Education Committee- House & Senate
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I'd like to call this meeting to order. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here today. We are here for our second day of meetings. We had a great meeting yesterday at AETN in Conway. For those of you that made that, I think you were pretty impressed with their presentation yesterday of part of what they do, and it was very in-depth, and we appreciate what they do and what they showed us yesterday.
So thank you all for the ones that
came yesterday and for you that couldn't, you just missed it. So, Madam Chair, anything? Thank you. I
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:41
have to say exactly what Bruce said. I thought it was an excellent meeting yesterday and sometimes we need to get out away from the Capitol and see what's going on. I think most of us were amazed at some of the things that they do that we had no idea. it's kind of hard for folks to toot their own horns but they have a lot to um to toot and it
is an educational thing so i was really impressed and i think um all of us i hope anybody who didn't have the opportunity yesterday will go down and spend a little time with them because they'd be glad to see
Speaker 9
2:18
them all right with that said i need a motion
to adopt the minutes from june 11th motion have a second we have a second all those in favor say aye any opposed no motion carries all right this time we're going to go to item d uh introduction of our adequate
adequacy study process miss nale smith you're recognized thank you
Speaker 13
2:53
good morning, I'm Nell Smith and I'm the
Speaker 16
3:01
Administrator for the Policy Analysis and Research Section for the Bureau of Legislative Research, and our section is responsible for
walking you through your statutory responsibilities under the adequacy study statute and for providing you with the information you'll need along the way. So I'm going to describe the process we'll use for the next 18 months to complete the statutory requirements of the study. So you may remember this slide from our meeting in June, but it's good to keep in mind that one of the reasons we're here is because education is such an enormous investment for our state. First and foremost, it's an incredible investment in our kids and their future, as well as the
future well-being of our state. But also, 41% of our state tax dollars pay for K-12 education. And half of school district revenue comes from the state. And finally, foundation funding alone, the state and local share, provides $3 billion to schools. So what is adequacy? What state policies will ensure students receive an adequate education and what resources do school districts need? And what is adequate funding?
Unfortunately, there's no single answer that is the correct answer. The amount of funding that's adequate is ultimately a judgment. It's your judgment based on the evidence that you receive. So the Bureau staff, the Department of Education, and other organizations provide information and analysis. That's the evidence. And you, the members of this committee, use that information to make a judgment about what districts need and what amount of funding is adequate. And that will be true whether you hire a consultant to help you with your decisions or not.
So you decide what's adequate. Adequacy is what you say it is as long as it's grounded in evidence. So that fight for funding happens in this committee and it's settled in November 2020 through your recommendations before the regular legislative session. And the full General Assembly then typically adopts the recommendations by passing those bills in the regular session. And that generally happens without a whole lot of discussion or debate. You may remember from the 2019 session, bills worth $3 billion flew right through committees
in the chambers. And that's because they had the adequacy stamp of approval. So we frequently get asked, is such and such part of adequacy? As in, is pre-K part of adequacy? Are charter schools part of adequacy? Is career and technical education part of adequacy? And there are really two sides to this question. The first is what is included in providing an adequate education? And the answer to that question is that it's up to you. If you ask us whether something's part of adequacy, we'll tell you what's been considered
part of adequacy historically, but it's up to you to decide whether to include different components of education as part of adequacy or not. The second side of this question is what's included in the adequacy study. And the answer to that question is that the adequacy study statute determines the minimum requirements, but you decide the rest. And we'll talk a little bit more in more detail about what's in the adequacy study statute.
So while you as a group have the authority to decide what an adequate education is, all of the things that must be provided to achieve an adequate education and what needs to be studied to make your decisions, there are a couple of rules for the road. your funding decisions, particularly all of your decisions, but particularly your funding decisions must be based on evidence. The information that you receive and any additional information you request must serve as the basis for your decision making. The second rule is the funding
amounts must be based on district's needs, not the amount of funding that's available. So in other words, the court has said you can't say we only have $200 million in the budget, it, so we're going to split that up and give it to schools. You have to determine what you think school districts need and then fully fund it. So in the words of Stanley and Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. As members of this committee, you're responsible for working together to determine what the
necessary components of an adequate education are. You guys determine what every school needs, what resources schools should have in order to provide an adequate education to students, whether they're in Bentonville, Little Rock, Helena West Helena, or Strong Hudding. But here's the responsibility. Anything you decide is necessary for an adequate education must be funded. So for example, if this body decides that smaller class sizes are necessary for an adequate education, you must provide school districts with the funding to pay for the additional
teachers needed to change class sizes. If this body decides that districts should have one computer for every student, the funding you provide to school districts would need to reflect that. So educational adequacy is important for a lot of reasons we've talked about so far, but there are two big budgetary reasons. In June, Taylor Lloyd talked about what's known as the doomsday provision, and that's the statute that calls for K-12 education to be funded first. That statute says that before other state agencies can receive their full funding, K-12
education must be funded adequately. The second reason this adequacy process is so important is that your funding recommendations in this committee will serve as the basis for the Governor's budget for education. Because of the doomsday provision and the legal history, the Governor needs your funding recommendations before he can finalize his full budget for state government. So at the end of this process, what will your recommendations look like? There are a variety of types of recommendations you could make.
First are funding decisions. So money is certainly a major decision you need to make during the adequacy study and it's the one that gets discussed the most for obvious reasons. But even with funding recommendations, there are different ways you can change district funding. So the most obvious funding change you could make is to increase or decrease funding levels. You could also change what resources you're funding. We talk a lot about the matrix and the resources it's designed to fund. Some folks say the matrix is outdated. So that's something you could choose to address.
Maybe the matrix wasn't designed to fund a resource you think should be in it. This is your chance to change that. The study process is intended to allow you to change the funding system as education needs and practices evolve. You can change restrictions placed on the funding. Program funding can only be used for certain types of purchases, but you could allow districts to have greater flexibility, or you could require more spending restrictions. You could also change the distribution methods. Maybe you don't think funding is being targeted to the right districts.
You can change that by changing the funding methodology. Or maybe you don't want to send some funding to the districts directly. You could redirect funding to a state-level program that then provides services to the districts. Funding decisions aren't the only type of recommendation you could make. You're also responsible for establishing the policy environment that's needed to ensure all students have access to an adequate education. School districts operate under local control, but the courts have been very clear that the state can't just provide the funding and walk away.
You set, or authorize the State Board of Education to set, the requirements that districts must abide by. The measures on which districts will be judged in their capacity to deliver an adequate education and the consequences for districts that don't measure up. So some examples of substantive policies include changing the required staffing levels that are currently established in state standards. You could add or delete curriculum requirements. Are there courses that all districts should be required to teach?
Or are there topics all students should be exposed to as part of the basic curriculum? them. You could change the accountability structure. Maybe you think the consequences that low-performing districts face are too lenient or too restrictive. You can change that. You could increase or decrease a district's ability to get a waiver from state standards. So all of these things can be changed outside the adequacy framework as well, but the recommendations will carry more legislative weight if this body determines that XYZ change is necessary
an adequate education. So the last type of recommendation you could make are those that affect the study itself. This study is dictated by statute, but as a body you could recommend changes to what must be studied. Are there any topics that are important to permanently address in the adequacy study? Are there any that are no longer important? You could also make recommendations about data that should be routinely collected, as As you go through this study, we might tell you that there isn't data on XYZ topic.
You might want school districts to begin reporting to ADE an important piece of information that currently isn't being collected, something we can't evaluate now because we just don't have the data. So now that we've discussed adequacy conceptually, let's talk about the nuts and bolts of the study. The adequacy study is required by law, and you should have a copy of the full statute in your binder from the June meeting. There were three main acts that developed the adequacy study statute that we use today.
The first was Act 57 of the Second Extraordinary Session of 2003. This statute set very broad study requirements. For example, the first study requirement that you have is to assess, evaluate, and monitor the entire spectrum of public education. That's actually what it says. So no small task. And that's just the first of eight very broad responsibilities that you have. Because the Act 57 responsibilities are so vast, the legislature passed Act 1204 of 2007,
which provided more specific tasks the legislature must undertake to accomplish the broad study requirements. So in your packet, you'll find a sheet that shows how this works, and it looks kind of like this. call this the blue and pink sheet. So on the left-hand side of the table, in the column labeled Adequacy Study Responsibilities are the broad study requirements set out by Act 57. The middle column, labeled Shall Be Accomplished By, lists the specific ways the broad responsibilities
must be accomplished. So you can see that for the first set of broad responsibilities, numbers one through four, the statute calls for you to accomplish five more narrow tasks. So you're to review a report produced by legislative audit. You're to review the state's academic standards. You're to review fiscal and facilities distress program, et cetera. This middle column becomes our guide for what we present throughout this study. And you'll see this sheet at every meeting.
This is what we use to let you know why we're doing the report that we're doing that day. And in the far right column we'll mark off the date in which the task was completed. So Act 725 of 2011 added an additional review of any new laws or rules approved in the biennium covered by the study.
And then two study requirements were removed in 2017 and 2019. The statute previously required a review of academic distress and a review of the school improvement plan process, something we called ACCEP. When the statutory changes were made to each of those issues, the review requirements in the adequacy study statute were eliminated. So sometimes people think of the adequacy study as one single report, but it's not. It's actually a year and a half long process with many reports and presentations.
In 2017-18, the adequacy study included more than 18 meetings and dozens of reports. The 2020 study will culminate in a final report that includes your recommendations as well as the supporting evidence and rationale for your decisions. And the final report is frequently referred to as the adequacy report. So this slide will provide the basics on our role in the study. The BLR staff role and as well as yours. So your role is to direct the study, to tell us what you need.
We're presenting the building blocks for the adequacy study, but this is your study. Your questions in your direction as well as the statute will serve as our guide. It's also your role to define what an adequate education is. And that includes the actual definition you'll adopt, but it also means that you decide what things are part of the adequacy and the adequacy study. We'll help provide some historical context in terms of what your predecessors thought, but we can provide information on what current, and we'll also provide information on what
the current research says. But it's your responsibility to define adequacy. It's up to you to identify problems and choose solutions. We're providing information and analysis, but we stop short of characterizing any situation as a problem. Our aim is to provide you what you need to determine for yourself what issues need to be corrected. And finally, it's your job to make those policy and funding recommendations.
So it's our job to make sure you know what the adequacy study statute requires, we'll remind you what your statutory responsibilities are under the law and what you're required to do. It's our responsibility to provide you with the information required by law and the additional information you request. We do that with the reports and analysis that we present to you each month. And finally, Taylor, our attorney, can provide you with legal guidance. Many other organizations are involved in the adequacy study and the quality study really
couldn't be done without these groups. First, the Department of Education plays an essential role both in answering our questions for the development of our reports as well as in answering your programmatic questions during the meetings. Superintendents and educators in school districts are also vital to this process. They participate by responding to our surveys and questions and by being our guide when we visit schools. advocacy groups such as the AAEA and the AEA and others have an important role in communicating
the policy priorities of their members. And finally, you may have the assistance of a consultant, depending on how things turn out today, who may offer their own analysis information and recommendations for you. So now we'll talk about the basic components of the study. A major part Part of our work is analysis of existing data. We have access to data that districts report through AppScan. AppScan contains what districts are entering for general record keeping and for compliance
purposes and we use it to analyze spending patterns and trends. We also survey superintendents, principals, and teachers on a number of different issues and we'll provide their responses in each of the relevant reports that we present each month. We've already sent out the superintendent survey and we'll send out the surveys to principals and teachers over the next few months. With the variety of surveys we do, we're able to ask similar questions of superintendents, principals and teachers and compare the differences in their perspectives.
If there's a question that you want asked on any of our surveys, please let us know. We typically visit a sample of 74 schools to do in-person interviews with principals. you'll also receive testimony from advocacy groups. They'll be asked to provide their thoughts and recommendations in writing and the chairs have asked that we set aside a couple of meetings to hear from them. Finally, the chairs have asked that we include a link on our website to collect additional comments from the public and we'll put that into place
soon. So the reports you receive from us from the Bureau are intended to provide a basic explanation of each topic that we're covering. We include a brief history of how the programs came to be, and we provide analysis to give you information on how those programs are working in schools. With our analysis, we're trying to answer questions we anticipate that you'd have. Because our reports are informational in nature, it can seem that we're providing information just for information's sake, but that's not the case.
