Friday, June 9, there will be a grand opening celebration for Central Plaza at the northwest corner of the intersection of N Central Avenue and Main Street. The program begins at 1 p.m. and will include a ribbon cuttingceremony and remarks about creating Central Plaza.

Being an elected official, either on the city or school board levels, isn’t easy. The issues seemingly always hit close to home and there isn’t the anonymity that comes with representing an area one doesn’t live in.+Monday, June 12, the New Prague Area School Board is expected to address, at least conversationally, two important issues, one potentially impacting the district and its children for years to come. Regardless of their point of view, we’d hope people pay close attention. After all, this is important stuff. And over time, it comes with a cost.

A recent Wall Street Journal poll indicates more than half of Americans don’t believe a college education is worth the investment.
The Wall Street JournalNORC poll findings, as reported by Fox New Prague Times News, shows 56 percent of Americans surveyed don’t see a college education as a good investment while 42 percent of those folks surveyed feel completing a degree is a worthwhile undertaking. That’s a flip from 2013, when 53 percent of Americans surveyed viewed a college degree as a good investment while 40 percent didn’t see it that way.

If you’re a thorough reader of the police blotter we run every week, you may have noticed a few weeks back we included reports of the police department checking licensed tobacco retailers in New Prague to make sure they are not selling products to customers not yet old enough to legally possess or consume the products.

Congratulations to New Prague High School’s wrestling team. You finished second at the state tournament. You have represented your school and community well and have much to be proud of in your accomplishments throughout the regular season, post season and last week at the state tournament.
You had a fine season, one to be proud of and remember fondly for many, many years to come.

Everybody ought to have a bucket list, things you want to see or do before for whatever reason you can’t see or do them. It goes to the idea life is short – live it as best you can.
The items in a bucket list don’t have to be exceptional or so extravagant they’re not realistic for some. Bucket lists should be unique to the individual. Maybe the items in a bucket list can be formed after years of experiences, or perhaps it’s something you saw once many years ago from afar or heard about and would love to experience it yourself.

We’ve all seen the insurance company commercials, the ongoing series featuring counselor Dr. Rick trying to keep people from adopting the behavior of their parents. It’s an amusing concept with lasting power, because, well, there’s a certain amount of truth to it.

Reorganizational meetings of city councils, county boards, school boards and the like are usually matters of routine business indicating how the elected body will go about conducting its business during the year to come. The New Prague School Board took up the task Monday, Jan. 9, and all proceeded swimmingly. Until …
The board took up what to do with its public forum – citizens’ opportunity to address the board at the beginning of meetings – at its organizational meeting.

To the uninitiated, they arrived at the park Saturday, Dec. 31, for an hour or two of pushing each other around, throwing a football, blocking, tackling or be tackled – the kind of stuff young men or those competitive enough to still revisit their glory days revel in at the time and second-guess the next morning.
A little crazy? Perhaps. And yet, none of them, it seems, would miss it for the world.
“Why do you do anything. It’s fun and it’s a tradition,” said Eric Steinhoff.

It wasn’t the perfect year, but 2022 was a pretty good one at that. We’re hoping 2023 is even better.
In this week’s edition, you’ll see a review of the stories we told you about in 2022. In as much as we’d rather not remind you of all the news you read about earlier this past year, it sure seems like there was plenty to feel good about on a local level in 2022. The community continued to grow and prosper. Challenges were identified and taken on. And through it all, New Prague is still a place plenty of people want to call home.

A man walked through the new-fallen snow Christmas Eve 2004. The cemetery was quiet and the moonlight reflected brightly off the thick blanket of snow. There’s something different, perhaps contradictory about visiting the cemetery, the final resting place of loved ones, Christmas Eve.
We brought luminaries, a symbol of lighting the way for Jesus’s birth. Christmas was a big deal, a time for family being together. Mom really liked them and made a point to have them on the steps from the front door to the sidewalk at the house when we were growing up.

They say the world is becoming more modern all the time and technology will make things more convenient. Oh really?
Wednesday, a trip to the University of Minnesota for a state swimming meet. While driving to the ‘U’ is no big deal, a byproduct of growing up in St. Paul, there is always some trepidation over parking. It’s never easy, especially on a campus with 40-plus thousand people on it and major sporting venues.

At the Monday, October 24 school board meeting, there were comments made during the
open-forum regarding the district’s equity training that, as the superintendent, I would like to
respond to. I would publicly like to explain the facts around equity and training for our teachers.
The word “equity” has taken on several meanings. For New Prague Area Schools, equity
means creating a culture where all students have an equal opportunity to reach their full
potential academically, socially, and emotionally. This can be accomplished by having all

As a high school freshman growing up in St. Paul during the mid- to late-1970s, New Prague was one of those far-away towns in Minnesota, a small city on the map we’d never heard of thanks in part to our provincial view of the world. Back then, a trip anyplace south of Interstate Highway 494 and west of Highway 35 was far enough out there it required thoughtful planning.
Times have, thankfully, changed.

Anyone who has seen the police drama “Hill Street Blues” will remember that usually one of the first scenes of each episode was a sergeant giving a duty list to a room full of police officers, plus other information that would show up later in the episode. At the end he would remind his officers, “Let’s be careful out there.” In a sense it’s not bad advice and most of us have heard it in one form or another in our lives.

In the last few months I’ve had a few people say to me that I’ve been at The New Prague Times forever. While it hasn’t been that long, this Friday, Aug. 19, I do mark 23 years at the newspaper. I arrived in 1999, just before Dozinky, the community’s Czech harvest festival. I was amazed at how many people attended. Then, like now, Main Street became packed with people on Friday for Cruise Night and on Saturday for the music and the Parade of Farm Pride. For the headline about the festival in the paper that year I asked if there was a Czech word we could use that was the equal to WOW!