Platte #1 - EdTribune WY - Wyoming Education Data

One Student: Glendo High School and Wyoming's Vanishing Rural Schools

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Glendo High School in Platte County enrolled one student in the 2025-26 school year.

One student in a building that held 35 in 2001. One student in a community 90 miles north of Cheyenne with a population under 200. One student in a state where 19 schools now operate with fewer than 10 enrolled.

It is an extreme case — but in Wyoming, the extremes tell the story.

The smallest schools in America's least populated state

Wyoming operates 336 schools across a state with fewer people than most mid-size American cities. Sixty-three of those schools — nearly one in five — enroll fewer than 50 students.

The smallest are scattered across ranch country and reservation land. Antelope Creek School in Albany #1^↗ has two students. Notch Peak Elementary, also in Albany County, has two. Crowheart Elementary in Fremont #6^↗, near the Wind River Reservation, has two. Bondurant Elementary in Sublette #1^↗, a ranching community in the Upper Green River Valley, has three.

Nineteen schools have fewer than 10 students. Thirty-seven have fewer than 25. These are not charter experiments or alternative programs — they are the primary schools serving communities where there simply are not many children left.

Glendo's slow decline

Glendo High School's arrival at one student was not sudden. In 2001, the school enrolled 35 students. By 2008 it was down to 16. It hovered in the teens and low twenties through 2018, dropped to 12 in 2019, and reached 8 by 2023. In 2024 and 2025, it appears to have reported no enrollment at all. In 2026, a single student is enrolled.

The elementary school down the road has held on somewhat better — 47 students in 2001, 20 in 2026. The junior high hit zero in 2023 but rebounded to 11 in 2026, suggesting a few families remain. The combined Glendo complex now serves 32 students, down from 98 a quarter century ago.

Platte #1^↗ (Wheatland), the district that includes Glendo, has been on an eight-year decline streak — the longest active run in the state. It dropped from 1,014 students in 2019 to 811 in 2026, a 20 percent loss.

Forty-six schools lost in 25 years

Wyoming had 382 schools in 2001. By 2026 it has 336 — a loss of 46 schools over 25 years.

The closures have come in waves. The early 2000s saw the sharpest drop — 21 schools lost between 2001 and 2005, coinciding with an enrollment decline of 6,293 students. A brief stabilization during the energy boom gave way to a second wave of closures after 2016.

Now a third wave is beginning. Laramie #1^↗ (Cheyenne) has announced plans to close eight elementary schools through 2035. A district consolidation bill has been filed in the legislature. The pressure to restructure a system built for 94,000 students to serve 87,000 — and soon fewer — is growing.

The cost of keeping small schools open

Wyoming's school funding formula, the School Foundation Program, ties dollars directly to student headcount. Every lost student means less money. For a school like Glendo High, which now generates funding for a single student, the economics are stark.

Yet these schools exist for a reason. In a state where the nearest alternative school may be 60 miles away on a two-lane highway, closing a school doesn't just consolidate costs — it removes the institution that anchors a community.

Seven districts — Sheridan #3^↗ (77 students), Park #16^↗ (90), Washakie #2^↗ (108), Platte #2^↗ (185), Fremont #2^↗ (195), Big Horn #4^↗ (225), and Fremont #6 (321) — each serve entire geographic regions with fewer students than a single large school in Cheyenne or Casper.

Wyoming's smallest schools are not failing. They are serving the students who remain in communities where the population has been declining for decades. The question is how long the state can sustain a system where one in five schools has fewer than 50 students — and some have fewer than five.

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

Wyoming's Worst Year: 2026 Decline Shatters 26-Year Record

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Wyoming 2025-26 Enrollment.

Wyoming lost 2,483 students in the 2025-26 school year — the largest single-year decline in the state's 26-year enrollment record.

The drop exceeds the COVID-era loss of 1,894 students in 2020-21. It exceeds the early-2000s decline of 2,168 in 2001-02, when the energy sector last bottomed out. Nothing in the modern data matches what happened this year.

At 86,745 students, Wyoming now sits just 3,040 above its all-time low of 83,705, set in 2006. At the current pace of decline, the state will reach a new floor by 2028.

A record that was already falling

The 2025-26 loss didn't arrive from nowhere. Wyoming's enrollment peaked at 94,002 in 2016, and the trajectory since has been a slow-motion descent punctuated by one brief interruption.

The state lost 741 students in 2017, then 285 in 2018. A small uptick of 803 in 2020 — likely pandemic-related families returning to Wyoming's early-reopening schools — masked the underlying trend. Then came the COVID crash of 1,894 in 2021, a flat year in 2022, and an accelerating slide: 352 lost in 2023, 1,343 in 2024, 1,069 in 2025, and now 2,483 in 2026.

The last three years alone have cost Wyoming 4,895 students — more than five percent of its total enrollment.

Forty-one of fifty-one districts shrank

The 2026 decline was not concentrated in one or two cities. Forty-one of Wyoming's 51 districts lost students this year — a loss rate of 80 percent.

Natrona #1^↗ (Casper) led the state with 443 students lost, the third consecutive year of accelerating decline. Laramie #1^↗ (Cheyenne), the state's largest district, lost 367. Sweetwater #1^↗ (Rock Springs) dropped 308. Campbell #1^↗ (Gillette) lost 261.

Together, these four districts — the backbone of Wyoming's enrollment base — shed 1,379 students, accounting for more than half of the statewide loss.

The smaller districts felt the proportional impact even harder. Platte #1^↗ (Wheatland) lost 71 students from an enrollment of just 811 — an 8.1 percent single-year loss. Fremont #1^↗ (Lander) dropped 81, continuing a decline that has cut the district by more than a quarter from its 2001 peak.

Twenty-one districts are now at their lowest enrollment in the entire 26-year data record.

Why 2016, not 2020, is the turning point

The conventional framing for enrollment loss is pandemic-driven — students disappeared when schools closed. But Wyoming's story doesn't fit that template.

The state's true enrollment peak came in 2016, driven by a decade of energy-sector expansion. Coal, natural gas, and oil extraction brought workers and families to Campbell County, Sweetwater County, and the Powder River Basin. From 2006 to 2016, Wyoming added 10,297 students.

Then energy prices collapsed. The families that had arrived for extraction jobs began leaving. COVID accelerated a contraction that was already four years old.

The post-COVID period has been worse than COVID itself. Wyoming lost 1,894 students in the initial pandemic year. In the five years since, it has lost an additional 5,193 — nearly three times as many.

What comes next

The University of Wyoming's economic forecast projects the state's 5-to-19-year-old population declining through 2031. The college-age cohort is projected to fall 23 percent by 2041 — the steepest drop in the Mountain West. Every age group under 44 is expected to shrink.

A March 2025 court ruling found that Wyoming has unconstitutionally underfunded its K-12 schools. The same month, the legislature cut $17.5 million from the recommended $66.3 million school cost adjustment. Wyoming's School Foundation Program ties funding directly to headcount, meaning every lost student is an automatic budget cut in a system the courts have deemed already insufficient.

Laramie #1^↗ has announced plans to close eight elementary schools through 2035 — the most dramatic consolidation in the state's history. Parents sued in December 2024 to halt the plan. A district consolidation bill has been filed in the legislature.

At 86,745 students and falling, Wyoming is 3,040 students from its all-time low. The energy boom that filled classrooms for a decade is over, the families it brought are gone, and the birth rate has not replaced them. The 2025-26 record makes that arithmetic harder to ignore.

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