Education Committee Senate & House
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Senator Jane English
Unverified
6:30
John, did you have something you wanted to say? Would you like to be recognized? Oh, first thing let me do is, that's it, go ahead. Representative Eubanks.
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
7:00
Thank you, Madam Chair. I was going to ask that something be put on next month's agenda, the $60 million that the governor put in for the beginning teacher salaries and that we voted on. I think there may be some unintended consequences that have gone along with that, and I was wondering if maybe we could have some of those superintendents, one or two, possibly come and give us a report on how that's affecting their individual districts, so that we can maybe get a little feedback on that as how it may be affecting their budgets
or either positively or negatively. Thank you. We will add
Senator Jane English
Unverified
7:40
that to the agenda for next month, probably on Monday. Thank you. Okay. So
first thing off the bat this morning, we have the Division
of Legislative Audit Report, Department of Education grants summarized by the Division of Legislative Audit for the year ended June 30th and Mr. Joey Buddenberg will be joining us.
Good morning, if you will identify yourself, you will be recognized.
Speaker 17
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I'm Joey Buddenberg, I'm a supervising senior auditor with Arkansas Legislative Audit. Thank you
Speaker 19
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for... Have a seat. Thank you for having me here. Be comfortable. each year we prepare a summary of all the grants distributed by the Arkansas
Department of Education the 2019 report summarizes the 3.4 billion that was provided as grants to school districts charter schools education service cooperatives and other entities this report is available on our website grants are funded from state and federal sources during the last fiscal year 2019 2.8 billion was provided from the public school fund 524 million was
provided from federal monies and 117 million was provided from other state and miscellaneous sources overall Department of Education distributed 17 million less in fiscal 19 than they did in 2000 in fiscal 18 specific amounts provided to recipients from all of the state and federal programs administered by Department of Education are summarized and detailed on the various attachments in the report brief descriptions of these programs are also
Senator Jane English
Unverified
9:55
contained in the report and one second for your information those reports those handouts are in your binders excuse
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me thank you no audit procedures were performed at the recipient level regarding how these monies were ultimately used for public school districts other state government entities and charter schools the usage of these monies will be described in the audit reports of these entities the report in front of you is designed only
to describe the distribution of the monies by the Department of Education thank you this concludes my presentation any questions
Senator Jane English
Unverified
10:40
we have any questions here seeing none appreciate thank you very much for your report thank
you ma'am okay so we will move along to discussion of the issues related to academic standards and miss Julie Holt
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Julie Holt with the Bureau of Legislative Research, and before I start my presentation, I wanted to give
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a brief update on where we are with our various surveys. Anyways, so this week we have posted on the homepage, is it up there?
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to the ARCLEG State RUS, so your webpage, over to the left, there's a link to it's called adequacy public comments and this was a new survey we started last year at the request of you and we had about 150 members of the public that we don't generally survey
respond to that so you may want to let your constituents know that that's available right now the plans are to have that available through I think mid-february that's optional so we can see how we get responses but otherwise that's in addition to the other surveys and the other surveys that we do and so I was just going to give you an update on that we survey each time we do the adequacy study every two years we survey all of the superintendents and this year we've heard
from all superintendents at all 235 school districts and at all but one of charter school system so we've had a great response rate there we also survey all of the principals in the state and that survey was in the field from October to November and I mean I'm sorry until December and we've got it had about a 72 percent response rate there we also do site visits to 74 randomly
selected schools and 74 is that number that gives you confidence that your findings are statistically significant so when we go to those 74 schools we're doing a sit down with the principals and asking them about what's going on at their schools but we also take with us surveys that we hand out to teachers and we ask them to get online and fill out surveys we found that is we found that's been the most effective way for us to get response from teachers so so far
we've heard from about 50% or over a thousand teachers in the state so you'll hear all those voices incorporated in our presentations and also included within our written reports I'm going to give them just one second
Speaker 42
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to the PowerPoint we're ready yeah yeah okay good thank you thanks Lori so my
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presentation today is on learning expectations and one of the reasons we're giving this presentation is it's statutorily required and you have a gold sheet in front of you that lists all the things that statute says we have to cover every two years or that you need to look at every two years as part of the advocacy study and one of those is academic standards and academic standards now in statute really refers to those specific learning expectations within each class the presentation today takes a little bit larger view and
covers basically what is what are those things we want our students to know and be able to do by the time they graduate high school what are the courses that we want them to have access to even if they choose to take others and then again those academic standards what's to be taught within each of those courses so I've touched on all of these topics within the written report on your desk so I start off with the literature review that looks at different
philosophies sometimes competing philosophies about how students should learn and what they should be taught. I discuss learning barriers. I talk about the development of the academic standards in Arkansas. And then I look at some specific things that relate to learning expectations like our graduation requirements, what advanced educational course enrollment is looking like. We've got the computer science initiative, the new recess requirement, the reading initiative and then also our student focused learning system that we're transitioning to.
So that's all in. There's about a 30-page report on your desk with all of those things in it. But for today's presentation, I'm going to focus only on those things that really relate to adequacy and equity because that's what statute says you are to be considering as we go through the topics for the adequacy study. At the end, I'll be glad to answer any questions if you have things about the report that I haven't talked about and, of course, about anything that we do discuss today.
So these are the four things I'll be touching on, the academic standards, advanced education courses, learning barriers, and then student-focused learning. So we're going to start back in 1983, and that was a pretty significant year in terms of education. That was the year nationally the report A Nation at Risk came out. And up until that time, the U.S. always considered ourselves leaders, but this report really warned that our education system was facing a wave of growing mediocrity.
So there was alarm throughout the country. Closer to home, we had the Arkansas State Supreme Court, which issued the DePree v. Alma School District decision. And that was the first decision, I'm sure you remember, because we say this in a lot of our presentations, But the first decision that found that Arkansas's education system was not meeting constitutional standards. And specifically, the court said that the state was not providing for an equitable education system across the state.
So around that time, there were lots of articles written in the newspaper about the education system and what was happening. And one that I came across really took a look at all the high schools that were not teaching or offering certain courses to students. And what that article reported was that of the 363 high schools in the state at the time, there were fewer than half where students could take a physics class.
And while chemistry was more prevalent, there were still close to 100 schools where chemistry was not being offered. Same thing with some other basic high school courses that were only available in around half of the schools in the state. And that was 1983, so that was not that long ago. So the state did respond to this whole situation with Act 445 of that year, and that was a pretty all-encompassing act, but specific to this discussion,
it really laid a groundwork for curriculum expectations in all schools in the state. And all of the elements
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first rules governing the standards for accreditation for Arkansas public schools. And basically, curriculum-wise, what it said is that there are 38 classes that we expect all high schools to teach, not to offer, but to teach. And there were a couple, chemistry and physics, I believe, that could be taught every other year.
But other than that, they had to teach them. And before that, the graduation requirements, we had 16 for students to graduate. They raised that number to 20. At that time, there were about 30 school districts that were either consolidated or annexed into other districts because they could not offer those 38 or teach those 38. Over the next 30 years, those requirements actually got stronger. by 2005, which was right after that first Lakeview decision, which found not only was
our education system inequitable, but it also was inadequate. So by 2005, there were now 22 credits required for graduation, and the 38 courses had to be taught each year, so none could get away with teaching them every other year those schools that closed and is due there if the 38 were not taught then schools could get probationary status
when it came to being accredited in two years of probation could lead to that consolidation annexation or reconstitution so much like what happens with level five schools today I was working at the department in communications from 2005 to 2011 and I can remember sitting through a lot of state board meetings and every spring I think it was in June schools would come and appeal their probationary findings and I know that the state board at the
time I mean the stories could be very heart-wrenching that you know they just didn't have kids to fill these upper level classes or they couldn't find the teachers but fresh off of Lakeview at that time the stance was really you know we feel your pain but sorry and very I remember very few appeals being granted because the again this was a foundation for what we wanted all students to have access to at that time so things went along in that vein until 2015 and that
was really kind of a watershed year for curriculum in Arkansas. And there were a couple of things that happened that year. One was the passage of Act 1240. And Act 1240 made it easier for schools to apply for and receive grant waivers from education laws. And these were education laws across the whole spectrum. And while waivers were not new in 2015 because charter schools, open enrollment charter schools or conversion charter schools could go through a pretty strenuous application process and apply for and receive
waivers. And then in 2013 there were schools of innovation created and they could also, they had to go through a pretty strenuous application process and they could apply for and receive waivers. But still in 2015 I think we had about 100 schools in the state that had waivers. next month I'll be presenting the report on waivers and I'll talk a lot more about that then but Act 1240 once it came along you were able to receive a waiver
if any charter school took one of your we won't say take but attracted one of your students into their system then you could ask the state board to grant you the same waivers that that charter school had made it a lot easier for schools to receive those waivers and the waivers have truly grown a lot since since that year so the other thing that happened in 2015 was the passage of act 853 and this one did specifically speak to that required 38 for high schools and what 853 did
was say that no longer would schools get in trouble as far as accreditation if they weren't teaching all 38 all they had to do was show that they had offered the 38 and if they could show that they had offered it that there was a place on their schedule, or that they had an assigned teacher, or with the increase in digital classes, you know, that they had access to a digital class if a student wanted something, then no longer were they in accreditation problem. And this made things, I think, took a lot of pressure for schools off and gave them some breathing
room probably. But, so for this report I've done some data analysis just to try to illustrate what happens when policy starts shifting and how that plays out in the field. And so we'll, I'll get to that in just a minute. But I did want to say this, bring to your attention the current definition of adequacy. Because there's a clause in there that talks about the mandatory 38 classes being taught at the high school level and as we just
talked about in law that's not that doesn't really line up with the definition and as we'll see when we look through the data practice does not line up with this definition so this may be something that needs to be addressed so for my analysis I didn't look at whether schools were offering courses because we don't we didn't have access to that decision-making process or what was going on but we could look at whether there was any enrollment in courses at
the high schools and so we pulled data for 294 high schools in 2018 and there are a lot of configurations of schools so any school that went up through 12th grade I looked at there are a number of high schools that are only 10th through 12th grade I think there's at least one that's only 11th and 12th so I looked at their feeder junior high schools and if the courses were taught at those schools the high school got credit but they
weren't counted as a separate school I only included charter schools that had 9th through 12th grades or that had clear feeder schools like Lisa and East End then my big debate on what to do with their we had eight standalone ALE schools, and this is all 2018-19 data. And I decided to go on and include those when I was looking at courses. I did the ALE report for the adequacy study two years ago and found that a lot of times when students are placed in ALE
they're there for either a good part of the day and a good part of the year. So I thought it was worth looking at what's happening within those schools as well. So I also looked at I tried to look at a spectrum of courses and I did use that original 1983 graph to provide some historical context so I wanted to look at those but also wanted to be sure I looked at some that were required for graduation some that were required to be offered as part of the 38 I looked at
two that were required to be offered as the 38 but no longer are to see trends And then I looked at one that is not required to be offered either as part of the 38 or as a graduation requirement. So the first one was chemistry, which in 2018-19 was required for graduation. That's no longer the case. It's not a graduation requirement anymore starting this year, so things may look differently.
But as you'd expect, in 2018-19, chemistry was taught just about everywhere. And there's the one charter school system where it was not taught. There were over 27,000 students enrolled in chemistry that year, and there were five high schools that did not teach chemistry. Three were the alternative education centers. One was a virtual charter school, and then one was a charter school that made up the entire charter school system,
so it's what you see over on the left side. And I did find out from DESI yesterday that that one charter school had been flooded, and so they didn't have high school grades, and so that's why there was no chemistry offered there. So when it's a graduation requirement, we can be pretty assured that it's being taught everywhere, which is a good thing. The next courses I looked at are part of the required 38, so required to be offered.
And it was taught in all but eight districts in charter school systems with over 18,000 students and there were 19 high schools where vocal music was not taught. Seven of those were the alternative education centers, six were open enrollment charter schools, and six were traditional or conversion charter high schools. Very similar pattern when you look at instrumental music, 19 schools again, eight were alternative
education, five were open enrollment, three were virtual, and three were traditional or conversion charter high schools. Next, I looked at foreign language. The standards call for two years of the same foreign language to be taught at high schools, And as you can see, there are a lot of students enrolled, and it's also very prevalent. There were only 14 high schools not teaching foreign language in 2018-19.
Five of those were your ALEs, alternative education. Four were open enrollment charter schools, and five were traditional or conversion charter high schools. Physics is one of those courses that a couple of years ago was part of the required 38. That came out, I think, for 17-18. and so back when it was required to be offered and it was available in all but 30 districts and charter school systems there were about 7,000 students who were
enrolled in a physics course and fast forward to where it's no longer required to be offered and there are 1,500 fewer students enrolled in physics and the number of districts or charter school systems doubled where it's not being taught as far as the high schools the patterns much the same it's twice the number of high schools no longer teaching physics seven of those in 2018 19 were your ALEs one was a virtual charter school six were open enrollment
charter schools and 69 were traditional or conversion charter high schools and And these do include your AP physics courses among those. And physics, like chemistry, is now called an integrated course, which the department explained to me means that elements of those two courses are taught in your other science courses. So it's not that students aren't getting any physics, but they're not taking a physics course as often as they were a few years ago.
Journalism was another course that came out the same year that Physics did. And you see the same pattern. It's not quite as drastic. There are about 400 fewer students taking it. There are not quite as many districts where it's being taught. During our site visits, one of the questions we asked about were these changes in the standards standards in the courses that were required to be offered, and we did hear, you know,
some feedback from principals and superintendents that this provided them more flexibility, and they appreciated that. I did visit one high school principal in northeast Arkansas who said his high school still taught both physics and journalism, and he felt that they were really important courses
Speaker 37
31:50
because they were two that where students had to apply the knowledge they were learning
Speaker 38
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and he just he felt it was important for those to continue and us high schools and districts do have the option to make that decision of course so journalism
of the 55 high schools that did not teach journalism in 1819 there were three that were the alternative education centers one was a virtual charter school, eight were open enrollment charter schools, and 43 were traditional or conversion high schools. Dramas, the course I talked about, that's not part of the 38, and it's not part of the graduation requirement, and so in 2018-19, it's not too surprising, there were 65 districts in charter school
systems that did not teach a drama course, and not that many students, three under 3,000. And this is, there is a drama course that used to, that satisfies ELA, but these are fine arts drama courses. So when you add that EALL course, the enrollment numbers actually go up quite a bit. So of the 88 high schools that did not teach drama,
there were five that were alternative education centers. That's my notes. My notes don't all fit on this page. Okay, well, that's in your report. I'm sorry, I can't. That'll work. Okay, here we go. Five were alternative education centers. Four were virtual charter schools. Nine were open enrollment charter schools. And 70 were traditional or conversion charter schools.
