Wyoming can be an ideal state in which to complete a high school education and earn a traditional high school diploma. The state's extraordinary natural beauty and recreational opportunities combine with a strong commitment to families and personal development to spur investment in high school programs. But even in Wyoming, high school disciplinary and academic progress issues can arise, threatening your student's advancement and graduation. Don't let high school misconduct charges and academic issues ruin your student's development, school record, and future opportunities. The Lento Law Firm's premier Student Defense Team is available in Cheyenne, Casper, Gillette, Laramie, Rock Springs, Sheridan, Evanston, Green River, Riverton, Jackson, Cody, and any other Wyoming location for your student's sensitive, strategic, and effective defense of high school disciplinary charges. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now for the attorney skills, experience, and highly qualified representation your student needs for the best outcome to Wyoming high school misconduct and academic progress issues. Your Wyoming high school student's future is worth preserving and protecting.
Wyoming High School Opportunities
Wyoming has many fine high schools in which to earn a traditional diploma, on time and with age peers. Those programs include the Jackson Hole High School, Cokeville High School, Sheridan High School, South High School, East High School, Powell High School, Kelly Walsh High School, and Lander Valley High School, among many others spread across the gorgeous state. Wyoming also has many large and fine school districts, including the Laramie County School District, Albany County School District, Sweetwater County School District, Teton County School District, Washakie County School District, Lincoln County School District, Campbell County School District, Sheridan County School District, Carbon County School District, Crook County School District, Fremont County School District, Converse County School District, Platte County School District, and Goshen County School District, to provide the funding, resources, and support that high school students need to meet their educational goals and complete the program. Our attorneys can help your student make the most of that high school education, protecting your student's educational and vocational opportunities.
Wyoming High School Parent Commitments
Our attorneys know that you take seriously your commitment to parent your Wyoming high school student appropriately. Parenting a high school student isn't always easy. It can take grit, perseverance, discernment, and judgment. When your student faces Wyoming high school disciplinary charges, sound and effective parenting can also require swift, sure, and confident action. Your student may appear mature but is still developing and lacks the judgment and experience of an adult. Your student needs you to be involved in the Wyoming high school disciplinary matter or academic progress issue your student faces. Thank you for your guidance, resources, insight, and judgment. Your student's school officials also likely want you involved, even if they disagree with some aspects of your advocacy for your student. They may, for instance, blame your student for your student's struggles, even though the school itself may be largely or partly responsible and, whether responsible or not, may need to take its own appropriate action to meet its legal and moral obligations. The best step you can take to fulfill your parental commitments and to preserve the hope, dreams, and ambitions that both you and your student have for your student's education and future are to retain our highly qualified attorneys.
Wyoming High School Discipline Impacts
Long Term Discipline Impacts
Make no mistake: Wyoming high school discipline can have long term impacts on your student's development and opportunities. Beware those impacts. Consider them when determining how to proceed with your student's serious disciplinary or academic progress matter. Your student may dream of attending a fine Wyoming college or university like the University of Wyoming, Wyoming State University, Wyoming State College of Science, Minot State University, Maryville State University, Medcenter One College of Nursing, University of Jamestown, Dickinson State University, Dakota College at Bottineau, Bismarck State College, Valley City University, Williston State College, or the University of Mary, or an equally fine and competitive out-of-state school, perhaps your own alma mater. Or your student may dream of pursuing a preferred vocational training program, internship opportunity, military academy or service opportunity, and other educational and career opportunities. Yet any preferred and competitive opportunity that your student hopes to pursue may well refuse admission in favor of candidates without discipline on their high school record. Watch out for the long term impact of Wyoming high school discipline. Let us help your student avoid those impacts and proceed instead to graduation with a clean school record.
Short Term Discipline Impacts
Watch out for the short term impacts on your student of Wyoming high school discipline, too. Your student is likely already embarrassed, chagrined, and concerned about the matter, perhaps enough to self-isolate and withdraw from studies and school relationships. Even an absence of a few days can have a prompt impact on your student's academic progress, compounding the high level of stress and anxiety that your student may already be feeling. High school students in Wyoming and nationwide often depend on peer relationships and school routines for their steady development, without which they can languish, giving into temptations and succumbing to poor personal discipline and habits. If your student's discipline results in loss of social privileges, sports team participation, club privileges, and honors, awards, and class rank, your student may further withdraw. Let us help you communicate, advocate, and negotiate with your student's Wyoming high school officials so that your student can keep up with studies while favorably resolving disciplinary or academic progress issues.
