News Release: K-12 education ranks high among Omaha Young Professionals priorities

News Release: K-12 education ranks high among Omaha Young Professionals priorities

OMAHA — K-12 education would be the state’s top funding priority if a group of about 90 young professionals surveyed Thursday were in charge of how Nebraska spends its general fund revenue.

Health and Human Services, presently the top priority in the Nebraska budget, would rank second among the young professionals, who were polled during an OpenSky Policy Institute presentation at Thursday’s Greater Omaha Young Professionals Summit.

Higher education and public safety tied as the third priority item among the young professionals followed by humanities.

“K-12 education obviously is very important to these young professionals,” said Renee Fry, executive director of the OpenSky Policy Institute. “But in a lot of other ways, the budget they proposed is very similar to our state’s present budget.”

Given the interest in K-12 education, it was seemed fitting that the group let out a collective gasp when a slide was presented that described a $100 million cut to the state’s primary education funds in the past few years.

“How is it that we just told you K-12 education is so important to us and yet it gets cut so much?” one participant asked.

In another question, the young professionals were asked which of the following factors would be most likely to cause them to leave Nebraska:

• Family;
• Work;
• Quality of life;
• Weather;
• Taxes;  and
• Other.

The young professions ranked work, quality of life and weather as the top three reasons they would leave, followed by family, other and then taxes.  Thirteen percent of those surveyed said they would never leave the state.