School Board sets money aside for vo-ag building
Sept. 15, 2021
NORFOLK — Jenny Gubbels turns heads whenever she’s dressed up and ready to go out square dancing.
The Randolph woman wears the traditional square dancing dress with the full skirt and petticoat.
“Whenever I wear my square dance clothes in public, people are always like, ‘Tell us more about it,’” Gubbels said.
She’s more than happy to do so and if you get her talking she can be quite persuasive, making you want to join in on the fun.
“We all hear people say, ‘I can’t dance. I have two left feet.’ I always say, ‘If I can do it, you can do it.’ You just learn the patterns and they just become a part of you,” Gubbels said.
Gubbels and her husband, Randy, are members of the Laurel Town Twirlers and she has been square dancing for the past 35 years.
Recently, she’s become concerned about the dwindling number of Twirlers. In fact, at any given dance there may only be 10.
“It would be a tragedy to see this end,” Gubbels said. “We want to keep what we have in this area going but to do that we have to have more people.”
If there’s enough interest, she’d like to start lessons in the Cedar County area.
Sept. 22, 2021
RANDOLPH — The Randolph School Board passed its annual budget with the inclusion of additional money into a special building fund but at least one member is still undecided about the building project moving forward.
Board Member Cody Backer was the lone dissenting vote to levy an additional $500,000 into the school’s building fund to potentially replace and expand the Vocational Ag buildings and include space for the high school’s art program.
Sept. 22, 2021
Area farmers are starting to hit the fields, bringing the crop in during these past few days of dry and warm weather.
Sept. 22, 2021
RANDOLPH - The Randolph Public Schools agreed to a three-day mask mandate at the high school last week and are making plans to acquire COVID-19 testing kits as the pandemic continues to keep administrators busy.
The mask mandate was put into place after an increase of COVID-19 cases linked within the student body, Superintendent Jeff Hoesing told school board members last week.
The Northeast Nebraska Public Health Department recommended masks to avoid a possible Designated Health Measure (DHM) specific to the high school that would include contact tracing and quarantine for otherwise healthy students.
“There’s no guarantee with our governor that HHS would’ve issued that DHM but it’s always a possibility,” Hoesing said.“
Sept. 22, 2021
From Bilbao, Spain, Malen Vallejo is living and experiencing rural America as a foreign exchange student here for her junior year at Randolph High School. She is being hosted by Doug and Joyce Tunink who have had a prior experience hosting an exchange student from Italy eight years ago.
Sept. 29, 2021
BELDEN — It takes a village and oftentimes it takes a survey.
The two came together for a Town Hall meeting Sunday night in Belden where 36 residents attended and identified top priorities for improvements to this south central Cedar County community of 113.
Andrea Larson, community planner for the Northeast Nebraska Economic Development District, led Sunday’s meeting by revealing results from the community-wide survey that was completed in June.
Each survey category revealed two or three top concerns but the overriding priorities were improving the swimming pool, improving sidewalks downtown and putting in public restrooms at the park.
Sept. 29, 2021
RANDOLPH — There’s something all a buzz in downtown Randolph - quite literally.
Cody Backer’s new building for CBees Honey on Broadway Avenue is up and operational. Construction started late last year and he started moving equipment into the new building in June.
Prior to the new building, Backer stored and utilized bee boxes and extraction equipment at various rental spaces and even in the back of a semi-trailer.
“It was working but not very conconvenient having to rent buildings from other people to store boxes in,” he said.
Using the extraction equipment in the back of a semi-trailer wasn’t the safest option either, he admits.
“My plan was to never stay in the trailer. It was only temporary,” Backer said - a temporary that lasted well over four years.
Even though the building is fully functional, it’s still a work in progress. Backer plans to add a full commercial kitchen inside the business so he can produce honey for farmer’s markets and other venues. Right now, his packaged honey is only available on his website.
Once the Floodplain project is complete, he plans to build an addition as well as he’d like to expand his current 2,000 colonies up to 5,000 within the next few years.
Sept. 29, 2021
RANDOLPH — Community volunteers were able to complete prep work to keep costs low on a maintenance project at the park’s softball field.
