Education Committee Senate & House
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- October 7, 2026
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:30
we are prepared to begin it's going to be an exciting day good afternoon everyone
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
2:04
trying to get started on time let
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:23
desk here it's uh it's
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
2:43
we'll give them time to find a real
chair all right first thing off we need to do is approval of the minutes from January the 6th and January the 7th do I have a motion motion second second all in favor say aye all right any of any any no's on that one no I think that's approved thank you guys unanimous everybody wants to get that out of the way all right today we are going to be discussing our activities and timeline
from our educational adequacy study process and we have with us today Justin Silverstein correct Silverstein Steen okay I'll get it right and miss Amanda Brown and so we are going to turn that over to them and let them discuss some of this then we'll have a question time and then we will move on to the rest of the agenda for the day so
Justin you and Amanda are recognized if you would just state your name for the record when you talk and that'll be great yeah Justin
Speaker 24
4:04
Silverstein for the record thank you all today it's great to be here kicking off the study with you all, and we are going to go pretty quick. We know you have a lot of different pieces on your agenda today, but we wanted to come in, give you an update of where we are, and lay out the proposed timeline that we've put together for presenting all the various pieces of this very large study for you over
the next ten months. I want to just frame a little bit that we are just getting started as far as data collection. We've been working with the Department of Education. They've been wonderful, but we are asking them for a lot of data. One of the things that we've agreed to with BLR is that we will get all data directly from the department so that we're getting the full data set from them. We will start presenting to you findings of different pieces of the study in April.
So that is when you'll start to see the very first pieces of this. Today we'll walk through when you're going to see everything and how we plan to get that done. We are also going to talk a little bit about overlap with BLR reports. We know that you are going to see a lot of different information between what we're presenting to you and what BLR is going to be presenting to you over the next couple months. One of our key goals is not to make anything repetitive. We do not want to bring something to you that they've already brought to you. And we also have to make sure, contextually, if there's things
that seem different, why they're different. We'll do all of that throughout the process. But today, we just want to lay some groundwork on in reviewing the work we've been tasked to do and all the reports that BLR does. Where do we think there could be some overlap? And we are actually working with BLR to make sure that we don't have that overlap and it's the most efficient process possible to get you all the information, but not to double up that work. And then one thing, sorry if we go back, that is not on here that we're going to wrap up today with, we hope, is to start to pick the comparison state groups so that when we come
back to you all, especially with our literature reviews, you have a set of comparison groups that you all have requested so that you're looking
Speaker 25
6:11
at the states that you want to look at when we compare data across
Speaker 31
6:24
the country. Amanda Brown, for the record. So many of you have had the opportunity to hear what I'm going to walk through at our presentation proposal prior meeting. So I want to go over similar information that you might have heard before. So I'll move fairly quickly. We have a number of kind of key study tasks that we think about as part of this work that go across a number of the RFP requirement areas. That includes looking at fiscal and performance data, conducting case studies of successful schools in Arkansas, conducting a literature review and data review. And when we talk about literature, it's both looking at what would academic research
what do other states do nationally, conducting educator panels and really involving stakeholders within the state, doing a district survey where we think there's some gaps in data that we might need to address, and then additional quantitative and qualitative work. And I'll talk about what each of these main areas are and then how we'll be using them to address the requirements of this study. So the first area is fiscal and performance data, and as Justin mentioned we have started this process of gathering a really robust data set from the Department of Education so we can conduct a number of regression
analysis to understand the relationships between growth and achievement around the state how does that interact with different school demographics fiscal expenditure information and performance so we understand kind of what are the impacts of poverty concentrations of poverty on outcomes what are the relationships between spending and performance and what does performance look like across student groups. So we'll be conducting a really robust set of data analysis in this area to answer a number of different RFP questions.
The next piece will be literature and document review. So as I mentioned, we both look at academic research and then what do other states do nationally. It's really the first step in any of the RFP areas that we're addressing is to look at what is happening, both in the research and nationally. We will be looking at all 50 states, regardless of what comparison groups we select, we just want to then highlight either regional neighbors, you might consider looking at different states that are performing well,
and we really want to dig into that at the end of this meeting with you all. The next piece is case studies. So what we recommended doing is 12 to 16 site visits at schools that are performing kind of possibly better than you would expect given the need of their student body. So schools that are doing very well with their at-risk students or their English learners to understand what is causing their success. We'll be looking at how does their staffing look, their use of non-personnel resources,
what sort of curriculum do they use, interventions or strategies to support students, how do they support their teachers via professional development time or structuring the day, do they use data to drive their decision-making, generally what's their school culture and leadership. So really digging deeply into what is working in these successful places across the state. The next key task area is educator panels. And we think it's really important to bring the voice of stakeholders into this process.
