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Teachers’ union launches programs to bolster performance in students, teachers

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School bells will soon be ringing and the president of the Nebraska State Education Association is touring classrooms across the state.

During a stop in North Platte, Jenni Benson talked about efforts to launch a non-profit group to keep the educators in the state and to better develop the educators who work with our children daily.

“We started a new 501(c)(3) this past year to help with professional development, to look at the whole child and also the whole teacher,” Benson says. “We’re doing some things with kids who are struggling. We need some support systems in place to help them.”

Classroom safety is a concern of parents and residents throughout the state, and Benson stresses educators are also concerned.

“Our teachers are also our family members, they have kids in school as well or grandkids, like myself, I have seven grandkids,” Benson says. “We are concerned about the safety and security of our students, of our faculty.”

Benson says it’s vital to provide younger generations with tools outside of the classroom, whether that’s through established programs like FFA or Skills USA, or a relatively new program called Educator Rising.

“(That’s for) kids in high school saying, ‘Hey, maybe I want to be a teacher,’ and we have a lot of programs across the state,” Benson says. “It’s now a club through the Department of Ed and we have 38 chapters in Nebraska. Some of these schools are having trouble hiring teachers but why not grow your own?”

The NSEA is a union representing some 28,000 educators across Nebraska.

Thanks to Tristen Winder, KODY, North Platte

 

Property tax cut proposal almost ready to present to legislators

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John Hansen

The group Nebraskans United for Property Tax Relief is in the process of putting together a package to present to state legislators next month for their consideration in January.

Coalition member John Hansen, who’s president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, says the goal is to find a way to pay for schools while also cutting property taxes.

“Adequately funding education and providing real property tax relief continues to be a very large issue in almost all of the state legislative races,” Hansen says, “urban or rural, but especially rural.”

Hansen says the state’s tax system needs to be reconfigured because over the last 20 years, it’s shifted away from relying on income and sales taxes to property taxes.

“When we address that we’re going to need to realign some incoming sales tax,” Hansen says. “Our state needs to do that. Our state tax system is completely out of whack and disproportionately uses too much reliance on property to fund K-12 education.”

Hansen says state legislators discussed the issue this summer and made little progress.

“They’ve had one study group so far,” Hansen says. “To that extent, that was a positive, but in order to get something done, we’re going to need a lot more than ten conservative state senators.”

Hansen says his coalition will need to get the support of at least 33 legislators to overcome the governor’s opposition to their proposal.

By Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton

 

Study: Wind farms do not hurt property values

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Wind energy projects do not lower surrounding property values, according to a study being released by the Center for Rural Affairs, based in Lyons.

Center policy associate Lu Nelsen says opponents of wind power development who speak out at public meetings typically make the claim, but there’s no evidence to support it.

“There’s a lot of questions about, ‘What could this do to my property values?’ and how should that affect citing requirements,” Nelsen says. “At least if we look at some of the research that’s been done on this issue, there’s no clear link between any harm to property values and wind energy systems.”

Nelsen says other types of development often -do- have a negative impact on land values.

“It’s less from the actual wind turbine itself, it could be from other what are called disamenities,” Nelsen says. “That could be anything from if an area isn’t restored properly from construction, it could be from something entirely unrelated to a wind farm, a confined animal feeding operation or a wastewater treatment plant.”

Nelsen says local officials and wind power developers need to be clear about what will happen with any new project, especially in regards to the land’s appearance post-construction.

“Making sure you control for things like damages to roads,” Nelsen says, “to make sure there is actual restoration after construction of an area so it isn’t torn up or it doesn’t look the way it would’ve looked if there was no construction.”

The study was conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Universities of Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Thanks to Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton

 

Remains of WWII flier from Nebraska come home at last

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An American pilot who was shot down over Austria during World War Two in 1944 was finally laid to rest with family members near his Gage County home.

A military service was held Thursday at Fox Funeral Home in Beatrice and at the Filley Cemetery for Flight Officer Richard Wesley Lane, whose remains had been interred in an American cemetery, in Belgium.

