LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – Being locked behind heavy metal doors can seem like the end of the line.

“With a prison sentence, you feel like everything’s shut off to you,” said Tami Fuller, who is currently serving a sentence in Lincoln’s Community Correctional Center.

However, a new program aims to make sure those doors don’t stay shut forever.

Fuller is one of more than 200 Nebraska inmates involved in the Unlocking Potential With Academic Resources and Development, or UPWARD, program. About 30 Southeast Community College instructors teach courses between the Reception and Treatment Center, Nebraska State Penitentiary, Nebraska Correctional Center for Women, Community Correctional Center and the Center for People.

The program’s administrator, SCC’s Amy Doty, experienced incarceration, and she says it was education that made all the difference in her life.

“After incarceration, instead of just kind of being in the moment and I’m feeling kind of hopeless and thinking about all the barriers that I was going to face when I went home, I was able to focus on building skills and building knowledge and becoming a better critical thinker,” Doty said.

Participants earn college credits, and some say the good goes well beyond the instruction.

“I’ve had them use my only my first name, or call me a student, which is amazing,” Fuller said. “When you’re incarcerated, you learn, everybody says your last name, not your first. So it humanizes you again, it makes you back into a real person.”

Some inmates look to the education to start a new chapter in their lives, like Jessica Whittaker, who’s currently taking a class to get her CDL.

“I anticipate that I’ll be a truck driver,” Whittaker said. “Overall, I want to be financially stable and set myself up for success.”

Some inmates are even using the opportunity to give back, like Lawrence Garner, who’s taking a communications class and wants to give speeches at juvenile facilities when he gets out, steering them away from crime.

“A lot of these kids are coming from broken homes, one parent homes, and I’d just like to maybe share my experience,” Garner said. “I’d take one, just one. Save one.”

It’s not just the students who soak in lessons.

“I’ve learned a lot from my students,” Rebecca Bartlett, an SCC instructor, said. “I’ve learned so much about perseverance and determination. I have learned so much from them about hope.”

The UPWARD program is set to expand next fall, with SCC administrators angling to tap into federal dollars to help run it.

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NORFOLK, Neb. (KTIV) – From downtown growth to new stores coming to the mall, Norfolk is touting its growth in Northeast Nebraska.

Home to roughly 26,000 people, Norfolk was recently awarded a grant from the State of Nebraska to help improve its community. The $435,000 Community Development Block Grant is being used in several ways. The most notable is the effort to add more lighting to downtown Norfolk.

“We’ve seen a lot of growth and progress over downtown in recent years,” said Mayor Josh Moenning. “And one of the things that we’ve wanted to do with that is making lighting more prevalent throughout the district to make pedestrian safety, especially at night enhanced.”

Another big improvement to the Norfolk community is a redesign of the riverfront. The city is in the final stages of the North Fork Riverfront Redevelopment project, set to open Memorial Day weekend.

“That’ll feature an 8-drop structure over a half-mile span that can be used for kayaking and tubing, with a white-water trail right in the middle of mile and a half-two mile trail that goes through Norfolk,” said Moenning. “Johnson Park, which is right next door, is going through complete renovations. There will be a new amphitheater for performance arts, an ice skating rink. new sports courts, nature playgrounds.”

New retailers are also opening at the Sun Coast mall. Kohl’s opened this week, with TJ Maxx coming soon.

Norfolk also celebrating another accomplishment after being recognized as one of the strongest towns in North America. Norfolk was voted the runner-up for the 9th annual Strongest Town Contest.

16 towns from across North America are pitted in a bracket-style contest. This competition relies on community votes. Norfolk was also recognized for the “Most Progress Toward a Robust & Responsive Housing Supply.”

”It promotes principals of fiscal sustainability, high quality of life, safe streets, walk-ability, all of those things in communities across America, Canada, all of North America,” explained Moenning. “Norfolk, as far as I know, has been the only Nebraska community in the competition since it started nine years ago so that was pretty cool to see, too.”

Norfolk came in 2nd behind Maumee, Ohio.

Copyright 2024 KTIV. All rights reserved.

Thirteen years ago, Nebraska nursing instructor Tara Spiehs Garst had to leave her job to take care of her son who was born with Trisomy 18, a genetic condition that causes multiple birth defects.

Three years later, she had a daughter who was born with the same condition. Since then, Spiehs Garst’s family has lived on a reduced income and pays thousands of dollars out of pocket for services and supplies, having to cut numerous corners. Spiehs Garst even went without a cell phone for a year, but the emotional impacts have been just as daunting.