Wyoming's High School Discipline System
Wyoming's legislature, like legislatures in other states, has enacted school discipline laws. Those laws both govern certain student conduct in the state's high schools and authorize the Department of Education, school district, and high school officials to adopt and enforce additional disciplinary rules. Wyoming Statutes Section 21-4-308, for instance, expressly authorizes local school district boards to adopt student discipline rules to punish “insubordination, disobedience, and other misconduct,” as the district defines. Wyoming Statutes Section 21-4-305 expressly authorizes school district boards or their designees to suspend and expel students who violate school policies and rules, provided that the district first provides the student and parents with due process. The statute details the notice and form of hearing the district board must provide. While the district board may adopt policies for other disciplinary grounds, Wyoming Statutes Section 21-4-306 lists the following specific grounds for student suspension or expulsion:
- “continued willful disobedience or open defiance” of school authorities;
- “willful destruction or defacing of school property” during the school year or on vacations;
- behaviors that are “clearly detrimental to the education, welfare, safety or morals of other pupils”;
- “torturing, tormenting, or abusing ... or in any way maltreating” students or teachers with physical violence;
- “overt behavior willfully initiated by a student causing disruption” of the classroom or other school operations; and
- weapons possession on or about school grounds, school buses, or school activities.
You can see the broad authority that your student's Wyoming school district and high school officials have to determine the grounds on which to impose severe discipline on your student. Let us help you and your student defend any such charges for your student's best disciplinary outcome.
The Wyoming State Board of Public School Education
While local school districts and high school officials have the primary responsibility for student discipline, the Wyoming State Department of Education also plays a high-level role. Wyoming Statutes Section 21-2-201 entrusts supervision of the state's high schools to the state superintendent of education as the head of the Wyoming State Department of Education. The next statutory section grants the Department of Education the power to make school rules, including rules for student discipline. Under that authority, the Department of Education has promulgated rules limiting the use of restraints and isolation for school discipline. Other Department of Education rules, regulations, and procedures may come into play relating to your student's Wyoming high school disciplinary matter. Our attorneys can help you and your student put those rules and procedures to the best strategic advantage in the most favorable resolution of your student's matter.
Wyoming Local School District Authority
You've already seen above that under Wyoming Statutes Sections 21-4-305 and 21-4-308, Wyoming's state legislature places primary responsibility for student discipline at the local school district board level, further granting the district board the authority to delegate that power to other officials. You and your student may thus deal primarily with either a district disciplinarian or with the high school principal or other high school official to whom the district board grants disciplinary powers. Wyoming Statutes Section 21-4-305 expressly requires that “the disciplinarian shall give every student to be suspended or expelled the opportunity to be heard as soon as practicable after the misconduct,” according to the detailed procedures the statute sets forth. The district or high school official with whom you deal should know and follow those protective due process procedures. Our attorneys can help you ensure that they do so so that we have the best possible opportunity to present your student's exonerating evidence and mitigating information to favorably resolve the charges.
Wyoming Local School District Student Codes of Conduct
To carry out those disciplinary duties, your student's Wyoming school district or high school will very likely have adopted a student code of conduct or other behavioral standards, typically found in the district or high school student / parent handbook. While the specifics of those local student codes of conduct can differ widely, the code governing your student's Wyoming high school conduct may look like the following examples:
- the Jackson Hole High School Student and Family Handbook contains an elaborate code of conduct, including rules for suspension and expulsion;
- the Cokeville High School Student Handbook includes many conduct rules, including a dress code, along with progressive consequences up to school suspension and expulsion;
- the Sheridan High School Student Handbook includes several pages of school discipline rules, including a progressive consequences chart; and
- the Lander Valley High School Student Handbook includes more than a dozen pages of behavior expectations and consequences up to school suspension and expulsion.
