Nebraska
Summer food aid program Gov. Jim Pillen at first snubbed is deemed a ‘success’ • Nebraska Examiner
LINCOLN – A federally funded summer food aid program for low-income youths — which Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen initially rejected but later accepted — wrapped up with greater-than-anticipated participation.
Nebraska officials have already signed up for next summer.
“Lots of families we’ve talked to are saying they were able to stretch their dollars longer, buy healthier foods because of these benefits,” said Eric Savaiano, food and nutrition access for nonprofit Nebraska Appleseed. “We’re really proud of our state for getting it up and going.”
Early on, state officials estimated that 175,000 students, or 80,000 households, would be eligible to receive grocery assistance through the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) program.
Appleseed, in pushing Nebraska to participate in the optional program largely funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, had estimated that 150,000 kids who qualify for free and reduced school lunches would be eligible.
As it turned out, the initiative across the state served 199,272 students, or 121,855 families, according to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services.
This program reflects our dedication to ensuring that every child has access to healthy meals, and we look forward to continuing this important work together.
– Shannon Grotrian, Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services
Under the Summer EBT initiative, each qualifying child receives a card to be used like a debit card loaded with a total of $120 in grocery-buying benefits. The effort, administered by DHHS in partnership with the Nebraska Department of Education, is designed by the federal government to provide access to nutritious food during summer months when school is out.
Nebraska’s participation translated into the distribution of nearly $24 million in grocery benefits, the state said.
Shannon Grotrian, director of the DHHS Office of Economic Assistance, said officials are “thrilled with the success” of the program she said has made a “significant impact on our communities.”
“This program reflects our dedication to ensuring that every child has access to healthy meals, and we look forward to continuing this important work together,” said Grotrian.
The summer food program drew extensive attention after Pillen balked late last year at opting into it, describing Summer EBT as a leftover from the pandemic that he said was now over.
He later added that he didn’t believe in “welfare,” which prompted more criticism.
Pillen ultimately reversed his stand on accepting the youth-focused food aid.
He added a twist when implementing the program, which state officials dubbed the “Nebraska way” of providing additional outreach that connected families with other resources as well.
The DHHS said the outreach led to about 5,000 referrals for Nebraska families in need of help with utility payments, health care, child care assistance and behavioral health resources.
About 2,000 families were referred to a separate and supplemental food service program, operated by the Nebraska Department of Education, in which kids visit community sites that offer free meals. A total of 6,650 families were provided meals in 2024 through that Summer Food Service Program, DHHS said, a 21% increase from the previous year.
Federal rules for the Summer EBT program called for benefits to be used within 122 days of issuance via the cards — or they’d be expunged and returned to the federal government.
Savaiano suspects that a better system of “getting the word out” contributed to higher than expected participation in the summer program.
He credited the state for its efforts, which also included informational websites.
The state more recently sent out letters notifying families of expiration dates as they approached.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
GRAND ISLAND, Neb. (KSNB) — Children across Nebraska can get free meals during the summer months through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program.
The Olinger family is one of many families getting free meals while school is out. Mikayla Olinger said the program helps save money on groceries.
“It helps a lot,” Olinger said. “Oh yes, especially with the three boys and now my daughter is starting to eat big food.”
Oscar Garcia, director of food service at West Lawn Elementary, said the community struggles with food insecurity.
“Some kids don’t know where their next meal is coming from, that’s why it’s important we meet the need in our community,” Garcia said.
The program also provides a place for children to learn new skills. One parent said it teaches children how to use a cafeteria so they are prepared when they go for the first time.
“The bonus to that is that sometimes they may run into their classmates they haven’t seen in a couple of months,” Garcia said.
Another parent said the program keeps children active.
Garcia said he has a goal for 16,000 meals to be served this year. Meals are available for any child whether they are in the school district or not.
Meal locations and dates
Free summer breakfast and lunch will be available at the following locations:
- Dodge Elementary — June 2-July 17
- Howard Elementary — June 2-June 26
- Shoemaker Elementary — June 1-June 26
- Starr Elementary — June 1-July 17
- West Lawn Elementary — June 1-July 17
- Grand Island Senior High — June 2-June 27 (breakfast only)
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Nebraska
Nebraska Public Service Commission approves controversial transmission line through the Sandhills
The Nebraska Public Service Commission on Tuesday approved a heavily disputed 220-mile Nebraska Public Power District transmission line through the Sandhills.
Commissioners were briefed that the limited scope of the vote wouldn’t stop the so-called R Project, but only delay it. It passed by a count of 3-1, with one commissioner present not voting.
Christian Mirch, representing eastern Douglas County, didn’t vote. Kevin Stocker, who represents Grand Island and everything to the west, voted against the project.
“I recognize that the Nebraska Public Service Commission has limited authority over transmission line projects and is not responsible for establishing Nebraska’s overall energy policy,” Stocker said, “but since this permit requires a vote from commissioners, I will state the reasons for my opposition. First and foremost, the entire project is in my district, and currently the project does not have total support from the landowners who will be directly impacted.”