Our reports are intended to move you toward making your recommendations. So each of our reports is intended to help you do one of two things. One is help you make a decision about what your recommendations need to be. If we're super lucky, we'll provide you the perfect amount of information and you'll be ready to make your recommendations as soon as we've concluded a report. But it's far more likely that our reports will give you enough information to tell you where you want to go next. So if you're not ready to make a decision, our reports hopefully will allow you to formulate
additional questions to help guide you to what you need next to be able to make your recommendations. And both of these outcomes are part of the process. Our reports are intended to provide a base level of information and get you on a path toward developing policy solutions. And another thing to keep in mind is that there are many months between when you receive some of our reports and when you actually put pen to paper and establish your recommendations, it's easy to forget that the information you receive today is intended to help you make your decision in November of next year.
So now let me tell you about the things our reports will not provide. Most of you know that as staff of the Bureau, we don't provide our opinions. We also won't tell you what we think are problems, at least we won't define anything as a problem. We give you the lay of the land so that you can determine for yourself which issues you think are problems and which aren't. And we try to put things in context using numbers and charts and research literature an educator's survey response, but we won't tell you that such and such constitutes a
problem. That's for you to decide. We don't provide any recommendations. The final adequacy report will include your recommendations, but that report will be considered your report, not a staff report. Now while we don't provide recommendations, we can provide you with policy options. But we don't just offer up policy options or new funding methods out of the blue. You've got to tell us that you think XYZ is a problem and that you'd like us to help develop potential solutions.
Finally, you will also not see any findings that a particular program is adequate or not. We try to provide you with the data you need or the best data available for you to make that sort of determination. We try to provide enough relevant data for a picture to emerge, but we don't determine whether something is adequate or not. And it's important to note that the reason we don't provide these things is not to make things more difficult for you. We know you like things simple and compact.
We don't provide these things because we want to ensure that you can always rely on us for objective and credible information. So the timing of all this gets a little confusing. So I'll go over it for our analysis and for your recommendations. We are currently entering the 2020 school year. The recent session, you just set the education funding levels for 2020 and 2021. So the foundation funding rate, the amount of money that each school gets per student, has been set through 2021.
This adequacy study will make recommendations for funding levels for 2022 and 2023. A long time away. When we do our analysis, we generally need a full year of data. Sorry. So we'll be looking back at data from 2018 and 2019 school years during this adequacy study. And that means we're really only able to assess the actual impact of policies passed in the 2017 session. We'll discuss the policy issues, the policies that you just passed in 2019,
and how they fit with ongoing issues, but for the most part, we won't be able to actually assess their impact, whether it affected spending patterns or student test scores, for example, until the next adequacy cycle. So now I want to go over our proposed meeting schedule, which looks like this. This is our first stab at mapping out what topics will be addressed in which meetings, meetings. But this document will probably change many times before we're finished with this process.
That's why we always have draft on it. It's never a final document until we're completely done with the adequacy study. So this is where we're planning to start. And you can see that most of the topics listed for each meeting match up with one of the topics listed on the adequacy study statutory responsibilities table. The items on this schedule marked with a double asterisk are those that are specifically called for in the Adequacy Study Statute. In the electronic version of this schedule, which is on our website now, you can click
on any item in blue to see the report on this topic from the last Adequacy Study. So if there's anything that you're particularly interested in, you can read the last report ahead of the meeting where that's going to be presented. So the recommendations and the final report. This will be the culmination of your work on this study. The report is important for two reasons. It documents your recommendations for the 2021 session and if your decisions end up
in a legal challenge, the report would likely serve as Exhibit A. We'll write a draft report for you if you like. Typically we draft a report as a summary of all the information that you've received over the course of the study and we leave a blank section to be filled in with your recommendations and while this is the way we've typically written the draft we're happy to draft the report in whatever style or format that you'd prefer. We'll distribute that draft several months before your final recommendations are due and you can change our draft in any way you like or just throw it
out completely. This report when finalized will be your report and should reflect the committee's thoughts and opinions. So the statute requires you to submit that final report with your recommendations by November 1, 2020. In the months leading up to that date, we'll put out a blank document in front of you, like this one, and you'll decide what recommendations you have, if any, for each area of the topics covered in the study, or for anything else
that this committee believes is necessary for an adequate education. Two weeks before submitting your final report, you must publish a draft. So the final report is the end goal, but in between the start of the study and the submission of your final report on November 1st, there will be a fiscal session. The adequacy study statute calls for you to meet before the fiscal session and review the recommendations from the previous adequacy study. So for this study cycle, you'll review the 2018 adequacy recommendations.
You're also to review any other pertinent issues that affect adequacy. And make changes, if necessary, by March 1st of 2020. And here's the thing to keep in mind. As I mentioned earlier, the funding rates for 2021, that's the fiscal year at issue in the next fiscal session, those funding rates have already been set. So the foundation funding rate and the state categorical funding rates, et cetera,
those rates were set in non-appropriation bills during the 2019 legislative session. So if you wanted to change them during the fiscal session, you'd need a two-thirds vote to consider such legislation. So this slide just provides the two links. The first link takes you to a page where you can access all of the materials from the past adequacy studies. The materials are organized by year of the study. We're now in the 2020 study. The other link on this slide is a direct link to where we'll be posting every handout from
the adequacy study meetings. Just as a reminder, these are the folks from the Bureau who will be most involved in this process. Please feel free to reach out to us at any time. You're getting kind of an overdose of me today, but I assure you you will be hearing from all of these people at the meetings to come. So that is all I have, and I'd be happy to take any
Chair
Unverified
29:11
questions. We have questions. Senator Chesterfield, you're recognized. Thank you very much.
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
29:15
And, Neal, thank you so much for the great job that you do and the BLR staff.
when you were talking about the individuals to whom you spoke when you were getting information you mentioned i guess superintendents principals teachers but i never heard you say support professionals those are the bus drivers those are the aides do y'all ever reach out to them and try to
Speaker 16
29:41
find out what's on their mind we we have not um we've we originally we were doing superintendent surveys sort of exclusively then we've added we added in teacher
surveys and then last time we added in principals that we'd be happy to reach out to whomever you would like us to reach out to sometimes it's the hardest part of surveys is the getting the correct contact information in fact for teachers we we don't have emails for every teacher in the state so we we've we've used the teachers that we when we go to visit schools we identify the
teachers in those schools and survey those those teachers but I'm we'd be happy to do whatever you guys would
Speaker 28
30:28
be interested in seeing I'd be interested in knowing if
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
30:32
the maintenance people what the maintenance folks feel or what the bus drivers feel which probably make up your largest group of support professionals what are they thinking about adequacy and finding a way perhaps working and I work be happy to work with you to find a way to get that information because we're funding it and I'm struck by the fact that they go to
to work they went to work what Tuesday and they'll get paid some of them on the 30th in the district one of the districts I represent but it'll only be for five days but they've worked for three weeks see those are the things that I don't quite understand and and perhaps that would help us get a feel for it because if you're not allowed to get unemployment unless you work for a private bus driving entity. Now they can get unemployment but those
individuals who work in the school districts and the public schools can't get unemployment in the summer and yet when they come back they don't get paid for three weeks and in some instances teachers weren't getting paid for a month depending on where they worked if they get paid once a month and we still have that madness somewhere in the in this state so I'd just be interested in knowing some of that because it puts a strain on keeping people so that's those
are my concerns and thank you Mr. Chair
Speaker 16
32:08
I appreciate the time. I'd be happy to work with you on developing a survey that that gets gets at the information that you're
looking for. Senator Elliott? Thank you Madam Chair. Good morning Ms. Smith. This is not anything I think you need to put on your front burner but something I just want to check to see if you can do this. I noticed that in the presentation we currently spend about 41 percent of every dollar on K-12 now. Can you possibly look back over the years and tell me
what that how that percentage has changed and I'm not so much concerned about I mean because I can get the raw numbers I'm just concerned about I don't know about the percentage if you do that that that will be just fine and the second question is about everything that we do has to be based on on evidence and this is probably I don't know if this is for you or just for our committee because when we say based on evidence that's a pretty wide swath we can have bad evidence as
well as good evidence. Is there any kind of metric in the industry that determines what good and bad evidence is, or is that up to us as well to make that determination as legislators?
Speaker 16
33:33
I think if you're, if we try to, we, the information that we try to provide is, is as good as we can make it. If there's research literature, we do internally, we're trying to process who's doing
this research. And sometimes if it's, well, first of all, we try to use peer-reviewed journals. Well, now, to be clear, I'm not talking
about you. Because I know you're not going to bring us stuff. But each one of us can
bring in evidence of something. And so I guess I'm just asking in terms of the committee any kind of guidance we could have to determine I found this and it says this and blah blah blah and then we get into a big tiff over whether that's good evidence bad evidence and if there are any
metrics to help us determine for example I know when I was teaching school and we did research papers you know I had some guidelines on
what constitutes you good evidence and just because it was on the internet didn't make it great evidence, yeah.
Speaker 58
34:43
And what is good evidence and bad evidence
Speaker 16
34:46
as far as what you... That's going to be up to us. It is going to be up to you. But I will say that anytime we're presenting information that we think maybe came from a, you know,
a source with an agenda is probably the most common. We're going to, all that information around the information that we give you, the caveats and all of that that are kind of boring, I know, but those, the reasons that we do that is to make sure that we don't give you information and not put it, give a caveat around it to say, here's information from such and such organization with such and such agenda. We're going to tell you it's coming from.
Speaker 65
35:31
All right. Thank you. Thanks, Madam Chair. Representative Sullivan. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Nell, are
Speaker 67
35:47
there, you know, are we able to measure in any way when our schools receive a grade now and we are, what the direct relationship is to the funding, to what schools are being graded on? Because some of those adequacy areas
have a direct link some of them would be support and some of them may not have any data evidence that they are supporting are contributing to what the school's grade
Speaker 65
36:15
is am I clear what I'm asking I think so let
Speaker 16
36:25
gets to your point you're I think you're talking about the the grade and then spending patterns for that school correct we have traditionally looked at
school districts and school district spending patterns um as and the schools so the grades are at the school level um and and we uh the school districts do report their school level spending and as part of ESSA, that was a requirement, but ADE has required them to code their spending to the school level for some period of time. Now that that's going to be publicly reported, I think we'll be seeing some changes
in how school districts are reporting their school level spending. So at this point, my concern with looking at spending patterns at the school level is that i think we're going to be seeing some adjustments being made i don't know how consistently school districts are reporting expenditures to the school level i know that they're doing it but i don't know how consistently they're doing it i'm wondering if
Speaker 67
37:41
we're studying adequacy and how we're going to fund that if we see schools are spending disproportionately on activities instruction support services that aren't directly related to the grade how would we as a legislator because that would then skew what what our funding levels might be to more relevant uh areas is that a part of the adequacy study at this time we can we can make it a part
Speaker 16
38:11
of the adequacy study we can show you information at the school level on school
level spending patterns we can compare it to the matrix even what what my concern is at this point is i think it'll be a few more years this is just my gut i think it will be a few more years before there's some consistency in the way schools are coding school level expenditures you know know, for an example, if you're talking about textbooks, you know, are schools coding those
expenditures to the school level all in the same way? We don't know that yet. We can provide you the information that the districts are reporting. It just may not be super consistent from one school to the next,
Speaker 67
39:02
I'm interested in making sure that the money is going to things that are related if we're going to grade them That's what we need to be paying for. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Chair Representative Deffenbaugh you recognized
Representative Gary Deffenbaugh
Unverified
39:28
Now yeah Thanks nail for your report. I there's two things one one is i'm old enough to remember when uh teachers did draw an employment for one summer and it was about 1972 73 there was some kind of loophole in the law and uh they got that fixed right quick i don't remember what happened but number two over what senator chesterfield said i was just curious about uh aren't the non-certified
personnel aren't they on this their contract read a certain amount of days like teachers do i mean they you know they they may start them sporadically but i'm just wondering aren't they aren't their contracts like certified personnel according to number of days? I
Speaker 16
40:27
think so, but the department may be able to definitively answer that. We deal mostly with teacher contracts rather than classified staff contracts.
Would you like an answer to that? Sure. Secretary Key, do you have
someone that can answer that for us? okay they're coming they're working on that's okay I'm pretty sure I got the answer well
Speaker 87
41:13
here you come thank you well Johnny Key Department of Education
Speaker 89
41:16
classified contracts representative are are by days but but there's a wide range of different types of classified positions as well so you can't really equate all of them school bus drivers are going to have you know different numbers of days and requirements as say a classified paraprofessional so there's really not any uniformity to that from type between types of positions but But teachers have, you know, by statute, they have a minimum of 190 days, I believe, is what's in that contract.
