ROCK SPRINGS — Megan Degenfelder has spent much of her tenure as Wyoming’s superintendent of public instruction talking about parental rights, transparency and accountability. In Sweetwater County School District No. 1, parents say they got the opposite.
Parents who went to the Wyoming Department of Education for help, were told they would be protected, and then watched their information come back out, twice, in an unredacted 300 page records dump that included complaints and correspondence with the State Superintendent.
How We Got Here
Sweetwater County School District No. 1 was already under statewide scrutiny by 2023, when the Willey family sued over allegations that their daughter had been socially transitioned at school without their knowledge or consent. The pressure only intensified after Kari Cochran’s fight to obtain records following the suicide of her son widened into a broader battle over transparency, accountability and how district leadership responds when parents start asking hard questions.
By August 2025, those concerns had grown serious enough that Rep. Darin McCann and other House members sent the district a letter asking for a meeting and describing what they called serious parental-rights concerns. Click here to read the full letter.
That Aug. 14, 2025 letter referenced reports of student-on-student sexual assault, questions about follow-through and communication with families, a student suicide, and a mother being denied access to records. Superintendent Joseph Libby responded by filing an ethics complaint against McCann. Speaker Chip Neiman dismissed it in December, concluding that even if Libby’s allegations were accepted as true, they did not amount to legislative misconduct.
Cowboy State Daily reported that Rachel Seppie, the wife of board member Cole Seppie, filed a complaint with WDE after a January 2024 incident involving her child in special education. Her husband later resigned from the board after what he described as “opposition, retaliation, and” an “unhealthy work environment.” The same reporting said WDE later found the district out of compliance in multiple cases, including the Seppies’, and that the district had improperly accessed confidential education records, disclosed information in a public meeting without parental consent, violated confidentiality protections, and interfered with meaningful parental participation under IDEA.
When the State Stepped In
In Complaint Case C-012-26, the Wyoming Department of Education found Sweetwater County School District No. 1 in violation of IDEA requirements in multiple respects, including failures involving student progress, access to general-education settings before supplementary aids and services were considered, and deficient prior written notices explaining district decisions. WDE ordered corrective action and said it would monitor compliance.
On Jan. 28, 2026, WDE publicly announced special monitoring of Sweetwater County School District No. 1, calling it a system-wide investigation of special-education practices scheduled for Feb. 23–27. The department said the monitoring was triggered by “recent findings of noncompliance” from official state complaints, along with concerns raised by parents, staff, and public reports. Degenfelder said at the time that “there are times when the state must step in, and this is one of those times.”
Then came the remark that appears to have changed the temperature of the entire fight. On Feb. 7, Cowboy State Daily reported that Degenfelder said WDE had “stacks and stacks” of reports and complaints from parents involving Sweetwater County School District No. 1.
From “Stacks and Stacks” to the Dump
What happened next is where this story turns from ugly to explosive.
According to Dr. Joseph Libby, in a statement given to The Open Range Record, he submitted two public-records requests to WDE, the first on Feb. 9, 2026. The second was on March 11 after a WDE employee reportedly stated in the media that many district parents had asked for a public forum with the department.
That timeline aligns with what parents were already saying publicly.
In a March 9 public comment to the school board, a parent asked whether board members had been informed, whether the request had been approved, whether the district had already received the records, who had reviewed them, and what the district intended to do with them. She also told the board that a citizen had obtained the same records and that the citizen’s copy was not redacted, adding, “I know your copy is not redacted as well.”
In a separate video transcript reviewed by Open Range Record, one parent said families had emailed WDE for guidance and that those exchanges helped expose problems in the district. Parents were told by Degenfelder’s office that their information would be protected and redacted if it ever had to be shared. Instead, pursuant to a FOIA request, a “huge file dump” was released. When a parent requested the same materials, they arrived “completely unredacted.” Her conclusion was blunt: parents who believed they would be protected were exposed instead.
A screenshot of an email chain reviewed by Open Range Record shows that on March 6, WDE’s Linda Finnerty told a parent there was no charge for the records because they had just been sent to the school district. On March 9, Finnerty wrote again asking for a phone number because “there was a mistake with the records and I need to speak with you about it.” The parent replied that she had been deeply concerned about the records and about the motive behind district leadership requesting them in the first place.
