Wyoming has once again proved its motto anachronistic

Once upon a time Wyoming became the first state to extend the right to vote to women. Once upon another time, a year later, they tried to renege. By a single vote, the legislature failed to repeal a woman’s right to vote. Once upon still another time, Wyoming elected the first woman Governor. The voters allowed her to serve the last two years of her deceased husband’s term.

Women have not been permitted to become Governor ever since.

That’s it. That’s all there is behind Wyoming’s claim to be “The Equality State.” That’s all one sees when Toto pulls back the curtain and we realize how the levers of power operate.

The notion of equality doesn’t seem complicated. It has to do with treating people as you would want to be treated irrespective of social, cultural, religious, racial, ethnic, or gender differences or immigration status. Christians and others find it wrapped up in the notion that we are all created in God’s image.

It doesn’t seem complicated until you see how it is misapplied in the Equality State. The latest example is a decision of the Wizards of Oz at the Wyoming Department of Education (WDE). By pulling a few levers, they erased a four decades old program supporting some of Wyoming’s most vulnerable young people.

The children of migrant workers have an understandably low high school graduation rate. That is because their parents are continually on the move, following the harvest here and there. The lifestyle of these workers, an economic necessity for them and their employers, creates barriers to school attendance and achievement. These barriers are not insurmountable.

I can relate to these families. My father was a child of migrant farmworkers. He left school in the fourth grade because his family followed that harvest from Texas to Colorado each season during the 1930s. Back then there was no program to assist children like my father to remain in school and get an education. They were expendable.

According to a report from Wyoming Public Media, “Farmworker families have the lowest income in the U.S., and studies show that nationally less than 50 percent of migrant workers graduate from high school.”

Forty years ago, Wyoming and most states adopted a federally-funded program to give these students extra attention to help them succeed. The U.S. Department of Education website describes the program’s purpose.

“The overarching purpose of the MEP (Migrant Education Program) is to ensure that the children of migrant workers have access to and benefit from the same free, appropriate public education, including preschool education, provided to other children.”

That’s what equality looks like. Educational equality is in all of our best interests and certainly consistent with notions of equal rights.

Not so, says the Wyoming Department of Education. They killed the program. Wyoming Public Media debunked the pretexts WDE officials gave publicly for not wanting to help these vulnerable children. When one Wyoming official laid claim to the idea that the program was terminated because of a fear that “individuals outside of the migrant education program could access data on migrant students,” the person running the same program in North Dakota called that “an excuse.”

Another WDE spokesperson claimed the program was shuttered because the numbers of participants have declined. But other states have programs serving the same number as those enrolled in the Wyoming program. Officials outside of the so-called Equality State stripped bare all the arguments WDE proffered in support of their decision to abandon these children.

That’s how “equality” becomes complicated when people of privilege choose to make it complicated.

Unequal treatment of people of color is never accidental. Neither is it coincidental that the Wyoming Department of Education made this choice in the midst of the dishonorable national debate over immigration, deportation, and DACA.

Instead of searching for the politically correct response to the educational needs of these vulnerable children, WDE might have asked itself, “What is the compassionate response?” Instead, Wyoming has once again proved its own motto anachronistic.