But depending on what position, even certified staff are in, it could be a 210-day contract, 230-day. I mean, so it varies greatly. Okay. Thanks. All right. Is that all you
had? Representative. Senator Chesterfield, you recognize again? Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm not going to get
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
42:12
into the weeds of that, but I do know there are a plethora of contracts and contract days, et cetera. What I'd like as a point of personal privilege, if I may, and that is to introduce Ms. Carol
Fleming, who is the new president of the Arkansas Education Association. Ms. Fleming, would you please stand? Thank you. And let's welcome her. We look forward to seeing you and to hearing from you as well. Thank you, Mr.
Chair. You're welcome. any other questions seeing none thank you thank you now reps and back did
you have one okay hold on reps and back popped in there right at the last
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
42:56
thank you I uh my question is it seems a bit cyclical or that we get in this okay we just we have the evidence to support and I'll just use student to teacher ratios as just something to use there and then we have to fund it once we say this is it it's I think now it's somewhere around 14 I believe 14 to 1 or something of that nature in an existing
matrix so the question I would have is in the statute once we decide I'll use 14 or maybe let's say we change that to 8 or whatever it was at that point does that become the answer you know I mean if we ended up in court you mentioned that that the report would be the main would that be said okay that is what the committee decided so that is a proper amount that is the adequate amount or would it just go right back and you know with a whole group of
individuals coming and say, no, you shouldn't have said it wasn't 10. It was, it really should be eight or something like that. So you understand what I'm saying? Because we fund based upon what we say is the correct amount of whatever it is. And then, but how do we determine that? You know, there's, like say, we've probably heard a lot of people talk about evidence. You know, there's all kinds of evidence out there that will point this way or that way. So when would it become solid? When would it become written in stone, I guess, that this is the actual number we will be
Speaker 16
44:38
funding? Thank you. Well, let's say the matrix right now is set up based on the student to teacher ratios. And so let's say you wanted to reduce those class sizes. We could do mathematically how many teachers each district is going to need for a district size of 500 students. There's a teacher salary in the matrix, so we would use that to cost it out.
But it's just a mathematical equation. You've got this many kids in the school. It would just be a mathematical equation to come up with, A, the number of teachers, and B, the cost of those new teachers. You're dead again. How about now? Okay.
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
45:38
I guess my question then would be, it was more related to at what point does the number that we decide become the official number? And from that point on, we don't change it. And if we end up in court, this is the number that we have to say that, yes, we did fund adequacy because we
Speaker 16
46:00
funded at this level. That's my concern. Right now, in terms of teacher ratios, and maybe your question is beyond that, but teacher ratios are currently in ADE standards.
So you could theoretically pass a statute that says teacher ratios are going to be such and such. You as a body could say, we're going to recommend smaller class sizes. Then you'd go into a legislative session and say, we're going to pass a statute that It says classroom teacher ratios have to be such and such. Or you can choose not to set that in statute. You can instead just say that's what we're going to base our funding on and give districts
more money and then ADE might not change the teacher to student ratios. There's kind of a combination of what you want to do. If you want to change the statute, that's going to happen in a legislative session. And then it's, as you know, it's not set in stone. It can be changed at any time. Or you can change the funding and not change the requirements. And at that point, the funding's going out, you know,
Speaker 25
47:09
for the, in the 2021 session for
the 2022 school year. So I'm not, I'm not sure if I'm answering your question. I think that's, that's
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
47:28
good. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. The question that I had is, you know, we've been talking
about redoing how we do our adequacy study and looking at other ideas. Do you all have any data or have you looked at how other states are, and this is not for
today by any means, but maybe at a future meeting, I would be interested in hearing a report is saying okay 12 other states are doing this model 10 other states are doing this model so what are others what models are other states using how does that compare to what we're doing so as we look in at making changes we can maybe learn from other people's successes and failures sure there's plenty of information on that and i'd be we'd be
Speaker 111
48:08
happy to add a report on that okay thank you. Representative Birch you recognize? That's you? Somebody else got
their mic? Okay, you're not on. Hit it
Representative LeAnne Burch
Unverified
48:40
again. There we go. One of the pieces of your report was the study components and i believe you mentioned that there were 74 school site visits and that seems like a random number so i'm curious how how that number came about why 74 could you provide us with a list of who those schools were and also just give us kind
of an idea of what that visit was like when you when when the schools were visited what was it that you were looking for how did those
Speaker 14
49:14
meetings go what came out of that so the 74 is is a
Speaker 16
49:19
is a we've got about a 1050 schools so 74 is a is a representative sample size so that's why we chose 74 in terms of our visits we we have in the past told the schools we're not going to tell anybody where we've where we're
going to allow them to be as candid as possible. If that's not something that this body wants us to do, we can do it another way. We can identify the schools that we visit. That's again up to you. In terms of how we bring the information back, we're typically going with a list of questions that are kind of conversational questions. In our surveys, You know, how many of this do you have, and, you know, what do you think of this?
Is it good, great, you know, terrible? Those multiple choice sorts of questions. So these conversations are open-ended conversations, and it gives us an opportunity to just hear things that we wouldn't even necessarily know to ask. And it also gets us in the schools so that we can see what schools look like and how they're functioning. So the information that we bring back are answers to the questions that we go in with.
So we'll ask, let's say, a technology question, and we get information from all 74 schools, and then we compile the information for that technology question into a report where we're talking about technology. So we don't have a report that just talks about the school site visits. We take each individual question and put it into the relevant report. We summarize the answers and put it into a relevant report. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
51:20
Representative Lowry, you recognize? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Nell, in your section about adequacy not just being about money, you referenced curriculum standards. Might have been different verbiage, but basically that. And I'm sure you're aware that it was brought to us last year, some curriculum changes that some of us didn't like. Changes like removing journalism as a required course, allowing oral communication to be embedded and things like that.
Why was that, if curriculum standards are part of adequacy, why was that not presented to us as part of the adequacy process? I remember it just being one
of our two days that we meet, we got the report on the
Speaker 111
52:12
non-adequacy day. We do have a report on academic standards, and that's what curriculum frameworks used to be called. They're now called academic standards, and that is something that remains in the adequacy
study statute, and we had a report about it, and we will have a report about it again. And I'm trying to think about the timing of, I know that we discussed, all of that was happening at the same time that that report was being prepared. So we had some information that this is going on, this is a change that's in the works, And at the same time, ADE was going through its rulemaking process to put it into place. Okay. Follow-up, Mr. Chair.
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
52:54
So, in other words, there will be, I guess, in this next cycle, there will be an adequacy presentation on evaluating those standards that have been put in place. And I know one of the issues that we get bogged down in sometimes is that adequacy is not equity. I mean, as much as we would want it to be, adequacy is something different than equity. But I guess the question I'm asking is, I mean, if the goal is equity,
we would certainly want every student in every part of the state to have the same equitable chance to take say a journalism course is that something that we're probably going to have a report on and a discussion of whether those curriculum standards actually
do meet adequacy well we wouldn't say it from the
Speaker 111
53:50
standpoint of do they meet adequacy that's again your your role but I do know that we've been that Julie Holt's going to be working on that report and we've already begun
pulling journalism enrollment data so you know before the rule went into place what was the journalism and physics enrollments and and after what was the journalism and physics enrollments and so that you can see what the impact is and that's the way we would we would present it
you are I think that is all of our questions thank you, Nell. Madam Chair, you recognize. Thank
Senator Jane English
Unverified
54:31
you very much, Nell. As always, this was an excellent
presentation. I'm not sure we've had this before, but it really sets it out for us, and we all need to hear it over and over again, because I think many of us get confused. One of the things you all have on your desk is this announcement about the State Chamber of Commerce is having, they're unveiling their new tractor. It will have, I think they're going from five stations right now to about 12. And if you know anything about Be Pro, Be Proud, it has been all over the state,
to high schools, to your colleges, to all kinds of events, hoping to give kids and parents AND OTHER ADULTS AN OPPORTUNITY TO SEE THE KINDS OF OCCUPATIONS AND CAREER PATHWAYS THAT COULD BE OUT THERE FOR THEM. SO THIS IS GOING TO BE THE 5TH OF SEPTEMBER, AND IT'S GOING TO BE DOWN AT THE STATE HOUSE CONVENTION CENTER, SO IT'S GOING TO BE UNVEILING THEIR NEW TRACTOR, WHICH I THINK IS GOING TO BE EXCITING. I HOPE TO HAVE A CAST FROM A NUMBER OF STATES ARE COMING AS WELL, BECAUSE THEY'RE VERY IMPRESSED WITH WHAT WE'RE
DOING. SO TAKE IT AND PLEASE COME AND SHARE THIS INFORMATION with other folks for you
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
55:50
that are not journalism people and our career people career ed type you can come to this so
Senator Jane English
Unverified
56:00
to poke at represented lowry over there can we make sure we have cnc and welding
Speaker 138
56:08
as requirements thank you i couldn't resist all
right next on our agenda is item E and this is discussion of the request
proposal for an RFP to conduct the adequacy study we've had a build-up to that with what nail is kind of presented to us so you should have received an email with the old and the new with the stricken language to make this a little more better for some of you to continue on with and what we're asking today is you you're welcome to for comments and they're excited to come in and but what
we're gonna do it at the end of all the discussion we will vote if we want to put this out to see if we can get a vendor to give us a quote so I will open it up for discussion on what questions you have and I guess I will try and
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
57:15
if we get hung we will try to get the right person down there to answer your questions representative
Lowry you're recognized thank you mr. chair and my first question was about process I would assume that this proposal is being
brought to us by someone the chairs so the question I have is is there someone that would represent themselves as the author of this so that they could be questioned like as a witness like we would do with an ISP it's just a little bit awkward having asked questions back to the chair but yeah and I'll try to answer that question right now while you're
still on the mic but no we did
not have any special group bring this to us this was something we've been talking about for I know the last four years maybe longer in this committee and something we put together earlier turned down yes we asked for opinions from people we got got some opinions from committee members and from others but where we really think that this is what we need to make changes.
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
58:30
And, Mr. Chair, the reason I ask that is I know in our previous deliberations on this,
the discussion ended up becoming a discussion back and forth between members, and I'm just wondering if it would not elicit more substantive information if we actually have a witness, whether it is someone from BLR whether it is one of the chairs that we can ask questions of specifically about the goals the intricacies of it rather than getting
into an open back and forth between members because I know that's what it that's kind of what it
became last and there again I don't know who to tell you BLR came up with
this proposal but it was from the things we asked for in this committee and from the chairs so i mean i would try to answer as many questions as i could i don't know where we could go from but most of this is from y'all this is what this came from the members in this in this group so um but i know there's been some heartburn on things and
then there's been some that have been relieved of it uh so i will try to i will try jane uh can try if not we'll uh okay well
Speaker 144
59:45
i'll just get back in the queue about questions about i just had a question about process okay thank you senator
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
59:56
Chesterfield mr. chair I move that we submit information that we ask for it that we submit the request for proposal on adequacy
okay proper motion would be and I'll state this
to you and you restate if you want to you can restate it for me be a
motion to authorize the Bureau of Legislative
research to begin the procurement process for adequate adequacy consultant services that is it you said exactly what
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:00:24
i said all right i have a motion do i have and i have a
second now is there any discussion i still i have a lot i have a lot of discussion on that so i'm gonna i'm gonna take you off senator chesterfield for right now well i thought the maker got to discuss first
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:00:46
her motion we're discussing the motion i know but the
Speaker 92
1:00:53
maker of the motion gets to discuss you can't okay go
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:00:59
came and we discussed this and at length we were given the opportunity to make changes um addendums subtractions whatever it is and we discussed this at length and I think by now we know whether or not we want to have an adequacy study done by someone other than just BLR so that we can get fresh eyes on on what is
needed in this state to provide it an adequate education and
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:01:32
I'd appreciate a good vote thank you Rep. Lowry Thank You mr. chair I as you well know because you and I've had a number of conversations I've been really all over the map on this issue I I made the original motion fall of 17 that we actually revisit foundation funding in the matrix and I kind of had to go back in my memory banks my own mental memory banks of whether I felt like that necessarily that motion necessarily
intended us having to hire an outside consultant and I've just really kind of come down on especially after hearing Nell's presentation today I've come down on the side of no this is something that is an internal process several things that that Nell indicated one of the things she said is that you You know, this is a statutory requirement of this committee, and we have sufficient information.