I also looked at advanced placement. Advanced placement until 2015 was different from the 38, because where the 38 had to be taught, advanced placement since 2005 had to be offered at each school. But it's actually very prevalent across the state. There were only 14 districts or charter school systems that did not teach any AP courses. There were about 14,000 students enrolled in AP in 2018-19, and AP could also be international
baccalaureate classes. There were 30 high schools, five were alternative education centers, three virtual schools, eight charter schools, and 14 traditional charter or conversion charter high schools that did not teach an AP class. And those ranged from one AP course being taught at 17 high schools across the state to the highest number being taught was at Little Rock Central, and they had 33 unique courses taught last year.
So of that 38, there's a subset, which is our graduation requirement. And Arkansas still has two paths to graduation. Smart Core, which for about a decade now, has been an opt-out path. So students are automatically enrolled in Smart Core unless their parents come and actually sign a waiver saying, my child doesn't have to follow that path. You can see the vast majority of students are in Smart Core. There's only 4% for whom there's a waiver on record for.
And that number of waivers has been decreasing steadily. you know, gradually but steadily throughout the years. The requirements are very similar, except when it comes to math, smart core diplomas require Algebra 2 and a higher level math course. Core only requires Algebra 1 and Geometry. I wanted to look at how our graduation requirements compare with other states, and ours are actually pretty rigorous.
Nationally, the range is 13 requirements for the state of California. to 24 credits required in Washington, D.C. There are three states, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, where that is a policy left up to local school districts. So at 22, we're among the more rigorous. When you look at how we're doing with SREB states, again, the story's the same. All require four years of English. There are five that only require three years of math, where we require four, and three
require four years of science, where we only require the three years. And digging down just a little bit deeper, I found that there are only five of the other 15 states that require students to pass Algebra II, and it may be that they have two graduation tracks like we do. And there are only three that require students to pass chemistry. And I was curious about that since our requirement had just changed. So all of that course offering really kind of relates to the questions of adequacy.
But I also wanted to look at equity. And I got a big help with that. Nell found this report sometime last year. And it's by the Government Accountability Office. And they were, as a 2017 report, and they were asking the question, you know, why do so many fewer students from families of poverty attend and graduate college than their more fluent peers? And so they did several different analyses, and they found that students who attend schools
with greater concentrations of poverty, there are fewer of the courses that are required for college admission that are being taught at those schools and they also found that that was true not just for schools with greater concentrations of poverty but for smaller schools and for charter schools so I thought well let's see what's happening here in Arkansas and if you look at schools whether they teach and the schools that teach are those darker bars and the schools that
don't teach are the ivory colored bars. You see that schools that do teach have an average enrollment of around 500 kids. When it gets smaller they're less likely to teach all the courses that are listed above on that chart. When you
Speaker 37
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look at it in terms of poverty disparities, again you see that the higher
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poverty schools are the ones that more frequently did not teach those
courses in 2018-19. For racial and ethnic disparities I divided enrollment into white students and non-white students and
Speaker 37
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again the wider the student body the more likely courses were to be offered. And then I'm going to go
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through these but this these next slides show the map of where
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courses are not taught and this is chemistry you remember there were very few schools the yellow dots rec
represent either schools or charter school systems since this there we don't have
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a big area for the charter school systems we can show like we do districts and then on
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vocal music you can see there's some districts and that's in red where students do not have vocal music taught in
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their school, or did not last year. They might this year. So vocal music, instrumental music, you can see the dots are going to be clustered in the central and northwest
because a lot of them are your charter schools, and most of those are in central Arkansas or northwest Arkansas. Foreign language, again, we look like it's most of the state. When
Speaker 49
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you get to courses like physics and journalism and drama, you start seeing
Speaker 38
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some geographic disparity. A lot of districts and schools in eastern and southern Arkansas, that may
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be a function because those are going to be smaller schools and more rural schools.
And AP, again, like we noted earlier, is actually pretty prevalent across the state. and the districts look like they're probably the smaller, more rural districts where students did not have AP taught. In terms of school governance, I looked, and there's a chart in your book, I think on page 16, I may be wrong, that goes into more detail on this, but basically courses are more likely to be taught
Speaker 38
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at traditional and conversion charter high schools. Again, that may be a function of size as much or more than it is a function of school governance. So we've talked about advocacy and equity. I did want to bring into this discussion because we're talking about learning expectations and what we want our kids to learn. We've all just finished our site visits to all the schools, and I think we were all struck by the barriers to learning that really have to be addressed
before teachers can expect to teach kids. And so I just wanted to share some of what we saw out in the field with y'all. We did have, I thought this comment, this was actually from the teacher surveys, that summed up very well what we saw. And she said, a very small portion of my job has anything to do with curriculum. I'm busy with students who may not have electricity, who are involved in drugs or already in the juvenile system, whose parents are getting a divorce, who may not have eaten the previous night, who may have been abused.
I could go on. So poverty was definitely one of the barriers we came across when we were out there. I visited 15 schools. Just a few quick stories from there. I went to an elementary school in north central Arkansas they had used some of their school funds to build a shower because they had families with no running water and they found that the students were you know not in a frame of mind to learn probably were getting bullied may have been a distraction to
other kids so with the shower they're able to get school kids right as they get off the bus bring them in let them take a quick shower put on clothes that been donated to the school and the day they said it's made a big difference another story I heard I went to another school in eastern Arkansas and this school district uses NSLA funds to buy food to put in backpacks to send home with their kids because otherwise they they have too many kids that they're
afraid are not eating and they come to school hungry and are disruptive and not ready to learn. One other school they had just gotten a coordinated school health grant been able to put in a school clinic and they said that had made such a difference because before when the students got sick and these were young kids and they call the parents the parents may or may not be able to come get them and then they may or may not have the gas to get them to the doctor so this way they knew that the kids were at least seeing the doctor
before they went home, and so all of these things are not things that, you know, you heard Nell's report on the NSL or ESA funds last month. Those are not what we list as intended uses, but they're uses that schools are having to deal with. The superintendent of the school district that did the backpacks, we always end up our site visits with the question, is there anything else that we haven't asked about that you would like us to share with legislators, and so I promised I would share this quote, and she said, there's a hidden population
in this state. Most legislation is not passed for the 82% of this school's students who live in poverty. It's passed for the 18% who live in a house that looks like the legislators. So I did want to fulfill my promise and share that. The other barrier to learning we found had to do with mental health and public health. And two years ago, when we were out doing site visits, we didn't have any questions about mental health, but that was just an issue that kept bubbling up. This year, we had some specific questions about mental health, because we know that's a barrier. And the schools
I went to, I added another question. I said, you know, how many of your students access mental Health Services, and I heard everything from 10% to 25% of students, which was, to me, a surprising number. I visited one school, and they had just had an assembly the night before warning parents about vaping, and these are all the vaping devices that they had confiscated in the first few months of the school year. And they said this is really, I mean, besides being a health issue, it's hard on educators
because these vaping devices look so much like, you can see one that looks like an electronic mouse. There's some that look like flash drives. There's some that look like lipstick cases. So this ends up being, you know, both a resource issue and then just a worry issue for educators. One other quick story. I visited a high school in North Central Arkansas, and the principal said they were having to put together a policy on how to deal with students who self-harm.
And this is because they'd had several students who had practiced cutting. One who was a girl who had gotten scissors from a classroom, gone into the bathroom, closed the stall door, and cut herself. And they said sometimes this cutting is just trying to drown out other pain in their lives, and then a couple of times it might have been suicide attempts. But this was a new policy that they were having to come up with. So there's a whole lot that educators are dealing with that I forget about
when I'm sitting around looking at data. So it's very good for us to get out in the field. I had a high school principal who, I'm just going to finish with this quote, says these kids have seen and heard and done things in 16 years that in 48 years I've never seen. They've been traumatized at home, they've experienced things that I can't even relate to, some have scars, and everyone that I talked to said, you know, that this isn't new, but the concentration of these issues are much more severe than they were, you know, five, ten years ago.
So on that happy note, the state is transitioning to a system of personalized learning, and this really puts the student kind of in the center of their educational experience. And one of the main ways that this is first being instituted, Act 930 of 2017 said that all schools would have student success plans in place with their students by
last school year and the student success plans were to be made with the student with teach their teachers their parents possibly their counselors or an administrator and they were to consider a whole wide range of things everything from what courses does the student need to be able to graduate on time do they need some extra interventions or can they take some accelerated courses what are their civic interests are there some volunteer opportunities they can get involved with so that's really addressing the whole child and we when
we asked superintendents on our survey about it we got overwhelmingly positive response about this they said 98% said that it had been beneficial for their students, and 93% said the process had been beneficial for their schools. That said, less than half said 100% of their 9th through 12th graders had a plan in place at this time. Part of that, I think some of them read the legislation of starting with 8th graders and so they're building them in, and about half said
that the personnel, that all of the people involved, that the law is specified to be involved were actually involved and about third said that they really covered all the topics in their plans originally the plans were to be developed at the school now there are a number of software options that schools can use to help them with the planning process and we did ask about the student success plans to the principals and their their response was overall positive not quite as glowing as the superintendents mostly because they said
you know it does take a lot of resources to spend this much time with the students and and to contact to get the parents involved seems to be an issue but one school I visited said they had had an assembly where they invited the parents in and said it was really I could tell the students were so enjoying having a formalized setting to really discuss their future plans and their courses with their parents so again overall this was has been seemed to be very positive out there so far so that ends my presentation again these are the
topics that are in your report as I think we said before we've tried to include everything we think y'all might want to know there's always going to be something we probably leave out but we'll be glad to answer what we can today or if you have questions later on um feel free to contact me or nell and we'll be glad to you know do whatever research we can to get your questions thank you very
Senator Jane English
Unverified
50:25
much we have a few questions okay senator sturch thank you
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
50:30
madam chair julie i had a couple of quick questions i'm on
the actual report uh page seven kind of top of the page i'm wanting to go back to discussion about how these 38 courses are determined we gave up that power as far as the legislature to review that I guess is the best way you put it in the top of the report and that is now done through the State Board of Education I'm wondering how frequent that is how often are these 38 courses reviewed how many how many times a year or how many times during five years has it changed you
know for academic standards we do a rotation system social studies you know sciences every five years or so
but how are the 38 courses how often are they looked at and
Speaker 38
51:21
this each spring okay the and and takes a vote on it February to March they want to get I know from listening in on State Board discussions that they want to give schools plenty of time to either incorporate new classes if that's the
case or to be able to utilize that
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
51:42
in your presentation for example like chemistry was taken out as far as one of the required 38 it was usually their decision based on either something they've seen as far as they've incorporated some of the same standards and other courses or how is it that they can just go ahead and say we don't have to have that as required is it because the same standards are being taught elsewhere or how is that connection made I'll probably turn this over to them I
Speaker 64
52:08
think there's some of that they also look at what's happening nationally the discussion
Speaker 38
52:13
back when two years ago when physics or three years ago in physics and journalism came out there was I know a period of public comment and I looked back through agendas and state board and the videos I did not find a similar discussion to chemistry there was reference so I don't know this may have occurred during a workgroup or maybe I missed but so I'm not I don't have
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
52:57
thank you thank you madam chairman I know you're just reporting data to us and and not really discussing with this policy implications but I just wanted to confirm some of the numbers so I can better understand going forward you know
what changes should be made I have been concerned ever since it was reported to us that journalism was no longer going to be required in the schools and now I'm even more concerned in looking at the numbers of the districts that do not offer it it looks like the and I just want to make sure that I'm understanding this correctly that the vast majority of the districts that are not offering it after we've given this I mean we've taken away their requirement our schools
that could have applied for waivers charter schools is that correct well one it's it's I
Speaker 38
53:50
don't know if they offered it and nobody decided to take it all I
Speaker 50
53:54
knows that they had no class with enrollment so that's what the numbers are showing is whether it was actually taught or not
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
54:02
well i mean what i'm looking at is 55 high schools did not offer journalism and of those i i did not look to see how many some
Speaker 37
54:12
of those may have waivers but with
the changes in the laws it's less necessary to have a waiver
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
54:22
are either open enrollment charter or traditional conversion charters that if they couldn't teach journalism they could have requested a waiver is that correct they could have and they might
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
54:38
totally removed the requirement for the vast majority of schools that if they couldn't teach it because of lack
of enrollment or lack of resources they could have they could have gotten a waiver rather than us removing it as a requirement is that correct they
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
54:58
okay so the only ones that are really being exempted or that are not shoots choosing to teach journalism even after we've told them they don't have to teach journalism are three ALE schools in one virtual Academy well in that the account with the
Speaker 38
55:12
traditional schools I don't know not all of those are going to be
Speaker 37
55:18
conversion charter schools so there's going to be some just
traditional schools that are not teaching right
Speaker 72
55:23
yeah i was excluding the charters and saying okay so and again you know
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
55:28
i'm not gonna i'm not gonna ask you a policy question because i know that would be something to be asked of the department but there already were mechanisms in place based on this data, that if a school district or a high school just did not have student demand, the vast majority of this number could have been excluded from that
requirement even without us removing journalism as a required class to teach.