Wyoming High School Behavioral Misconduct
Wyoming high school student codes of conduct often deal primarily with student behaviors that disrupt the instructional program, endanger students, or undermine student morals. High school students can test the boundaries of permissible conduct on things like alcohol, tobacco, pornography, computer hacking or other misuse, drug use, weapons possession, fighting or horseplay, and even arson, bomb threats, and gang activity. Teachers may construe high school student conduct to be disruptive, disrespectful, insubordinate, disobedient, harassing, offensive, and even endangering or harmful. Wyoming high school students can also commit property damage or destruction, theft, vandalism, interference with fire alarms and suppression equipment, and trespass, disrupting school operations. Wyoming high school officials can treat these disruptive and endangering behaviors with severe punishments, leading to school removal and referral to a disciplinary boot camp or reform school.
Definitions of Wyoming High School Behavioral Misconduct
You've seen above that the Wyoming legislature provides only high-level definitions for student behavioral misconduct. Wyoming Statutes Section 21-4-306, for instance, authorizes student suspension or expulsion for vague actions like continued willful disobedience, open defiance, and behaviors that are “clearly detrimental to the education, welfare, safety or morals of other pupils.” Your student's Wyoming high school student handbook or other student code of conduct will very likely list the specific wrongs that may lead to behavioral misconduct charges. The Jackson Hole High School Student and Family Handbook, for instance, lists major and minor infractions, including alcohol or tobacco use, obscene or inappropriate language, tagging cars, and other specific misbehaviors. The Cokeville High School Student Handbook, for another example, lists horseplay, stealing, insubordination, and weapons or alcohol possession, among several other specific and general prohibitions. Our attorneys can help you and your student interpret and apply the governing rules while advocating and negotiating for an early voluntary dismissal of the behavioral misconduct charges.
Punishments for Wyoming High School Behavioral Misconduct
Wyoming school district and high school officials clearly have the state legislature's authority to impose a wide range of student punishments. While Wyoming Statutes Sections 21-4-304 to 308 focus on school suspension and expulsion, other discipline may include anything from a caution or warning, through reprimands and probation, to parent contact, in-school and after-school detentions, loss of athletics, social, and club privileges, remedial counseling, education, and training, restitution, and fines, and school or community service. Wyoming Statutes Section 21-4-306 requires a one year suspension for a weapons violation but permits local district officials to shorten the suspension on specific grounds. Wyoming Statutes Section 21-13-309 further provides for state funding of alternative disciplinary schools, otherwise known as reform schools or boot camps. While these alternative placements can play an important role in continuing the education of students found to have committed serious weapons, drugs, alcohol, physical violence, and other endangering wrongs, the academic performance of these alternative programs is often poor.
Wyoming High School Behavioral Misconduct Defense
Beware the severe potential punishments for behavioral misconduct. Let us help make a case in mitigation of those punishments and in favor of remedial measures that preserve your student's clean school record. Keep in mind that Wyoming high school behavioral misconduct charges are merely allegations. Charges do not necessarily mean that school officials have the evidence to back the charges up. School officials may instead expect your student to explain away the allegations with credible testimony and other evidence. Our attorneys can help you and your student gather, organize, and present exonerating and mitigating evidence. We can notify school officials of our appearance, arrange conciliation conferences at which to advocate and negotiate for early voluntary dismissal and invoke a formal hearing if necessary. If you and your student have already lost the formal hearing, our appeal may obtain a reversal. If your student has already lost the appeal, we may be able to negotiate alternative special relief through the district's general counsel.
Wyoming High School Sexual Misconduct
Wyoming high school, sexual misconduct charges, raise your student's stakes above lesser forms of behavioral misconduct. Sexual misconduct allegations can indicate to high school officials that your student is both a danger to other students and a corrupting influence. Parents and the public can pressure school officials to take swift punitive action relating to sexual misconduct allegations, even when those allegations lack credibility. Federal Title IX laws and regulations further mandate sexual misconduct prevention, protection, and punishment. Ignore those mandates, and Wyoming high school officials could lose federal school funding, damage the school's reputation, lose enrollment, and face personal civil liability. Expect your student's Wyoming high school officials to aggressively investigate, pursue, and punish suspected sexual misconduct. For your student's best outcome, get our skilled, sensitive, and strategic help in fighting those charges.
