News

The National Mentoring Partnership reports one in three children will go through life without a mentor. TeamMates believes all children, no matter their life experience, can benefit from a relationship with a safe, caring adult.

You don’t have to be an expert. You just have to be there. That’s why Team-Mates’ vision is to reach the gold standard of school-based mentoring programs and serve 12,000 youth by 2020.

The goal of our Harvard Chapter is to serve at least 30 children by 2020. We currently have 22 students matched with local mentors who come into the school once a week to talk, play cards and games, do crafts, and other fun activities with the students. We still have many students on the waiting list who would love to have TeamMates mentors!

Harvard’s Math Club competed at the Doane triMATHlon and UNO challenges, with several students placing.

At Doane, in the individual exam:

• Ashley Nierman - Division II - Top 10 (out of 68 Participants).

Extreme Team Challenge:

• Celina Chrisman, Aspen Binder, and Nierman - Division II - third Place (out of 18 Teams).

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No matter how you word it there is a winning team and a losing team when it comes to football playoffs.

There is a team who celebrates with their community and classmates at center field, cheering loud and proud.

There is a team who, with heads hanging low, walk off to be greeted with hugs and pats on the shoulder with a “you did good,” following behind it.

No matter how hard a team worked to get to playoffs, there’s a chance they could be the losing team who’s season ends and who’s seniors have taken their last march onto a field and into a game they’ve spent countless hours working on.

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Wages were the hot topic of this week’s Clay County Board of Supervisors.

Two departments—the Clay County Highway Department and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension Service at Clay County—met with the Board on Nov. 19, at the courthouse in Clay Center, both seeking changes to employee wages.

“We are either right at or above most of the other counties,” Tom Roemmich, Jr., County Highway Superintendent said, “but I guess my opinion is, I’d like to see Clay County above everybody.”

For the county to stay competitive in attracting and retaining employees, he suggested the Board consider if there needs to be adjustments made not only in his department but other county services.

“If we’re going to set that bar, let’s set it,” Roemmich said.

A meeting for all players interested in playing baseball for the 2020 Sutton American Legion Post #61 is set for this Sunday afternoon, Nov. 24, beginning at 3 p.m. at the Sutton American Legion.

For additional information, contact the Sutton Legion Restaurant at 402-773-5503.

The South Central Nebraska Unified School District #5 is so far excelling in an educational measure outlined by the new LtoJ system adopted by Sandy Creek and Lawrence-Nelson public schools, reported SCUD Superintendent Julie Otero to the Board of Education during its regular meeting on Nov. 18 at Lawrence-Nelson High School in Nelson.

LtoJ is an approach to teaching designed to promote a true love of learning through the 12th grade. Among its core strategies is assessing students on a weekly basis as to how much information they are retaining from key concept to key concept covered in a teacher’s cumulative lesson plans. The results of these assessments are then graphed on both individual student and classwide charts.

Education consultant Dr. Lee Jenkins revisited Sandy Creek Public Schools last week to monitor staff progress in adopting his LtoJ system of teaching.

He was previously on the Fairfield campus in September.

“Coming back makes it exciting to see what they’ve done since the last time I was here,” said Jenkins, who travels from his home in Scottsdale, AZ.

The overarching idea behind LtoJ is to shift American education away from a model that promotes cramming, and then forgetting, to an approach that creates a true love for learning through 12th grade, he explained.

“Historically, schools have thousands of ways to extrinsically motivate kids,” Jenkins said. “Intrinsic [motivation] is what they start kindergarten with. They want to learn. So our job in education is not to motivate them. It’s to maintain what they started kindergarten with.”

South Central Nebraska Unified School District #5 spent $1 million more than what it brought in during its 2018-19 fiscal year, according to an audit conducted in August.

SCUD Superintendent Julie Otero reported key findings from the audit during the Board of Education’s regular meeting on Nov. 18 at Lawrence-Nelson High School in Nelson.

“Overall, there was nothing out of the ordinary except for the NCAPS building,” she said.

Receipts for the last fiscal year totaled $15,249,366.30, Otero explained, while disbursements for the same time frame totaled $16,298,516.82. The difference in spending accounted for outlays for the Nebraska Center for Advanced Professional Studies (NCAPS) facility located on the Sandy Creek campus near Fairfield. Construction was completed in Dec. 2018.

The Edgar City Council received a positive police report during its regular monthly meeting on Nov. 12 at the city hall in Edgar.

There have been very few calls about suspected criminal activity in the community since the City hired a law enforcement officer this summer. Likewise, reports of drug activity that had fueled concerns earlier this year have dropped.

This has allowed the city’s police officer, Doug Hartman, to follow up on broken ordinances, such as issuing tickets for unlicensed vehicles sitting on the street and delivering letters to residents whose properties have been declared a nuisance.

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Ducks Unlimited has established a $30,000 endowment fund to further close the property tax gap created when land has been acquired for waterfowl conservation.

Tim Horst, Ducks Unlimited’s Nebraska land manager, of Edgar, announced the endowment during the Clay County Board of Supervisors’ regular meeting on Nov. 12 at the courthouse in Clay Center.

“It’ll help pay the difference,” he said.

Clay County has 16 designated waterfowl protection areas, totaling 6,709 acres, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Land repurposed for federal wildlife refuge is exempt from property taxes, as is the 35,000-acre federal U.S. Meat Animal Research Center situated between Clay Center, Fairfield, and Glenvil. A total of approximately 11.3 percent of Clay County’s 367,360 acres does not collect annual property taxes.