Speaker 37
55:59
They could have, you know, there were limitations. The charter application process or the School of Innovation process is about a year-long process. and the act 1240s were limited to those districts that had a student withdraw to attend a charter school and then that charter school would have had to have the same waiver right okay all
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
56:29
you madam chair and i i perceive this report is more leaning to
the academic side but you hit on it as far as the environment of which the kids are learning in I'm wondering when you were talking to the superintendents and getting the stories that you were shared did you gather any data as far as the presence of school-based counseling and the impact that it's having on those
students as provided by a third party like a counseling clinic did you delve into
Speaker 37
56:57
that any that was our question was what are what kind of mental health services are here and now we'll be dealing with that a lot more and when per
future reports a lot of what we heard
Speaker 38
57:09
or third party providers coming in and billing occurring through those providers and not through the schools you know we didn't specifically ask what the impact was but my
Speaker 36
57:21
sense is that they felt that was a needed service okay it's beneficial so we'll get
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
57:29
that in future reports madam chair can I have a follow-up question also in looking at the numbers and this kind of goes back to the previous presenter with regards
to the budget numbers maybe the department wants to address this when they come to table I'm curious about where we identify Medicaid dollars that are coming into the schools because of various Medicaid programs that are being offered on the campuses and how do we account for those dollars as it ties into the school budget did you have to look at any of that in your discussions no that
Speaker 38
58:01
that was a little far afield from what I was looking at okay but
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
58:05
perhaps we can get that information in the future too madam chair thank you
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
58:13
thank you madam chair did when you discuss the
AP report part of this would you clarify for me that what you were saying is that most of these schools a number of schools that are offering the AP it meant you were referring to the four AP courses that are required to be offered is that what you were referencing or could they
be courses that were not part of the required courses to be offered that's a good question and these are these
Speaker 64
58:56
are courses that were actually taught uh-huh because we I don't have any way of
Speaker 38
59:01
pulling from the data if they offered it and you know had a waiver or had nobody enroll so I only looked at the courses that were taught, and I would have to go back and look to see if that was always one of those four core basic subjects. Yeah, I'd
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
59:18
really like to know how we're complying with
that law that requires those four classes to be offered. And for the personalized learning, this is probably something that you perhaps wouldn't look at. I can see why you might not I've forgotten what year it was maybe 2011 or 2013 we passed a law that is called a student re-engagement and it's a reference to the students who are 16 years old I believe but they're on course not to be able to graduate
because they're so far behind right now and that it just reminded me of that with the personalized learning which is what that law is all about actually to re-engage them and I was just wondering if we know if any schools are actually using that legislation to re-engage those kids so that anything pop up like that I
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:00:24
not look into it okay all right and for the physics and the other classes that we were what you were talking about
about but I guess this is particularly physics when the report says that there were elements of physics that are being taught does it has anybody making a just a clear distinction about elements of physics and
physics what does that actually mean would you like to hear from the
Speaker 64
1:00:56
department because I'm and honestly I didn't take physics in high school so I'm not
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:01:01
a good one to answer that anyway well I I've had um when I took I think it was
maybe earth sciences or someplace like that that was a really good class and it had elements of physics embedded in it which was I truly enjoyed but it was clearly not a physics class and I guess I guess that's something for us to think about as legislators something I think we may be giving up too much of what we ought to be thinking about as requirements and not requirements is why I'm asking thank you Madam Chair and thank you Ms. Holt thank you Madam Chair
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
1:01:49
And you may not have drilled down this far on
this, but I was looking at the personal learning thing, which sounds like, at least from what we're hearing, quite a success. And I appreciate that. My curiosity is there are statements here that say that, you know, 98% said it was a success for the students, the planning beneficial to the students and stuff.
Did they go, did you dig down any on that? What were those benefits that they were seeing? They listed it was beneficial for the students and for the schools. I'm just curious, did they drill down any to tell you where they, why they made that statement, I guess would be a better way
Speaker 64
1:02:38
to put it. And I'm trying to remember on the surveys, but I know in site
Speaker 37
1:02:43
visits when we talk to people, It was really divided into a couple of things.
Speaker 38
1:02:50
One is that it helped expose students to career opportunities that they may not realize were out there. So that students really benefited from having that focused time with an educator looking at their planning. And then again that time with their parents. but I think I think that maybe broadening their vision was on the survey the response we got most that would drill down. Thank you. Any other
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
1:03:26
questions? Senator Sturge. One more Julie just real quick. Thank you Madam Chair. On the different slides that you have where you're talking about the different districts and the high schools and what they're offering as far as the instrumental music, chemistry, and so forth. You were able, in your presentation, now it's not here on the page, but you were able to break that down as far as either whether it was in person or virtually and things like that.
Speaker 64
1:03:58
Actually, I did not break it down that way. Even on the slides. I don't
Speaker 37
1:04:02
know whether they were digital class or classroom based. I did not look at that and like as i was
Speaker 38
1:04:07
going through this yesterday i thought you know that maybe i should have done that i know there were some instances where i saw an enrollment of one and so i assume those were digital and that is something we can find out so if you would like to know specifically right well and that's what i
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
1:04:22
had heard and maybe i had heard it wrong like for example on instrumental music you said there was three enrolled but you didn't know there we have four
Speaker 116
1:04:31
virtual school right schools in the state and so I did break out whether it was at a virtual whether the
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
1:04:37
virtual schools were virtual school that's what was throwing me off because I was thinking okay an instrument of music how can you do that virtually you don't learn to play the piano by reading a book about how to play the piano and so I was throwing me off but I understand what you're saying now as
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:04:54
far as the different schools thank you thank you Senator Elliott I just wanted to
get one clarification here when you started your presentation you talked about this is an adequacy study and this may be
tiki but I don't want the public to get the impression that we're actually doing a study this is actually a review is that not further a review of what we're doing what we what we're doing and you're reporting to us not a study but
a review because that is technically really important we've since I've worked here
Speaker 36
1:05:33
we called it a study but I understand in your eyes that it's a
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:05:37
review yeah I mean I I understand that but I just wanted I guess maybe for and for me
I couldn't care less what it's called but I want people to know the reason we are spending money to bring somebody in to help us take a look at we're doing because we are doing a study but every year we changed the law in 2007 to change it from study to review and I just want to remind us of that so people won't be won't think we are double dipping here that's all it's not thank you
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:06:16
thank you madam chair I just wanted to just backtrack and just make
one observation i don't looking at these numbers on the journalism classes i want to make sure that i'm not focusing on the glass half empty and not recognizing and acknowledging my appreciation that so many school districts have continued to teach journalism even though they're not required and so i just want to commend the superintendents and the superintendents association to pass that on um i just wish you know that we had not excluded that but thank you very much for offering that
to your students so julie thank you for the data that lets us know that that schools are being responsive and especially with this one anecdotal quote where the the principal or the superintendent says you know we think it's important so
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:07:14
thank you thank you madam chair Looks like that's all the questions. Thank you, Julie. Appreciate
your report. They're very informative. And now we will move on to discussion of fiscal distress designation, Elizabeth Bynum.
Speaker 128
1:07:33
Good morning, my name is Elizabeth Minum, I'm with the Bureau of Legislative Research and I'm here to talk about the Fiscal Assessment
and Accountability Program, better known as Fiscal Distress. And this is a state program used to identify and correct school districts that are struggling to maintain fiscal stability. Fiscal distress is one of the required topics that the committees are required to review as part of the adequacy process, and so this report is presented in
Speaker 129
1:08:27
fulfillment of that requirement. want to make a note that to date no open enrollment charter schools have been
classified or identified in fiscal distress and
Speaker 128
1:08:38
those are if the charter authorizing panel has the authority to place charters on probation for fiscal issues and
Speaker 129
1:08:44
so that's how those issues issues are handled and so that's why I will not be discussing open enrollment charter schools I've got several sections in my
Elizabeth Minum
Unverified
1:08:55
report I'm going to start with the history of the fiscal
Speaker 128
1:09:00
distress program and I'm going to talk a little bit about the process of fiscal
distress from kind of from beginning to end and
Speaker 129
1:09:08
talk about some recent changes to the fiscal distress program and talk about the five districts that are currently in fiscal distress and look a little bit at characteristics of districts and if we can find any commonalities in districts that are in that are classified in fiscal distress. So I wanna start with the history. I think it's important to start here because I'm gonna refer back to some of this information throughout my report.
Fiscal distress was created by Act 915 of 1995, and the original program contained three phases of fiscal distress. Districts were in different phases based on where they were in the process and what they had done or not done. In 2003, Act 1467 modified the program and eliminated those phases. It's important to note here that Act 1476 contained a time limitation for the first time. Districts could remain in distress for two consecutive years.
And then in 2013, Act 600 of 2013 extended that time requirement from two years to five years. Act 29, or excuse me, Act 929 of 2019 is going to broaden the focus of the Fiscal Distress Program. The goal is to create a new program, you know, to improve public school finance broadly, and I'm going to talk about that a little later in more detail.
If you look at the bottom of page one, there's a little table that will show you some numbers numbers about um the numbers of districts that have been in distress so the total number since 1995 there have been 77 districts classified in fiscal distress because of consolidations and annexations only 56 of those districts still exist and most of those are g2 act 60 of 2004 and those districts falling below the required 350 ADM for two consecutive
years following at 1467 of 2003 with the changes to the program there have been 59 districts classified in fiscal distress 47 of those are still operating districts and 11 of those have been classified in distress twice and that includes three of the current districts, Dalloway, Earl, and Lee County. Next I want to talk about our physical distress process, and I'm going to go briefly through each of the steps in the process.
Early warning, identification and classification, sanctions and corrective actions, and removal, and I'll start with early warning. So early warning was created under Act 798 of 2009. the program requires that the division monitor districts for signs of fiscal problems and notify any districts with more than two non material violations in one year and so under division rules a non material violation is something that does not yet directly jeopardize the fiscal integrity of a school district
but has the potential to put the school district in distress if you flip to the back of your report on the back two pages pages 13 and 14 you'll see in the appendix there is an early warning checklist and this is a tool that the division provides to districts to help them identify issues that may have the possibility of may be dangerous for the district in terms of being classified in fiscal distress and the division reviews three years of districts unrestricted
fund balances audits and average daily membership when they're looking at districts to determine if districts need to be identified in early warning or in fiscal distress districts may move in and out of early warning at any time during a school year the districts currently in early warning are cleveland county clinton huntsville and pangburn so toward the bottom of page two is a chart that will show you some numbers about districts in early warning there have been 36 districts in early warning since the inception of that part
of the program um 18 of those districts were previously in fiscal distress at some point so half of these early warning districts were at some point already in distress before they were placed in early warning um 15 of those districts have moved from early warning to fiscal distress and if you'll flip to the top of page three there's a chart and that will show you all of the districts that have been moved from early warning to fiscal distress and it'll show you
the number of months that those districts were in early warning and you can see that the average number of minds in early warning is 17 or 16.75 and so as I said 15 of the 36 districts that have been in early warning have moved from early warning to fiscal distress so in other words it's 42 and percent of districts early warning does not seem to prevented them from moving to full fiscal distress but that leaves 58% of districts that have been in early
warning and then not moved to the full fiscal distress classification if you look at the bottom of page three I wanted to look and try and see is early warning do does it seem to be an effective program so the table at the bottom of page 3 is showing the number of districts that were in fiscal distress at any point during the calendar year from 2004 to 2019 and we start with 2004 because this is the first full year after at 1467 of 2003 so
you can see that from early warning was passed in 2009 and you can see from 2010 to 2012 the number of districts in distress rises but then after 2012 the number of districts in distress seems to be falling fairly consistently I want to move on from early warning to you identification and classification the Arkansas code lists the indicators of fiscal distress and the division has the
authority to identify a district in distress if the district has any of the indicators and those are a declining balance or an actor violation determined to jeopardize the fiscal integrity of the district or any other fiscal condition of a school district deemed to have a detrimental negative impact on the continuation of educational services by the district if you look at the top of page 4 you can see a list of some of the acts and violations and conditions that would jeopardize the fiscal integrity of the district so the
division identifies districts in fiscal distress once they are identified the division is required to notify those districts in writing once the district receives that identification the district has the option to appeal to the state board if the district does so the state board must hear that appeal within 60 days most districts do not appeal and then if the district chooses not to appeal the state board must still vote to classify the district in distress so the division identifies districts in distress but only the state
board may vote to classify the district in distress all right so what happens once a district is in distress there are possible sanctions corrective actions and the district has certain responsibilities and about the middle of page four is a list of the district's responsibilities once it's been classified districts are required to file improvement plans with the division they're required to allow on-site technical evaluations and assistance and for members of the fiscal support and excuse me fiscal services and
support unit and they're required to adhere to recommendations from the division and obtain written permission from the division before incurring additional debt once a district is classified there are certain actions of the division and the state board may take in the district including removing and replacing the
Speaker 128
1:17:41
superintendent removing this district school board requiring fiscal training for the staff or the local board of the district monitoring
Speaker 129
1:17:49
the fiscal operations of the district and basically taking any other
action by law that is deemed necessary and to assist the district in removing itself from fiscal distress so we've had it is possible to be in state takeover for fiscal distress we've had nine districts since the start of the program that have been in takeover for fiscal distress and well helena west helena has actually been in state takeover twice i think it's important to note here it's possible for a district to be in this in state takeover for another reason and then later classified in fiscal distress and we'll
see that with a couple of our districts that are currently in distress I wanted to look at the average amount of time that districts remain in fiscal distress and because of the changing time limitations on being in distress it's a little tricky but I did want to want to look at it and see if it see what the averages looks like for all districts since 2003 since Act 1467 of 2003 the average time in distress distress was 20.2 months the average for districts
that were classified after Act 600 of 2003 which increased that time limitation to five years the average for those districts was two years so the average increases a little bit when that time limitation increases and but it's still below that two year around that two year time frame the final step in the process is removal from fiscal distress a school district must demonstrate that all causes of fiscal distress have been corrected and the
state board must vote to remove the district from distress if a school district is not removed from fiscal distress within five years the state board is required to annex consolidate or reconstitute the district the code it does allow that if the district is unable to be removed from fiscal distress due to conditions beyond its control that the state board may grant additional time but the statute doesn't specify what those conditions and beyond the district's control would be currently and none of that neither of
our there we do have some districts that are in state takeover for fiscal distress none of those districts and is nearing the five-year mark and none of our districts are nearing and I did the districts in distress are nearing that five-year timeline and I want to talk now about at 929 of 2019 and so this is legislation passed in the last session that makes significant changes to the fiscal distress program so these changes are going to mirror act 930 of 2017
which is the legislation that made changes to the academic distress program and changed it into our system of providing support and having districts in level 5 in need of intensive support so the purpose of Act 929 is to improve public school districts financial practice and use of resources by enabling the division to review financial management practices of school districts establishing a program by which the division can identify and
address public school districts in any part of fiscal distress and creating a system for providing fiscal support and monitoring the schools that were once in distress
Speaker 128
1:21:25
and so when the and during testimony in the House and Senate Education Committees the division actually changed
Speaker 129
1:21:31
the name of the unit providing fiscal distress services in about early 2016 from the fiscal distress unit and to the fiscal services and support unit and begin reaching out
to districts attempting to provide support to prevent districts having to be classified in in fiscal distress and so the point and part of the idea I think behind this bill is to you and provide support at all stages and provide support after districts are removed from fiscal distress so I mentioned that actually 929 and years and the chain at 930 of 2017 and the changes to back it
what was the academic distress program I want to mention that at 930 and allows for the waiver of certain statutes that are not allowed under act 929 and so at 929 prohibits the waiver of the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act and the Public School Employee Fair Hearing Act. So if a district's in distress, it's not possible to waive those two acts. It is possible, you know, to waive application of other laws, but those are both exceptions to that. So Act 929 requires
the division to create a system for reviewing the financial management practices of public school districts to determine the support needed in the districts act 929 also sets out requirements for general business managers the division must have rules ensuring minimum qualifications for general business managers for districts and this is to try and ensure the best financial management practices are occurring in school districts
okay and then act 929 and did not remove the requirement that a school district may not remain in distress after the end of the fifth school year following the district's classification and it still contains that exception that the state board may provide additional time i want to briefly discuss some of the changes act 929 made to specific parts of the program In the early warning system, there are certain required dates by which the division is required
to notify superintendents, and the required dates have been changed. Act 929 also adds that indicators of distress, of fiscal distress, may be from the statute or they may be in division rules. And it also allows the division to request that legislative audit conduct an annual audit of a public school district determined to be experiencing fiscal distress at a non-material level. And so legislative audit does not conduct all audits of school districts. Those are
often conducted by a private auditor, but if the division determines that a district is experiencing fiscal distress at a non-material level, they can request that legislative audit perform an audit on that district. For the identification and classification changes, The Act 929 adds two violations that can allow the division to identify the district, and that's failure to comply with the new minimum qualifications for a general business manager
and material failure to comply with reporting, debt approval, or other requirements placed on a public school district that's been returned to local control. um 929 adds several possible sanctions and corrective actions and those are to authorize an individual appointed to the school district to remove replace reassign or suspend public school district personnel and to suspend on a temporary basis summer all of the powers or duties granted
to the Public School District Board of Directors, but to allow the Board of Directors to operate under the direction and approval of the commissioner. And this is a change, prior to Act 929, it was possible to remove the Board of Directors entirely and appoint an advisory board, but it was not possible to do it on a temporary basis or to leave them with, to let that board operate in any form. It allows for the reassignment of some or all of the staff of the district, and the
reorganization, closure, and dissolution of one or more of the district schools. For removal, Act 929 requires that in addition to removing all the causes of fiscal distress, the district must not have experienced any new indicators of fiscal distress, and it requires that districts return to local control are monitored by the division the divisions provide support to those districts for at least three years and that they may the division may impose reporting requirements on those
districts when I talk now about the five districts that are currently in this fiscal distress Dollarway Earl Pine Bluff Marvell Elaine and Lee County and I'm going to discuss them in the order that they were classified starting with Dollar Way so Dollar Way was classified and on April 14th 2016 Dollar Way at that time was already in state takeover for what was then academic distress they were placed in state takeover in December 2015 and so the superintendent
was reassigned to a different position in the district and replaced and the school board was removed and the reasons that Dollar Way was classified in fiscal distress were declining fund balances and material audit findings and if you'll look at the bottom of page 7 and the top of page 8 there's a list of some of those audit findings one thing I thought was especially interesting in the testimony of the state board meeting where Dollar Way was classified representatives from the division noted that the audit findings were some of
the worst that they had ever seen and you can see those at the top of page 8 Dollar Way did not contest its first school distress classification it was also previously on the early warning list twice and the divisions done several things in Dollar Way including and making transparent policies and procedures and helping them build capacity in federal program funding and providing support to the superintendent the next school district is Earl Earl was classified in October 2017. It was identified based on an audit released in
June 2017, which contained serious audit violations. And so EARL was identified based on material audit exceptions and acts determined to jeopardize the financial integrity of the district. If you look in the middle of page 8, that tells and some of the audit findings one that I want to mention specifically is the misuse of national school lunch or ESA categorical funds and because the
district has had to pay those back so the district was placed in state takeover in November 2017 they are still in state takeover their superintendent was removed and replaced their school board was removed the The district recently has been classified as a district in need of level five intensive support at the district's request. And so at the request of the district and the division, the state board classified them as being in level five, in need of level five intensive support for academic issues.