So we are suggesting or will be doing at least four in-person listening sessions across the state. So going to four different locations. Usually doing at least a couple sessions in each location to make sure folks can attend. those would be open to anyone that wanted to attend both educators in the general community we're also going to be doing a number of targeted educator panels so within each of those kind of four locations that we're suggesting we go to doing a set of panels in each place so one with your superintendents
with your CFOs with your school leaders and with your teachers to really dig into what did they feel like is working under the current system what could be areas in the resource matrix that they think need to be addressed further digging into issues around attraction and retention and also around the college and career readiness definition so there's some key areas that we're hoping to talk with them about we're also going to be doing an online survey so in addition to giving folks in-person opportunities to participate we want to
make sure others can as well so again that includes educators in the broader community including parents, community leaders, business leaders. So you have a really wide range of voices participating in this work. The next piece is a school district survey and as I mentioned this is to really gather data where we gather information where we think there might not be data readily available. So that could be on current practices and policies around school size, the best use of funding for different student groups, capital needs
as well as looking at what CT programs that they offer. So again, anywhere we think there might not be data or data that we want to dig into further, we're going to consolidate and put into a single survey that goes out to districts. And then kind of a broad bucket of additional work that we'll be doing, and that will include further data analysis, looking at the equity of the systems, look at any changes due to declining enrollment or if you did a different uniform tax rate impacts of vouchers of waiver programs it also includes any additional interviews that we
need to do some places we'll talk about when we get to really the impact of size particularly your district size what does that look like for your education offerings across your districts and we'll look at some GIS mapping so you can really see how does this play out where do you have pockets that there might be some inequities that might need to be addressed and again as I mentioned and any of
Speaker 28
12:16
that modeling of fiscal impact. So the next few slides really highlight each of the 30 plus different areas that are a
Speaker 31
12:22
part of this study and the key research tasks that we'll be doing to address them. So highlights on this page, again, we are not going to be coming up with any sort of adequacy figures as part of this work. We understand that it's the discretion of the legislature to determine what that is, but we'll talk about what are methods out there to regularly address adequacy. Two through four are really those deep dives around fiscal and performance data, looking at concentrations of poverty, identifying the gaps, and then using case studies
to identify the programs to address, looking at that correlation between performance and funding, reviewing what have other adequacy studies said around the country for the past 10 years with a lens of specific kind of resource allocations. So what class sizes do those studies tend to produce? What counselor ratios? What additional support? So again, less on the dollar or a weight that might be used, but really what are those underlying resources that will be helpful as we get into the review
of the resources in the matrix. So that's one piece of information. We really think about the review of the resources as the culmination of all this work. So both seeing what was happening in case studies, What did educator panels say? What would the literature or the data analysis might suggest? The college and career readiness definition, which will again be looking at what is happening nationally in this area, what, doing some deep dives of the data that you have and the available indicators to measure how well are schools and districts doing in this area, and also looking at what CTE programs
are offered, so that's an important piece of this as well. Okay, so under 3.0 B is really all of the questions around size, and we tend to think about them together, both what are current size policies in Arkansas? What are policies nationally? How much input does the public have in setting those sizes? What would be an ideal size school coming out of this information? Then policies around district size, so how do you deal with small districts?
