The Albany County School District Board of Trustees voted Wednesday to close the Lab School — a unique K-8 institution that has operated for 135 years on the University of Wyoming campus.
Trustees expressed heartache but also fiduciary obligation before voting 7-2 to close the state’s longest-running school, which the University of Wyoming no longer wants to house on campus. The vote came despite supporters’ testimony that Lab offers neurodivergent and other special-needs kids educational support they can’t find elsewhere.
“It’s beyond unfortunate that we sit here again discussing closing a school in our district,” Board Chair Beth Bear said. However, she said, closing Lab School “is financially responsible, and more importantly, I truly believe in the amazing educators at all of our schools to provide our current Lab School students with an incredible education and to support them emotionally, socially and academically.”
Trustees opted for closure over moving the school into the vacant Beitel Elementary building. The district closed that school this year due to declining enrollment and the condition of the aging building. Moving Lab School students into Beitel after mothballing the facility felt imprudent to most trustees, who said the costs and work involved in rehabilitating the building wouldn’t make financial sense.
The vote followed pleas from parents, students and alumni to keep the school open to continue opportunities like on-campus field trips, flexible classrooms, outdoor-based programs and emotionally engaging environments.
“Some kids simply do not do well at a school filled with 700 people,” Lab School teacher Matt Klima said. “Some kids do better in a smaller, more intimate setting, and some kids learn better with non-traditional approaches. Some kids come alive when they’re out in nature. Please keep this option open for our community.”
How we got here
The school was established in 1887 — three years before statehood — as the Preparatory School to serve secondary education students from counties without access to high school. In 1913, it transitioned to the Training Preparatory School, used as a learning laboratory by UW’s College of Education.
In 1999, the private school partnered with the Albany County School District to become a district public school. The Lab School operates as a “school of choice,” meaning any district family can enter a lottery to enroll their kids, regardless of where they live.
The school occupies a roughly 75-year-old building in UW’s College of Education. That arrangement makes it an outlier; most Wyoming schools operate in buildings owned by their districts, not other entities. UW students still train in its classrooms, but they now also train in classrooms across the district and beyond. The number of Lab School student teachers plummeted from 18 in ‘21-22 to just one this school year. Enrollment in 2024 also plummeted by nearly 60 students — though many say that’s due to uncertainty over the school’s future.
UW and the district have historically operated under a memorandum of understanding that guides the tenancy. But efforts started in 2023 to again extend that arrangement failed to produce an agreement. UW instead announced over the summer it was pursuing an extension only for the 2024-’25 school year, meaning the school must find a new home if it wants to continue beyond that. The Lab School is no longer part of the university’s core mission, according to UW officials. Problems around security and maintenance funding also contributed to the university’s actions.
Following listening sessions this fall, Albany County School District Board trustees hashed out three options for Lab during a work session last week:
- Moving the school into the Beitel building.
- Pausing any decision until after the legislative session with the idea that lawmakers could pass a bill rectifying the situation.
- Closing the school and transitioning students into the schools that correspond with their age and home boundary.
Option three would save the district the most money, estimated at between $750,000 and $1.2 million. That option also “frees up resources to provide access and programming that benefits ALL ACSD students,” according to a presentation given to board members. With most support leaning toward option three, the board put the option on its agenda for Wednesday.
What they said
The vote followed a public hearing in which supporters sang the praises of Lab School for the ways it meets the needs of students who don’t fit into the traditional education model.
“Our school is a wonderful option for some students,” said school secretary Virginia Chai. “I feel we should be very careful when making assumptions that one school would fit all.”
Chai also said the ordeal has been hard on staff.
“Sadly, we’re in this situation where we aren’t wanted by the university and we aren’t wanted by the school district,” she said. “Our entire staff feels quite uncertain and anxious. Dissolving our school would create less choice for Laramie’s families, less opportunities for educational choice. It would be a travesty to lose the oldest school in the state of Wyoming.”
Other parents, however, spoke of positive experiences in other district schools, including with neurodivergent students.
After the hearing, Trustee Nate Martin noted in the wake of UW’s decision, the Lab School will resemble something different no matter what.
“We don’t have the option of going back,” Martin said, “and so the conversation and the decision that we have is, ‘what does it look like going forward?’” He voted in favor of closing, but also advocated for looking into an alternative middle school “so that we can accommodate those kinds of students who don’t do well in the middle school environment.” Other trustees supported that idea.
Trustee Cecilia Aragon voted against closing Lab. When the district has an educational institution get displaced, she said, “it is our responsibility to find a home for that … I find that we have a moral imperative to place Lab School at Beitel, and then face the challenges as we get there.”
But Trustee Emily Siegel-Stanton, who voted in support of closure, brought up difficult budget decisions the board has recently faced.
“We laid people off last year, trying to right size the district,” she said. “So people lost their jobs, and then for us to turn around and say that we’re in an expansion phase and we’re going to start a new school in the community feels pretty tricky.”
The vote might not spell the end of Lab. State lawmakers have expressed interest in pursuing legislation that could preserve the school. The legislative session doesn’t begin until January, which means that even if a bill passed, it wouldn’t be until spring at the earliest.
The ACSD1 Board has no idea how much money will be saved by closing the Lab school because they don’t know how much it would cost to renovate Beitel to acceptable standards, how many students would attend a re-opened Beitel with the Lab model, how many Lab students are zoned for each boundary school and the new enrollments at those schools after closing Lab, how many middle school students will be at LMS, which classrooms they’ll be in, and whether they’ll fit, or how many students with IEPs and 504s are at Lab and where they will go and whether their boundary schools can accommodate them.
As the article says, several board members acknowledged that this was happening way too quickly and they didn’t have all the options or all the facts; so it came as a major shock that those very board members were willing to vote to shut down a school and displace 150 kids anyway!
Please look through this document, titled The UW Lab School Situation Explained, sign our petition, and share! Legislators are open to saving this historic treasure of a school, but they need to know this is what their constituents want!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lq4HGLcvRPvo8HSaJC3rN2JxUp_7R0QZLQDAiOpcOa8/edit?usp=sharing