CASPER, Wyo. — Children’s Hospital Colorado hosted the Wyoming Pediatric Mental Health Symposium, a first-of-its-kind event designed to shine a light on adolescent mental health in Wyoming and beyond.

The event, which took place over a two-day period May 13 and 14, was “designed for mental health, school, and healthcare professionals seeking to deepen their expertise in pediatric mental health,” according to a brochure from the hospital.

According to the FDA, pediatrics cover those ages 0-21, and that’s exactly who mental health professionals who attended the symposium wanted to reach. Professionals across a wide spectrum gathered at the Best Western Downtown to learn more about counseling and crisis centers, schools, hospitals, primary care practices and outpatient services. They received clinical updates and engaged in discussions regarding current, evidence-informed issues that impact the care of pediatric patients and mental health needs.

And, according to the professionals, there are a lot of mental health needs in Wyoming.

“We’re here to work with folks in Wyoming about pediatric mental health concerns,” said Sandra Fritsch, MD, MSEd, DFAACAP. “May is mental health awareness month, so what a great two days to be here to talk about that during this time, as well as the challenges for access to care for pediatric mental health that exists nationally.”

Fritsch said the goal she and her peers had was to increase knowledge and awareness for everyone who attended the conference, whether they work at a school or a hospital or are a community health worker. She said she wanted to foster a commitment in the community to have real, open conversations about pediatric mental health.

Geographic densities are big reasons that mental health assistance is so hard to find in Wyoming, Fritsch said. However, they’re not the only reasons.

“I think awareness and then knowing the resources you can tap into is really important when it comes to pediatric mental health,” she said. “I do think that we need to have a dedicated approach to increasing the workforce, and that’s the workforce of everyone, whether it be a community health worker who can do screenings, therapists who can be in schools, traditional therapists, child psychiatrists or psychiatric nurse practitioners who can help assess and treat. I think building workforce is something that’s really essential.”

Fritsch said that the suicide rate in Wyoming is staggering, especially for youth, but the pandemic reminded people about the notion of mental health and its importance among the community.

“It actually created awareness and opportunities for a conversation that more people are willing to engage in,” she said. “And the other thing, too, is the notion of putting the head back on the body. Looking at the whole being is really important, and seeing more of that from a prevention and early intervention standpoint, that’s what I would love to see a lot more of.”

Early prevention in adolescence, Fritsch said, begins with parents.

“How are we working with families before they’re even having kids?” she asked. “Being a parent is the hardest job in the world. It’s an apprenticeship program. It’s trial by fire. You think you’ve got it straight with one kid and then you get the next one and it could be completely different. So how do we help support that as well?”

Fritsch said there are no simple solutions, but there there are things people can try.

“One thing I would want is for families to have plans for how they’re together and when they’re together, how they’re off screen, etc.,” she said. “So family meal times, family activity times, things like that. And working on ensuring good, quality sleep I think is really important for all concerned, from that standpoint.”

She also said it’s important to help caregivers meet kids where they’re at developmentally.

“It’s about understanding that and promoting positive success and celebrating those successes and moving forward from that standpoint,” she said. “The other thing, too, is earlier identification and treatment for mild to moderate conditions. You can have anxiety as a preschooler. It’s different than what it looks like as an adult, but being able to address that may offset that depression you would otherwise have when you’re a teenager.”

Fritsch herself spoke at the symposium, heading a talk called “Assessment and Treatment of Depression in Pediatric Primary Care.” The following day, she gave a talk called “Putting Evidence Into Practice: Approaches for Pediatric Anxiety and Trauma Related Disorders.”

Both of these presentations offered insight into mental health needs across Wyoming, Colorado and the entire country.

“I just want people to have an awareness of the breadth of what our understanding of mental health is for the youth population,” she said. “How it can play out in the school setting, how it can play out in the primary setting, how it can play out in the community. And then I want to bring that information back to where they’re at and come up with some commitments to how they way want to do things differently based on what they’ve learned.”

For more information on pediatric mental health, visit www.childrenscolorado.org/.

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by Angus M. Thuermer Jr., WyoFile

Thousands of acres southeast of Cheyenne owned by and associated with U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis lie in the path of Microsoft’s planned data center expansion, Laramie County property records show.

One of Microsoft’s existing data centers — a climate-controlled warehouse of computers, data storage and networks — sits southeast of Cheyenne on land the company purchased from the Lummis family in 2021. In April, the Seattle-area tech giant announced plans to buy 200 acres adjacent to its data center in the Bison Business Park and said it will purchase another 3,000 acres nearby.