It was discovered through DNA testing and other analysis that the remains brought to the U.S. and to the Filley Cemetery in 1948, were NOT those of Lane, but of another soldier.

The investigation and testing started this past January, and in April, the misidentification involving four sets of remains from a single grave in Belgium, was resolved.

Lane lived most of his life near Burchard and Lewiston, attended high school in Burchard and Pawnee City, then the University of Nebraska, before being called into the service.

He received his wings in Douglas, Arizona, May 23rd, 1944. Seven months later, his B-17 was shot down. He lost his life at the age of 22, while on his second mission.

By Doug Kennedy, KWBE, Beatrice

 

Emergency 911 service is restored to 14 counties after outage

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911 service is back online in southeast Nebraska. The system crashed on Wednesday, affecting a wide area of the region.

Beatrice Police Chief Bruce Lang, whose department houses the Southeast Communications Center, explains what may’ve happened.

“The information we have is that it was a computer upgrade to the server boxes that are housed in Lincoln that possibly caused the outage,” Chief Lang says.

Counties were affected in varying ways, by the outage. The Southeast Region includes Gage, Cass, Jefferson, Clay, Fillmore, Nemaha, Johnson, Lancaster, Pawnee, Seward, Thayer, Richardson, Nuckolls and York counties.

The outage hit the Southeast Communications Center from 4:20 a.m. until about 10:20 a.m., a six-hour stretch.

Seven counties provided an alternate phone number people could use for emergencies during the outage. Those included Gage, Jefferson, Johnson, Nemaha, Otoe, Pawnee and Seward counties.

Lang says locally, people could call the regular police department phone number to report an emergency.

“We’re always concerned that somebody didn’t get through or didn’t know about the alternate number,” Lang says. “We have not gotten any feedback yet today anyway of people that said, ‘Hey, I had an emergency and I couldn’t get through.'”

Lang says it’s possible that luck was on the center’s side and that it was just a slow day for emergency calls.

(By Doug Kennedy, KWBE, Beatrice)

 

ICE agents raid multiple O’Neill businesses, private ranch

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Several businesses in the north-central Nebraska community of O’Neill were raided Wednesday by federal immigration agents.

The targets included a restaurant, a grocery store, a private ranch and a tomato processing plant.

Governor Pete Ricketts says he was told about the raids and he was asked by reporters if the actions by federal agents in the state concerned him.

“I think one of the things the people of Nebraska are very clear about is they want law and order to be upheld,” Governor Ricketts says. “I believe that is what our federal government and Homeland Security is doing…is they’re enforcing our laws.”

The raids are part of a multi-state operation in Nebraska, Minnesota and Nevada. In total, 13 business owners and managers were arrested in the raids and over 130 workers were detained.

O’Neill schools set up a shelter in the elementary school for children whose parents were detained, some as young as infants.

(Thanks to Julie Becker-Owen, KBRX, O’Neill)

 

Gage County man faces sexual assault charges, wife is still missing

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William Kelley Junior

A man whose wife disappeared over ten years ago and has never been found, has been bound over to Gage County District Court on sexual assault charges.

47-year-old William Kelley Jr.’s wife, Ann Marie Riekenberg-Kelley, was last seen April 15th, 2008 and her disappearance remains unsolved.

William Kelley appeared for preliminary hearing in Gage County Court yesterday, where a judge found probable cause to bind him over to Gage County District Court.  He is charged with 1st degree sexual assault of a minor and 3rd degree sexual assault of a child.

The lone witness during the preliminary hearing was an investigator with the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office.

Kelley is scheduled to be arraigned on the sexual assault charges in district court, September 6th.

The charges allege that Kelley sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl when he was 36 at a residence near Filley and in a Beatrice hotel room.  The assaults are alleged to have occurred between June of 2007 and June of 2008.

Kelley was sentenced in June of 2009 to serve a total of 16 years, eight months to 20 years in prison on two counts of child abuse, two counts of being a felon in possession of a weapon, and for falsifying an application for a handgun.  His mandatory discharge from state prison happened last May.

