 - The Central Wyoming College Board of Cooperative Higher Education Services plans to limit the number of dual enrollment courses it offers Fremont County students next year due to an anticipated decrease in property tax revenues for 2025-2025.){kind=link}
(Riverton, WY) – The Central Wyoming College Board of Cooperative Higher Education Services plans to limit the number of dual enrollment courses it offers Fremont County students next year due to an anticipated decrease in property tax revenues for 2025-2025.
The half mill that CWC levies to support dual enrollment for Fremont County students is expected to decrease in value by about 25 percent for 2025-2026, CWC-BOCHES Program Director Mathew Johnson said in a letter to CWC President Brad Tyndall this month.
That decrease in value represents a loss of more than $107,000 in revenue, according to the budget CWC BOCHES has proposed for fiscal year 2026.
“With such a significant reduction in funding, it will be necessary to stop offering one free ACT test to Fremont County students,” Johnson said in his letter to Tyndall. “(And) if dual enrollment participation remains similar to FY25, the estimated revenue for FY 25-26 will not be sufficient enough to cover all of the costs of the Dual Credit program in Fremont County.”
10-course cap
When CWC BOCHES has experienced revenue shortfalls in the past, Johnson said the college has “absorbed the extra expenses in its general operating budget” – but this year, “other budget cuts at the college make this unsustainable,” so “it will be necessary to impose some restrictions on dual enrollment participation.”
Previously, Fremont County students were offered “unlimited numbers of dual enrollment credits,” Johnson said, but “because of declining mill levy revenue, (that) is no longer financially viable.”
Instead, CWC BOCHES now plans to offer Fremont County students up to 10 total dual enrollment courses during their high school career.
More than three-quarters of CWC BOCHES students “are only taking one or two courses a semester through dual enrollment anyways,” Johnson told the CWC Board of Trustees during a meeting this week, but “some of those students who do take three or more courses … won’t be able to just take as many as they want anymore.”
Those are the students who tend to graduate from CWC while they’re still in high school, Johnson said, predicting that “we likely won’t see a high school graduate with this limitation for the next few years … just because a lot of the students have to take a lot of dual enrollment to earn the specific degrees that they have gone after.”
“They could still get a long ways towards a degree though,” he said.
The CWC BOCHES report indicates that homeschool students tend to take the most dual enrollment courses per semester. 
Seniors who have already taken eight or more classes through dual enrollment will still be eligible to take three dual enrollment classes per semester for academic year 2025-2026, the CWC BOCHES proposal notes, but for juniors, sophomores, and freshman, “all previously taken dual enrollment courses will count towards the student’s cap of 10 courses.”
None of the proposed changes will impact concurrent enrollments, Johnson said.
The CWC Board of Trustees ratified the proposed CWC BOCHES budget for 2025-2026 during a meeting this week.
For more information, call (307) 855 2083 or email boches@cwc.edu.