year to the next over the five-year window, against 0.2 to 1.5 points for the overall state rate. That volatility is a function of small statewide cohorts, which have ranged from 73 to 105 students, and it means the data cannot distinguish between a bad year and a structural problem.

What the five-year window does show is the absence of sustained improvement. The rate has not exceeded 58.2% in any year. The gap has not narrowed below 23.2 points. The 2025 drop back to 51.4%, after two years at 58.2%, means the modest gains of 2023 and 2024 did not persist.

For students in foster care in Wyoming, graduating on time remains roughly a coin flip.

Graduation figures come from the Wyoming Department of Education's graduation-rate reports.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.