So Earl has actually been in fiscal distress two previous times. And in this particular classification, the division has assisted in establishing appropriate processes for requisitions, minimizing new debt, becoming current with bills, training staff, and maintaining the day-to-day finances of the district. The third district in fiscal distress is Pine Bluff. Pine Bluff was previously in distress under the original version of the program from 1998
to 2000. They were identified in August of 2018 and classified in September of 2018 and also placed at in-state takeover in September of 2018 with the removal of the superintendent and the removal of their school board. They also did not appeal their classification. Pine Bluff was classified due to declining fund balances, projections that the district would be in the red financially at the end of the current school year IRS
penalties and several other issues so one thing I thought is especially interesting the district was an early intervention prior to the division identifying the district being in fiscal distress but the testimony is state board and meeting where pine bluff was classified and taken over indicated that the district did not comply with the recommendations from the division while they were in early warning and at that time the division did not have they
were not required to comply with those early warning recommendations I think another thing that's interesting to note about that state board testimony there's a question asked at the state board whether declining enrollment then was a primary reason for Pine Bluffs fiscal distress because it was mentioned as one of the reasons that they were classified. And the testimony from representatives of the division was that it would have been possible
for the district to manage its declining enrollment in a way that would not have placed it in fiscal distress. And they listed several things that the district did, increasing salaries, adding positions, making non-necessary expenditures that they did while they were in early warning or things that they might have done differently, but that it would have been possible to manage their declining enrollment in a way that would not have placed them in fiscal distress.
Pine Bluff has also been classified as a district in need of level five intensive support. so some of the changes in Pine Bluff since its classification include a staff reduction in force identifying unused and underutilized buildings and putting those up for sale creating a fiscal distress plan and creating a budget for fiscal year 2020 the next school district is Mar Valley Lane and I want to point out that this is the only one of the five school districts in distress that is not also in state takeover so it is not in state takeover at this time
but it is the only one of the districts in it currently in distress that is not in state takeover Marvella Lane was classified in or identified excuse me in January 2019 and classified in April and there are two reasons for this identification and the first is declining fund balances and the second is the conduct of the district's former business manager between July of 2014 and December 2018 the business manager issued 90 unauthorized checks to
herself totaling almost four hundred and seventy two thousand dollars so part of and one of one of the corrective corrective actions that the that the district is currently performing is they are sending electronic complete bank statements to the divisions the division can monitor those bank statements apparently the the business manager was sending would doctor the bank
statements and print copies and so the paper copies could be manipulated and so the division is receiving electronic copies of those and monitoring that is and the district is also first time was relying on outside services to conduct payroll and debt request and they have also requested to receive level four academic support from the division the last district in distress is lee county lee county was previously in distress from may 2014 to september 2017
It was then identified again in April 2019 and classified in May 2019. Toward the bottom of page 10 is a list of some of the audit findings, and a number of these are repeat findings. And some of the changes in Lee County include creation of a fiscal distress plan, a preliminary budget, a new salary schedule, and starting a staff reduction in force and Lee County is also in-state takeover
for accreditation issues and that occurred before the district was classified in fiscal distress and if you'll turn to page 11 the last section of my report I wanted to look and see are there commonalities trying to figure out if there are commonalities in districts that are being classified in distress so we're looking at the last several years from starting with the 2013-14 school year and so you see at the top of page 11 that's that chart is going to show you which districts were in distress at any point during each of
these school years so districts are able to move in and out of fiscal distress at any point in time so these districts they may have been in distress the full year they may have been in distress part of the year the you know the X in one year doesn't mean they were in distress that entire year but they were at some point and that charts included say that you know which districts were we're talking about in the charts below and the first characteristic I wanted to look at is poverty and I am as we often do using and the percentage of students
eligible for free and reduced price lunch as a proxy for examining and the relationship between fiscal distress and poverty so the chart on the bottom of page 11 has I've got and districts classified as low medium or high poverty low being and 70 below 70 percent of their students eligible for free and reduced lunch medium poverty 70 to 90 percent and high poverty at 90 percent and higher and so they at the top of the chart shows you all of the
school districts in this state and so the numbers in low high and medium poverty and the second chart shows you just the number of districts in distress and so what I think is interesting and important to point out here is that until 2018-19 there are more medium district medium poverty districts in distress each year than high or low poverty districts you'll flip over to page 12 the other characteristic I wanted to look at was a school's enrollment and so I'm using the ADM the average daily membership which is a way
of measuring a school's enrollment and so I've classified districts as small with 750 students or less medium 751 to 5,000 students or large 5,000 or 5,001 and bigger and so you can see the top of the chart has all districts in the school and the number of districts that are small medium and large the bottom chart has the number of districts only the number of districts in fiscal distress in those years so as you can see the number of small districts is
consistently the highest so so I wanted to look and see what the percentage of the total small districts what the percentage was of districts in distress of the total number of small districts so if you look at 2018-19 there are three small districts in distress for that year and there are 84 small districts total across the state so that's only 3.5 percent so 3.5 percent of those small districts are in fiscal distress the number of small district the highest
number of small districts in one year was in the year 2013-14 and that's eight small districts and at that time there were 83 small districts in the state and so that was 9.6 percent of the small districts in that year in addition I think it's interesting to note that the two districts that have spent the longest amount of time in fiscal distress since Act 1467 are Pulaski County which is a large district in terms of its ADM and Helena West Helen
which would be classified as a medium district that concludes my report and i'll be happy to take any questions thank you
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:39:16
very much let's see we have senator hammer thank you madam
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
1:39:22
chair i'm just curious when you were going through and doing your examination for the schools
that ended up in fiscal distress did you identify if at the time they went into fiscal distress if they were used in a private auditing firm or legislative audit i did not
Speaker 129
1:39:39
and i would be um i could look into that and see if i can figure
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
1:39:44
that out but i i did not ma'am chair not
a member of the committee but could i make a request of the chair yes okay i'd like to i'd like to ask that they do an analysis to determine if when the schools over the history when they went into fiscal distress were they using a private auditing firm or were they using legislative audit in both the early detection period but also at the time that the state actually took them over okay what I need you to do is send me
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:40:14
an email I'll send you an email thank you
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:40:18
madam chair representative Lowry thank you madam chair my question is related to the definition of fiscal integrity was that established by statute or by department rule I mean I see that it talks about indicators but I don't see where there's an actual definition of fiscal integrity that might be a better
Elizabeth Minum
Unverified
1:40:50
question for Taylor I don't believe that there is a definition of fiscal integrity
Speaker 128
1:41:03
okay well i don't recall i don't recall seeing that in the statute um i don't recall seeing that in the division's rules um but
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
1:41:16
okay well i do know she's looking at because i just center gave her notes on a proposed ISP that deals with this issue being that my
concern is that there's data that says of the 500 million dollars that school districts collect in school millage debt service millage less than half of it is spent to retire debt and something like 55% actually goes into other educational purposes operations and maintenance i know in in my case if i had excessive say credit card debt that would be a challenge of fiscal integrity okay so that's why i'm asking about this definition if
you are having to basically borrow to keep your school district afloat that should also i mean does it make sense that that should also be an indicator of lack of fiscal integrity i i could that be a could that be a factor that is added in i believe to any definition of fiscal integrity i believe it could okay all
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:42:39
chesterfield yes thank you madam chair uh on page one you indicate the number of districts
in distress is 77 that is the
Speaker 128
1:42:47
number that have been um classified in distress at any time since the beginning of the program in 1995 yes how many are
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:43:01
in distress now five districts are in distress now five districts only have fiscal issues or have been identified by the State Department of Education or whatever the name is
Speaker 128
1:43:13
now as in fiscal distress those five districts have been identified by the division and then the
Speaker 129
1:43:19
division the state board voted to classify all five of those districts
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:43:25
in distress and there are no other districts that have similar patterns of I'm not gonna say abuse but a lack of knowledge of how to deal with the fiscal demands of the district
Speaker 128
1:43:41
I think those are the only five districts in distress I don't I
Speaker 129
1:43:46
don't know I don't have any way to know if those are the only districts that
might need to be in distress but I those are the only five that are currently in distress help
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:44:00
me to understand what you mean by districts in distress remaining not consolidated or annexed at 56 what does that
Speaker 129
1:44:06
mean I'm sorry that means the number of districts that are currently still in operation so some of those 77 districts have been annexed or consolidated to other districts and so so for example Alzheimer United was annexed to Dollar Way it was one of the districts that was in distress in the early part of the program and so so that
56 means there are 56 of these districts that have been in distress that are actually still operating as school districts and the remaining 21 were annexed or consolidated with other districts so
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:44:38
all of the rest of these districts are doing just fine except those five is that what
Speaker 129
1:44:45
you are telling me all of those districts that there are five districts that are currently in distress okay
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:44:52
well help me understand that the chart on page three districts
in this in fiscal distress with number of months and early warning what does that mean
Speaker 128
1:45:04
these are districts that have been moved from the early warning program to fiscal distress and so this is showing the average number or the number of months that each of these districts was in early warning prior to being classified and this is current information this is no I mean this is current in the sense that it is that it is correct but it's these are districts
that were classified and at any time since early warning was created so these are not all just warning was created in 2009 2009
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:45:36
so why are we looking at this if it's
not current information this is just giving us a history of fiscal distress or whatever because when you look at it you would think Alpena and Bismarck and all of these other districts are having fiscal problems but you're saying they had them in the past but they don't have them now I I'm
Speaker 128
1:46:03
the these are the districts that have been in early warning and in fiscal distress at some
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:46:15
in early warning now four only four only early warning and the other five already in distress
Speaker 143
1:46:26
the other four the other four are Cleveland County Clinton Pangburn and Huntsville and did
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:46:32
you find a pattern as to how you move from early warning to
total distress what what are the factors that did you find that made them move from just being in the
early warning stages to the academic I mean the fiscal distress whereby they're taken over by
Speaker 129
1:46:51
the state what are those factors um I'm I'm not aware of what the factors are I think they vary from school district to school district so each school district to be identified in early warning they would have two or more non-material violations that the division notice identifies but those would be different for every school
district and then if they show if they are in early warning and they show any indicators of fiscal distress which are different than the non material violations that's when they would move be identified in fiscal
Speaker 143
1:47:22
distress I guess what you're saying troubles me when you say it would be different
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:47:28
from district to district I would hope the factors would be basically the same would you I I think
Speaker 128
1:47:34
the factors that the division is looking at are the same and that they are looking across the board,
but there are a number of factors that may be present,
Speaker 129
1:47:44
and so each factor may not be present in each school district. Okay, of the 21 districts
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:47:51
in early warning that have not been moved
to fiscal distress for currently in early intervention, you gave me those names, there are 21 that have problems. I'm sorry, I think that refers to
Speaker 128
1:48:05
21 that have been in early warning at any point in time. Well, early warning means they're having some problems, right?