We've got 15, 16 years of knowledge of how the matrix works or how, in some cases, it doesn't work. And I think it gums up the whole process for us to hire an outside consultant that is going to have to be brought up to speed with what we have been working on. My other concern is that by bringing in an outside consultant, you know, we're looking at recommendations that wouldn't be able to be implemented until the 23, 24, I think that was the year, 24, 25 academic year.
And yet there are some issues that we've been talking about for several years that if we were able to do a review of the matrix internally, we could actually start getting data back and discussion items back so that possibly some of these changes could be implemented into the next biennium. for instance we've been talking for at least six years that transportation funding should be pulled out of the matrix it should be spent categorically it should be based on finite
objective information like miles driven students transported rather than the way that we're funding it now where we give money to school districts based on every student that's enrolled whether they're transported or not other issues have been talked about is how do we make sure that the money we put into the matrix for teacher salaries goes for teacher salaries well there's you know one of the discussion items has been well then teacher salaries maybe should be categorical that we've made an intent to have an intent of funding teacher salaries in a line item
we want to make sure those dollars go to teacher salaries i just use those as several examples to say that we have a very strong skeletal framework that we're working from we know what the shortcomings are and i i think and based on especially the excellent presentation that we not only got today from nell smith but that we always get from nail and all the individuals over BLR, a wiser course of action would be for us to, and this might be something that BLR
may need to give us guidance on, but that rather than. Representative Lyra, can
I bring Ms. Marty Geraghty to the stand and let you ask her those questions? Bring who? Ms. Geraghty from
BLR. Sure. That'd be fine. I think she needs to answer those questions that you're asking. Okay. Okay. So, Scarity, if you will take the stand, I'm going to let you kind of give him a brief on what he – he may have to restate some of those
for you, but – and you may not be through, so that's fine.
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:05:39
But I just wanted – No, that's fine, because I was getting ready to get to a point where I needed to ask about a recommendation. I think she kind of
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:05:51
saying. Okay. You're recognized. The suggestion that I know some members have talked to me about, and forget what the total prospective dollar amount is for the RFP, say it's $900,000. We could, for far less, hire additional support for BLR to work within the framework of the matrix.
What would be the mechanism for this committee? i know we've got the authority to be able to issue an rfp to hire a consultant but what would be the framework for or the whether there is a possibility of a framework that this committee could authorize additional budget to blr to hire the support staff necessary to do an intensive review uh and to do modeling for for different aspects that we would want to change in the current
Speaker 160
1:06:43
matrix structure thank you marty garrity with the bureau of legislative research represent lowry um i'm not sure in terms of the funding for staff positions we have that available it's the position lines themselves that we would need to look at as well as just the process that it would take to bring those staff in determine exactly the qualifications for the staff that we would need and then go through the process of recruiting them or you know the hiring process
as well as you know trying to figure out how that combines with our current adequacy study that Nell and her staff are undergoing I don't know what kind of timeline that would look like and I'm hesitant in saying that we would be able to accomplish that by the end of 2020 to be prepared to provide some kind of report
Speaker 54
1:07:41
or information to this committee for the 2000 i guess 21 regular session okay but it would
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:07:47
be possible for us to outline maybe a priority of three or four items
that we've had ongoing conversations about say could you pull these to the top of the list and give us some modeling on what the matrix what funding would look like if we pulled transportation out of the matrix, if we pulled teacher salaries out, if we looked at, I think Representative Beck was talking as an example, lower class sizes at the K-3 level, we've identified that that is a significant issue we should be addressing just in terms of making sure that children
are reading at grade level. If we don't meet that standard by third or fourth grade, then they're always going to be having to catch up it just seems to me and you can certainly give me some differing opinion or feedback it seems to me that we're more capable of being able to parse these different items internally as opposed to hiring an outside consultant to come in and look at these things
Speaker 160
1:09:00
and I would like to get
Nell's opinion but it seems to me that if you're looking at one or two items maybe even three it could be part of the adequacy report if that's something that this committee chose to be part of the adequacy report but I think a comprehensive review is is what I have some concerns about being able to accomplish in a timely matter for this committee and the expertise again I don't depending on that information that you're looking for I don't know if we have that current expertise within the bureau to pull those numbers sure well
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:09:35
as my final comment I would just say that my concern you know then the human nature is that if someone gets a contract for nine hundred thousand or a million dollars they're gonna want to present something that makes it look like they did some work and that may include more than what we really need We may not need someone to come in and convince us to have a totally different and new funding
stratagem. We may just need to tweak the one that really some very smart people helped put together 15 years ago, and some of those smart people have still continued to be in the process. so that's that's my argument for why I I think that there is a way forward for us to do this internally and that's that's the argument that I would be making against the proposal to put out
Speaker 144
1:10:38
an RFP so thank you for answering my questions you're welcome representative Lowry I I understand what
you want i believe you're still sitting on the same stage we're sitting on
now we're not looking forward and i think what we're looking at is trying to get some ideas of where we need to be not where we've been and i think if we stay with what we're doing we're doing the same old same oh and we're just tweaking a little bit here and there but i think we need to know what's in the future what's coming how do we how do we prepare for that and i think that's one of the main
reason is that i would like to see this request is that what we need to do in the future because this is not for this this cycle that we're doing we will not be able to unless they've had you know so we had somebody that could get this started they might would give us some recommendations for the what we're working on right now but that's going to be very hard this is going to be for the people in the next uh committee uh two years from now that will be working on what we're doing now for this proposal so we're talking about the future we're not talking about
sitting still we're talking about moving forward and I think that's what we've got to do is look at going forward I don't disagree with you but
I don't agree with you so Senator Elliott I don't disagree with you but I don't agree yet either. So thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess
I want to speak in favor of the motion itself, but I've just got some questions I need to have answered. And, you know, I'll do my mea culpa of
falling on the sort of, you know, for the last six years or more, probably I've been trying to get us to do a full study because we were just reviewing stuff and didn't know what we were doing. We just kind of, in my estimation, did some stuff. And I don't think it's going to be helpful to treat what we do in-house where people are giving us information based on what we've done before to the process that we need to carry on.
So with that, Mr. Chair, I have a question on page 10 at the very bottom of the page. Page 10, number three. Because a lot of things have
been stricken between now and the last time we met and so somebody made these decisions to put stuff in here or strike stuff out and so whoever can answer my question I'd like that to happen if you start with number three after the first period the recommendation will provide the committee a process to follow for determining adequacy I think that and you go on now and into the future is my question I I think that is not necessary and it almost sounds as if it's into
perpetuity so I would like to see that part stricken so that it reads beginning with the recommendations will provide the committee a process to follow for determining adequacy because we know we're talking about you know a period time we're going to start this rather than a particular dollar amount and strike that part about now and in the future i don't know how we handle our suggestions because i was on the
impression we're going to have a robust discussion about any suggestions we had so mr chair i don't know how we handle my proposal to strike that part so i guess i need are you talking about just
striking the part after advocacy says now and in the future yes that's the only part
that uh-huh and now and into the future because i think that's just too much to suggest that we're going to get something that's going to guide us now and into the future because we're going to come we're going to have different legislators here different groups and so i just think that is overbearing
well we'll take that into consideration um if senator chesterfield will take it as
a friendly amendment as as the other two i'm going to come up with in a minute that'd be great um i'd be fine with that mr chair I will accept
it as a friendly amendment I'm sorry I'll accept that as a
friendly amendment as a friendly amendment and we can do that and we can and we can do that so you're just wanting to strike now and in the future yes uh-huh okay yeah all right um I'll take that as a motion
oh well if it's a friendly amendment
we don't have friendly amendment our amendment we still have to vote on that amendment but uh my next two questions and these are the only other two lest we get bothered, on page 11, on page 11, number 8, number 8B, where it reads, address why salary disparities exist. I think we ought to stop right there. Because I don't want to guide them to what they're going to do,
despite the equalization of foundation funding. All I want to know is why the salary disparities exist. So they will look at number 8B. So 8B, I just wanted to stop at address why salary disparities exist. And don't put the other kind of editorial part in there. This in the back. We're trying to find it. Okay. Page 11. What page is it? Page 11. Page 11?
Yes. Where you're at? Okay, I'm sorry. Section 2, where I'm talking overviews, section
2, page 11. I got it. So why did you not like that? I'm sorry. I would like to see it addressed, just say, address why salary disparities exist. And period, leave it right there. and if they want to bring in the rest of that stuff that seems like editorialized
and that's their responsibility to do that. We don't need to know just despite equalization. We need to know for whatever the reason is. I am on page 11. Oh, you're down on the bottom on eight. Okay,
the other eight. There's two eights in B. We were on the top one. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm on the bottom one. I'm on the bottom one. We're moved down. Okay. you
see it now okay now state what you wanted to say i just wanted to stop address why salary disparities exist period rather than the rest of it that's about equalization is up to them to
look at equalization and anything else that makes exist i don't want to kind of tie their hands i believe michelle's got what you
want over here okay all right if nobody
has an objection to that i mean i'm just putting it out there for these are my thoughts mr chair and i just have one more you have one more um mr chair if nobody has an objection to that is okay if senator chesterfield will accept this as a friendly amendment because i'm not substantively changing it i just want it to be clear all right and she will she said all right said she i sound like a little red hen
and then on number nine i read it all the way through so you'll see what i'm talking about Uh, right after 11, right after that number, after that eight, assess and recommend criteria to be used for identifying isolated schools or isolated school, uh, school districts. I would like to stop. I would like not to have the rest of that sentence there or, and I particularly would not like to have and condition or both and conditions under
which such schools should remain in operation or be consolidated now I there may
be some other options so I just think we could be in good shape
if we just stop at assess and recommend criteria to be used for identifying isolated school districts it's up to us then after we get
the information to decide what to do I do not want the people who are doing the RFP deciding
for us what should be consolidated because that's our part that's our responsibility that's yeah
that's my point any thoughts anybody else any
objections reference reference starch I believe you have something to say on that one? All right, I'm going to pop you in there also. Go ahead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
1:19:28
to ask and make sure that I'm reading it right, because there are
such things as isolated schools within the district, and there are also isolated school districts. For example, Cedar Ridge had two elementary schools, one at Newark, one at Court Charlotte. They themselves then discussed and assessed and saw that they needed to close one that was isolated at court charlotte and incorporated into newark elementary so the way i read it it's it's saying both of those things there are isolated schools within a district and there are isolated school districts so they're wanting to see the conditions which one should remain
open or one should be consolidated within that same school district am i reading that wrong i really
don't know but i think you're right so i'm just nice that's above my pay grade there um you know i think and i'm just going to put my two cents in there i think that we can look at that we have different eyes than that somebody else is going to look at this differently i mean it would only be a recommendation it wouldn't be something that
we had to do we could still do what we want but it would just be a recommendation if we had someone else look at this and make that uh thought to us so um i'm kind of against taking that out of there senator elliott for that reason but i think we probably need someone to look at it doesn't mean we can't do it differently we've done a lot of things differently
yes i understand that mr chair but what i what i don't want school districts out there thinking is that we are trying to get somebody else to tell us when schools or school districts should be
consolidated by putting it in the RFP that is our responsibility I'm particularly concerned about the small schools we when we change the law to say you can exist if you have 267 students we're at 350 and we keep going down I am you know that's a decision we've made and I am at peace with that decision but what I said at the time is I don't think we give ourselves a pass by
telling those school districts you may exist if you have 250 students and not fund them adequately and I think what this could mean is we could take a decision that we made and use this as somebody else tell us oh this school district has only 267 people so rather than funded adequately we want somebody to tell us we ought to just consolidate them if we want to consolidate them i think we ought to just do it that's why i think it should be out we want to look at it and fix it some kind of way
but i think the word consolidation has no place in in this rfp because that's a policy decision are you finished i
am finished all right thank you senator hindron you're recognized time well are we are we still talking about that
Senator Jim Hendren
Unverified
1:22:32
change or just in general in general whatever you want to talk about okay yeah so I have a and I guess I'd ask director key if he wouldn't mind coming and commenting on this and I
think it's important for us to understand where we are on this last time we had an RFP put out and there was a lot of us who had a lot of concern because we had only one person who participated nearly a million dollars and the testimony from those who had worked with this group before said get prepared for the price tag to go up significantly and so clearly that caused a lot of us a lot of concern because and I think we need to be clear here and I
and I'm gonna ask Senator Chesterfield to respond to this because she said something in her emotion that I don't see in the RFP the RFP has been changed from what we talked about before and primarily because of what Senator Elliott talked about on page 10 item 3 and the striking of item 1 and 2 the first the first RFP said we want this outside group to come and tell us how many dollars we should be spending in Arkansas and that's again somewhat I think perilous for us when we have the kind of court oversight that we have on
