Better Wyoming Action + Research worked with public education advocates across the state to stop the takeover of local school boards by extremist candidates backed by Moms for Liberty and other far-right groups.
BWAR supported “slates” of public education champions for school board seats in five districts: Cheyenne, Casper, Gillette, Lander, and Sheridan.
In all, BWAR backed 20 candidates, and 15 of these won their seats. This included a five-for-five sweep in the Casper school board race.
As a result, Wyoming school boards will be filled with responsible leaders for public education rather than radicals seeking to politicize the work of educating young people in our communities.
A SERIOUS THREAT
BWAR began meeting with local residents more than a year ago who were concerned about the impact of extremists on their school boards.
In 2022, Casper and Sheridan both saw multiple members of Moms For Liberty—or, as the Casper school board chair described it, Moms For Tyranny—win seats. Unless the trend stopped, the school boards in these places would be overtaken.
Meanwhile, Cheyenne and Lander both had majorities of Moms For Liberty members on their school boards already, and they spent inordinate amounts of time banning books and debating hot button national issues instead of doing the real local work of running a school district.
In both Lander and Cheyenne, this resulted in the loss of quality educators. In Casper and Sheridan, the new Moms for Liberty members brought chaos and disruption to every school board meeting.
A NEW GENERATION OF LEADERS
With BWAR’s help, public school champions recruited candidates and ran coordinated campaigns in each of these communities, appealing to local voters’ desire to continue with the high quality of public education that already came from their district.
Even as BWAR’s candidates faced organized opposition and attacks from partisan groups and far-right politicians, our grassroots campaigns greatly succeeded.
The losses our candidates did endure were at the hands of either incumbents or candidates who were not on our slates but also do not align with the Moms For Liberty.
Overall, in the five communities where BWAR worked, only two new Moms for Liberty candidates won their races, while we stopped more than a dozen others.
Meanwhile, BWAR helped elect new—and, in many cases, young—leaders who will be the next generation of ensuring Wyoming public schools remain excellent.