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:48:15
Right. Okay. Of those 21 districts, three have been classified in early warning, Augusta, Deer, Mount Judy, and Mountain Pine. And 10 of the 21 were previously in distress, counting Mount Judea and Forest City. But only these five are currently in. academic distress in that they have been taken over
Speaker 128
1:48:38
they are currently in fiscal distress so they've been classified in fiscal distress two of them have actually
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
1:48:45
been taken over I apologize it's Mount Judy not Judea I apologize to
those of you who for whom my pronunciation was incorrect
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
1:49:13
is really, serving a few years on education audit and seeing repeat findings, I might have missed it.
Is there something on this checklist that talks about, it does talk about some of the legislative audit things, but finding repeat findings, whereas that might be an additional trigger for you as far as early warning? Because I look back at some of the districts that are on physical distress, and I remember them as being districts that had repeat findings, which used to frustrate me. So maybe it's included somewhere else in the early detection, but possibly something on that checklist.
Speaker 128
1:50:03
I am not seeing it on the checklist, and I don't know. Someone from the division may be able to say
Speaker 129
1:50:08
if that's something that they look for when they're looking to identify districts. If they're looking, I know they're looking at the audits, and so I assume they're looking for those repeat findings. But they may be able to speak better to that. Thank you. I think Taylor's got an answer to Representative Lowry's question. Hi, Taylor Lloyd, BLR.
Speaker 181
1:50:33
To answer your question, Representative Lowry, fiscal integrity is defined in statute. It's defined as it means to comply with financial management, accounting, auditing, and reporting procedures and facilities management procedures as required by state laws and rules and federal laws and regulations in a forthright and timely manner. so it is under statute representative de la
Speaker 185
1:51:12
be the department that has to answer it but what is the coordination that occurs between within the department when a school or a school district is in fiscal distress and academic distress or level five the reason I ask is because I noticed in Pine Bluff they're in need of level five intensive support but then also they're having a staff reduction so I'm just curious what the
coordination is because if we've got multiple teams trying to help correct a particular issue what happens when one, what happens when trying to correct the fiscal issue affects the academic issue, and what's the coordination between those two, because I could see them making very conflicting recommendations and
Speaker 128
1:52:02
changes. Right. I've not looked specifically into the coordination between handling physical distress and handling something else that the
Speaker 129
1:52:09
division would be assisting with, so that may be something that
somebody from the division can speak to. could we get
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:52:19
somebody to answer that yeah let's see we have somebody from the secretary key looks
like he is winding his way forward do you want to repeat the question again yeah oh wait just one second let him identify
Speaker 190
1:52:40
himself johnny key department of education and i heard the question okay so representative that is one
of the challenges that we found when i came into the to the office of commissioner is the difficulty in coordinating especially when you see a or you're working with a district that has multiple systems that are in some level of uh you know maybe not failure but certainly not operating the way they need to operate prior to 2017 we had the office of intensive support and my predecessors had established that office to be kind of an independent,
not really independent, but separate in a way from the department to go out and provide the support, but it only had three members of that team. But they had someone who was curriculum, they had someone who was finance, they had someone who was leadership. That simply wasn't enough in the effort to coordinate a lot of those systems issues that you addressed and you asked about. So in 2017, we established the Office of Coordinated Support and Service, and that is led by Dr. Mike Hernandez.
We have, he works with directly the department and directly with those districts on the issues of fiscal, coordinates with the fiscal team at the department, works directly with the academic side of things, with facilities. I mean, whatever that district needs, because what we find is the symptoms of distress are not always confined just to what we have, like we're talking about the fiscal distress system.
The challenges aren't always defined neatly in a fiscal wrapper. Sometimes they're facilities. Sometimes they are governance. Sometimes they are, you know, there are a number of things that go in. So we establish that office to create a better system of the department and the districts working together and coordinating the supports that the department has to bring to bear
Speaker 185
1:54:55
on addressing these challenges. So when you have conflicting recommendations, let's say, the fiscal folks say you need to reduce staff.
the academic folks say no we actually need more you know what is he the one that would actually make because somebody somewhere has to make that call to to decide which one's going to have priority over another or somebody has to have the leadership over that is would that
Speaker 190
1:55:24
be him or does that roll up to you ultimately falls to me but he works to bring those recommendations works with those with those superintendents i mean that's one thing we do very closely is dr hernandez
works with those superintendents and most of the times those recommendations and those decisions are are made at the district level it's very important that we have that level of decision making authority that to to the best we can it's happening at the district level and then that sometimes that comes to me through the form of most of the time through board actions that in my role we're talking specifically about state takeover here but in my role is having the
authority of the state or of the local boards then those things come to me for approval in non-takeover i'll give you an example with marvel elaine that is an example of a district that requested help they they saw that they were having significant challenges they were not going to be able to solve them by themselves and they came to us well the the team the ocss team still works with them even they're not even though they are not in state takeover because they still need
that level of support but that board is still in place so that board has shown a willingness to listen to to do what they can to make whatever adjustments at the local level that they need to to make but again a lot of that is coordinated the public school accountability the the ocss learning services fiscal you name it i mean we have adopted a philosophy that school turnaround or school improvement is not the job of one unit it is the job of the entire agency and that
problems in academics problems in fiscal again they're they're symptomatic of broader system issues and we tackle those with greater coordination now than we've ever done in the past thank you thank
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:57:41
um senator elliott Thank you, Madam Chair. Um, do you, do you have any notion when it comes to fiscal, um, instability?
Uh, what the, if any of these districts are still impacted and on a list because of, um, the gas companies issue that's been ongoing where they're not paying their taxes and I think that's still, uh, trying to be resolved. Do you know anything about how that's impacting folks who might end up
on this list of fiscal instability? I
Speaker 129
1:58:16
haven't encountered anything about that, and I've watched the state board meetings where all of these districts were classified, the five current districts.
No mention was made of that, but I'm not aware of anything. I've not heard of anything regarding that about districts that might potentially be classified in distress.
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:58:38
Might we surmise, though, in areas, say, like Clinton, Pangborn, I think, Hebrew Springs maybe at one time was in that group, might we surmise, though, that lack of resolving this issue and taxes on which these school districts have been dependent puts them in a
tenuous position of maybe moving toward some kind of fiscal instability?
Speaker 129
1:59:06
I think, the current fiscal state of that particular district. Okay. I'll check with the Department
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:59:12
of Education later on, Madam Chair, to find out, you know, if there's anything they can tell us. We don't
have to know that right now. And my second question has to do with something that I think I heard you say at the beginning of your presentation, that for the districts that are in fiscal distress right now, we're going to look at their similarities.
Speaker 135
1:59:35
What did you mean by that? So that's a, when I was looking at poverty and at the ADM, I
Speaker 128
1:59:43
was trying to figure out is there, you know, is there something that we can point to, you know, this is where, this is this characteristic is what puts a district in distress and really
Speaker 129
1:59:53
um you know I I don't think that 80 I I don't know that I can I don't think there's any one characteristic that I can point to you and say this is this is how a district ends up classified in
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
2:00:07
distress did you find anything though that any
assumptions that maybe you had that may not be the only reason but might have a a huge
Speaker 128
2:00:18
impact um i i don't believe um i don't believe so i don't know that i had
Speaker 129
2:00:23
any assumptions about what would um what would land a district in distress
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
2:00:29
all right but but these districts that are there i noticed i mean i noticed similarities in those districts i i surely other people do too um and poverty certainly seems to be one of those things because it is true
there are there are points of what I would call mismanagement but kind of like back to the question that representative de la Rosa was asking these districts that are in poverty whether there are these or not they end up having some times to make difficult decisions or we're gonna teach kids or we're gonna have a balanced budget that's just something I think we ought to give some consideration to all right thank you madam chair I appreciate it thank you thank you
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
2:01:17
madam chair on that subject did you find a correlation
between those that started in educational distress but ended up being in fiscal distress or is that in the report somewhere did you look at that a
Speaker 128
2:01:31
relationship and a relationship you looking to see if if districts in academic distress are more likely to end up in physical distress yes
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
2:01:45
and and did you identify the the districts over the history that this report covers that
they started off in academic distress but they eventually ended up in physical distress also I did not I did
Speaker 129
2:02:00
not look at their relationship between academic and fiscal distress about I'd like
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
2:02:05
to get that information if you would and manager I'll put that in my email to you as well can I have a follow-up okay so on when when the districts begin to experience early warning distress or whatever the phrase is without me finding it in the report it is whose
duty is it to report to the Department of Ed that they are officially in the early warning status does that fall on the superintendent who is primarily
Speaker 128
2:02:38
responsible okay so if a school district is experiencing two or more non material violations the superintendent is required to report that to the division and the division is required to report the same thing to the superintendent so if they see two or more non material violations they're
required to report that to the superintendent the division actually places districts in early warning and
Speaker 129
2:03:04
so it would be their responsibility and to notify the school district and say we've put
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
2:03:13
you in early warning in in your research did you find or did you look at failure in the system to communicate as as early as it should have been reported to the department of beginning early detection.
And where I'm going with it is I'm wondering, I struggle to wonder how many of those that started off as early ended up in fiscal distress and was it because somebody wasn't doing their job reporting as soon as they should have been reporting to prevent that district from going further, subsequently ending up in full-blown fiscal distress i did
Speaker 129
2:03:53
not look into that and whether whether the superintendents are actually um notifying notifying the division and how
frequently that happens or if it's happening um at the appropriate time because i'd hate to
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
2:04:04
have somebody leave one school district in an irresponsible matter and end up in another one and the problem continue over there because in leg audit we have seen that happen before i'll put that in my email madam chair for that information to be sought out too thank you thank you madam chair this
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
2:04:27
may be a question for the department but maybe you can answer
it i was wondering if there are any rules in place that set the minimum qualifications for either a district treasurer or the business manager the bookkeeper or anything like that is that solely
Speaker 128
2:04:47
a district decision on do they hire so act 929 requires that the division will
Speaker 129
2:04:53
make rules and setting minimum minimum qualifications for the district business manager I'm not aware of any rules and for a treasurer position
and if you'll allow me to look at my notes for one minute act 168 of 2019 requires that school board training includes training or instruction on how to read and interpret audit reports and those are the only those are the only rules of that nature that I'm aware of but there may if there are more and the division can and chime in but those are the only ones that i'm aware of thank you
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
2:05:43
thank you i just wanted to follow up on the the questions about property taxes and my area was impacted by that and there is fluctuation in that and there was a unique situation that actually has been resolved then we passed legislation to resolve that issue I think probably more work needs to be done but the legislation that we passed that stabilized those property taxes for some of the school districts in Cleburne County and White
County we were able to stabilize that situation and they were able to get paid but that was a you know a company that was sold to another company but the new company did resolve that issue because i think they saw the benefit of their relationship in the community but it is you know it is something that we have to really understand how all of this fits together with the assessment coordinating division and property taxes and how they're
assessed and when they're collected and the legislation that we pass and how easily it can be affected by that so some of your report it indicates that people moved in and off the list of fiscal distress were there and that some don't remain on fiscal distress for an entire school year so in those certain situations in your report was there any one particular event
Speaker 128
2:07:18
that created that scenario um so i think most um you know when i'm referring to my chart um on page 11 districts are moved are allowed to move in and out at any time um and so um so you know for purposes of the chart they may not be in distress for a full school year um my sense is most of most districts are in distress for more than a full year and
Speaker 129
2:07:49
I'd have to look and to look at my and my data to see if there are any that have been in distress less than a year and
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
2:08:03
what the precipitating events might have been okay and and to follow up on some of the conversation so there there is no requirement for a financial officer their qualifications so AG
Speaker 128
2:08:16
929 as 2019 requires that the division will set minimum qualifications for the
Speaker 129
2:08:23
general business manager in a district and that the districts have to comply with that with those
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:08:41
minimum qualifications okay all right thank you thank you madam chair this is going back to my education audit days again but on the early
wasn't early warning warning warning is there a requirement in there as far as
the school boards being notified I noticed at one point that the superintendent was required to report it to the paper or something newspaper or something but in the in the early warning section is there because in audit we we constantly got that where where something would happen and and here comes somebody's on the school board and they well they weren't aware that this was going on type of this situation so i guess my question then is is there some type of a thing that says
Speaker 129
2:09:32
that the school board gets notified i'm not aware of any requirement that the school board gets notified of early warning once a district is classified in distress what you're remembering about the newspaper once the district is classified that has to be reported along with the reasons for classification in the newspaper but I'm not aware of any requirement and that the school board is notified about early warning thank
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:10:01
you thank you seeing no further questions thank you very much
for your report it's been very enlightening thank you and we will move on quickly to our last presentation and that
is on our by Adrienne Beck on our special education.
