The Wyoming state board of education voted on March 17, 2015, to return to the task of adopting new science standards, according to Wyoming Public Media (March 17, 2015) — but a proposal to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards outright was rejected.
Instead, the board will reconvene a committee of science educators which, after eighteen months of review, recommended the adoption of the NGSS in 2014. "The group will be asked to consider new information" before making a new recommendation.
The board was previously forbidden, by a footnote in the state budget for 2014-2016, to use state funds for "any review or adoption" of the NGSS. The treatment of climate change in the standards was cited as the reason for the footnote.
The legislature's blockage of the NGSS was widely condemned by the state's scientists, educators, and newspapers, and the board eventually declined to develop a new set of science standards independent of the NGSS.
The footnote was repealed in March 2, 2015, when House Bill 23 was signed into law. The new law directs the board to "independently examine and scrutinize any science standards proposed or reviewed as a template" for Wyoming's state science standards.