this to particularly when the RFP was written to say we're gonna let them use professional judgment so make a subjective view based on their opinion what our financial obligations are and then we're sitting here with the court that can enforce that so again it caused a lot of us some concern so that concern was addressed in many ways by the removal of item one and two which said you're not going to be talking about specific dollar amounts but you're going to be talking about the methods because as many of you have pointed out there are some problems with the way we do adequacy it doesn't adjust it doesn't address transfer transportation funding appropriately the issue of how we deal
with small school districts versus large school districts probably is not addressed appropriately. So now as I read this RFP it's not an RFP to go out and tell us how many dollars we should be spending but to tell BLR these are some just tweaks to make your adequacy study better and more and more thorough. So I think we need to be clear and again I want Senator Chesterfield to weigh in on this what are we requesting here? Are we requesting them to give us dollar amounts or are we requesting them to tell us how to improve our process and if it is the
latter I'd like to hear you know Johnny Key come and say that he agrees with that and because I know you were involved in some of these discussions about changes to make certain that that was the method that we were going down so I'm still undecided on this because again if it's the latter I still would be uncomfortable if we just have one presenter and it's a million dollars to come and do this but are we willing to move forward I think if the department says they're comfortable with it but based on these changes and if we are clear as a
committee that this is not a request to have an outside group come because you talk about policy Senator Elliott about whether or not consolidation is a policy issue well I promise you funding is a policy issue so to turn that and delegate that to an outside group I have the same concern on funding that you have on consolidation so I guess I would ask for Senator Cheshfield and also uh director key to come and comment
Speaker 209
1:25:45
to whether or not i'm understanding this correctly you want me to
Speaker 87
1:26:00
go okay you're recognized johnny key department of education
so yes senator hendron you're correct the chairs
Speaker 89
1:26:05
had asked the department to weigh in as they had I think asked several groups to weigh in on after the failure of the original attempt at an RFP and we did look at it and this wasn't a department, this wasn't part of the department input but it was my understanding of much of the legislative input was concern over the original
submissions, same direction at identifying a new dollar amount, a new foundation funding amount so as far as removal of item one and two under 3.0 a I think we do get closer to what I understand the desire is which is the methods you know how do we after you know now 16 years post Lakeview are our methods for determining adequacy
still what they need to be and what research has come about in the last decade and a half that may help inform the direction this committee goes in making those recommendations so
Speaker 210
1:27:17
does that mean you're comfortable with it or not comfortable with
Speaker 89
1:27:22
it or what i am comfortable with the the language as it is in this revision that we're talking about methodology i mean there are some components in here that i think will get into dollars i think
specifically with some of the categorical and then i don't know where you know y'all might end up going with respect to the things like transportation but i will say that and just have everyone to recollect that even after odd and pikas gave their original recommendations and then the 06 report where they came back and and we did some recalibration their recommendations were tweaked that's how we went from a a school size
of 500 prototypical to a district size for one as one example of 500 so there there are some components there that I think necessarily start talking about amounts as it relates to components of the current matrix and changes or additions something that I've been hearing a lot about lately is mental health I think there's been some conversation in this committee about that is that a component that might be added to the matrix so am I comfortable
with that conversation yes ultimately it's this committee and the full General Assembly that will decide if those recommendations end up becoming part of policy thank you represent murdoch you're recognized i don't
have you in the queue i'm sorry are you have a question for no i'm going to yield
to her thank you secretary uh pop your mic okay there you are i'm sorry go ahead thank thank you
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:29:16
you, Representative Murdoch. I appreciate it. Representative Key, Senator Elliott, and I are the individuals who are left from the Otten and Picus era. Anytime you have a study, you're going to have to look at some money somewhere because it's going to be ultimately our responsibility. Does it mean that we follow what they say? No. The courts have never required that we follow exactly what people tell us or present to us, but it is important as we look at adequacy that we get new
eyes. It has been 16 years since we've actually defined. What we're doing now is just responding to what we started 16 years ago. This is 2019. It is time to look at what constitutes inadequate education now. As he mentioned mental health, we didn't think about that then. As he talks about, as we look at children who are the victims of their parents' drug use, opioid addiction, methamphetamine addiction, we didn't talk about that then.
All of that is a part of what will constitute an adequate education for our kids. And so I just want us to look at this. You and I are the ones who will determine what monies we will put in. But if we don't start looking ahead, because what we're dealing with today, inadequacy, is what we dealt with 16 years ago. And education has drastically changed since then. And we need to look at what we need to put into this, to this matrix, to make sure that we're providing as close as we can to what our kids need.
I was one of those who voted no the last time because of the money. We've taken out some of those components, that one and two. But ultimately, we're going to have to make a choice as to whether we continue to just do things as we've always done or we're going to move ahead and give our administrators, our teachers, our support professionals what they need in order to make better judgments and us about what we need to make better judgments about what constitutes an adequate education.
Speaker 224
1:31:36
Thank you. Thank you, Chairman. As I sit here and have listened for the last ten years when we have these discussions, the frustration continues to grow with me in that the legislative body continues to focus on, it seems, not necessarily, well, first of all, we agreed to spend a lot of
money for going back to Oden and Pikes and any other studies since, and maybe this one now. We decided to spend a lot of money to hear experts and those that we agree have the ability to make assessments of our system. Then we make determinations and finally make decisions based upon something else. The needs come back at a level of this, and we fund it at that. And we continue to do that. Then we have expectations of outcomes to be better. It is so
frustrating to listen to leadership in this body that continues to focus on evading the dollar. You have to spend money for these outcomes to be what they should be. Now, it should be spent wisely. We're going through assessments. We're considering another consultant. But it's my opinion that we have enough information, not that we should continue to get information for things that Senator Chesterfield just mentioned that arise, that have become part of the adequacy process. We should continue to study, get more information, make adjustments. But the problem
becomes we don't even do what it says all the way back to Oden and Pikas. We don't even fund it or take care of the things as they have been stated. And because we have the ability to say no for whatever reason, then that's what we continue to do. And I think as we go forward, we can have this discussion, we can spend $600,000, $700,000, $200,000, and we'll end up in the same situation again if we don't have the courage to listen
and not try to politicize the report that we're going to get and make sure it fits our political agendas, and that we just take the raw data, the information, and then make a decision to help folks. And we can't do it by normalizing. What I mean by that is this state is different. There are different parts of the state that have different needs. So we must attend to it in that manner if we're going to fix something.
Again, I say this every time, and it falls pretty much on deaf ears because we make decisions based upon other priorities. Going back to Lakeview, Lakeview told us what to do and how to do it irregardless of cost. That don't mean that cost don't matter, but that means that we're really supposed to do the things we're charged to do, irregardless of the cost. So dollars is going to be a part of this, should be a part of it. And I think if we're ever going to do what makes sense, then we're going to step up
and we're going to have the courage to listen to somebody, be it BLR, be it this consultant, be it Odin Pikus, somebody, and fund it to the levels that they suggest versus us getting and manipulating it for our priorities. Thank you. Representative Meeks. Thank
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
1:35:15
you, Mr. Chairman. Colleagues, I'm going to speak in favor of the motion, which is why I seconded it, obviously. You know, the scriptures tell us that with a multitude of counselors, there's great wisdom.
And it's very easy for us to get lost. I'm going to use an old cliche here. You can't see the forest for the trees. We're all involved in this process very heavily. BLR is very involved in this process heavily. And sometimes it is beneficial to have someone come take an outside look to make sure you're doing things the best that you can. You know, we're currently spending, what, half of almost half of general revenue on education, over $2.5 billion a year.
To me, a million dollars is a very small investment. And if they come back and say, hey, you guys have got the best system in the country, I think that's a small investment to affirm to us that, hey, we're doing things the best that we can be doing it. Obviously, there are tweaks, you know, Representative Lowry, there are tweaks that do need to be made to it. However, if they come back and tell us, no, here's an even better way to do it, wouldn't you want that information? I mean, if you look at our students right now, our students are scoring in the 40s,
our 30% proficiency in math and science. Nationally, we're ranked like in the 41, 42 in science and math. So obviously, we're not doing it the best way we can. And to me, a million dollars to have someone come from the outside, give us a fresh look, give us some new ideas on how we can improve or fundamentally change what we're doing so that our students aren't still scoring 40th and 50th in that bracket. I think
it's worth it to us to make that small investment. And like Senator Chesterfield said, we haven't had someone look at this in almost, what, 15 years now. Having someone from the outside look at this every decade or so, again, I think it's wise for us to do so. And so for that, I'm supporting this, and I would encourage you all to do the same. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I sure hope none
of those consultants are watching our live stream. They know we're going to pay a million now. So.
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
1:37:41
Senator Johnson, you're recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chair. uh i feel like that representing meeks made several of the arguments i was going to make but coming from a different direction uh i i think it's true we do need to review these things i don't know that we need to do it within the established system we have of having a matrix deciding what's in it deciding what's funded externally of that i guess i keep coming back
to the fact that I'm a consultant, that's what I've done for about 35 years, and I'm a temporary person that comes in and deals with a specific issue related to my clients, and they cannot cost justify or otherwise justify bringing in permanent expertise in that particular area that I advise them on. I see us in a situation where we, to use a building analogy, Mr. Chair, since you're in that kind of business,
you hire an architect to design a building for a specific purpose, and then you have a builder that puts it together. I think that the consultant could very well be the architect, and our BLR staff could pretty well be the builder, working with the department and Secretary Key. But once you do that, you've got your maintenance people in that building that keep it up and come in and say, we need to make these little tweaks here and changes here. In the context of where we are today in doing this,
I tend to think we need to, you know, and I very much agree, We probably could have a regular, and regular meaning not biannually or annually, but regular at some longer interim or interval, a review of just how we do things. And I appreciate what Senator Chesterfield said about the things that have changed in this 15 years or so. Technology that we can use to deliver education has changed in that 15 years or so.
So knowledge of things that we've been doing that maybe haven't been working, and one that pops into my mind, working with Senator Elliott in the science and reading issue, that's something that's come forward, and we've seen how important that is. But the real question I have is, to kind of cut to the chase, Is this something we properly fund and do within our own staff, in-house, so to speak,
or do we bring in an outside consultant? I'm not against, in the future, bringing in an outside consultant, but I think that we have the building plans, we have the structural framework, we need to tweak it, and we ultimately have to tweak it and make those decisions. So I tend to be leaning toward this, moving toward making this an in-house for this cycle, making this an in-house operation.
And, you know, I may be back here a year or two from now saying, you know, now we need to bring in outside people. But for this very moment, unless the Secretary could change my mind on it and point out specific instances why we definitely need that outside architect to guide our hand on this, I feel I'm going to have to vote to keep it in-house and not to go spend a million dollars. I mean, yes, in the context of state budget, Representative Meeks is right.
That's not a lot of money, but I go back to Senator Dirksen's admonition, you know, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. So I encourage my colleagues to consider the possibility that we can try this within our existing staff, and even with the money we save by not going forward with the RFP, augment that staff as needed to get where we need to be on this. And I think we all want to go to the same destination.
We just have to decide which path we're going to take. But that's all
I've got on that. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Well,
Senator Johnson, we are doing this in-house this time. This will not have anything to do with the adequacy that we're working on right now. And if we put this off, then you're putting it off for six years down the road because this will not take effect till 22 23 if we did one now so as a junior member on the
education i know you haven't dealt with this before and i don't really mean junior but i mean this is your first time on education here so we that have been on here for quite a long time and been talking about this know the need for doing this now because it does take two years in the process so if we push this or let's use representative lowry's terminology kick the can down the road again as he's used quite a few times on other things then we're pushing this off for four more years so i just want to put that out to you to the people on the committee that for you
that are new this is something we have been talking about for quite a long time and has
got kicked down the road and now we're ready to make the basket so um represent
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:43:26
lower you're up thank you mr chairman and i purposefully avoided using that phrase today so thank you for attributing it to me um i have a request for clarification for centra elliott on her first motion that's been adopted as a friendly amendment and then i've got
a follow-up to that our Senator Elliott
Speaker 129
1:43:49
are we just remu excuse me removing the phrase now and in the future or are we removing now and in the future rather than a particular dollar amount just now and
Speaker 230
1:44:06
in just now in the future yeah that phrase
Speaker 129
1:44:11
Well, my follow-up would be, in light of the fact that the last consultant we hired, we
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:44:18
have used their recommendations then and into the future, why would we limit this RFP to actually being something that we would use for maybe up to 10 or 15 years? I'm just wondering if your argument is that that language is just redundant or it's unnecessary. I don't know. Answer that.