What Libby Says
In response to questions from Open Range Record, Libby said WDE “provided the district with an initial production of records followed by a subsequent production, Some of the records sent to the district did not redact student names or other identifying student information.” In a follow up email to The Open Range Record, Libby confirmed that both records requests were submitted by him.
According to Libby, “The District was not involved in the release of any unredacted records. The District was not aware that WDE had released these records to a member of the public until the public comment portion of the Board’s March Meeting.”
Libby claimed the district falls within a typical statewide range on special-education complaints and pointed to staffing, climate-survey, and academic-growth data as signs the district remains stable and improving. This statement is contradicted by the WDE’s admission that there are “stacks and stacks” of complaints.
What WDE Says
In response to separate questions from Open Range Record, the Wyoming Department of Education acknowledged that “limited unredacted information was released in violation of department policy and attributed the disclosure to human error.”
WDE said the error “was quickly identified, corrected within the online folder containing the produced documents, and communicated to recipients the day after the matter was brought to the department’s attention.”
But this isn’t accurate. The WDE released the same unredacted files to a parent who had sent a FOIA request for everything that was provided to Sweetwater School District 1.
The department also said the “personnel involved were reprimanded and stripped of their public-records duties,” and that WDE is “revisiting processes and creating a corrective action plan for the Department to ensure this does not happen again.”
Degenfelder said she also personally spoke to the family of a student whose information was not redacted.
WDE added that agencies may redact or withhold information under the Wyoming Public Records Act when disclosure would violate privacy protections, including FERPA and HIPAA.
What Degenfelder Says — and What the Law Says
At a Feb. 16 luncheon in Cheyenne hosted by the Wyoming Federation of Republican Women, Degenfelder told attendees that one of the most frustrating parts of her job was discovering that what the public, and even she thought the superintendent could do, was not always what the office could actually do, saying much of that authority lies elsewhere, including with the State Board of Education and other boards and commissions. She also spoke about the Sweetwater controversy in terms that made clear she was already well aware of the dispute and its sensitivity, telling the audience it could make her “pull my hair out” because, in her view, there was only so much the state could do.
That helps explain her public defense. It does not end the question.
Wyoming law does not describe the superintendent as a powerless bystander. Under W.S. 21-2-201(a), the “general supervision of the public schools” is entrusted to the state superintendent, who is also the “administrative head and chief executive officer” of the Department of Education. Under W.S. 21-2-202(a)(ii), (iii) and (iv), that office is charged with consulting with and advising local boards, administrators and citizens, maintaining adequate records, and enforcing the education code and administrative rules.
The Real Accountability Problem
Taken together, the responses from Libby and WDE do clarify one point: both now place responsibility for the unredacted release primarily on WDE’s handling of the records, not on the district’s public dissemination of them.
If WDE was the entity that improperly released unredacted records, then the agency charged with protecting students and enforcing the rules failed at the point where parents were supposed to be safest.
If Libby’s district requested the files in order to see what parents were saying to the state, that raises a separate but equally serious question about how secure parents can feel when taking concerns outside the district chain of command.
Multiple parents say they were never personally contacted by Degenfelder, never apologized to, and never given a direct explanation that their information had been released without proper redaction. WDE says in the statement given to The Open Range Record, Degenfelder personally spoke to one affected family.
The Chain That Keeps Breaking
And that is the larger issue this case exposes.
During debate on House Bill 157, McCann described parents who had gone through repeated channels without relief and said some were too afraid to come forward because of “payback.” WDE’s chief policy officer testified that the department receives numerous complaints but has “very limited jurisdiction,” while parent testimony argued that local processes often leave families unheard and that litigation is financially out of reach for ordinary people.
Sweetwater County may be the district blowing up in public, but the deeper question is whether it is unique at all. If parents in one Wyoming district can follow the chain from teacher to principal to superintendent to school board to the state and still come away unheard, exposed or financially punished, then voters have every right to ask how many quieter versions of the same story exist elsewhere in Wyoming.
Megan Degenfelder leads the agency parents are told to turn to when every other rung fails. Her department publicly said there were “stacks and stacks” of complaints. Her office later acknowledged releasing unredacted information in violation of policy. The district says it did not distribute those records, while WDE says it has disciplined staff and is developing a corrective action plan.
The Open Range Record will continue to update this story as developments warrant.