Throughout the 2026 legislative session, NAPE/AFSCME members have united to protect public services from drastic budget cuts. Union members won a major victory in late March, when the Nebraska Legislature voted 40-0 to eliminate a proposal that would have harmed youth in DHHS custody and led to the layoff of our members who care for them.
LB1013 was amended into LB867 by the Legislature’s Health & Human Services Committee. The bill would have changed state law to allow a proposal in the governor’s budget to take effect. The governor’s plan would have closed the Whitehall Campus in Lincoln. Whitehall youth would have moved to the YRTC-Hastings campus, Hastings youth would have moved to YRTC-Kearney, and Kearney youth would have moved to the Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility in Omaha. NCYF would have become a DHHS facility.
According to the governor’s budget proposal, the plan would have saved $7 million, but our members knew that it would have caused a cascading series of setbacks for the youth. That’s why NAPE/AFSCME members united with coalition partners from the Nebraska State Education Association and Voices for Children in Nebraska to educate Nebraska state senators on the harm that could result.
After a lunch hour press conference in Lincoln to call attention to the issue, union members contacted their senators in droves, and we encouraged senators to conduct an interim study before the next legislative session to make sure that any plan to change youth facility populations is well executed and protects the vital services our members provide to the youth.
Senators heard us loudly and clearly, and voted unanimously to eliminate the amendment from LB867. “We’re all grateful for what the senators did by examining the situation and taking time to give their opinions on that. It gave us hope since we took the time to write letters to them and speak with them,” said NAPE/AFSCME member Miranda Karn, a Behavior Health Practitioner at the Whitehall Campus in Lincoln.
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Photo credit: Chad Greene/CRG Photography