Speaker 218
2:10:49
I'm Adrienne Beck with the Bureau of Legislative Research. I'll try
Speaker 219
2:11:17
to be as quick as I can though I can't promise it'll be as quick as you
may like and I'll be discussing discussing special education funding and expenditures as well as other issues related to special education including details about Arkansas students with disabilities their performance on state and national assessments special education teachers and survey results from principals and teachers regarding special education and you'll you should see on your yellow handout that this is one of
Speaker 220
2:11:47
the required items to be reviewed as part of the adequacy study so the federal individuals with disabilities
Education Act or IDEA in Arkansas code both guarantee a free appropriate public education to every child with a disability every student with a disability has an individualized education program also known as an IEP This serves as the student's plan for specialized instruction. This customized plan is developed by an IEP team that includes special education teachers, regular education teachers, a representative from the local education
Speaker 219
2:12:27
agency, the LEAs, or the district, an individual who can interpret instructional implications of evaluation results, any other individuals who have knowledge or special expertise parents and the child when appropriate so get started i'll go over some details about the students with disabilities in arkansas so in the 2019 school year there was 60 000 excuse me 63 935 students with disabilities
age 5 to 21 in arkansas public schools or about 13.4 percent of the total student population in the state charters typically have lower percentages of students with disabilities than traditional school districts out of the 24 charters that has students with disabilities 20 have proportions lower than the state average and of the 10 districts and charters with the with the lowest proportions of students with disabilities nine were charter schools
the in bowden charter school is one of the few charters that had higher proportions as they had the highest percentage in the state with 33.9 percent of their total 59 students having disabilities the Fordyce school district came in second with 25.9 percent and excluding Hoss Hall and Bentonville which has zero students with disabilities Hoss Hall Fayetteville had the lowest percentage of students disabilities at 0.2 percent and as you can see on chart one on page two of your report the number and percentage of students
with disabilities has been increasing since the 2013 school year in that school year there are fifty three thousand six hundred and ninety seven students with disabilities or eleven point five percent of the total student population in Arkansas and that is increased by about 18 percent um to the current school year again with 63 000 nearly 64 000 students in the state in comparison the total number of students statewide has increased by just over one percent in that same time frame and we'll go over some of those reasons in a little bit more detail in a little
bit i do want to note that these numbers do not include students with 504 plans they also do not include students from the arkansas school for the blind school for the deaf division of youth services the conway human development center or the excel center there are 12 categories of disabilities used to determine students eligibility for special education you can find that list on page three these include autism deaf blindness hearing impairment which includes deafness
emotional disturbance intellectual disability multiple disabilities orthopedic impairment specific learning disabilities speech or language impairment traumatic brain injury visual impairment which includes blindness and other health impairments so chart two on the next page shows the breakdown of these disabilities for the 2019 school year and that shows that specific learning disabilities make up the largest proportion which affects about 31 percent of the state's students with disabilities and these include
perceptual disabilities brain injury minimal brain dysfunction dyslexia and developmental aphasia so now we'll get into some of the reasons why the numbers of students with disabilities are increasing um so the biggest growth uh occurred in autism since 2013 that has grown by 55 percent and this is followed by students with emotional disturbance which has grown by 44 percent and you can find these numbers here on page five another notable increase was in other health impairments which
grew by 33 percent and you'll see the corresponding the number increases alongside those percentage increases. And according to DESI, these increases may be due to increased awareness of the characteristics of autism and physical and mental health conditions associated with other health impairments, as well as increased access to mental health services on school campuses. And table two on the next page shows the percentage of students with disabilities
among their total student population in the 2019 school year in most districts students with disabilities make up more than 10% of their total student population and in 12 of those in 12 districts they make it more than 20 for national comparison now table 3 on page 6 shows the breakdown of disabilities in Arkansas compared to the national average and you'll see some similarities in the top disability categories at the national level as well.
Tables four and five on the next page look at the racial and gender breakdown of students with disabilities, and you'll see that black students and male students are both overrepresented in special education, which has been an issue for several years. When IDEA was reauthorized back in 1997, it said that states should monitor how their states identify and serve minority students with disabilities however it did not specify how states should do this so Education Week noted a
government account excuse me and government accountability office report that found because there are so many methodologies for monitoring this issue that significant disproportionality was likely going unaddressed so when districts are found to have that disproportionality they must use 15% of federal special education money to address that issue the US Department of Education recently made changes to this process the equity and idea rule was
finalized in December of 2016 and was created to address these disparities in special education it was supposed to go into effect in the 2019 school year but the current administration put a two-year hold on it to study it further that hold was removed by a federal district judge in March of 2019 and in May the US Department of Education announced that districts should now comply with this rule which requires states to use a standardized approach to monitoring how their districts identify and serve minority students so
now move on a student placement which begins on page 7 under idea students disabilities are to be educated in the least restrictive environment federal law requires that students with disabilities be educated with children who are not disabled to the maximum extent appropriate chart three on page seven shows the breakdown of how students with disabilities are placed during the 2019 school year just over half of Arkansas students with
disabilities spent 80% or more of their time in a regular classroom just over a quarter of those students of students with disabilities spent 40 to 79 percent of their time in the regular classroom and then 13 percent spent 40 percent or less as seen in table 5 Arkansas exceeds the national average by nearly double that person in the by nearly double in the percentage of students with disabilities being placed in resource rooms and again this is also known as
the students who are spending about 40 to 79 percent of their time in a regular classroom. And according to DESE, Arkansas is still traditional in its approach to special education delivery models, which means that large numbers of students are still being pulled out of core instruction to provide special education services. There is a high number of students who are pulled into resource courses for core curriculum and not in the general classroom. DESE is currently providing professional development on inclusive practices to try to
remedy this so getting into student assessments which begins on page nine students with disabilities are required to participate in state assessments students IEP teams must decide whether each student will take the regular state assessment the assessment with accommodations or for a very small percentage of students with significant cognitive disabilities an alternate assessment so the total number of students taking each subject tested in
the alternate assessment cannot exceed one percent of the total number of students in the state being assessed in that subject which includes literacy math and science if the state expects to exceed that cap they must request a waiver through the u.s department of education arkansas has applied and received this waiver for the last three school years and is applied again for the 2020 school year and the numbers um have increased since last year in terms of the percentage of students taking that assessment
this is due to a switch in the alternate assessment being used previously was the multi-state alternate assessment known as the msaa now that's being now the dynamic learning maps or the dlm is now being utilized and we'll get into that a little bit more later so even with that increase in students taking the assessment desi has noted that they've still made progress in reducing the number of students taking the assessment
for example 1.43 percent of third grade students took the literacy assessment in the 2018 school year in the next school year in 2019 that same group of students taking the assessment in fourth grade decreased to 1.36 percent so about 35 000 students with disabilities take the regular assessment the act aspire in the 2019 school year and you can find their results on charts four and five on the next page in 2019 seven percent of students with disabilities scored
ready or exceeding in ELA or English language arts compared to 50% of students without disabilities and this is down from 2017 in which 9% of students with disabilities scored ready or exceeding and 58% of students without disabilities did 12% of students with disabilities scored ready or exceeding in math compared to 53% of students without disabilities this is up from 2017 in which 13 percent of students with disabilities scored ready or
Speaker 225
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exceeding in math compared to 51 percent of students without disabilities and
Speaker 219
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I do want to know what the ELA and the drop in those may be likely be due to a change in the ACT aspires process in determining their benchmark cut scores which affected likely affected students statewide so a chart six on that same page shows ACTS by our growth scores for students with disabilities and these look at the difference between what a student is expected to achieve based on
prior achievement scores and what the student achieves in the current year if score of 80 represents students meeting expected growth in the school schools above 80 or exceeding and scores below 80 or not so as you can see students without disabilities had higher growth scores. Additionally, the growth scores for students with disabilities indicate that on average, these students did not meet expected performance. As noted earlier, the DLM replaced the MSAA
as the alternate assessment beginning in the 2020 school year. And that was made because the DLM includes a science component, which the MSAA does not, and the DLM provides more instructional resources and was moving to an instructionally embedded assessment instead of a year-end assessment. So chart seven on the next page shows the percentage of students with disabilities scoring ready or exceeding on that alternate assessment.
These percentages have been decreasing in the last few years with the biggest decreases occurring in the 2019 school year when the DLM was first put into place, which may be impacting those scores a bit. As you can see, the percentage of students with disabilities scoring ready or exceeding in literacy fell from 52% to 41, and in math, it fell from 51% to 21% in 2019. So moving on to the national assessment,
so each state uses its own test. it's difficult to accurately compare student proficiency from one state to another, so the best way to do that is looking at the National Achievement of Educational Progress, also known as the NAEP. These scores are based on a random sample of students in each state instead of the entire state student population, which means that if the entire population had been tested, the score may have been different, and it's also possible that states may be applying federal guidelines
little differently in classifying children with disabilities so it's going to take a little bit of caution in comparing these state to state. So charts 8 through 11 on page 12 show how the average scale score for Arkansas students with disabilities compared the average scale scores in the top and bottom performing states along with the national average. Students with disabilities in Arkansas scored among the lowest in the country in both reading and math in 4th and 8th grades. This is also true for the past NAEP math
and reading assessments since 2013. So the US Department of Education annually assesses whether each state meets the requirements of Part B of IDEA and this Part B of IDEA relates the provisions of services and federal funding for states to provide a free appropriate public education or FAPE in the least restrictive environment for children with disabilities ages 3 to 21 and I won't get in too much detail of it right now but they have changed the
methodology a little bit and you can see how Arkansas scored in 20 in the most recent scores released in 2019 those in black indicate they received zero points those in dark gray indicate where they received two points and those in why is where they had one point and there are a couple there that had remarked not valid or reliable and this is relates to some of the data that the state was providing to the US Department of Education I do have some information
about the succeed scholarship but since that's going to be provided in a separate report at a little time I won't get into too much detail on that now so I'll move into the financial piece of special education that begins on page 16 in 2019 districts spent 458 million dollars on special special education services or about seventy three hundred dollars per student with a disability charter spent eight point eight million dollars on special education services or
about forty three hundred dollars per student and I do want to note that these figures and expenditure numbers should not be mistaken for the total cost of educating students with disabilities because they do not include expenditures that districts make on behalf of all students such as the cost of principal salaries or utilities so these figures represent only the expenditures that are specific to special education services charts 12 and 13 on next page show the districts and charter schools the total special education expenditures broken
down by the type of funding they use to make the expenditures the numbers do not represent the total amount spent from each funding category only the total amount from each funding category spent on special education so according to expenditures reported in the arkansas public school computer network also known as app scam districts use state and local funds to cover 71 of their special education cost and federal funds covered at the remaining 29 in comparison charter schools use
state and local funds to cover 58 of special education services and federal funds to cover the remaining 42 and while a larger majority of charters special education expenditures come from federal funds as compared to districts they both spend federal funds roughly the same on a per student basis table nine on the next page provides a breakdown of the special education expenditures based on the funding source that districts and charters used some of these funds
are designated specifically for special education like special education services funds and catastrophic funds. Other funds like state categorical funding and student growth funding are not. Federal funding comes from IDEA, Medicaid, and other federal sources. The boxes shaded in dark gray indicate the funding sources accounting for the highest percentage of special education expenditures. For both districts and charters, foundation funding, local funds,
and activity funds collectively make up the largest funding source for special education expenditures followed by idea funding table 10 on the next page provides information on the same special education expenditures however this time the expenditures are broken down by the type of service provided again the boxes shaded in dark gray indicate the top expenditures for districts providing instruction for the resource room and self-contained classrooms have been the
top expenditure for the past few years for charters providing instruction for resource rooms and speech therapy and audiology services have been and with the increase in the number of students with disabilities the amount of money amount of money districts and charters are spending is increasing as well table 11 on the next page shows that in 2013 districts and charters spent four hundred and twelve million dollars on special education compared to 2019 in
which they spent four hundred and sixty-seven million dollars or about a thirteen point two percent increase compared to the eighteen point eighteen percent growth in the number of students with disabilities you also see that the per student expenditure amount decreased during that same time period and we also did a little comparison little analysis to look at funding in relation to achievement and growth scores from the ACT ASPIRE and while the growth scores
did not correlate with the per student expenditures the per student those expenditures did moderately correlate with the readiness score so the growth no connection but the readiness scores of percent scoring ready or exceeding did have a moderate correlation so that means that even though a special education spending is not associated with higher growth higher special education spending is associated with higher achievement though the
correlations do not mean that higher special education spending causes higher achievement as noted earlier foundation funding is the largest source of special education funding for districts and charters the foundation funding matrix provides funding for 2.9 special education teachers for every 500 students or 381 dollars and 70 cents per student in the 2019 school year under this foundation funding methodology the state funds special education based on
each district or charter's total number of students rather than on the total number of students with disabilities districts and charters use of foundation funding including a special education portion is unrestricted meaning they can spend the money however they choose this differs from the way funding is distributed for English language learners or students in an alternative alternative learning environment which do have some restrictions table 13 takes
a look at how districts and charters are spending special education foundation with foundation funding the number of full-time teachers those funds are providing as well as using all funding sources and you can find that here on the next page in the 2019 school year districts received 175.6 million dollars in foundation funding for special education teachers and spent 176.7 million dollars of the 235 districts operating
in the 2019 school year 116 employed more than 2.9 special education teachers using those foundation funds while the remaining 120 reported 2.9 or less charters received 6.7 million dollars and foundation funding for special education teachers and spent two point million dollars of those funds on teachers other 24 charters operating in the 2019 school year and i've excluded a couple of the charters of friendship aspire academy in litterlock and covenant keepers
since them covenant keepers was absorbed from the by friendship aspire mid-year in the school year among the charters five employed more than 2.9 teachers using foundation
Speaker 221
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funding and 12 employed 2.9 or less and then five charters did not use any
Speaker 219
2:35:12
foundation funding for their teachers but instead relied on federal funds and then the remaining charter had no student disabilities but were still received the same amount of foundation funding for their teachers
um so i did have a little analysis an analysis here on starting on page 20 looking at how funding mechanisms for special education vary by state the most common was using a
Speaker 220
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multiple student weight system which essentially weights students with different disabilities a little bit different so each one has a different funding
Speaker 219
2:35:53
amount and here on table 14 I've compiled
the mechanisms used for the top three performing states on the NAEP and the bottom three as well as Arkansas's to get an idea of how different states are funding special education so another funding another source of funding comes from the state comes from special education high-cost occurrences funding also known as catastrophic occurrences that name changed in 2019 which is
defined as individual cases in which special education and related services required by the IEP of a particular student is unduly expensive extraordinary or beyond the routine and normal cost associated with special education so Prior to the 2020 school year, districts qualified for this funding for any student who needs more than $15,000 worth of services after Medicaid, federal funding, and any other available third-party funding is applied.