do you deal with remoteness and isolation we'll also be looking at the research around class size and student teacher ratios and then you'll see that that will also be part of the fiscal and performance data analysis so looking at salary variations and are there indicators that might help you understand why there's discrepancies in this area 3.0 C has some number of kind of different items within it so there's less of a consistent theme around size but first is really looking at what would be the appropriate proxy for
measuring students that are economically disadvantaged or might need extra support knowing that there's been some impact of the community eligibility provision and how you can identify those students so we'll be looking at both what are alternative proxies what are the impact of state a formulas if you change the proxy you use and over time as identification rates have shifted because of CEP we will also be in this area looking at the equity of the current system we'll also be looking at changes of due to enrollment then really
the last attain attracting and retaining administrative and educational staff as well as nurses and then support of student and mental health issues those are the first areas we'll start to dig into in April through a literature review and then we'll also be addressing them again as we talk to educators around the state. For the next piece we'll be looking at capital as well and really building off the work of the existing advisory committee on facilities to focus more of a lens on how does equity address capital needs across your state
and current policies. So that will include talking with districts through that survey. We'll also be looking at the best use of poverty funds and the programs they support. Again both looking at those case studies and what do educators say we're looking at vouchers and waivers how do other states deal with these what are digital impacts that you could see around cost or performance looking at the uniform tax rate again our lens is often equity so what does that look like for your districts across the state what would
any sort of change look like then pieces around professional development and extra duty time how do folks in the state use those resources what would your literature recommend comparing the prior study to current legislation and then again educator panels that we've really enmeshed in a number of places across the study so it's a very quick highlights of what the key research will be doing and how they impact the areas Justin will talk about how we're
planning on laying them out as far as timeline the presentation in addition to all of those areas we're going to be available for kind of support along the way if there's any related questions that arise we can work through the chairs and BLR to determine if that's something we can provide support on we'll be here to provide monthly updates to you all and then finally this will culminate in a draft report in November with a final report in December so it's going to be a very busy year but we're excited to be here so the the next
Speaker 25
17:45
handful of slides are going to take the grids that Amanda just
Speaker 24
17:49
showed and try to to lay out when we're going to start bringing back information from each of those studies to you as the committees. We
Speaker 25
17:55
will, all of this is, of course, subject to change based on when
Speaker 24
18:03
the data comes in. And then also, more importantly, anything that we get done earlier, we will bring back to you as soon as we can. So we're not going to wait on something because we say it's going to be ready in September. We get information done earlier.
We'll bring it back to you earlier. All of it will clearly be wrapped up in the timeline as we go forward. So in March, we want to come back to you and do a little bit more of this level setting and planning. So we have a lot of interaction that's going to go on around the state in April and May. We want to come back to you, map that out. So we're going to come with a proposal of where we feel we're going to go for those educator panels, those locations, and dates.
We want to get a little feedback to make sure that we're getting the right spread across the state. We also want to talk to you about the types of topics that we are going to bring forward. We clearly have that structure built into our design currently, but we want to make sure if there's anything else that we might want to bring forward that we're hearing from you on that. We are going to talk a little bit about how do you select successful schools. So when we get to April, we want to actually be bringing back a list of successful schools.
We want to talk to you about the criteria that we plan on using in March. And then we want to finalize, if we don't do it today, and we're hoping we'll do it today, those comparison states. So starting in April and then going forward, the first thing we're going to do when we come back and talk to the committees is just to give you an update on what have we done as far as who have we talked to? What data have we collected? So outside of the actual findings,
what are we doing day to day? Just so you know all the interactions that we're having. And then we're gonna start with the first three sets of findings, which are gonna be the literature reviews on the student mental health issues, attracting and retaining administrative and educational staff, and attracting and retaining nurses. And so we're gonna bring that forward. We'll have the comparison states that you all have put together. Those items and many others as we talk further are still going to be influenced, some, by the educator panels and perhaps the survey.
And so there'll be other information that might come out in the final report. But this will be the in-depth literature review that's going on. Then in May, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about that proxy. And we know that nationally there's a lot of work being done around what does it mean to have a proxy for your economically disadvantaged students, especially because of the CEP impacts. And so we're going to bring back three pieces of that study to talk to you about, and then we're also going to talk to you about the impact of waivers.
In June, we will be looking at the impact of vouchers, the examination of uniform tax rate, impacts on equity, and impacts on enrollment changes. Those are all kind of separate pieces. Those aren't quite the same bucket that you're going to see in July, where we really are bucketing everything we can put together on school size, district size, all those questions around size. So we're going to bring that together all in July.
In August, we're going to come back and we're going to start talking to you about what we are hearing from the educator panels. We're going to give you the review of those adequacy studies nationally. We're going to give you the comparison of the prior study recommendations and legislation. And we're going to bring back our work on a college and career readiness definition. And in
Speaker 25
21:51
September, we are going to be looking at the results of the
Speaker 24
21:55
case studies. So again, we're going to be in schools across the state looking at what do schools who outperform
other schools do on the program level, on the professional development level, everything that makes them unique to be successful with their students. We're going to bring back the information we found from that.
