Dive Brief:

• Wyoming legislature is paying Cross and Joftus $98,500 to analyze and advise on the current structure of its education department through March 2015.  
• In April, the Joint Education Committee met to discuss power struggles between the governor-appointed Board of Education and elected state superintendent, ultimately deciding to create a task force to make recommendations on the department's structure. That task force was never created.  
• At a follow-up meeting Thursday, Rep. Matt Teeters (R-Lingle) and Sen. Hank Coe (R-Cody) — co-chairs of the education committee — went over the task force decision and announced plans to hire the consultants, who will interview stakeholders and study how other states structure their education departments.  

Dive Insight:

Something smells fishy. The fact that the creation of a task force had been decided but never came to be is compounded by the fact that two members of appointed Education Committee came up with the idea to hire a consultant. 

Rep. Matt Teeters name may sound familiar, as he is the representative who created the law halting Wyoming's ability to move forward with the Next Generation Science Standards — a plan that also paralleled the Gov. Matt Mead's opinion on the NGSS. Teeter would argue the decision has nothing to do with sides and was simply a matter of time.  "We don't have the people or the time to do [interviews]," he told the Star Tribune after the Joint Education Meeting.