The maximum amount of reimbursement a district or charter could receive was 100% of the first $15,000, 80% of the amount between $15,000 and $50,000, and 50% of the cost between $50,000 and $100,000. No special education high-cost occurrence was eligible for more than $100,000 each year. So beginning in the 2020 school year, DESI changed how these occurrences would be calculated. The formula and the new rules calls for districts to receive
zero percent of the first $15,000, 100% of the expenditures between 15 and sixty five thousand dollars and eighty percent of expenditures above the sixty five thousand dollar mark still with a reimbursement cap of one hundred thousand dollars and this change was according to the department to promote equitable distribution of resources for students with the most unduly expensive and extraordinary cost associated with special education services they need regardless of the school they attend so the new calculation could result in
higher reimbursements for the highest cost students and that can be seen in table 15 on page 23 which takes a look at two different students one with a hundred thousand dollars worth of cost and one hundred one with sixteen thousand dollars and how those would vary under the new rule so the formula will eliminate much of the funding for districts with students just over fifteen thousand dollars that could result in districts with the highest cost students
receiving a greater pro-rate a share of their eligible reimbursement and typically districts and charters receive a percentage of their eligible claims depending on the funding amount available and so district with the highest cost students could potentially grieve receive a greater share of their reimbursement instead of the districts that have more students with disabilities that incurred no more than fifteen thousand dollars in special education expenses and so the new rules went into effect in 2020 but it's still
too early to determine the financial impact but DESE has projected some potential impacts based on past funding numbers based on the 2017 funding applications 164 districts were approved for um high cost occurrence funding and using the current allocation of 13 million dollars 74 districts would receive more under the proposed rule change and 90 districts would receive less using the previous rules for funding of high cost occurrences
table 16 on the next page provides details on this funding for the 20 from 2015 through 2019 In 2019, 164 districts and charters requested reimbursement for $37 million in eligible special education high-cost occurrence expenditures. Of these funds, nearly $34 million was calculated as the total amount of reimbursement. However, the General Assembly only funded $13 million, or 38.46%.
According to DESI, some districts that potentially would lose money under these new rules have higher proportions of claims in the lower range of $15,000 to $17,000. So special education high cost occurrence funding was being used more for supplementing routine special education expenses like self-contained classrooms instead of for students with more unusually high cost. Until the 2018 school year, the General Assembly had funded roughly $11 million in special education high cost occurrence funding annually during the 2016 adequacy study
both the House and Senate Education Committees recommended increasing funding for catastrophic occurrences by two million dollars in fiscal year 18 and then by two point oh two million dollars in fiscal year 19 so the appropriated and funded amount increased to 13 million dollars in 2018 and then 13.02 million dollars in 2019. In the 2018 final adequacy report, the House and Senate Education Committees made two different recommendations. The House Committee recommended adding four million dollars to the high cost of
current funding for a total of 17.02 million dollars in fiscal year 20 and keeping that level at fiscal year 21 with the understanding that this amount could be changed during the budget hearings. The Senate Education Committee recommended making no funding changes and keeping special education high cost occurrence funding flat at thirteen point oh two million dollars for both fiscal year 20 and 21 and so ultimately act 877 of 2019 appropriated 13 point oh
two million dollars for special education funding for high cost occurrences so another source of special education funding is the federal idea Part B like the earlier Part B is provided to states for regarding students 3 to 21 require special education services and these are to meet excess cost of providing special education and related services to children with disabilities funding is distributed based on historic funding levels the
number of students in the state number children the state the number of children living in poverty in the state districts are required to distribute most of Part B funding to districts and charters that are able to keep a small portion to use for a variety of reasons including technical assistance and personnel preparation and assistance to district and charters in providing positive behavioral interventions and supports one of the requirements to receive Part B funding is maintenance of effort this means that districts must
maintain their total state and local contributions for special education from one year to the next to receive Part B funding a district or charter cannot reduce the amount of state and local funds is spent in the preceding fiscal year there are some exceptions to this and those are listed on page 24 districts and charters must use Part B funds to pay for the excess cost of providing a FAPE to children with disabilities these include special education teachers and administrators, other related service providers like psychologists, materials
and supplies, professional development, and any other specialized equipment or devices. In addition to paying for the excess cost of providing FAPE to children with disabilities, a portion of Part B funds can be used for coordinated early intervening services to assist students in grades K through 12 with emphasis on grades K through three who are not currently identified as needing special education and related services but still need additional academic and behavioral support to be successful in a general classroom environment and so
another fund another federal source comes from Medicaid districts and charters can submit claims to Medicaid for reimbursement for certain services these include physical therapy occupational therapy speech language pathology therapy and personal care assistance services and claims could also be submitted for services and administrative duties for general education and students with disabilities to be reimbursed for by Medicaid for these services districts and charters agree to pay a Medicaid
match payment or percentage of these services in order to keep the state Medicaid budget neutral typically this matches about 30% of total reimbursement Beginning in the 2017 school year, the state Medicaid behavioral health and developmental disability systems began undergoing multiple changes and some of these will potentially impact special education services. One of those is a 90 minute a week cap on occupational physical and speech therapy. Any of
these services that exceed that amount will need prior authorization. Since the new requirement went into effect in July 2017, some districts have come across an issue in which districts have to obtain prior authorizations for services they provide that exceed the 90-minute cap this is because some students receive OTP occupational physical and speech therapy outside of school with a provider for medical reasons but then receive those services in school as part of their federally required IEP when a student receives the same therapy in an
outside providers facility and in the school both entities will bill Medicaid the outside provider typically bills first which creates so in a district later for bills for that same service it's combined with the schools and that typically exceeds a 90-minute cap this creates a competitive environment for providers and districts to bill first additionally schools are required to seek authorization from the primary care provider prior to offering and billing for services regardless of the minutes provided for past beneficiaries however
the past beneficiaries are not required to have a PCP assigned any provider member in the past can act as the child's primary care provider so this creates a huge barrier for schools seeking information necessary to get approval for billing a past beneficiary Desi has expressed his concern to DHS and developmental the division of developmental disability services and they're trying to work on implementing a private agreement with the private providers in the schools to help
Speaker 219
2:47:03
progress the second and change involves the transition of the responsibility of providing a FAPE from the early intervention day treatment centers to the LEA's since that's more of a preschool area I won't go into too much detail on that now um but it is having some impacts on preschools within districts um so moving on to special education teachers which begins on page 27.
according to desi there were 24 different types of special education licenses and 12 504 licenses that are current of the 24 special education licenses currently held only 11 of those are guaranteed granted to new licensees their mating were discontinued however some individuals may still host some of those licenses or they may hold multiple licenses or they may not be teaching at all based on numbers in app scan there were nearly 3 788 full-time employees working as special
education teachers in Arkansas districts in the 2019 school year on average special education teachers earned an annual salary not including benefits of fifty thousand three hundred dollars which is about two thousand dollars less than the base salary included in the foundation funding matrix one issue districts have faced in providing special education is an inadequate supply of appropriately licensed special education teachers who want to teach in the field if it is an undue hardship for district or charter to fill a vacant
position with a qualified individual licensed in that particular content area and level of licensure licensure the district or charter can apply for an exception from that requirement the exceptions include additional licensure plans or ALP or a long-term substitute teacher known as LTS an ALP is given to educator to become certified in a particular subject or class while teaching that particular class educators can be employed out of their licensure
area for up to three consecutive school years as long as the State Board of Education approves their ALP each year approvals for the second and third years will be based on whether the educator has made progress towards completing their education in 2019 151 districts requested 396 alps for special education in the fall of 2018 46 districts requested 85 LTS is and in
spring of 2019 39 districts requested 74 LTS is for special education in an effort to increase the number of people who are certified to teach special education and to reduce the number of waivers districts need DESE recently changed the special education licensure creating more pathways to getting certified until 2014 DESE regulations required individuals who wanted to teach special education to get an initial get an initial license and then add a
special education endorsement to that license this meant that in addition to the undergraduate degree required for their initial teaching license they were were required to take an additional 21 credit hours of a master's level special education program for the endorsement there was a concern that many aspiring teachers chose not to get special education certification because it required additional training but offered no additional salary so they have made some changes to those special education licensure one of those includes a new
k-12 initial license for special education that allows teachers to get their standard license and special education this allows them to teach special education after obtaining their bachelor's degree without having to get an extra endorsement another option was the k-12 special education resource endorsement and this is an expedited special education endorsement for individuals who are already licensed to teach elementary grades k-6 or English math or science in grades 4 through 8 or 7 through 12 previously teachers who
wanted to add a special education endorsement were required to complete at least 21 hours of graduate level coursework and special education the new expedited resource endorsement endorsement which received final approval in 2015 requires teachers to complete just 12 hours of additional coursework another option was the early childhood special education birth through kindergarten license which is an option for individuals interested in working with children in the birth to kindergarten age range it is available
as an initial license add-on and through the MAT program which I will go over next the MAT which is the masters of art and teaching is an avenue for people who are not certified teachers to obtain a master's degree in teaching to become certified individuals can teach under a provisional license while completing the program previously this option was not available to individuals who wanted to special education and chart 14 on page 29 shows the fall enrollment for each of
these new options in higher among higher ed institutions in Arkansas and additionally and the number of individuals and wrote and enrolled in higher education programs increased from 630 in 2005 to 1079 in 2019 Table 17 below, on page 30, shows the numbers of each special education licenses from 2016
through 2019, including discontinued licenses that are highlighted in gray. The total number of special education licenses increased from 12,410 in 2017 to 12,793 in 2019 so that takes me to the results from our adequacy study survey that Julie mentioned earlier in her presentation so like she mentioned we
visited a randomly selected group of 74 schools and talked to the principals as well as teachers within those schools that we provided an online survey to and during these visits special education came up quite a bit in our conversations when principals were asked about staffing challenges for classroom and non-classroom teachers 14 noted that special education staffing whether teachers or aides pair pros was it one of their biggest challenges and when
they were asked to provide kind of general comments not included in the survey three of them noted that more funding for special education was needed one principal particular added that the special education population is rising and their school is exhausted their special education dollars from the federal government and are now supplementing that with state dollars that are supposed to take care of the non special education population so in the teacher surveys we had a total of two thousand five hundred and four that
were distributed and one hundred one thousand two hundred thirty six I responded by December 20th of night 2019 so among the twelve thousand twelve hundred teachers that have responded to the surveys one hundred and sixteen were special education teachers of those teachers twenty nine percent noted that they are considering quitting teaching or leaving the k-12 education profession profession the most common reason was stress or workload which was also a most common reason among teachers as a whole and then paperwork
and bureaucratic issues were among the next most common issues reasons for considering leaving and for this question several special education teachers also added additional comments that further discuss about their high cake excuse me that their high caseloads high stress levels and increased paperwork 25 teachers made comments relating to special education and they're kind of an open-ended question and just over half of those came from
non special education teachers so there was a good mix of people commenting about special education the most common responses addressed there were how students with disabilities were assessed five commented that that testing system needs to be adjusted one noted that there should be some difference in testing between regular and special education students and then the remaining comments noted that students with disabilities should be tested at their actual level instead of being tested by their level of growth our
level of growth other common responses included schools being understaffed and special education the paperwork and the workload for special education teachers is too high and the combination of working with students with varying skill and functional levels in some cases the rep comments kind of discussed a lot of students with different kinds of needs and functional levels being in classrooms together which presented some challenges for some teachers other comments included the high work demand negatively impacting personal health and or
family quality of life low salary and or other financial burdens associated with it being a special education teachers and then also that more planning time was needed for special education teachers and with that I will take
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:57:17
thank you very much let me see senator thank you
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
2:57:23
madam chair a few questions on the summary sheet that we were given in
anywhere in the report which is very thorough by the way thank you anywhere in the
report does it show the total dollars associated with each one of the 12 identified areas so I could say X number of dollars went to autism X number of dollars to deafness etc I don't have that breakout I'm not
Speaker 219
2:57:48
sure that's something that would be be able to do it because a lot of services are not really categorized by disability types I don't think that would be something we would be able to to do okay then number four is emotional
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
2:58:04
disturbance do we are you able to drill down in that one in particular because I think about case managers managers that are affiliated with mental health organizations that have a presence on school campuses and I'm wondering what what makes up the definition of emotional disturbance and are those are they addressed by mental health counselors that have a presence on campus
Speaker 219
2:58:32
mental health counselors I would imagine I don't have the exact number of
how many students they're serving that are have emotional disturbance under special education that would imagine there's some of those there let me see don't have the let me see if i can find the definition of what emotional disturbances includes i'll tell you what for
Speaker 225
2:58:51
the sake of time i'll get with you offline okay i just i didn't know if
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
2:58:57
you i didn't see it in the report didn't know if you had it in the report and yeah i don't have it in
Speaker 236
2:59:04
the report but i can certainly get that pretty quickly okay
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
2:59:07
the next one's on page 13 of
your report okay it says art saw is one of 38 states considered to have met all requirements of idea part b for i guess that's year fiscal year whatever 2011 in each year since the methodology changed in 2014 and i'm getting the impression that something significant happened in 2014 where it seems like we were doing okay but whatever happened in 2014
started sending us in the wrong direction am i misinterpreting that and if i'm not do you know what change in
Speaker 221
2:59:47
2014 triggered it so there was a methodology change in 2014 um i'm not
Speaker 219
2:59:53
sure exactly what triggered the methodology change but they did change the way they were conducting this assessment so that likely would have impacted it seemed to impact what arkansas's rating was at that point but i don't know if there's any other factors that change in 2014 to
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
3:00:11
change okay so am i am i right in concluding that whatever that methodology
shift was in 2014 that evidence supports that it was not a good change for the results or perhaps it was a good change that revealed what the true results were that prior to that methodology shift we were seeing a skewed in appearance but 38 other states would have been wrong too i want to know what that methodology shift was and who drove it was it the federal government the department or who drove that methodology shift that all of a sudden we went
from doing okay to going the wrong direction um
Speaker 219
3:00:52
so that would have come from the u.s department of education um let me i don't know exactly what fueled that change that i can dig into that a little bit but i don't have that right off what fueled that or what whether or not which one was right or wrong i'm not sure i'd be able to say what's the better way of judging it in terms of
Speaker 238
3:01:15
results obviously that impacted arkansas's rating but i'm not sure i can say which one was
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
3:01:21
the better one ma'am chair can i have one more and i'm done one thank you so on your summary report summary sheet on on the front it talks about special education expenditures and 450 million 58 million and that's seventy three hundred and eighty two dollars which is above the per student cost that schools are allowed if i'm right is is the difference between what we send to schools to take care of the need of the students and that 73 82 made up for out of that and i'm going to
call it catastrophic catastrophic fund or because one of the complaints i hear from schools is that they get high need students okay and they're having to absorb the difference so they're having to rob peter to pay paul in order to cover the cost of those students am i am i right in what i just said or am i wrong in my interpretation and that the difference is paid for
Speaker 223
3:02:19
out of that fund so my understanding of the extra costs are typically obviously catastrophic funding or
Speaker 219
3:02:25
high cost occurrences is is helping with that or
eating some of those costs but there's extra funds being pulled from the foundation funding pot better so some of that extra costs are being
Speaker 238
3:02:35
absorbed by foundation funds in addition to the catastrophic or the high cost occurrences thank
Senator Jane English
Unverified
3:02:43
you madam chair let's see senator Chesterfield thank you
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:02:47
madam chair and good morning thank you for your report one of the things that was prevalent when I was in the profession was the overload of paperwork especially
in the spring it was just a time of great stress in in visiting did you visit with the Department of Education to see if some of that paperwork was going away so that we can maintain those persons who are qualified to teach special ed so I
Speaker 219
3:03:19
know I haven't had any recent conversations but I know that there were some efforts in the past year or two to try to reduce the the amount of paperwork that teachers were doing I don't have the exact number of what you
know what the what that's look like what that looks like now you know that definitely came up in teacher surveys but I don't know right off if that's a shift downward or upward in previous years but I know there have been efforts to
Speaker 236
3:03:44
address that but I don't have right off what the impact of that has been because those reports were not done on
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:03:55
school time right they were done on their own personal time and had to be in by a particular particular time period you're talking about pages and pages of reports per child that had to be filled
out and that was driving some people to retire early in your looking at special ed how many individuals who work in cbi did you encounter community-based instruction or did we differentiate
between types of special ed so from understanding your your
Speaker 219
3:04:31
question And were you looking at teachers in terms of types of instruction provided?
