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...