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Safe haven laws are designed to save young infants from being abandoned in unsafe public settings such as dumpsters and bathrooms. In July 2008, Nebraska enacted a safe haven law. [...]

Since 1987, the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program (ADAM--formerly known as the Drug Use Forecasting Program) has documented the prevalence and type of arrestee drug use across the nation. Unfortunately, this research is limited to urban or metropolitan areas, possibly because of presumed low levels of both crime and drugs in rural areas. The purpose of this paper is to present the importance of researching arrestee drug use in rural areas using data collected from the Rural ADAM Pilot Program. Specifically, this study examines the prevalence and type of arrestee drug use in four rural Nebraska counties and compares these results to those found in Omaha, Nebraska, which is a current ADAM site. Results indicated that arrestee drug use is similar to that in urban areas and the type of arrestee drug use varies across rural counties as well as between rural and urban areas. Most importantly, rural arrestee methamphetamine use appeared to exceed Omaha arrestee use in one rural area. These findings have substantial implications for planning at the local, state, and federal levels.

Community satisfaction has often been linked to the level of satisfaction with a community's infrastructure, job opportunities, and social support networks. Yet most empirical analyses of community satisfaction have focused on only one aspect of the available theory to predict community satisfaction. In this paper we integrate multiple models to analyze community satisfaction of almost 4,000 rural Nebraskans. The integrated model indicates that social ties may have a greater role in predicting community satisfaction than had been thought previously.

The issue of language within the United States continues to be a matter of contention. Southwestern states, such as Arizona and California, currently wrestle with matters of English as the official language and setting limits upon bilingual education. Plaintiffs and defendants in court cases will communicate emotionally, forcefully and articulately, before the bench and in the public media, defending the moral and constitutional aspects of their beliefs. In these exchanges, the management of symbols most assuredly will be utilized to provide legitimacy. These are not the first incidents relating to language concerns and the manipulation of symbols. During and after World War I, the war to 'make the world safe for democracy,' the issue of state sanctioned language was already being considered. This study will examine the issue of language, and the use of three classifications of symbols - myths, metaphors and scenarios - to evaluate the paradoxical attitudes and actions of the Nebraska State and County Councils of Defense during an era of perceived crisis., INTRODUCTION Symbols have been utilized to furnish explanations within settings of social tension (Cohen, 1969), to make confusion comprehensible and to provide action in uncharted and seemingly unchartable terrain (Ortner, [...]

During the decade of the 1980s Nebraska restructured its social service (welfare) delivery system. Prior to the change, administrative responsibility for many social service programs was shared between the state and county governments. The restructuring brought the entire program under state administration. A primary reason for this policy change was to eliminate administrative inconsistencies evident in the decentralized structure. This article utilizes 1980 and 1990 data on the distribution of Food Stamp and AFDC program expenditures in Nebraska to analyze the impact of the restructuring on expenditure distribution. The results indicate that expenditures were more equally distributed and that arbitrary decision making was reduced when social service administration was centralized., Welfare reform has been a popular topic in political circles for the past several years. There are many dimensions to the debate but one of the more durable themes has [...]

This paper describes Nebraska's six-year experience with a successful prevention program to form and maintain local drug-free youth groups. More than 4,500 youth were involved at the time of a six-year evaluation survey. Nearly 91% of group members who responded reported being alcohol-free in the previous 30 days and almost all (97%) reported being tobacco-free. Thirty-eight percent of members met one or more of the federal criteria for 'high-risk' youth. Sixty-eight percent of responding high-risk youth who previously used alcohol credited group membership with helping them quit or reduce use. The program appears to assist in delaying onset of alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use for youth in the program, and to assist in decreasing or eliminating use of alcohol and tobacco by adolescents who used before participating. (J Sch Health. 1995;65(2):49-53), Adolescent alcohol and other drug use continues to be a primary concern for schools and communities across the nation. The most recent national 'Monitoring the Future' survey indicates high school [...]

Gov. Dave Heineman (R) 'has signed two landmark abortion bills into law that both sides of the abortion debate say are firsts in the country. One bars abortions at and [...]

In the face of the great nationwide push for standardized testing, Nebraska has established a system that relies on local educators to design their own assessments. Ms. Roschewski reports on [...]

The Nebraska STARS plan is ambitious; it is idealistic; it is the right thing to do for the right reasons to get the right results, the authors maintain. Decisions about [...]

According to a recent Associated Press report in the Lincoln Journal Star, Nebraska corrections Director Harold Clarke said prison officials could use one jolt of electricity to execute death row [...]

An increasing number of people in the rural region of Nebraska feel that the campuses close to their house are not getting the required attention which the core of the state's public education system, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, is never short of. As a result of the newly acquired powers of the state's Coordinating Commission for Post-secondary Education, there are plans foot to cater to such deficiencies. One plan is to broader the missions of community colleges, several of which have traditionally been centered around technical and career coaching. Another plan is to reexplore the utility of remedial courses.