Stocker said changing national energy policy and NPPD considering a nuclear power station raises questions about the $800 million R Project. He called on the utility to perform an updated assessment of the plans.
Amy Ballheh lives and ranches near Burwell. Fire sparking is a concern, and the record-breaking wildfires this spring are evidence of the risk, Ballheh said during the public comment period.
“When these lines are put up out in the middle of nowhere, the fire gets started before you can hardly see it, and then you can’t get to them because the hills are too sandy,” Ballheh said. “There’s too many low, wet grounds. It’s just very, very difficult, so that is a big concern to have it out in that grassland.”
Many landowners have not signed agreements with NPPD. Landowners cite the fragile nature of the Sandhills and how the project could endanger the whooping crane and American burying beetle.
Trent Lewis of Sherman County said the Sandhills are a key part of one of the largest grasslands in the world. He’s a co-op owner of NPPD but said the power company’s plan doesn’t add up.
“In the name of net carbon zero, [NPPD] wants to bring concrete, steel, and heavy machinery into the second-largest carbon sequestration area of the world and somehow believe that we’re making progress,” Lewis said. “Making progress for who and what?”
The Sandhills are “the Great Plains’ largest and most unspoiled grassland ecosystem,” a University of Nebraska-Lincoln article said in 2024.
The commission’s legal team said NPPD provided all the necessary infrastructure waivers with phone, internet and railroad companies nearby to move forward. Its attorney said the Public Service Commission is statutorily required to approve projects that meet requirements, like the R Project has.
This is the latest news in a 13-year case that’s heading to court for the second time, after permits were vacated following the first case in 2020.
A nonprofit called Preserve The Sandhills and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota seek a preliminary injunction in the U.S. Civil Court of Denver, where U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel named in the case are based. The Fish and Wildlife Service approved a permit application filed by NPPD, which outlined a plan to minimize harm for the endangered American burying beetle, allowing the plans to move forward.
In a statement emailed to Nebraska Public Media News in April, a spokesperson for NPPD said the project “is desperately needed to improve reliability and reduce congestion on the Nebraska grid.” The utility said it followed all legal requirements in the Fish and Wildlife permitting process.
Nebraska
Keith Jacobshagen, famed prairie painter, finds essential and eternal in endless Nebraska sky – Flatwater Free Press
Several days each week for more than 50 years, Keith Jacobshagen got behind the wheel and drove into the countryside around his home in Lincoln, to look, to experience, to think and, most importantly, to draw and paint.
“I could not stay away from going out there and being absorbed into the space and the light and the landscape,” he said. “So it was a real lure to me that was strong.”
Unlike other landscape artists who capture obvious scenic glories of crashing ocean waves or snow-crested mountains, Jacobshagen has devoted his life to depicting what much of the rest of America calls flyover country and ignores: cornfields, treelines, grain elevators and vast, unimpeded skies.
For decades, he has been one of Nebraska’s best-known artists with works featured in scores of exhibitions across the state and the U.S. He has gained renown nationally as a chronicler of the Great Plains, with work featured in two influential museum shows that traveled the country.
“I really regard Keith as the most significant Plains or prairie painter today or then,” said the
exhibition’s curator, Joni Kinsey, “and he seemed to be doing more monumental works, and I don’t mean in terms of size but in terms of significance, that were truly in the category of sublime. His work just stood out.”
Now 84 years old and in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Jacobshagen is facing the reality that his painting days are largely behind him.
He is content to look back at what he calls a very satisfying career in which he produced more than 2,000 paintings, not to mention hundreds more drawings and original prints.
From May 15 through Aug. 16, he will be spotlighted in a solo show, “The Shape of the Prairie,” at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Mo. And the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney is tentatively planning a Jacobshagen retrospective in 2027 that curator Karissa Johnson hopes will tour at least regionally and include an accompanying scholarly catalog.
Jacobshagen’s works have a singular look – a low horizon line with sometimes only loosely delineated features across the landscape and big, sweeping skies – delicate white clouds against a panorama of blue or the orange and slate gray of a sunset turning into night.
“Once you see a Jacobshagen, you wouldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s work,” said David Cateforis, a professor of art history at the University of Kansas. “He has a very distinctive style.”
The elevated point of view came from being a pilot. When he was in his teens, the Wichita, Kansas, native learned to fly from his father, who was a test pilot for Boeing during World War II.
As an adult, Jacobshagen would sometimes rent and fly planes and gliders around Lincoln for fun.
“Every time I’d get back in one piece,” he said, “I just felt grateful for getting to do that, to mix both my affection for the landscape in terms of drawing and painting in it and in terms of flying over it.”
Although Jacobshagen’s landscapes are rooted in specific times and places, his skies often verge into abstract-expressionism, with his gestural, free-spirited deployment of color and patterns.
In previous eras, landscape artists often felt compelled to fill up their compositions, but in keeping with her notion of “plain pictures” with its clever dual reference to the Plains and uncluttered scenes, Kinsey, a professor emerita in art history at the University of Iowa, argues that Jacobshagen avoids that approach.
