Balow delved into these and a few other issues during a brief presentation Monday for the Casper Rotary Club, beginning with the state of K-12 education after the COVID-19 school year.

First, she celebrated Wyoming’s ability to offer in-person classes this year as most of the nation remained virtual. Indeed, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Wyoming had the highest proportion of in-person learners this school year in the U.S.

Balow said the state is likely to continue that trend through the next academic year.

“Our local school districts and the county health officers will have maximum flexibility to make the decisions as their health metrics dictate,” Balow explained. “By and large, this coming year will look even more normal than last year did.”

While the pandemic is not over, virus transmission continues to slow and leaders are again shifting their attention to longer-term issues. In Wyoming, how to pay for K-12 education is among the largest of those lingering questions.

“Our mineral-dependant revenue education system is just a few biennia away from really collapsing,” Balow said Monday. “Right now we are running in the red for education funding and pulling from our rainy day account … That’s not a sustainable way to fund education.”

The state is staring down a $300 million deficit in the education budget. Lawmakers during the most recent legislative session were unable to pass a bill addressing the shortfall, and Balow said there have been a lot of ideas but “not so much consensus” on how to respond.

Balow added the most recent federal pandemic aid package—The American Rescue Plan Act—provides more than $300 million just for Wyoming K-12 schools, and some of that money may be used to offset the shortfall. However most of it will go toward stemming “learning loss” through after school and summer school programs.

Finally, Balow shared just a glimpse of three initiatives underway in her office dealing with: civics education, early literacy and career and technical education.

Balow would like to see comprehensive civics education across the U.S. be a larger priority, though she did not say what the education department is doing to achieve that goal.

The comments were in reference to the national controversy around critical race theory and if it should be taught in K-12 schools. Nationally, experts have explained that “critical race theory” is not a curriculum but rather an academic frame in higher education for analyzing information.

“What my hope is for Wyoming classrooms is that we can ensure that we teach the victories, the challenges and treacheries as raw and honestly as we possibly can,” Balow said during a question-and-answer portion of the presentation. “We need to teach American History with objective fact and not through the lens of a particular theory.”

She also commented on how the issue has been politicized, saying that right now, “we’re talking past each other.”

Balow herself issued a press release in May decrying “critical race theory” and a Biden Administration proposal that would have offered grants to educators hoping to teach ““Racially, Ethnically, Culturally, and Linguistically Diverse Perspectives.”

Though she did not provide specifics on how her office plans to review civics education, she did provide details for the early literacy program.

That initiative would have K-2 teachers trained in how to adequately teach early literacy, particularly the reading program Phonics.

“There is a vast science of teaching reading, and some of our programs and some of our teachers do that really really well and some of them don’t,” she said.

Wyoming will use state and federal money to retrain educators on how to properly teach that program.