by Tom Rose The Shame on U.S.report has recently recommended that Congress withhold all federal child welfare funds in order to compel states to comply with child welfare laws and standards that the authors say are being violated in every state. The Children's Advocacy Institute of the San Diego School of Law in conjunction with First Star, a non-p...

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...

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 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...

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...