Wyoming’s High School Graduation Rates Increases to 82.4%

The Wyoming Department of Education (WDE) announced that high school graduation rates increased to 82.4% from 2020 to 2021.

This is the eighth-consecutive year of improvement from the class of 2013, where 77.6.% of students graduated.

That number has been increasing slowly each year, going up to 79.4% from 2014 to 2015, to 80.2% from 2016-2017, and to 82.1% from 2018 to 2019.

Nationally, Wyoming is slightly below the national average, which was 86% in 2019, with Iowa and Alabama at the top with 92%, while New Mexico is at the bottom at 75%.

Across the state, the WDH said 17 school districts had a graduation rate of 90% or higher this past school year.

Two of those districts, Sheridan number three and Washakie number two both had graduation rates of 100%, however, both districts only had a graduating class of eight people.

Across the state, students who were identified as American Indian had the lowest graduation rate at 52.9%, while those identified as Asian had the highest at 93%, however, those groups only consisted of 223 and 71 students respectively.

White students made up the largest demographic at 5,573, out of 7,174 total students, with a graduation rate of 84.5%, with Hispanic students representing the second-highest number of students at 1,007 with a graduation rate of 78.2%.

The Natrona County School District had a graduation rate of 80.3% in the 2020-2021 school year, compared to 81% from 2019 to 2020, 80.3% from 2018-2019, 78% from 2017 to 2018, and 79.3% from 2016 to 2017.