Rich Olson of Randolph, assisted by Corby Robinson, donated his time and equipment to grade and level the outfield prior to hydro-seeding work this week.
Oct. 6, 2021
RANDOLPH — Jeremy Sudbeck’s dreams for opening his own business went up in flames - literally.
The Randolph man and his business partner - Audrey Kyncl of Norfolk - spent a year building an addition onto the location at the corner of Wayne and Main streets with plans to open the Cardinal Meats butcher shop.
And they did open if only for one day.
“We technically opened. We had beef in the fridge,” Sudbeck said.
A fire in early July was potentially caused by a spark from his grinding tool as he was working on completing a skinning table for the business. An ember flew behind one of the unfinished walls and ignited.
Luckily, the building was unoccupied at the time.
Oct. 6, 2021
The Lied Randolph Public Library hosted a wine tasting event, “Aged to Perfection,” at the Randolph City Auditorium Friday night. More than 100 people attended the fundraising event with the proceeds to go toward a musical instrument park that will be located at the library.
Oct. 6, 2021
RANDOLPH — The Randolph Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department is experiencing a role reversal.
This time, it’s the community coming to the rescue with more than $38,000 raised for the purchase of a new ambulance.
Last week, the department accepted a $25,000 donation from Randolph Farm Supply.
“That’s the largest I’ve ever seen,” said Rescue Chief Tony Backer.
Fundraising for the $270,000 ambulance kicked off with a rib cook-off event in August where nearly $8,000 was raised. The event featured live music and other entertainment throughout the day.
Reaching Out Around Randolph donated all proceeds from the beer garden. Meat and other supplies necessary to host the event were donated by businesses in town, Backer said.
Oct. 6, 2021
BELDEN — A local elevator will remain a vital part of this small community with a change of ownership.
Tim Gubbels of Yankton and Mike Victor of Laurel purchased Belden Grain & Feed and took over ownership from the Berner family of Belden last week.
The business on Highway 20 was put up for sale after Brian Berner died in May 2020, Gubbels said, and it took a personal phone call from Clarette Berner to consider purchasing it.
Oct. 13, 2021
RANDOLPH — When students or staff members at Randolph Public Schools are sent home due to experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, they essentially have three choices.
First, they can visit a doctor and get an alternate diagnosis; they can get a COVID-19 test; or they can stay home and isolate for 10 days. All of those options take time and the first two have costs associated with them, said Superintendent Jeff Hoesing.
“We don’t want otherwise healthy kids missing school or having their families incur an expense to prove they are healthy,” he said. “We want students or staff that are COVID positive to be identified as quickly as possible and be removed from school to reduce the chances of a widespread outbreak.”
Starting this week, there’s another option available.
Students and staff are now able to get a free antigen test at school if they start experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.
Oct. 13, 2021
RANDOLPH — Two businesses downtown are changing ownership but plan to keep operating with business as usual.
Johnson’s Funeral Chapel is under new ownership as of Oct. 1 as Owner Brad Johnson retired and sold to Home for Funerals. Up the street, the Drunken Moose is under new ownership with Molly Hartman selling the business to Amber Hanson of Randolph Monday.
Oct. 13, 2021
RANDOLPH — Rural fire departments responded to combine fires for the same local farmer in the span of a week.
Wausa Fire responded to a combine fire one mile north of town at about 9:45 p.m. Friday night.
The cause of the fire is unknown and 15 firefighters were on the scene for about an hour, he said.
The combine owned by Dewey Gubbels of Randolph was still operable after the fire.
That wasn’t the case in a fire just five days earlier for the Randolph farmer, though.
The Randolph Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department responded to a bean field north of the Randolph Catholic cemetery Oct. 4 at 11:35 p.m. and spent more than two hours putting out flames on Gubbels’ fully engulfed combine.
Oct. 20, 2021
RANDOLPH — More than seven tons of trash have been hauled out of the Cedar County Motel and other items will be donated or sold.
The Randolph city council authorized City Administrator Ben Benton to determine what to trash, donate or sell out of the motel that the city purchased Sept. 27.
