by Tom Rose As introduced in the first part of this series, the Shame on U.S. report, published in January 2015 has made some radical recommendations to address the national crisis of child welfare. If the Congressional committee to which it was presented follows the recommendations of this report, Wyoming may soon see a drastic decrease of federal...

by Tom Rose Wyoming's status as the only non-compliant state to the JJDPA (Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act) has recently come under scrutiny at a national level. In January 2015 the Children's Advocacy Institute presented a report entitled Shame on U.S.: Failings by All Three Branches of our Federal Government Leave Abused and Neglected...

Facing a state budget deficit, declining revenues and the desire to continue spending, Gov. Mead asked, "What constitutes a rainy day?" This thinly veiled call to raid the state's rainy day account to fund his spending priorities was ignored by the legislature. Instead, the legislature began the search for more revenues by developing a task force c...

by Stephen Klein CHEYENNE – The Wyoming House of Representatives passed Senate File 14 today with a vote of 54-6, which follows the Senate's passing vote of 26-3 (1 excused) on January 23. The bill would amend the Wyoming Controlled Substances Act to end the practice of civil forfeiture by requiring an individual to be convicted of a drug felony be...

by Wyoming Liberty Staff This article is not about Wyoming. Not directly, at least. But it is about the values that the people of this great state hold dear: freedom and self determination. Beyond our state borders - in fact, beyond the borders of the United States - a new, aggressive brand of radical socialism is on the rise. It is more radical th...

by Tom Rose I recently wrote a blog entitled Keeping Kids Out of Jail which led into an entire series including the Troubling Trend of Elementary School Arrests and finally to the Wyoming School Safety Issues That Every Citizen Should Know series. This week we return to the consideration of what can be done preventatively to keep our children on-tr...

by Stephen Klein After narrowly emerging from the Wyoming Senate Judiciary Committee by a 3-2 vote on Monday, yesterday the entire Wyoming Senate began to consider Senate File 14, which would replace civil forfeiture under the Wyoming Controlled Substances Act with criminal forfeiture. That is, instead of law enforcement being able to seize and for...

by Tom Rose The final subcommittee for the Wyoming School Safety and Security Task force is the Response, Planning and Training Subcommittee. An overview of the findings of this task force can be found in the first blog of this series and we've respectively covered the first subcommittee on School Resource Officers (SROs) and the second on Faciliti...

by Tom Rose The Wyoming School Safety and Security Task Force was initiated in early 2013 and published its recommendations on October 24, 2013. The team was "…asked to evaluate the current state of safety and security across Wyoming school districts; identify weaknesses, strengths and best practices; and to propose recommendations for improvements...

The legislature must rein in out-of-control spending demands Wyoming school districts are funded using the School Finance Block Grant Funding model. About half of the funding for these block grants comes from the state's School Foundation Program account, and the other half from local revenue sources. For the 2015-16 biennium, the state's contribut...

by Tom Rose First of all let's just state outright: school violence is genuinely terrifying for all concerned. The issue at hand is whether draconian measures as directed by the Department of Homeland Security are relevant, necessary or even beneficial for Wyoming. We began by consideration of the findings and recommendations of Wyoming Governor Me...

by Tom Rose In our recent blog on Keeping Kids Out of Jail we mentioned that revisiting the policies that led to placing school resource officers in Wyoming schools would significantly reduce Wyoming's second-in-the-nation juvenile arrest and incarceration rates. In this blog we will explore some of those policies. While policy direction appears to...

With last week's tragedy in France, it is important to pause and reflect on the importance of that most inimical of liberties, free speech. It is with fortune that America is not a regular witness to physical retaliation when dissident and unorthodox ideas are communicated. However, our national cultural and legal respect for free speech slowly dwi...

If the proponents of Medicaid Expansion get what they want, and if the SHARE Plan developed by the Wyoming Department of Health is enacted, we can - the report says - expect approximately 17,600 Wyomingites to enroll at an annual cost of $110 million. That is a cost of $6,250 per enrollee per year, or $520.83 per month. There was a point in time, n...

One of the biggest problems with tax-paid, government-provided entitlements is that government makes promises without a credible source of funding. The universal approach to entitlements is that legislators identify a problem, assume government is the best vehicle for a solution, then craft a bill, pass it into law and go home to their voters and t...

You are likely to hear two arguments — myths, really — favored by Medicaid expansion advocates. The first is that Medicaid expansion will save our Wyoming hospitals; the second is that all enrollees will have their health needs met. As for our hospitals, is true that the discounted "100% reimbursement" promised by the federal government for an esti...

It was painful to sit in December's Labor Committee meeting and listen to the Department of Health and others advocate for Medicaid expansion. This is such a terrible idea in so many ways that it is hard to know where to begin explaining what is wrong with it. We get help from Gillette's Doctor John Mansell, who is on the front lines treating patie...

Happy New Year, taxpayers! If you live in Wyoming you are probably very happy not to have to pay income taxes. Make the most of it for now - you never know when the state may find itself at a point where it needs to introduce a personal income tax. Actually, strike that. We can foresee the income tax with fairly good accuracy. Let me first stress t...

Police officers stationed at schools are generally known as School Resource Officers (SROs). According to the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), the formalized organization of SROs began in 1991 although alternative sources predate the existence of SROs by several decades. Irrespective of the history of SROs there is little d...

For months we have been investigating problems associated with troubled youth in the state of Wyoming. Recently we published a series of reports on How to Keep Kids Out of Jail. Within this series is a piece focusing on the presence of School Resource Officers increasingly in schools. An inflammatory news article appeared in the press just before C...