By Doug Kennedy, KWBE, Beatrice

Weather extremes like flooding & drought are becoming more common

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Nebraska and other Midwestern states are seeing more weather extremes this summer, with many areas experiencing heavy rains that cause flash flooding followed by long periods of heat with no rain.

Meteorologist Dennis Todey, director of the USDA’s Midwest Climate Hub, says in some regions, those heavy rain showers may come more often.

Todey says, “That is something that has been noted more frequently and is potentially projected via computer models, is having larger events happening.”

Todey says part of the pattern of climate change includes more weather extremes — like what we’ve experienced this spring and summer.

“You have maybe larger periods of dryness and then you have big events after that instead of events distributed around,” he says. Todey says it’s very difficult to forecast the arrival of some storms that will bring very heavy rain.

“This is what presents this complication when you’re trying to understand precipitation,” Todey says. “Sizes of events and timing of events and trying to understand those two spatial variabilities, that more big events at different times of the year and more isolated events really confuses the situation.”

Todey says there’s growing concern those weather extremes could also apply to rapidly spreading drought conditions.

By Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton

 

Antelope County farmer fights Keystone XL route, decries federal report

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A report from the U.S. State Department says the new planned route for the Keystone XL oil pipeline would have -no- major impact on Nebraska’s land, water or wildlife.

Art Tanderup farms near Neligh on property in the pipeline’s proposed path. Tanderup says the report was written by bureaucrats far from Nebraska who don’t know the land or how it would be impacted.

Tanderup says, “They don’t come out here and walk the route, take a look at the flood plains that this would have to go through, take a look at the fields where you dig a post hole and you’re digging water all the way down.”

Written comments are being taken on the impact of the pipeline through the end of August and Tanderup says the project endangers the water supply as well as migratory birds.

“A lot of us are going to be writing comments about that and telling what a threat the chemicals in these tar sands would have once they’re unleashed,” Tanderup says.

He says one section of the pipeline would run parallel to the Elkhorn River in Antelope County.

“It’s in an area that, over the years, no farmers have built homesteads on that flood plain where the pipeline would go through,” Tanderup says. “Any leak or spill there would contaminate the river.”

The Elkhorn drains in to the Missouri River near Omaha and he says it would be very susceptible to any spills.

Tanderup is a plaintiff in the Nebraska lawsuit challenging the Keystone XL project. Oral arguments in the suit will come in October at the earliest and a decision isn’t expected for several more months.

By Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton

 

Never been to Wilber? This is the ideal weekend to Czech it out!

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Allen Brozovsky & Sheryl Kastanek

The Saline County community of Wilber is hosting the 57th Annual National Wilber Czech Festival this weekend. Activities run Friday through Sunday.

Long-time volunteer Sheryl Kastanek says the town was named the official Czech Capital of Nebraska in 1963, while the national designation came later.

“We’re not self-proclaimed. We are the Czech Capital of the USA and that was in a joint resolution between the House and the Senate,” Kastanek says. “President Ronald Reagan signed that proclamation in 1987.”

This year’s theme is “The Centennial of the Founding of Czechoslovakia 1918-2018.”

Friday’s events include a Children’s Parade on Main Street at 7 PM and community awards to honor those who have contributed their time and support to the festival.

Allen Brozovsky, vice president of the Nebraska Czechs of Wilber, says other Nebraska communities celebrate their Czech heritage, and while Wilber has the national designation, the Czech communities support each other.

“A lot of them travel not only in Nebraska but all over the country also to the Czech celebrations,” Brozovsky says. “It’s just a gathering where everyone can be a neighbor and a friend and a Czech at the same time.”

The Wilber festival typically draws more than 30,000 visitors for the three days and Kastanek says attendance has hit 50,000 in the past.

Along with polka music, the Wilber-Clatonia Alumni Band will perform. There will also be Czech food, culture and dancing.

The celebration Saturday and Sunday will include parades at 1 PM and the Miss Czech-Slovak U.S. Pageant.

By Doug Kennedy, KWBE, Beatrice