The Impact of Sexual Misconduct Discipline
Sexual misconduct discipline can carry especially severe consequences for a student hoping to move on to college, a university program, or another preferred and competitive educational or vocational training program. School and program officials may not want to risk the liability, safety, regulatory, and reputation concerns of admitting a student whose record already reflects an endangering and injurious wrong. Your student's record could prevent your student from pursuing key motivating goals and continuing to develop on a healthy path toward a flourishing life. You know the low esteem in which the public holds sex offenders. Do not let your student fall into the category or class simply through a record of school sexual misconduct discipline.
Definitions of Wyoming High School Sexual Misconduct
The breadth and reach of federal Title IX sexual misconduct definitions may surprise you. Of course, Wyoming high schools must prohibit and punish outright sexual assaults to comply with Title IX and preserve their federal funding. But Title IX also requires Wyoming high schools to prohibit and punish dating violence, stalking, and even sexual harassment that does not involve any non-consensual sexual contact. Title IX regulations define sexual harassment to include severe and pervasive words or communicative acts that foster a hostile environment interfering with equal access to education. Sexual jokes, banter, slurs, epithets, unwanted advances, requests for sexual favors, and displays of sexual images may so offend or annoy students as to lead to Title IX sexual misconduct charges. Wyoming high school student codes of conduct, like the one included in the Lander Valley High School Student Handbook, typically reference and incorporate Title IX prohibitions while designating a Title IX coordinator to enforce the provisions.
Punishment of Wyoming High School Sexual Misconduct
Punishment of Wyoming high school sexual misconduct can include an emergency suspension, even before any significant investigation or any due process hearing, to protect the putative victim. Your student could face an immediate campus ban and no-contact order. If school officials confirm the allegations, your student is likely to suffer school suspension and could end up expelled and transferred to an alternative disciplinary program. Parent and public pressure and the prospect of regulatory action and civil liability can spur Wyoming high school officials to impose sexual misconduct sanctions on less evidence than in other behavioral misconduct cases.
Wyoming High School Sexual Misconduct Defense
Title IX procedural protections, together with Wyoming state law procedures under Wyoming Statutes Section 21-4-305, ensure that our attorneys will have a substantial opportunity to present your student's exonerating and mitigating evidence before impartial decision makers for your student's best disciplinary outcome. The goal is to keep your student in school while keeping your student's school record clear of any finding of sexual misconduct and any sexual misconduct discipline. We may be able to arrange an early conciliation conference at which to present evidence, provide assurances, and negotiate alternative remedial relief like training, counseling, school service, and reconciliation. If your student's matter proceeds to a formal hearing, we can present your student's evidence while cross-examining adverse witnesses and challenging other incriminating evidence. We can also take appeals and pursue alternative special relief through the district's general counsel's office if you and your student have already lost the formal hearing.
Wyoming High School Academic Misconduct
Academic misconduct is another form of disciplinary charge that Wyoming high school students can face. Academic misconduct involves cheating, plagiarism, or some other attempt to gain an undue academic advantage. Academic misconduct does not endanger other students and, in that respect, may look like a less serious disciplinary charge. However, Wyoming high schools must protect the integrity of their instruction and their reputations, which academic misconduct undermines. Academic misconduct can look especially bad on the record of a student seeking to gain admission to a preferred and competitive college or university program. Beware of academic misconduct charges. Retain our attorneys to fight the charges and preserve your student's good academic standing and clean record.
Wyoming High School Academic Misconduct Definitions
Wyoming high schools can take varying approaches to defining academic misconduct. Some student codes of conduct do not define academic misconduct, instead only mentioning cheating or plagiarism broadly, without specific examples. The Sheridan High School Student Handbook takes that broad and vague approach to defining cheating, presumably depending on teacher syllabi and instructions to fill in the details. Other student codes of conduct define the term with reasonable detail and specific examples. The Jackson Hole High School Student and Family Handbook, for example, takes the latter approach, listing cheating, plagiarism, fabrication, and collusion as forms of academic misconduct while giving brief definitions to each form.