Yes, it is redundant.
It's just superfluous to anything that we're going to do. because the other problem with it is we changed the law in 2007 to make what we would do in the future a review. This is actually a study. So this study might inform the reviews that we do henceforth, but it certainly doesn't mean we're going to do a study every biennium. SO WITHIN ITSELF I THINK IT'S ADEQUATE WITHOUT ADDING THOSE OTHER WORDS THERE BECAUSE WE'RE
NOT GOING TO DO ANOTHER STUDY IN 2025. WE'LL BE DOING A REVIEW ACCORDING TO WHAT
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:45:32
THE LAW SAYS. OKAY. WELL I WOULD JUST AND I THINK YOU KNOW YOUR REQUEST FOR THE THREE DIFFERENT AMENDMENTS THEY'RE REASONABLE BUT I THINK IT KIND OF CLOUDS THE PROCESS THAT YOU KNOW WE'VE HAD A NEW RFP brought to us with changes that are intended to make some members more comfortable with it.
And then these changes are being incorporated into an overarching motion. So I would request that we actually have separate votes on those amendment changes and that any vote that we have would be done roll call by division. That's fine with me. i was
Speaker 179
1:46:15
just trying to be expeditious that's all later or
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:46:25
now at the proper time we'll do it later
Speaker 238
1:46:31
all right are you finished represent lowry i am sorry thank you that's not me series votes yes representative
eubanks i believe you're in representative walker seat is that correct you're are you mic'd up okay it's you go ahead thank you mr. chair i'm
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
1:46:55
glad i have representative larry sit next to me tell me when the mic's live so
i don't know that i object to a study of what we're doing because i've always had questions about the model that we use and if it's still applicable to how we're distributing the funds and everything but obviously there's been some questions this morning about what the RFP says and wanting some change in the changes in it I know when we do the adequacy recommendation we go through everything line by line I don't know that you would be receptive to this but would it be
possible to just schedule a meeting where we the committee could go through this thing and and uh with everybody in it with as many that are interested be in attendance and and go through it so maybe more people are more comfortable with what the rfp is saying no i'm taking a vote i'm taking a vote today you've had this
for two weeks to come up with questions and i think that's what we're doing now so if you haven't read it line by line and you have your questions that's what we're doing and and and you're welcome to discuss any line item you have but i i don't think we want
to we started this back in june uh april and here we
are almost september so no i'm not going to go back if we fail it today it'll
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:48:30
chair um and i think i kind of made this discussion a few months ago when we were originally considering this and
and i think it's probably even uh i'm i'm even more of the same frame of of mine as I was back then that especially since we're not we've taken out some of the dollar amount specifics over the last few biennium we've hired a ton of consultants or several consultants for various task force and study various issues and things like that or we've put out RFPs and it's kind been a mixed bag as far as what we get and I just would caution this committee
as we're looking forward if this if this goes forward and we do get requests for proposals and we we hear presentations from various proposals the various presenters can present really well sometimes to get the get the contract And then oftentimes the quality of work that they have is a compilation of various other organizations that they've seen or worked with in other states and the best practices from other states.
And having been on some of those task forces and things in the past where we've actually had to fire a consultant, the challenge that I have with putting something out like this is really it goes back to how many people are within the education space across this nation that would give us their free opinion.
which would be our job to look at the policy proposals that they have. If we're looking at purely process and purely policy recommendations, I'm a firm believer that we have some of the best staff in the nation in BLR, and they have done a fantastic job in previous task force working with consultants and even doing much of the task force or the consultants' work for them,
I'm not entirely convinced that we need to hire a consultant that we could put out both a request for policy proposals, process proposals, best practice proposals from a variety of organizations. obviously most of them will have a particular point of view on things whether it's left right center or whatever but then we as a committee take those recommendations and ideas and come
up with what what we're going to move forward with in the future without having to hire a consultant and let our staff who are fantastic at it compile all that information into a report that many of us may or may not read or follow through with in the future for far less expense. So with that in mind, I would just encourage us, I don't know how the vote's going to go on this today, if we go forward with putting out an RFP, I'll question the people that put proposals out
and try to do the due diligence of making sure we hire the best one for the job. But if we don't, my hope is that past today, we move forward with some sort of a study and task BLR and reach out to various groups out there to give us the best practices, see what's going on in other states, see what the new innovative ideas are, and continue this discussion past today if we don't submit an RFP out.
And that's kind of my two cents on it. Thank
Senator Jim Hendren
Unverified
1:52:43
you. Senator Hendren you recognize? As I said I'm undecided on this but I think I'm gonna go ahead and support it today with the understanding that if the RFP comes back we've had two different visions presented this morning we've got one who says we're not doing our job because we're not funding education with absolute disregard to what budget realities are and if this is going to be a tool for doing that, then, and if the RFP presenter presents us with that, then I'm
not going to support moving forward with it. But we also have an obligation to fix problems with our funding mechanisms. And if that's what it's going to be, and if that's what the presenter presents us, which is the way I understand what the RFP says, then I think that's good information for us to have. The only, and again, I cannot speak any more in agreement with those who have complemented the capabilities of BLR. As Representative Dodson said, I've worked with task forces and BLR staff a lot and with consultants. But the one thing that BLR cannot do, and we don't want them to start doing, is give
us opinions. And one of the things we're going to be asking a consultant to do is to say, you probably ought to consider changing this or doing this. Now we can then decide whether or not we want to do it or not. But that, again, is something that BLR does not have the capability to provide for us. again I don't have a you remember we killed this last time after the presentation and a response to the RFP so I don't think there's any real harm in letting us hear from a presenter I hope there's more than one and I hope it's not a million dollars because we're not asking them to redo our adequacy report
we're asking them to review what we have and make some recommended recommended changes in the methodology so I don't have a big problem with taking it to that next step but again it's it's whatever the committee wants to do but Again, I think we have to be clear that there's going to be a lot of scrutiny because, again, I hear two clearly different visions about what the purpose of this is. Is it about fixing the methodology and refining the way we do it, or is it about using this as a tool to leverage more dollars with the court's assistance? And, again, I'll support the first but not the second.
Senator Elliott. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I really want us to make some distinctions here about what we're talking about doing because I've read this RFP and nowhere in here does it say tell us what to do but in every instance it says recommend and there is a reason it says recommend it's because that's exactly what they're asking us to do we don't use tell, we don't use order
We don't use stipulate. We don't use any of those words. So that's why I keep talking about policy decisions for us. They give us their recommendations, and we decide. So I don't see what's going to be hurtful about having that. The second thing is to ask BLR to do this is to ask BLR to have to try to go out and hire a whole bunch of other people to do this. What we have done from BLR all along is what the law requires is that we do the review.
Never have we required BLR to do a study because they are not set up to do that. And if we're to ask them to do that, that would be out of order even with the law. And the other thing is if we are going to think about what it means to take a look at every other state or wherever, wherever somebody has something going on we'd like to replicate we're talking about you know we include our territories look at what we're talking about doing then most of us many of us
just came back from the national conference of state legislatures i serve on the education committee along with some of the rest of you in here i went to all of our sessions as i have over the years. I'm telling you, if we are looking to other states to help us achieve adequacy, and I remember now, we're not even talking about excellence or world class. We're having a beef over whether or not we're going to do what we need to do just for our kids to
be adequate and they deserve so much more than that and if we look at the other states if we're going to replicate somebody you know this and you probably choke on this but we might as well ask Massachusetts to come on down here because they're about the only one that said but at world-class not just just that adequacy it's going to be Massachusetts it's going to be Maryland which is about to go world-class or it's going to be somebody like Connecticut and I don't think that's where we want to be if if we want
our kids to have the best of adequacy we need other eyeballs we need people who are experts in this to help us decide what we're going to do I'm going to vote with this motion whether or not you accept it I just tell you that the emotions that I have out there and mr. chair and that interest if it's going to help people feel if that's a hindrance for some people I don't want to make us vote on them. I can I can live without it. I mean I'm used to not getting everything I want and because the other thing that has happened we've had we've had people in this committee say things
such as well we already know what we want to do one of whom is in the newspaper. How does that look to the public if we state that we already know what we want to do so why bother with getting information from somebody who's expert at this and just go do that and then say we've done a study. I really do appeal to my colleagues to ask
you to let's do this the right way and not put our staff in a position where they certainly should not be of giving us their recommendations.
All they can do is give us information. We're asking these folks to recommend and I will repeat we don't have to do it, that's when it becomes policy making for us. Thank you,
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:59:07
Mr. Chair. Senator Chesterfield. Thank you, Mr. Chair. My
motion was to recommend the extension of the RFP. It doesn't cost a million dollars.
It just says give us your best shot at helping us decide whether or not we want to use your services. It's not going to cost a dime. We're just extending the RFP. That's what this vote is about. It isn't about money. It's not
going to cost us for folks to tell us what they want to do. So I don't know where the million dollars came from in the first place. this is a request for proposal
it's not going to cost us anything if we don't like any of the proposals like we did the last time what do we do we vote it up or we vote it down but
as the song says don't cost you nothing to extend
for an RF to ask for an RFP I would appreciate a good vote thank you thank you for that clarification representative Allen
Representative Fred Allen
Unverified
2:00:20
thank you Mr. Chairman the last time we had RFP we only had one person one company to bid on it if that's the case this time are we still willing to move forward actually representative Allen there
was two companies that went together and bid on that and just used one company's name but we'll just have to see when we do that We we have no clue on who's gonna bid or what they're gonna bid until we actually put this out. So okay
Come in I have one more and then we're we're shutting it off Are you have no comments just
Representative Fred Allen
Unverified
2:00:58
as soon as you go follow up. Yeah, go ahead The last time we we did an adequacy study was 16 years ago Since that time there have been a lot of things to change But one thing that has not changed is the politics and so what I'm hearing here today day, it's a lot of politics that's involved in it. And we should not lose sight of our kids. Because if we don't move forward, we're asking our kids to pay for something that we were not
willing to do. And what we need to do today is make a decision to move forward. Because it's obvious what we're doing now is not working. I was 16 years ago, and you cannot ask a football team or a basketball team to go out and play a game based on the strategy 16 years ago because things have changed. And that's the way it is with the school system now. 16 years ago we didn't have to worry about guns. 16 years ago we were not worried about kids that had problems with mental habits, mental
habits. Now we have to face with all those things. So I'm going to vote in in favor of this today, and I will urge my colleagues to do the same. Thank you. Representative Lowry, I
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
2:02:19
believe you have a statement to make. Yes, in light of some of the discussions already taking place, I rescind my motion to have a roll call
Speaker 144
2:02:26
on all of the suggested changes in the motion. All right.
We have immediate consideration. for the vote so alright we're
going to go to a vote all in favor for the RFP say aye all opposed no the
ayes have it alright with that being over thank
you thank you for your support for each and everyone and thank you for your
consideration and all of your ideas and comments
i i do thank you for that all right we have three items left on the agenda and i know some of you may have to leave here before too long but we do have three items left and this time is item f senator elliott you might want to make sure that you talk with Jill about those items that we did the amendment part of okay miss Deborah
Kaufman come on down and dr. Eric flowers got you both down here
you are I guess we only have two items left item F the state's status under every student succeeds act and I will
let you have it you are recognized good morning Deborah
Speaker 256
2:04:15
Kaufman public school accountability division of elementary and secondary Education at the Arkansas Department of Ed. Dr. Eric Flowers, Arkansas Department of Education. And we have a PowerPoint. Do you have a visual? We
Speaker 258
2:04:26
have it in our book. I mean we do have
the PowerPoint in our book if you don't have it yeah is it up there where it's not loaded you see it
Speaker 265
2:04:54
it's not up there no they're just you can go ahead we
have it all if you want to start we have it's everyone that's in your book
So your action items, I mean, action items, your overhead are
in the book. If you want to look at those as she presents those, that'll
Speaker 256
2:05:57
save us a little time, maybe. We have excellent visuals,
Speaker 272
2:06:01
and we're so sorry that we're not getting to post those. But we're very happy to speak to you today about accountability. And when you think about accountability, accountability is a mechanism to receive feedback so that you can improve.
