Republished with permission from AbleChild.
An article in the Wyofile describes a bill draft before the state legislature’s Select School Committee in Cheyenne, WY., that would raise class sizes and cut teacher roles and fails to address nutrition and mental health counseling issues cited as part of a 2025 court order.
The Wyoming Education Association, an educator advocacy group, sued the state in August 2022 and High school districts joined the lawsuit as intervenors in court. However, under the separation of powers, a court can declare a law unconstitutional, but it cannot force the legislature to pass a specific law—only the people’s elected lawmakers have that lawmaking authority.
Over two days in Cheyenne, a familiar parade rotated through the microphone—teachers, administrators, lobbyists, and professional organizations—telling lawmakers what must not change and what must be funded, now, forever. And like clockwork, the same pressure tactics appeared: warn of catastrophe, invoke the children, and demand that accountability be treated as “destabilization.”
Parents are watching this with a different reality on their shoulders. They’re working. They’re raising kids. They’re trying to keep food on the table and still help with homework at night. They don’t have time to attend two-day hearings or hire lobbyists. They depend on lawmakers to do the job parents can’t do from the kitchen table: resist the coordinated pressure, stop recycling the same failed approaches, and put education first.
The suggested legislation captures the political theater seen too many times before: a wave of testimony, a flurry of amendments, and then language inserted to signal “we’ll deal with this later” by adding what Sen. Bo Biteman explicitly called a “placeholder” for mental health, nurses, counselors, and related support funding, meaning the details are deferred until next summer.
Most people don’t live their lives in legislative jargon, so let’s translate that this suggested legislation is a promise without a plan, and it becomes a pressure valve that keeps the same system alive until the next spending push when mental health funding is quietly slipped in and parental rights are further stripped away.
The larger issue that Wyoming needs to face is that the behavioral health clinics in schools do not teach reading, writing, or arithmetic. Mental health counseling does not teach a child phonics and mental health therapy does not teach multiplication. A mental health referral does provide educational tools for a child to practice good grammar. Kids are starving for education, and no amount of school-based mental health clinical expansion will change that.
This is not an attack on individual counselors or teachers. It’s a refusal to keep confusing “more services” with “better outcomes.” It seems like every problem in schools become a mental health staffing proposal, drifting away from educational instruction and toward a permanent mental health service economy inside the education system with a trickle-down approach that rarely reaches the child. The result is a therapeutic nation with all the power and assets to the administrative state. And the same groups who benefit from that arrangement show up every legislative session to insist that any restraint, any oversight, any demand for proof that additional mental health services is necessary, is somehow viewed as dangerous thought.
If the state of Wyoming wants something people can believe in, it has to start with a hard line: basics first. Reading. Writing. Arithmetic. Protect instructional time. Stop turning schools into intake centers for outside behavioral health providers and drug companies that feed off a captive audience.
And if lawmakers are serious about protecting families, not just funding the mental health systems, then they also need to pass the toxicology accountability bill AbleChild testified on last session and bring it back stronger. Wyoming cannot keep expanding psychotropic pathways for children and adults while refusing to require the most basic, objective accountability when tragedy strikes: postmortem toxicology that reports actual antidepressant/psychotropic levels and metabolites so we can tell the difference between therapeutic use, toxicity, withdrawal, and dangerous interactions. That is not politics. That is public safety. Without that data, the state cannot honestly evaluate outcomes, regulators cannot identify patterns, and families are left with unanswered questions.
The recent two-day lobbying blitz that occurred in Cheyenne is exactly why the legislation matters. Organized pressure is not the same thing as public interest. Wyoming families need lawmakers with backbone, lawmakers who can look past the podium traffic and ask one simple question: “Did this improve reading, writing and arithmetic, and did it protect people from harm?” If the answer is no, then the mental health funding and the contracts do not deserve another victory lap.
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AbleChild is a 501(3) C nonprofit organization that has recently co-written landmark legislation in Tennessee, setting a national precedent for transparency and accountability in the intersection of mental health, pharmaceutical practices, and public safety.
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