Lummis, members of her family and companies associated with them own about 6,000 contiguous acres that almost surround the Microsoft center. Microsoft displayed a map Thursday at a Cheyenne community information session showing its 3,200-acre expansion extending into that Lummis family property.

Microsoft’s pending purchases land at the doorstep of one of tech’s biggest supporters in Congress. Lummis, known as the crypto queen of the Senate, has sponsored at least five significant cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, blockchain, stablecoin and tech bills. Political action committees associated with her received $1.34 million, including from major cryptocurrency and tech interests, since Dec. 31, 2021 and July 2025, WyoFile and reporting partner the Sunlight Research Center have found.

Microsoft and members of Lummis family — the senator, her brother Doran and daughter Annaliese Wiederspahn — would not comment or agree to interviews about the development or their relationship to the project. The senator’s family has owned much of the expansion property for decades — some dating back to 1944 and before — and has a long history of ranching, real estate transactions and business operations in and around Cheyenne.

Wiederspahn is a board member of Cheyenne LEADS, a corporation dedicated to area economic development, including data centers.

Microsoft’s land-buy announcement comes as Cheyenne is quickly becoming a data-center hub — the city is weighing proposals for 40 to 70 new data centers, according to some estimates — amid questions among area residents about water and energy usage, plus sweeping changes to the landscape. Those concerns prompted the Cheyenne City Council to consider a moratorium on new data centers, but local officials ultimately voted against such a measure.

Lummis has heard those queries, she wrote in a September op-ed.

“During my travels across Wyoming, countless folks have approached me about AI and the data centers coming to our state,” she wrote. “I tell them the truth: If we don’t power America’s AI with Wyoming energy, China will build their AI dominance on their coal instead.”

Abundant energy and land

Data centers are large, climate-controlled warehouses that contain computers, data storage and networks — used by Microsoft to establish and maintain the Microsoft Cloud, where data is kept. “[Y]ou can store your photos, play Xbox games, video call with your family, and work on documents from anywhere and on any device, without needing a powerful computer,” the company explains.

While some data centers focus on storage, others focus on providing the computing power to operate artificial intelligence. Those servers can also be used for bitcoin mining. 

Wyoming’s coal and potential nuclear power generation are a plus for energy-hungry data centers and AI, Lummis has stated. Wyoming’s cool climate and lack of corporate business tax also fuel data center development near Cheyenne. The state’s open land is another plus for data center development — and Lummis and her family own a lot of it.

Microsoft established its existing data center southeast of Cheyenne on 249 acres of Lummis-family land in the Bison Business Park in 2021, a subdivision created through a fast-track planning process. Arp and Hammond Hardware Co., whose president is Lummis’ brother Doran Lummis, carved out an adjacent 200-acre parcel in April 2025, a year before the tech company announced its intent to expand there.

Beyond that, Lummis’ family owns almost all the surrounding land — about 6,000 acres of it — including property mapped for purchase by Microsoft and displayed at Thursday’s open house in Cheyenne. The sprawling holdings, most of which are unirrigated rangeland, are owned by Lummis family companies Arp and Hammond, Lummis Livestock Co., Old Horse Pasture Inc. and Sweetgrass Land Co., Laramie County property records show.

The expansion, Microsoft said in an April statement, will be “strengthening Southeast Wyoming’s role as a growing hub for technology-driven economic activity, innovation and job creation.”

Crypto Queen

Lummis, elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives in 1979 at 24, was the youngest woman to serve in the Legislature. Voters then elected her to the state Senate, Wyoming treasurer and, in 2008, as Wyoming’s lone U.S. representative. She won election to the Senate in 2020, defeating Democrat Merav Ben-David with 73% of the vote.

Lummis announced in December she won’t seek reelection this year.

While in the Senate, Lummis has advocated for and sponsored legislation boosting cryptocurrencies — virtual money like bitcoin and stablecoins — and supported technology innovators, artificial intelligence and blockchain.

In 2021, “I founded the Financial Innovation Caucus to educate my fellow senators about the vast potential of emerging technologies to promote financial inclusion and build new wealth for all,” she said in a statement that year.

In December 2022, she placed her shares of Microsoft (valued between $15,000-$50,000) and bitcoin (valued between $50,000-$100,000) in a blind trust “to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance of any such conflict.”

Details about the land sale, including the price, have not been publicly disclosed.

This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.

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