And so we really think about accountability in that way. Our vision at the Department of Ed is to transform Arkansas to lead the nation in student-focused education. And so today you've hit upon those conversations about what do we do that's adequate and then what do we do that is exceptional. so in our efforts to provide the best accountability system available in Arkansas we started years ago with stakeholder meetings we scheduled 10
immediately around the state to gain input from all stakeholders and so the first question we're asked usually is who are the stakeholders and it's it's It's every person in Arkansas. It's parents, it's students, it's taxpayers, it's business leaders, it's factory workers, it's educators, organizations, advocates. We want to hear, and we did hear, from a variety of people. In addition to hearing from our stakeholders about what they wanted in an accountability
system. That information is reviewed at many meetings, and many of our partners sit behind me today that hosted meetings for us. We had social media out just constantly throughout those times trying to get feedback from people and making sure that they're aware of what was being discussed. Our state board meets monthly, and they've talked about ESSA and our state accountability just about every month. We have an SS steering committee that's comprised
of various stakeholders. In fact, Senator English and Representative Cozart sit on that committee as well as other stakeholders from across the state. A committee of practitioners that is purposefully divided to or developed to bring about the diversity in our state. So we have people that are educators and non-educators that are represented regionally around our state. We've posted everything by Commissioner Memo and on our website. We've asked for public comment
over and over again. Our accountability plan is reviewed by a technical advisory committee that's made up of experts from
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the field. We have the fixer here. Oh, great. So,
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advisory committee is constantly looking at our data to see that our accountability system is working the way that we expect.
And finally, our ESSA plan was reviewed and approved by the U.S. Department of Education not once but twice. So we feel confident that many eyes have read our ESSA plan. But if you've not, we certainly would love to talk to you about that. In our ESSA plan, we submitted in September 15, 2017. We were approved January 16, 2018. We submitted an amendment in January 7, 2019, and that amendment was brought about because
ACT Aspire did change their cut scores for ELA. At that time, we also took in the comments from our stakeholders once again and adjusted our long-range goals to statistically represent and have some common dates so that schools could plan accordingly. That was approved March 11, 2019. Our ESSA plan is individualized by states, so you will not see another one exactly like
it. Love you. It is different because that's exactly what the feds have allowed us to do, to have a plan that is specific to states, but they did set some very rigorous expectations within it. Our plan does not provide labels, so if you're hearing someone labeling a school, that is not a part of our accountability system.
We know from our previous accountability systems that you can label a school right into the ground, but it didn't ensure that they were going to improve. And so labeling or calling them names didn't work. So you will not see that in our current accountability system. Our performance is measured by a multitude of, or a multiple set of measures. previously we had basically one set of measures and that was just test scores
so we realized that our schools are much more than just test scores however test scores are extremely important but there are other measures that go into an accountability system those were determined by those stakeholders that said what's important to us in this state what's important in our accountability system one of the things that you're going to see throughout our accountability system now is a real effort and a real expectation to have
stakeholder engagement and that's looking at a wide variety of real diversity of Arkansans to say what do you know and understand what would you like to see what's important to you so the federal government required that in our ESSA plan but we were just we're happy to do it this way and so as I go through the presentation I want you to see that it didn't just happen as a one-time event but we're living it this way in fact our SS steering committee
meets next week and we'd love to all have you join us in person or by live stream or watch us later because all of the meetings are recorded so we really try to make it available to all stakeholders our stakeholders asked us to not only include four-year graduation rates but to include five-year graduation rates because they want to see if we're really doing all we can to ensure that our students are graduating and finally our accountability system
under ESSA is not just focused on proficiency but it's focused on achievement and growth growth takes a really large component into the plan the The other thing that our stakeholders said in our meetings was that they needed us to align our accountability system. So that's exactly what you did in 2017. You passed Act 930 to help us have a state accountability system that aligned with our
federal ESSA plan. rules that were approved and then there was an adjustment in act 1082 of 2019 that will bring about more support to our school districts based on those reading scores so our state accountability system you're going to see some common language is student focused it instead of it replaced the academic improvement plans for kids and put in student success plans for all of our students
beginning with the eighth grade it has more support to providing excellent educators for all students we all all students deserve the very best teachers and so what can we do to ensure that that's happening so you're going to hear some really great data from dr flowers our system at the state is about support it's not one size fits all you did this so you're at this level it's a level of support that meets your needs some days I get up and I might need a little
support to get around or I might need support on working on a project and other days I need less support and so this is really a responsive support mechanism for our school districts and finally we've asked our districts to start writing district support plans if we're working together so that we're clearly articulating what we're doing together so it really changes some of that language I heard you say this morning you know we did away with academic distress we did away
with labels and the shaming of school districts so we're working on how do we support and improve our school districts so the goals of a comprehensive accountability system and this is written into our ESSA plan but I think it's consistent across state and federal is to identify who needs help identify the underperforming schools and work with the districts to ensure that those schools are getting help provide the support that's necessary but don't
over hover, provide the support that's necessary to ensure that success, and then inform the public, be transparent, and that is a common thread throughout this. Part of stakeholder engagement is having the information to make decisions and having the information to provide good guidance to us as we move forward. So in our ESSA plan, you probably saw this slide and you've seen us if you've heard us present on the accountability system that we followed a theory of action and so today we want
to kind of break down that theory of action the theory of action if we do something then you will join in with us and we'll get the outcome or desired results so in our plan we said if the department of ed implements a comprehensive support and accountability system notice the word support first i'm going to help you meet your goals a comprehensive support and accountability system that measures many facets of student success and school quality that inform and sustain student
learning so a couple of things to unpack there we said multiple measures not just one so you can't say oh she's the most beautiful because she has gray hair you have to think about all of the measures that you would take into your accountability system. In fact, those components are that we have rigorous academic standards, that we have a solid statewide student assessment system, that we have equitable access to excellent
educators, and that we've predetermined what will be those accountability metrics by which we will make decisions and hold our schools accountable, and then that we will have transparency in our reporting so that not just a few know, but everyone can know. And so together, that builds a strong accountability system which you can be proud of. Those academic standards you're going to get into and you're going to have lots of conversations about,
but as a teacher I've sat on the standards committees I've worked in those to try to bring the best standards to our state they're transparent they're on our website there are so many stakeholders involved and I'm sure that as you get into that section you'll dig into it deeply but our academic standards really set the foundation of what are we gonna what do we want and And, therefore, our assessment system tells us how closely we're getting to that.
What do we expect of our students? So at the state level, once again, we've set our standards. We determine what the assessments will be. And then our federal plan, we determine how we will use the data from those assessments. So from our ACT-Aspire assessment, grades 3 through 10, the data are used in our weighted achievement. and it is used to determine student growth. The growth value is set based on the student's trajectory,
based on how they have performed over the past up to four years. So we have to have at least two data points to set that growth, but we could have up to five. The school quality and student success indicator of our index is inclusive of ACT-Aspire data in the reading on grade level, the science achievement, the science growth. We also use ACT in the composite and ACT readiness benchmarks in addition to other
measures of success that our stakeholders recommended. A strong accountability system is relying upon excellent educators. And so in our plan, we define what an effective teacher is and an effective leader. And as you look at this in your notes, you'll see that effective teachers are collaborating with stakeholders. They're involving the parents. They're involving the community in the learning process. They're really purposefully selecting those high effective
instructional practices effective leaders are doing similar things they're engaging the stakeholders people need to know what's going on in schools they need to be engaged and engaged is not just attending it's not just coming to a parent night engaged is do I really understand do I know that there's data available about my school on my school info am I really engaged in what's going on? Have I been a part of the school improvement planning process?
An excellent leader is doing that. They're reaching out. They're ensuring that their community knows what's going on in the school and that the community is a part of the school. They're exercising that professional behavior that we expect and they're continuing to grow just like our teachers are. so as we think about that accountability or ESSA school index as most people call it as states we
had different options we chose to go with a school index because we knew we needed to align our accountability system so we knew that we would need to calculate a letter grade so we need those systems to work together. So in our SS school index, we asked stakeholders, there are certain requirements from the feds, but how should we address those requirements? So we knew in weighted achievement that we would have to look at our test scores, and our stakeholders said, that's
expected. They would consider that reasonable, that we would look at test scores, but we looked at it to say, not only would we look at the kids that are ready and exceeds, but we would give partial credit for the kids that were close because because close does have value in a cts fire then we looked at student growth and we had lots of conversations about this our stakeholders were just adamant that school that student growth should have a big portion they should play a large
percentage of the index and so as you look on the screen you'll see that in elementary and middle school, student growth is 50% of the overall index score. In the high school, it's 35%. And that's because the other 15% comes from a requirement to have graduation rate. Now remember, our stakeholder said we don't want you to just look at four year, we want you to look at four year and five year. And so you'll see those represented accordingly on the index. And then school quality
and student success indicator was a brand new piece that we've never had the opportunity to include in an accountability system. However, our stakeholders were just so excited about it because this is something they've been saying for a long time. Our accountability system should be built on more than just one test on a few days. So this was the opportunity to hear them and to include those components. school quality and student success and by the way we can go into great detail
on these in the future but we look at attendance we look at graduation we look at SCAR reading on grade level science achievement science growth ACT community service learning and then not only did we get the list that we're including now but our stakeholders gave us a list of other items to study and to modeled the data for in the future to see if there's future consideration that they may be included so if you've not been to my school info you can do it right now on your phones and my
school info is so easy to get to it's right on the front page of the arkansas department of ed website there's a very quick link but if you just google my school info it's going to come up first You cannot break it. Please, please, please try to overuse it. We've had 2 million hits, and we would love to have 2 million more. So please tell everybody you know to go to My School Info. When you type in a school name or a school district, it's going to pull up and give you options to click on.
Once you've gotten inside the school, you're going to see a page that looks like this, where you can access the information about the school, statistics, the school rating, and the report card. When you click on that report card, and by the way, you can always share it with your friends because there are share buttons on the side. But when you click on the report card, that report card is really all-encompassing of the reports that we provide. so if you open that up it will drop down you'll see it's still called the school report card for
right now we're working for a better word in the drop down but you'll see the esso school index so october the 15th coming soon you'll see the brand new esso school index so you can change the date at the top of this page and look back over three years for a school district to see how did they how well did they do on their index. So if you click on the ESSA school index for a school then you're going to see something that looks like this immediately. This is the ESSA overview
and it gives you your overall score and it immediately begins to show you charts and data about your school in comparison to other schools. So if you're a high school it compares you with other high schools. So I think in screenshotting this, to put it in here, you can't see, but this school scored a 67.1 overall on their index. The state average was 66.28. You see that up in
the little arc graph at the top. And then at the bar chart across the bottom, what you can not see probably on here is there's a black dot on there that is this school district this school and if you hover over those bars you can compare to say who are the schools that are doing better than I am who are the schools that are scoring below me so you can see yourself in comparison
and that's just a very quick visual on all of our pages you'll see a button that in this one there's an orange button at the top that says ESSA overview so not only are we providing the data but if you click on those buttons you're going to get a one or two pager that's some very parent friendly and easy to read language so if you don't want to read our big thick ESSA plan and you'd like to know what it what the ESSA overview is in a page or two right here
it is so we've tried to make those things fast and easy for all of our stakeholders if you wanted to dig into one of the indicators of our ESSA plan and into their ESSA index you can click on over on the left side it gives you a place a little drop-down and in this particular one I pulled up the value added growth score. And if you've been to any of our sessions, you know that we strive to have a score
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of 80 or better in growth. And so this school is scoring at 79.56. So what do you know about
them? On average, the majority of their
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kids are growing as expected. And the value of our growth model is that we're not just looking at growth as some preset, but it's growth for the individual. So if I'm from a poverty background or something, that's not affecting what my potential for my growth is because it's based on my own growth. How much am I growing each year?
