The program provides meals and snacks to children at schools, churches, playgrounds and parks during summer and other school breaks. It was created to ensure children in low-income areas can get meals when they don’t have access to school lunches or breakfasts.

Eligible sponsors include public or private nonprofit schools, residential camps and local or state government sites. Program sponsors may apply for up to $15,000 a year for non-recurring expenses. The deadline to apply for a grant is March 1.

Grant applications may be downloaded from the Nebraska Department of Education Nutrition Services’ web page at http://www.education.ne.gov/NS/SFSP/news.html .

The jury released its decision Thursday in the case of 23-year-old Corey Green, who died Nov. 23 at Regional West Medical Center in Scottsbluff. He’d been arrested earlier in the day on a warrant and booked into jail. Authorities say Green later complained about a medical problem , so he was taken to the hospital, where he died.

Nebraska law requires that a grand jury examine the death of anyone in custody or while being apprehended.

Justices denied the inmates’ request for a declaration that their sentences were no longer valid, upholding a decision issued by a district court judge. But the state’s highest court left open the possibility that the inmates could raise similar arguments when challenging their convictions individually.

“We conclude that the inmates have equally serviceable remedies and accordingly affirm the district court’s dismissal” of the case, Chief Justice Michael Heavican wrote in the opinion.

The inmates argued that the Legislature’s 2015 vote to override Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto and abolish the death penalty effectively reduced their sentences to life in prison. A petition drive led by death penalty supporters suspended the repeal law before it could go into effect and placed the issue before voters, who reinstated capital punishment in the 2016 general election .

The lawsuit also contended that the petition drive was invalid because Ricketts helped finance it, which the inmates said violated constitutional separation of powers. It further claimed that Ricketts should have been listed as an official sponsor of the petition because of his contributions and his close ties to activists who spearheaded the petition drive.

The court rejected those arguments.

In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska said the ruling doesn’t address its clients’ claims that they may no longer be executed.

“We look forward to resolution of these claims in the individual post-conviction proceedings the court has ruled that each prisoner must undertake,” said Danielle Conrad, the group’s executive director. “While we respect that Nebraskans of goodwill hold different viewpoints on the death penalty, these and other concerns about transparency, accountability and fairness will persist beyond this case.”

Nebraska carried out its first execution in more than two decades in August, using a never-before-tried combination of lethal injection drugs. Days before the execution, Nebraska corrections director Scott Frakes acknowledged in an affidavit that the state probably wouldn’t be able to obtain another batch of drugs in the future.

State officials refused to disclose their supplier, despite doing so in past cases, which prompted still-pending lawsuits from the ACLU of Nebraska and the state’s two largest newspapers. The Nebraska Supreme Court is expected to rule in those public-records lawsuits as well.

Both sides made their case Friday to lawmakers and the public.

The bill’s lead sponsor, Lincoln Sen. Anna Wishart, says the bill would help people who are suffering from debilitating seizures, nausea from cancer treatments and other chronic ailments.

Wishart has promised to launch a statewide ballot campaign if lawmakers don’t pass a legalization measure.

Gov. Pete Ricketts opposes the measure, arguing that legalization for medical purposes could open the door to recreational use. Osborne, a former Republican congressman, says he believes marijuana is addictive and dangerous.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts has signed a proclamation celebrating School Choice Week, an annual effort to promote private alternatives to public schools.

The event on Thursday came one day after the annual “I Love Public Schools Day,” an effort to tout the importance of K-12 public schools.

Ricketts, a Republican, supports charter schools and voucher programs that allow low-income students to attend private schools. The governor says School Choice Week highlights “the work we have to do to give more students and families more opportunities to get the education they need to achieve their dreams.”

Sen. Tom Brewer, of Gordon, presented a proposal to a legislative committee that would require better tracking of such cases. The Legislature’s Judiciary Committee heard all-favorable testimony on the bill Thursday from Native American women and other advocates, but took no immediate action.

Brewer, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, said law enforcement agencies don’t always communicate well with tribes or the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

“This failure to communicate between these agencies has left a no-man’s land where people can fall through the cracks,” Brewer said. “There’s not a way to track the numbers and have the accountability that we need.”

The bill would direct the Nebraska State Patrol to collect data on missing Native American women and organize meetings with law enforcement agencies, tribes and the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs. The patrol would report all of its findings to lawmakers by June 1, 2020.

Brewer’s original bill focused solely on women, but he said he hopes to expand it to include children.

More than 80 percent of Native American women have experienced violence in their lifetimes, according to a 2016 report from the National Institute of Justice. More than 56 percent of the women questioned in the nationally representative survey reported that they had experienced sexual violence, and nearly 56 percent reported physical violence by an intimate partner.

“The statistics are staggering about the number of missing Native Americans, and we know that this has to do with human trafficking as well as other issues of domestic violence and assault,” said Lincoln Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks, a co-sponsor of the bill.

The lack of information stems from a combination of factors, said Scott Shafer, an administrative assistant for the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs.

Shafer said some missing-persons cases involving Native American women go unreported, and in others, the woman’s race is misclassified. Sometimes, the women who go missing live transient lifestyles and their absences aren’t immediately noticed. Other cases slip through the cracks because of poor record keeping and a lack of communication between agencies, he said.

“It’s hard to fix the problem if you don’t have a true understanding of the full extent of that problem,” he said.

The bill was partly inspired by the unsolved 2016 murder of Sherry Wounded Foot, who was found beaten and unconscious behind an abandoned building in Whiteclay, a tiny Nebraska village that borders South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Wounded Foot died from her injuries 12 days later.

It’s modeled after a new Washington state law that requires the state patrol to figure out a way to identify more cases of missing Native American women. North Dakota lawmakers are considering similar legislation , and may expand it to include data on all missing people in that state.

The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a similar measure in 2017 in response to the death of a Spirit Lake Tribe member in North Dakota, but the bill stalled in the House.

April Marie Satchell, a Native American woman from Lincoln, said the measure highlights a seldom-noticed crisis plaguing many indigenous people. She said she is already working to teach her young granddaughter “the dangers of being Native American and female.”

“Right now, our lives don’t matter,” she said.