“He’s got maybe grain elevators or other structures,” she said, “but they are so tiny that they don’t dominate, and what he allows to dominate is the vista – the flat horizon and sweeping sky, and definitely there is almost a kind of (Mark) Rothko effect.”
While he certainly knows well the centuries-long history of landscape painting, Jacobshagen has always made a point of keeping up with the ever-changing pulse of the art world. For years, he’d spend a week or two each summer in New York City viewing dozens of gallery and museum exhibitions.
It is this balance of past and present, of abstraction and realism, that gives his pieces a contemporary quality.
But Cateforis believes that like the great 18th- and 19th-century English landscape painter John Constable, the Nebraska artist is of his time but also manages to transcend it. “There is a sense of something that is kind of essential and eternal that Keith is finding in these humble Midwestern landscapes,” the art historian said.
Jacobshagen was born in Kansas in 1941 and has spent his entire life within a three-state area, nearly all of it in the Great Plains, the vast region of grasslands that stretches from Canada all the way south to Texas.
He first fell in love with the Plains landscape as a child, when he peered out the car window as he rode with his mother to airfields outside of Wichita to pick up his father from work. “There was something magical about what was around me that I somehow knew as special to me,” he said.
He went on to earn his bachelor’s degree from the Kansas City Art Institute and his master’s degree at the University of Kansas, where he studied with Robert Sudlow, a noted landscape painter who Jacobshagen called a “huge influence.”
The two would venture into rural areas around Lawrence and set up their easels 10 to 25 feet apart. He vividly recalls Sudlow yelling out in excitement as a change in light or some other natural phenomenon was occurring: “Geez, look at that blue!”
Jacobshagen would continue this practice throughout his career. He traveled into the landscape as often as five days a week, depending on his schedule at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he taught from 1968 through his retirement in 2008.
Before heading out in the morning, he would sit with a cup of coffee and look over aeronautical charts he used for flying or regular road maps.Sometimes, an intriguing town name like Rokeby or Saltillo or an unusual arrangement of a group of lakes would catch his eye. “Those kinds of things lured me out there like the sirens,” he said with a laugh.
He sometimes brought an easel with him, painting for two or three hours at whatever site he’d chosen and roughing out perhaps half of a composition. Then he’d finish it in his studio, relying on Polaroid photos he had taken at the same time and his memory.
Other times, he used orange, 5-by-7½-inch engineering notebooks to make sketches or jot down notes about the weather conditions or time of day, factoids that can sometimes even be found written in small letters along some of his drawings and small paintings.
“So, there is a specificity to his work at the same time there is a universality to it, and that again adds interesting layers of complexity,” Cateforis said.
For Jacobshagen, just taking in the landscape was as important as the final art work. “Being out there and absorbing the light and the temperature and the lovely sounds that go on out there and the terrific smells of a freshly turned field,” he said. “There is nothing better.”
Many of Jacobshagen’s drawings and paintings are small, but he has created larger-scale works as well, including “Crow Call (Near the River),” a twilight scene that measures about 4 feet tall and 6½ feet wide.
That panoramic piece was acquired in 1991 by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., and it was featured for a time on a postcard available in the institution’s shop.
It is not on view now but has hung in a place of honor in the museum director’s office since 2018.
“I got very charged up when I made that painting,” the artist said. “I made a lot of personal discoveries about how I was thinking of the process of painting.”
The big question surrounding Jacobshagen is legacy. In addition to his many exhibitions, he was represented by several New York galleries, including the prestigious, now-defunct Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, and he has works in more than 50 museum and corporate collections across the country.
But is that enough for him to be remembered in 50 or 100 years?
“I hope so,” Kinsey said. “I definitely hope so, because I think he has been all along one of the more astute artists of this distinctive landscape, and there are not a lot of them.”
It doesn’t help that Jacobshagen was not included in a 2019 book titled “Landscape Painting Now,” which featured more than 80 artists, or that his works are not in the collections of major museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York or Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Also working against him are the art world’s continuing coastal biases and lack of understanding and appreciation of the Plains landscape. That’s something that the influential 1996 show “Plain Pictures” strived to counter. Jacobshagen’s work was included in the exhibition, which opened at the University of Iowa Museum of Art and traveled to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and Omaha’s own Joslyn Art Museum. One of Jacobshagen’s paintings was featured on the cover of the show’s catalog.
But the reality remains: Landscape painting has never been at the forefront of 20th or 21st century art.
What’s not in question is the mastery of Jacobshagen’s work itself, which Cateforis believes has the transcendent quality that can match the great Dutch masters. “There is a sense of calm and serenity but also a sense of supreme accomplishment in the way he renders the sky, the land and the elements of the landscape,” he said. “There is a quiet assurance in the work.”
While the upcoming show in St. Joseph and the other planned by the Museum of Nebraska Art are important, what would significantly help Jacobshagen’s chances for a more lasting place in art history is a touring retrospective organized by a larger, more prominent institution.
That may happen, or it may not, but the artist himself professes to give little thought to his legacy.
He is sure of one thing: He has no regrets.
“Oh, no, none,” he said without hesitation. “I am content.”
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