“My people that I interact with are physicians, are therapists, my children’s medical providers, that’s who my social interaction is with because they’re my full time job,” Spiehs Garst said. “I can’t leave them to go and do other things. Somebody has to be there to take care of them.”

She is just one of 179,000 caregivers in Nebraska who face similar challenges, including emotional and financial burdens, every day.

These challenges sparked the Caregiver Tax Credit Act, sponsored by Nebraska State Sen. Eliot Bostar. The act would create a nonrefundable tax credit for caregivers that would cover about 50% of eligible expenditures used for the care of family members each year. The maximum credit is $2,000, and it is $3,000 for family members who served in the military or who have a dementia diagnosis.

This potential tax credit comes as federal and state governments are trying to solve the senior care crisis, in which the cost of care continues to skyrocket while more of the population ages. Today, there are over 53 million caregivers in the United States, as people have stepped in to care for family members who can’t afford rent at senior care centers or to pay at-home nurses.

“We’re relying more and more on caregivers and family members to provide that care because the healthcare system is bursting at the seams,” Associate State Director for Advocacy and Outreach with AARP Nebraska, Jina Ragland said. “We have a huge desert of accessibility to health services but also for having the workforce development enough to provide inside facilities.”

If passed, Nebraska would be the second state to establish a caregiver tax credit. Bostar’s bill is modeled after Oklahoma’s, which went into effect at the beginning of this year. Unlike Oklahoma’s legislation, Nebraska’s potential tax credit would not have an age requirement for eligible family members, recognizing that people of all ages receive care at home.

The non-refundable tax credit would be capped at $2.5 million, but Ragland points out that it would save the state money in the long run. According to the Nebraska AARP, family caregivers in the state provide over 168 million hours of unpaid care valued at approximately $2.8 billion every year.

“Family caregivers are the backbone of the U.S. care system, helping parents, spouses and other loved ones remain in their homes,” Bostar said during a floor debate last month. “LB 937 will help ensure Nebraskans in need or care can stay in their homes when their health is failing, eliminating the need for the much more costlier option and added emotional burden of being cared for in a taxpayer-funded nursing home.”

Although the tax credit has wide bipartisan support, it saw an unexpected roadblock during the first round of debate in late March when a handful of amendments, including a controversial dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations to crisis pregnancy centers, were tacked on at the last minute. The credit was eventually advanced and passed with a unanimous vote on the second to last day of session. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen has until Wednesday to sign it into law.

“With the baby boomer generation retiring and getting older and all of our nursing homes seemingly closing right and left, we will have to address more creatively how we take care of these folks,” state Sen. Jana Hughes said during floor debate. “Encouraging them staying at home is a very, very good thing.”

More: Caregivers spend a whopping $7,200 out of pocket. New bill would provide tax relief.

‘The backbone’

Like caregivers across the country, Sarah Rasby of Nebraska had to make financial and emotional sacrifices to take care of her 35-year-old twin sister, Erin Lewis, who went into cardiac arrest and survived an anoxic brain injury, leaving her unable to walk, speak or move her body. Rasby spent hours a day caring for her sister for three and a half years before she passed away in 2022.

“There’s just really not a lot of time for the caregivers to care for themselves because they’re giving so much of their life to the other person,” Rasby said, noting may caregivers face social isolation. “The tax credit will help them identify as caregivers, but at the same time, those in the thick of it will start feeling some more value.”

Joyce Beck had made similar financial and emotional sacrifices to take care of her husband, Jerry. Beck’s husband suffered a heart attack while he had multiple sclerosis and had to have a quadruple bypass at the age of 52. He was later diagnosed with cancer, leading Beck to retire early from her position as a hospital CEO to care for him after it spread. Jerry eventually passed away about three years ago.

Beck is “ecstatic” the caregiver tax credit passed, saying it is an acknowledgment of the sacrifices caregivers make and will relieve some of the financial burdens they face.

“I’m proud that Nebraska is the second state in the United States to pass this because it shows the rest of the country that we are compassionate, we care about our people, and we want to take care of everyone,” Beck said.

Although she’s not a caregiver anymore, Beck knows the experience all too well. She wasn’t able to return to work after her husband passed and had to collect her pension and social security early on top of paying thousands of dollars out of pocket for medical bills. Despite the financial and emotional hardships, she was honored she got to spend the last few years of her husband’s life caring for him.

“It’s so hard to watch someone pass away by inches, it’s like almost a nightmare to watch,” Beck said. “It is truly just an honor to be able to take care of someone like that and to help them every step of the way. It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do but it is the most rewarding thing you’ll ever do.”