The nice thing is, once again, you'll see at the very top that blue button that gives you the opportunity to have an understanding of the school value added growth this one's a two pager i couldn't get it in one page you'll see information where you can change between this chart or if you like numbers better you can click over and see the data remember it's all shareable you can download it print it share it email it text it whatever makes you happy if you look at
This one in particular, you can see in the bottom quadrant, in the bottom quadrant, the black dot, and that is this school district. So once again, if I want to do some comparison to the other high schools, then I can click on any of those other dots and their name, their school name, and their growth score will come up. So it's a very interactive, we found to be a very useful tool. So if you're still at MySchoolInfo.arkansas.gov, if I haven't mentioned it, in MySchoolInfo, you can go to a tab that's called School Rating.
And the reason we put this in here is because we wanted to provide our stakeholders a one-page, easy-to-read overview of what's going on in the school. So if you don't want to dig down through the ESSA school index, you don't want to read the pages and pages of the school report card. Here's just a simple one pager. Start here and then work your way in. This is kind of the shallow end of the accountability reporting. So this school, as you recall, had an ESSA school index score of 67.1 overall.
You can see the grading scale. The grading scale is different for elementary, middle, and high school. As in all of our accountability system, they are grouped by those grade spans. And in this one, there was a letter grade of C. If you'll see right below it, you'll see Learn More About Public School Rating. So I want to know how that happened. And I can click on that and pull up. I think it's a two-pager that goes through the details of how the school rating was earned.
so in our theory of action if we've put together a comprehensive support and accountability system then our school districts and our schools will engage in continuous cycles of inquiry and improvement by combining their state and local information to identify and address the needs of their systems so So the way they do that, first of all, is by looking at their students.
What do our students need if we're truly student-focused? And remember, we talked about these great student success plans. We're going to be meeting with our eighth graders and planning what will their learning experiences look like. What are they going to need to excel? What are the deficits they need to bring up? What do they want for themselves? What do they want to try out? It's really that focused conversation with kids. From that data that's helping us plan as a school how we better support our students.
So in that continuous cycle of inquiry, a school is looking at the data from their students, they're looking at their ESSA school index, they're looking at additional data that they have on site, survey data, other perceptual data, their demographics, their policies. looking at how they do business and saying how do we better serve our students and they do that through a continuous cycle of inquiry then they write their school level improvement plans based on what they've prioritized
so they're saying what do we what is their needs telling us how are we going to prioritize we're going to create a plan I always say plan the work and then work the plan and then we're checking it to say did it get us where we wanted to be? Are we further down the road in how we support and guide our students to success? Districts are then looking at their systems, and they're looking at all these school improvement plans. Those school improvement plans were turned into the district by May 1st. They're collecting
those. They're interacting with the schools, but they're looking at it and say, how do we resource our allocations to ensure these schools succeed so maybe we need more educators here maybe we need to put our best educators in a different spot maybe we need to set our more funds to one district maybe we need new materials in a building so the district is looking at in a systems lens
of how do we make these systems most effective and most efficient and support the schools to ensure their success. And that's where the department comes in. So this is where we provide support. And support is not a label. It's not a place you get into. Support is a relationship. we look at level one general support as what we do for everyone what we put on our website how we
answer the phone how we reach out all of the meetings that we're attending and presenting and encouraging others to reach out to us that's all general support and general support is usually enough for many of our schools because they've got excellent people working for them they're paying attention they're reading they're studying they're asking questions and they do a fabulous job when we look over at our ESSA plan our ESSA plan said and
this is a federal requirement that we identify the lowest performing five percent of schools so we take our title one schools we rank them and we identify the lowest five percent those schools are identified as in need of comprehensive support which means that because their score is low it would appear that they need to look at their entire system they need to look at their core instruction they need to make sure they have a strong curriculum that's
aligned to the academic standards that just makes sense if you also or if a school also has a lay a low performing subgroup persistently low performing subgroup then those subgroups are identified and in this it's called schools in need of targeted support means you need to target your resources to ensure that those subgroup that subgroup of students is getting what
they need to be able to achieve to the levels of other students in this case when we ran our data we knew that we would identify 41 schools in need of comprehensive support because that's 5% that's just math in looking at the data on our subgroups and we looked at who was persistently underperforming we had a subgroup that stood out that has been underperforming and that subgroup is the subgroup for students with disabilities our special ed students receiving
special ed services so that's not to say our students did something wrong that's to say we need to go back and look at our systems to say are we allocating the appropriate resources to ensure those students can succeed so through our support system that brings about the different types of support as in the Arkansas accountability system, that we may need to collaborate with the district to ensure they're meeting the needs of students. We may need to coordinate with them. We may need to direct
that resources are allocated in such a way to achieve success, or we may have to provide more intensive support. And there's details on there that align with the state accountability and then the most recent legislation. At the federal level, you know, I've talked about the identification of schools in need of comprehensive or targeted support. What confuses some people about that, and they kind of get them mixed up, but in the federal, the identification only happens once
every three years so we identified based on the 2018 um 2009 what the 2018 data is when it was based and they were identified during that school year we have been working with those schools to ensure that they're addressing either the systems or the subpopulation of students they've been some of them have received planning grants through 1003 and they're actively involved in updating their school improvement plans and therefore district support plans
those schools will continue to receive that additional federal support up and to which time they can either exit that identification or to our next identification cycle which will be based on 2021 data all along the way we'll be letting them know how well they're doing and so that's a part of our monitoring and feedback process okay we've been walking through
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the theory of action for
student success and so what a theory of action does is allows districts to think through the process of successfully implementing intervention of choice so working through a theory of action can be viewed through an if-then scenario so let's use educator preparation programs as an example so if we support and promote teacher preparation programs continuous growth and professional learning across the state then this will hold all new teachers to the same high standard and this will create highly effective teachers and principals that
help produce college-ready and career-ready learners. Arkansas currently offers 25 traditional and alternative educator programs across the state. We are at a four-year all-time high of Arkansas in regards to enrollment in education preparation programs. In the 17-18 year, we had a total of 4,062 enrolled. This past academic year, that's 18-19, around 800 Arkansas students enrolled in the teacher cadets and or orientation to teaching classes which are high school
recruitment programs and they're offered to grades 9 through 12. What we did is we sent a survey to over 300 of those students responded in those grades 10 through 12 and over 53 percent of those respondents said that they plan to pursue admissions into a traditional educator prep program once they attend college. Arkansas continues to exceed the teacher national retention rate percentages as well at the 15 year it is currently over 10% higher than the national average so let's taken from the 2017 data in 2018 275 schools improve
their overall S index score and improvements range from five point increases up to over 11 point increases in regards to letter grades between 17 and 18 158 schools improved their school rating by one letter grade the schools recognized were 68 elementary schools 28 middle and 61 high schools three of these schools raised their letter grade by two letter grades as noted we had three schools that raised their letter grade by two letter grades and they were
Bob Folson Elementary and that's in the Farmington School District Harmony Grove High School Saline County in the Harmony Grove School District and and Ouachita High School in the Ouachita School District. As Ms. Coffin mentioned earlier, the Arkansas ESSA Index contains five indicators for success, weighted achievement, growth, progress to English language proficiency, graduation rate, and school quality and student success. So weighted achievement academic growth make up 85% of the school index score
for elementary and middle schools. And for high schools, these two indicators make up 70% of the school index score. So as part of determining the overall ESSA score, schools earn points based on students' value-added growth scores in the content areas of math and English. Value is also added where applicable for English language proficiency. It is important to note that when considering student achievement, student growth can be seen as a vehicle towards consistent improvement. So in highlighting these three schools that raised their letter grade by two,
members of the standard and support unit team spoke with administration to each of these schools to discuss actions that were put into place to help them achieve the success so our first school bob folson elementary school serves grades k through 3. from 16 to 17 to the 17-18 academic year the overall essa score went from a 69.65c to an 80.69a the school saw their weighted achievement increase over 20 points from a 58.92
during the 2016-17 year to a 79.35 for the 17-18 academic year. And for value-added growth, again, seen as a vehicle towards improvement, saw a 7.48 increase. So some of the highlights these schools noted was that they are a professional learning community. The teachers place students in groups based on their needs when they focus on areas of weaknesses to offer additional support for them. When discussing assessment scores, the teachers also utilize this time to focus on growth
and the needs of the individual students. Okay, this next slide, what we want to do is we're going to take a snapshot and compare 17 and 18 data. So when looking at In Need for 2017, they had 60 students. And you will see for 2018, they basically decreased that by nearly half. Harmony Grove School improved their letter grade from a D to a B. this is our second school the overall ss score went from a 62.72 d during the 16-17 year to a
68.44 b in 2017-18 serving grades 10 through 12 the high school saw its height achievement increase from 43.43 to 55.83 up 12.4 the value-added growth saw a climb of 3.45 from 77.34 for up to 80.82 during the 17-18 academic year. Highlights include their main focus being centered around conversations about achievement, and they also worked with the Dawson Education Service
Cooperative on seven through 12 curriculum alignment. They also had meetings with the Dawson Extension with their math, science, and literacy specialists. These meetings included ideas of how to teach to each standard and the importance of communication and collaboration across their staff. Next, schools serving grades 7 through 12, Ouachita High School saw their letter grade improve from a C to an A during the 17-18 academic year. Value-added growth for the 17-18 year saw a tremendous increase
from 76.24 to 82.98. Their administration shared that ACT-Aspire summative and interim assessment data was utilized to determine how to enhance student achievement. The data was utilized to identify weak areas, essential standards, and students who did not meet the benchmarks for improvement. Goals were set on the data to determine necessary strategies and a plan of action. It was determined that they needed to incorporate more writing in all of their subject areas.
So ELA teachers and the director of curriculum and instruction attended a literacy design collaborative training to provide this. as Ms. Coughlin mentioned earlier on October 15th we will have our 2019 ESSA school index and that is the
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end of our presentation alright great I'm not sure everybody understands
that perfectly I think a lot of you will be checking out that webpage now and seeing how it is Senator Sturge you still have a question
punch your button there and I'll get
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
2:45:46
you in you're recognized thank you mr chair um miss coffin i had just a quick question going back to the school report card
online i noticed that there was a in your example there was a poverty rate uh number there i i guess that would be school specific right that's their free and reduced lunch percentage of the student population um
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2:46:10
that data has been provided to school districts
and it's i'm not sure exactly the calculation for that in fact that's come under question okay we've actually decided that in the future we're
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2:46:22
going to remove that and then put a more descriptive information about their poverty in a in a better location in their in the report
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card because it needs an explanation of where the data are coming from. Sure. And
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
2:46:36
then one of the tabs was also towards the bottom, school report card, ESSA, discipline, and then waivers was at the end.
That's where we put any waivers they've received from State Board for a teacher licensure or whatever it might be, correct? You
Speaker 289
2:46:51
are correct. We list all waivers that school districts have received. It could be a School of Innovation. It could be an Act 1240 waiver. it could be a district conversion waiver or it could be a charter waiver okay thank you ma'am thank you mr chair thank you seeing
no more questions thank you for such an excellent report sorry that a lot of them left there is something else going on today and i think they really just
didn't want to listen but now uh we now they did they they there was something else going on so a lot of them had to leave but we thank you for an excellent report and i have i was honored to along with senator english to work on the essa plan being developed and it was at times confusing for us i'm sure so i know it was for me but hopefully a lot of people can understand that so we are going to skip item g today the fellow reps and senators that are left and we're going to push
that to next month due to the lack of participation in our committee and they thought they were going get out of hearing that one but they're going to have to hear that one next month so yeah leave your books do not take your books with you as senator cheetah was trying to do and we had to stop him but with if nobody has anything else we are adjourned
Agenda
A. Call to Order – 9:00 AM
B. Remarks by the Chairs
C. Approval of Minutes from the June 11, 2019 Meeting [Exhibit C]
D. Introduction of the Adequacy Study Process
E. Discussion of Request for Proposal (RFP) to Conduct the Adequacy Study [Exhibits E1, E2]
F. The State’s Status under Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) [Exhibits F, F1]
I. Adjournment
Documents
Speakers
Representative Bruce Cozart Chair
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Senator Jane English
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Chair
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Senator Linda Chesterfield
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Senator Joyce Elliott Chair
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Representative Gary Deffenbaugh
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Representative Rick Beck
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Representative Stephen Meeks
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Representative LeAnne Burch
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Representative Mark Lowery
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Senator James Sturch
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Senator Jim Hendren
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Senator Mark Johnson
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Representative Jon S. Eubanks
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Representative Jim Dotson
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Representative Fred Allen
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