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:04:38
The CBI instructor are those individuals who deal with our children who can't
speak, who have to have their diapers changed, who have to have – they can't communicate in any way. But at the same time, we teach everybody in the public schools. So that we differentiate because there are some CBI schools. I worked at a CBI school, which is different to some extent from, well, to a large extent, from the regular if there is special ed class.
Speaker 220
3:05:12
I didn't when I was looking at that. That's not something I looked at, but we could certainly try to look into that and see if that's something we could come up with. I
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:05:23
would appreciate it because I'd like to know we don't have an enormous number of CBI schools, but there are CBI schools across there that require special ed instructors, and I'd like to see what they're saying in comparison with those persons who teach other special ed classes. Sure thing. All right, and thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
3:05:45
Representative Rye. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This one, it could be for Director John. John, you may need to help me with this. let's just say up to $15,800 per child for disabilities is spent but now let's say on the first 25 mills maintenance and operation that of the say the $6,900
on the maintenance and operation that you only came up with $1,500 for the child in that poor district. What happens on that 15-8, John, and anything up and above that? Can you kindly help us with that,
Senator Jane English
Unverified
3:06:43
Do you know the answers to everything, a wizard?
Speaker 190
3:06:50
Johnny Key, Department of Education. I know, Madam Chair, I do not, but I have people who whisper in my ear that do know the answers and i may have to have one of them if we get too far in the weeds but representative rye i think you're talking about the catastrophic or high cost funds now so under the old system the first fifteen thousand dollars was eligible and that the exceptions that are in the book or in the report were the only exceptions so So now under the new rules, the first 15,000, because that is establishing that as, that's routine, a routine cost.
What high cost fund is really supposed to do is address the needs, as it says, high cost or in previous, the previous language was catastrophic. Those that are not routine, over and above the routine. so in a case like you you talked about with a a school district that first 15 thousand for that particular case is it it's going to be on the district but that is money they're already getting they're getting it through a foundation
they're getting it through the ESA now formerly NSL I mean a lot of those funds and the any amount that they expend over and above that routine cost of a special ed education of a special ed student or student with special needs then can be reimbursed so from 15,000 to I have to find a 60 I know it's in here somewhere
was it 65 000 all right you know then then that is where the state through this fund comes in through this line item and reimburses those very extraordinary needs and it is reimbursed so it's not like the students aren't being served the districts are serving the students it's just this gives them a mechanism to come back and say hey this meeting the needs of this student cost way more than we expected because of this that this student has and then they can file
to get that reimbursement for the services already
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
3:09:09
provided okay john kind of follow-up on that one johnny you know like if you had a thousand kids in a school now and you had say 10 that were of this type with disabilities is that is that figured in with the funding formula or are they are they actually taken out before that you use that reimbursement based on the
Speaker 193
3:09:35
wealth of the district the foundation funding includes part
Speaker 190
3:09:39
of the matrix includes special ed so that that would
what that's what we would consider the routine special education costs for a school district and at the 2.9 teachers that are included in the matrix. And that's not per special ed student. That is per student. Because you don't know from year to year how many students you will have that come in that require special education services. But that is built into the foundation funding.
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
3:10:23
you very much. Representative Beck. Thank you, Madam Chair. This will be a quick, easy question for you. Do you know, are there other states that use the ACT Aspire for assessments for special needs? I know the number's really low,
Speaker 221
3:10:36
if not just Arkansas. I don't remember right off. There's been a shift, but I don't think many. I think Arkansas might be the only one.
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:10:58
Senator Chesterfield thank you madam chair it says the commissioners here are the secretary is here so secretary key is here when he finishes visiting with representative why may I ask him a question madam chair certainly Thank you.
Good morning, Mr. Secretary. Good morning, Senator. How are you? I'm doing well, thank you. Good. I'm going back to my concern about the CBI classes. I'm not sure you heard my question before. Is every district required to have CBI classes in a particular school?
Speaker 190
3:11:35
And that is one of those, Madam Chair said. I do not know the answers to everything, but I have people who
Speaker 197
3:11:41
can help. So I would ask if Lisa Tyler could come to the table and help address that question. It
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:11:46
is a major concern of mine because there seems to be the idea that somehow in the public schools
we're not providing for kids with extreme personal needs or educational
Speaker 265
3:12:01
needs. Lisa Tyler, Learning Services. So your question was, is every school district required to
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:12:07
have a CBI class? If it reaches
Speaker 265
3:12:09
a special threshold, yeah. So no, every district is required to offer a continuum of services based on students' needs. And so what we would refer to what you're saying, community-based instruction, is a self-contained kind of setting,
and we have three designations for those, and districts determine what they need to use depending on the needs of their students because not every school has the same population. How
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:12:34
many school districts do have CBI
Speaker 265
3:12:36
classes? We don't refer to them as CBI classes in our rules, so we could look to see, like, how many schools have students in a 1 to 6, a 1 to 10, or a 1 to 15 classroom, because those are our self-contained classrooms. But there's no way to designate, you know, in terms of other than 1 to 6 kids with higher needs,
because there are fewer students in the classroom, there's a paraprofessional required, that it's actually the type of classroom that you're referring to. But we could look to see. I can't tell
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:13:09
you offhand. I'd like to see what that is. Having been in a school that is, I don't know if you ought to refer, you know, you change terminology every other minute. Right, of course, all the time. All the time. But these kids had extreme needs. Yes. And there were paraprofessionals that were in the classroom with them.
and we had to teach them some skills how to those who were capable of going to town those you know those I'd like to see what we're doing in that area and what the turnover is in that arena because I need to know that and the other thing I need to know is have we reduced the
paperwork because the people in in in special ed are leaving because they feel overwhelmed in
Speaker 265
3:13:54
the springtime so the answer to your last question is yes significantly three or
four years ago we had a huge push around paperwork reduction at the same time we developed process guides for districts to use with their teachers so that they could have the ability to understand the process more fully without feeling like they had to reach out to the department all the time I can't tell you offhand but probably the number of pages required in our paperwork was reduced by about 50% and we got lots and lots of good comments now it's still an issue it's still hard districts are free to require more paperwork than we require at the
state but we did reduce our required form significantly you don't have any idea
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:14:37
of the number of pages that are required now by state law for them to fill out it would
Speaker 265
3:14:43
be different depending on the conference and the student I can't tell you exactly how many pages but I could get it for I can tell you I I could look and tell you how many forms we have available that are required for different
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:14:56
things. That would be nice because there ought to be a limit. And it's difficult enough to grade papers during the course of the year and then to have to at the end of the year fill out
in addition to teaching the class, grading the papers, also doing the extra paperwork.
So I'm still interested in finding that out. Yeah, certainly. I think that
Speaker 265
3:15:15
more than just the number of pages they're filling out, It's just the process of really looking at students' needs and assessments and all of that is still necessary on an individual basis for kids with disabilities, as you know, to ensure they make progress. So that's the tough part, and then documenting all that as well. And is it not true that ACT Aspire has said that they
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:15:37
did not want that test to be used in the way we're using it, or did I get that wrong?
I have no knowledge of that. That's not true. It's not true. No, ma'am. So that's just a rumor that
flew from somewhere. But we're the only ones
Speaker 189
3:15:55
using ACT Aspire. We're the only state using it. That's what I'm saying. Yes, the only state using
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:16:01
it for state accountability. Well, I'm not talking about you and
Speaker 190
3:16:04
me as individuals, John. I'm talking about the whole state. Well, but there are other jurisdictions that use ACT Aspire. But
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
3:16:10
we're the only state who uses it as a measure.
Speaker 190
3:16:13
All right, thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Sure. Madam Chair, while I'm here, and Lisa is here, I think if you would allow us to go back to one of Senator Hammer's questions about the methodology that changed in 2014. Yep. Go ahead. So the federal government changed how they looked, and really it was a change for, really student-focused, change for the better. They were looking at whether, in the past, whether you were complying with all the rules,
and then they shifted and added an element of whether, obviously, compliance is still there, but also what are the results you are getting, the student results. And that is where that transition is when we did not score as well, because one thing we know is that our assessment results for our students with disabilities is not where we want it to be. Frankly, that is one of the elements of our RISE initiative,
is that we saw that our students with disabilities and their reading scores and reading progressions were not what they needed to be. And so really focusing on how we change that tier, that core instruction, tier one instruction for all students and then what are the things that the the students with disabilities need as far as interventions so we are expecting over the years as we get deeper into implementation
that those numbers will turn around but lisa can speak probably more specifically to those
Speaker 265
3:17:56
changes too. Yeah, so the big change was that prior to 2014, our determination from the federal government, which is like a grade we get for our special education programs, was based totally on compliance factors. Did our kids get their evaluations completed within 60 days? Did they have a transition plan on paper? All of those checking off the boxes kinds of things. Were our forms
complete in 2014 our determinations were changed across the nation to still of compliance because that's a foundation of kids aren't getting evaluated on time they're not receiving services etc so it's still important but 50% of our determination was then also based on results so student achievement participation in assessment graduation and dropout and we along with 30 plus other states went from meeting requirements every year to needing
assistance for results and certainly you've heard what our outcomes are for kids in terms of assessment that's that's where we needed to be we have a lot of work to do and we realize that and I agree with Secretary Key with rise and the other initiatives we have what I hear from our special ed directors is if If we had had these RISE techniques and procedures and if we were educating our kids with IEPs, particularly those with specific learning disabilities,
in the general ed environment and using this type of instruction, we'd have far fewer students in need of special ed services and most definitely, their outcomes would
Senator Jane English
Unverified
3:19:45
be better. Super, thank you very much. Appreciate it, thank you everybody. your explanations. Okay. All
right, folks. We have this thing that's been passed out by the Arkansas State Teachers Association.
Pass that out for your information. Our next meeting will be on February 10th and 11th. At that meeting, we will have APA come in and so we'll be doing the adequacy review the reports on one day and then on one day we'll be doing uh working with the consulting coming it probably won't be every month um because i'll be doing things but they will be here at the meeting um so they will be here to present their scope of work answer any questions we may have
and so they can move on with with their efforts also the department of education is going to send out an invitation to everybody for the 6th of February they're going to have a poverty simulation over at the Department of Education from 9 probably till noon and kind of give us an idea of what kids go through every day that we probably don't see sitting where we do in these seats so be on the lookout for that for that invitation from the department and I think that's if nobody
has anything else? We're adjourned.
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Opening Remarks by Chairs
C. Review of Division of Legislative Audit Report, “Department of Education Grants Summarized by the Division of Legislative Audit for the Year Ended June 30, 2019” [Exhibits C, C1, & C2] Mr. Joey Buddenberg, CPA, Supervising Senior Auditor, Division of Legislative Audit
D. Discussion of Issues Related to Academic Standards Ms. Julie Holt, Legislative Analyst, Policy Analysis and Research Section, Bureau of Legislative Research
E. Discussion of Issues Related to the Fiscal Distress Designation Ms. Elizabeth Bynum, Legislative Analyst, Policy Analysis and Research Section, Bureau of Legislative Research
F. Discussion of Issues Related to Special Education Ms. Adrienne Beck, Legislative Analyst, Policy Analysis and Research Section, Bureau of Legislative Research
G. Other Business
H. Adjournment
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — EDUCATION COMMITTEE - SENATE AND HOUSE MEETING JOINTLY WITH ADVANCED COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION, Jan 7, 2020 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Adequacy Responsibilities Tracking Sheet | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| EX C ADE Grants June 30, 2019 | Exhibit | 5 needs OCR | Official source ↗ |
| EX C1 Ed Committee Presentation | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| EX C2 ADE Grants | Exhibit | 92 | Official source ↗ |
| Handout D1 Learning Standards Highlights | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Handout D2 AR Learning Expectations for Students | Exhibit | 35 | Official source ↗ |
| Handout D3 Learning Expectations PwrPt | Exhibit | 43 needs OCR | Official source ↗ |
| Handout E1 Fiscal Distress Highlights | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Handout E2 Fiscal Distress Report | Exhibit | 18 | Official source ↗ |
| Handout F1 Special Education Highlights | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Handout F2 Special Education Report | Exhibit | 36 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Senator Jane English
Unverified
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
Speaker 17
Speaker 19
Speaker 37
Speaker 38
Speaker 39
Speaker 42
Speaker 49
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
Speaker 64
Speaker 36
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
Speaker 50
Speaker 72
Speaker 81
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
Speaker 116
Speaker 128
Speaker 129
Elizabeth Minum
Unverified
Speaker 152
Speaker 79
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
Speaker 135
Speaker 143
Speaker 174
Speaker 181
Speaker 183
Speaker 184
Speaker 185
Speaker 190
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
Speaker 218
Speaker 219
Speaker 220
Speaker 225
Speaker 221
Speaker 236
Speaker 182
Speaker 238
Speaker 223
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
Speaker 253
Speaker 193
Speaker 26
Speaker 260
Speaker 197
Speaker 265
Speaker 189