PRAGUE — A few minutes after finishing a lesson in surveying to a group of Prague High School students, shop teacher and Principal Ray Collins sets up a wooden booth near the entrance to the gym.

After saying goodbye to her third- and fourth-graders, Chris Hampl takes a seat at the booth and prepares to sell tickets for the night’s volleyball triangular.

At the ticket booth is a stack of programs that athletic director and history teacher Kevin Behne made earlier in the day. He’s an old-timer there, having started teaching at the school in 1980. For years he was the head boys’ basketball coach, too, though he gave that up when his own kids were in high school.

That’s the way it works in a school the size of Prague’s.

Teachers are also coaches and advisers. Nearly every student is an athlete or actor or member of something.

This year, the K-12 school in Saunders County has 137 students. It’s one of the smallest schools in eastern Nebraska.

“Everybody gets a chance at a small school,” said Nicole Wiederspan, a Prague senior, who said she hopes to send her kids to school there someday.  

Come Tuesday, the school district will ask voters for another chance, too.

The school district is asking voters to approve a 60-cent levy override — the highest such override ever attempted in Nebraska.

 

Normally, school districts receive $1.05 for every $100 of assessed valuation, though the districts can hold special elections to ask voters for more money. Prague is asking for $1.65 for every $100 of assessed valuation. However, Superintendent Gene Simmons said, the board might not elect to collect the full amount.

The district’s voters overwhelmingly passed a 30-cent levy override in 2002. That override will expire at the end of the 2006-07 school year, he said. The new override wouldn’t take effect until the following academic year.  

If Tuesday’s override vote fails, it means that the 2006-07 school year likely will be Prague’s last. Already the school has looked at the possibility of consolidating with four other area schools: Wahoo Public, North Bend Central, Cedar Bluffs and East Butler. And a recent survey distributed to parents of Prague students indicated that most would likely send their kids to North Bend, 13 miles away, if Prague were to close. 

But if the override does pass, it means Prague Public Schools will continue on, at least for a little while longer.

Then it will come time again to make decisions about the school’s future.

Simmons hopes that in the meantime, the Legislature becomes more friendly to small schools, granting them more money in state aid, making it easier for them to survive.

There’s only so much you can ask of taxpayers, he said.

“What we’re really buying is time.”

Prague has been buying time since Behne started at the school.

Even then, 25 years ago, there were rumblings of consolidation.

One by one, he said, the schools Prague had long played in sports closed their doors or consolidated with other schools.

Bradshaw, Marquette, Greeley, Waterloo, Rosalie.

Prague’s problems, meanwhile, would subside, and then resurface.

“It’s like you hear that about every five years,” he said.

And after all that, Behne said he doesn’t think community members really believe the school could close. 

“It’s pretty heroic that Prague as its own entity has stayed open,” said Mark Rezac, who works at the local bank and runs the insurance company.

Rezac doesn’t live in Prague, population 346, and his kids don’t attend school there. But the school’s closing could affect him anyway, he said.

“If the school closed, downtown’s probably going to slow down a little.”

Jim Kubik, who owns Kubik Auto and Truck Service, guesses his business would suffer if the school closed, too.

But Kubik, who also owns his Prague home and some farm land, doesn’t know if he could shoulder the extra taxes.

“You’re paying millionaire taxes, but you’re not a millionaire,” he said.

Kubik, a 1987 Prague High School graduate, thinks the state should be responsible for funding small schools like Prague’s.

By keeping the school open, Kubik said, the state would help save the towns, too.

Prague, while it’s held onto its school, bank and other businesses, isn’t the town it used to be, said Paul Sloup, who grew up there.

He remembers when there was a drugstore and a grocery store, when free movies were shown every Wednesday night in the greenspace next to the post office.

“This used to be quite the place,” he said, drinking an after-work beer at Bud’s Bar and Keno.

He doesn’t want to see any other businesses close. He doesn’t want his home to lose its value.

So he’ll vote in favor of the levy override.

“It’s just common sense,” he said. 

Hampl, who in addition to teaching also works at the Prague Quik Stop, isn’t sure that most taxpayers feel that way.

No one wants to see the school close, she said.

But it’s a lot of money. And with gas being so expensive and farming being difficult anyway, she wonders if the extra tax will be too much for some to bear.

But there’s always a chance, she said.

“I know they want the school.”

A few years ago, when she first heard talk of Prague’s school closing, junior Sara Musilek and her classmates began to discuss where they would go instead.

They’re a close class, she said. Most of them wanted to say together.

Behne said that last spring, the possibility of Prague closing was all his civics class could talk about.

Even the little ones, Hampl’s third- and fourth-graders, want to know what will happen if the override doesn’t pass.

“They’re worried about their school. They want to graduate from here,” she said. “Here they’re familiar with everyone.”

Hampl is, too.

She lives in Prague, so she knows her students’ siblings and parents and grandparents.

And that’s just one benefit of a small school, she said.

Before starting in Prague five years ago, she taught kindergarten through eighth grade at a country school.

There, she said, the little kids picked up on the older kids’ lessons. The younger students’ lessons served as review for the older ones, she said.

That’s true, at least to some degree, with her third- and fourth-graders, she said.

“It was just a circle of learning,” she said.

First- and second-grade teacher Terese Brown said the school feels almost like family.

She and her husband, who spent 13 years as the P.E. teachers and football coach at Prague, were attendants in his former students’ wedding.

Her husband left the school two years ago and now teaches at Waverly.

He left, she said, because of the school’s uncertain future. The couple didn’t think they could risk both losing their jobs at the same time. 

Most of the teachers are worried about Tuesday.

Shalee Kenny, who teaches Title I, seventh-grade English and eighth-grade reading, has been at the school for four years. She lost her job as a result of budget cuts at her first school, where she taught a year before moving to Prague.

And she likes where she is now.

“In the smaller districts, you have more freedom,” she said.

Neither she nor Brown will be able to vote. Both live outside of the school district — Brown in Wahoo, Kenny in Lincoln.

But both are hoping for the best.

“I’m nervous, very nervous,” Brown said. “I just hope they decide to keep the school.”

Reach Cara Pesek at 473-7361 or cpesek@journalstar.com.