Factors Aggravating Academic Misconduct Charges
Wyoming high school teachers and principals may treat academic misconduct primarily as an educational issue rather than a disciplinary issue. They may initially presume that your student did not understand academic customs, rules, and conventions. However, factors can aggravate academic misconduct allegations and turn them into a much more serious matter. Those factors may include when a student is a cheating ringleader recruiting other students into the wrongs, a student cheats repeatedly and flagrantly, or a student discloses confidential exam questions and answers or otherwise destroys the substantial value of confidential educational materials.
Punishing Wyoming High School Academic Misconduct
Wyoming high school student codes of conduct, like student codes elsewhere, tend to treat a first cheating offense with in-class, teacher-only sanctions. The Sheridan High School Student Handbook is an example where a first cheating offense ordinarily warrants only loss of credit on the test or assignment. But subsequent offenses or offenses with aggravating circumstances can lead to more serious discipline up to suspension and expulsion, as the Sheridan High School Student Handbook warns. And some Wyoming high schools may treat cheating allegations more seriously from the get go. The Jackson Hole High School Student and Family Handbook, for example, lists cheating as a major offense rather than a minor offense, for which suspension, expulsion, and alternative placement may be imposed.
Wyoming High School Academic Misconduct Defense
If your student's Wyoming high school officials treat the academic misconduct charge as potentially warranting a school suspension or expulsion, under Wyoming Statutes Section 21-4-305, they must provide your student with due process protections. We can invoke those protections to present your student's explanation and evidence at an early conciliation conference, at the formal hearing, or on appeal, as appropriate. We have at our disposal forensic consultants who can analyze handwriting and electronic files to determine disputed authorship, access, and involvement. Keep in mind, too, that even if your student committed all or part of the alleged academic misconduct that, we may be able to successfully advocate and negotiate remedial measures like training and additional schoolwork, keeping your student's school record clear of discipline.
Wyoming High School Academic Progress Issues
Your student must also make the grades in order to advance to Wyoming high school graduation. Your student's issue may have to do not with alleged misbehavior but instead with alleged academic deficiencies and academic progress issues. Wyoming Statutes Section 21-2-204 authorizes the state's Department of Education to adopt content standards and hold the state's high schools accountable to ensure that graduating students meet those standards. However, students can have several reasons for their inability to meet content standards, with some of those reasons attributable not to the student but instead to the school or other circumstances beyond the student's control. Let us help you and your student advocate for your student's due relief from academic progress issues to ensure that an academic issue does not become a behavioral issue leading to disciplinary suspension and expulsion.
The Context for Wyoming High School Academic Progress Issues
One approach that our attorneys can take is to ensure that your student's Wyoming high school officials are considering their own obligations to provide fitting instruction so that your student can meet state content standards. Even if your student's struggles appear to involve attitude, motivation, and other personal issues, those issues may themselves be due to inadequate instructional support or other circumstances attributable to the school. We can help you and your student assess the school's performance, including how it accommodates and serves your student or fails to do so in respects that undermine your student's efforts, discourage your student, and lead to deficient academic performance.
Addressing Wyoming High School Academic Progress Issues
Our attorneys also have extra legal tools at their disposal to favorably resolve your student's academic progress issues. Your student's Wyoming high school has the obligation to prevent bullying, harassment, and intimidation, which can often be the cause of a student's struggles. Your student's school officials also have the obligation to recognize when an educational disability may be interfering with a student's progress and to refer that student for disability testing at school expense. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires your student's Wyoming high school to provide special education accommodations and services to students with qualifying disabilities. Let us investigate these rights to ensure that your student can overcome academic progress issues.
Premier Wyoming High School Student Defense
The Lento Law Firm's premier Student Defense Team is available in Cheyenne, Casper, Gillette, Laramie, Rock Springs, Sheridan, Evanston, Green River, Riverton, Jackson, Cody, and across the rest of Wyoming for your student's high school defense. We successfully represent hundreds of students nationwide in all kinds of school disciplinary and academic progress issues. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now to retain our highly qualified attorneys for your Wyoming high school student's best possible outcome.