Speaker 25
22:10
We're going to start talking about funding for concentrations of poverty and the information we're getting from both our large data analysis and literature reviews. We're going to talk about professional development and extra duty time, and we're also going to talk about the capital needs in the
Speaker 24
22:27
state. And then in October is really where we're bringing it all together. There's going to
be some very specific pieces here, but in October is when we, you know, firmly believe we're going to have all of that large data set analysis done, and we can start linking everything we've learned from this large data analysis to all the other quantitative and qualitative work we've done throughout. And so we're going to bring, you know, it's going to be a heavy lift that month. But some specific pieces we'll be talking about are the concentrations of poverty. So what are the impacts of concentrations of poverty on districts and their ability to serve students? Identifying gaps and program areas to address those gaps. So what student
groups are we finding educational gaps for? We're going to talk about the correlation between performance and funding that we find in the Arkansas data. We're going to talk about the best use of poverty funds. We're going to take a look at class size requirements, student-teacher ratios, and teacher salaries. I will say that is an area where we'll probably bring the literature to you earlier, but we want to look at that. This is where we're going to link the literature to what we're finding from the data analysis. We'll come back with
our review of resources in the matrix, and we're going to come back with our method for routinely reviewing adequacy. Then in November and December, we're going to be looking at the draft report in November and the final report in December. So it feels and sounds like a lot of work. It is. We're really excited for it. We have, again, a very strong team of ourselves and subcontractors who are doing this work. And we're moving forward right now. And within, you know, two months from now, you're going to start having to listen
to us a lot talk about a lot of findings. Okay. So then the last thing that we want to go through in this presentation before we talk about comparisons is just, again, the overlap with BLR reports. And so staff have been amazing over the past couple months, and they sent us a list of all the BLR reports that are presented to you all and the actual reports, so we've been able to read through all of those.
And we just wanted, we just started to walk through as we read them to really understand are there clear areas of overlap where we need to be very thoughtful about what we as a study group are doing and so we're not, again, presenting either conflicting or overlapping information to you as the committees. And so what you'll see in these charts is the name of the BLR report, the BLR statute. And so there are a couple reports that you are presented frequently that are actually
not mandated as part of the adequacy review. So if it's a yes, it means it is mandated, as I understand it, under the adequacy review. There are a couple that will say no. They are not mandated. The next column is where we think the RFP overlaps, or at least is similar to the report. So where do we think and where did we dig into? What are we doing compared to what BLR is doing to see if there's overlap? A very brief summary of the BLR report.
Clearly your staff know those reports better than we do, but this is our description. And then a comparison of the reports and the APA work. In that final column, if you see bold, that is where we start to think there's some overlap and we need to make sure that we're understanding how to address that. What you'll see on the first slide here in the first page is that we don't actually see any overlap in the initial, in this set of reports. For example, you have a special education report, though we're going to be looking at
the whole system, we do not actually have a specific RFP section that looks just at special education versus anything else. We are looking at the overall matrix, but there isn't a separate individual special education study. Or fiscal distress, that is not something we're being asked to look at at all. And so, again, you can take a look here at where there aren't overlaps, and I should take a quick step back. We are being asked to analyze information and data and present you with that analysis.
And BLR is really asked to bring to you a descriptive set of details about what is going on. They're, you know, kind of the way we've thought about it is they are telling you what is and what is going on both in the state and somewhat nationally. We are being asked then to take a look at that and say, how does that impact students and student performance and what's going on in the state? So, you know, maybe we're allowed to have an opinion, might not always be the exact opinion you all will like, but we are, you know, and BLR staff is really being asked to bring
information to you without then making a statement about where you should go. It's just the different balance between what their job is and what we are being asked to do, and so that's where we're taking a look at that. So again, when you read the description, most of the BLR reports are a descriptive analysis or description of what's happening currently, and they don't really step too far beyond that. I will say you have an unbelievable wealth of information, a set of information that most states do not collect on a regular basis. So it is not to undersell what
they're doing by any means. They are putting a lot of really good information in front of you. So the next set of studies is where we get into some of the overlap. So currently there's a career and technical education report, that is actually not a mandated report, but it pretty clearly overlaps what we've been asked to do, which is to take a look at all of the CTE offerings that are going on across the state. That is a pretty clear overlap, so we're going to work through that.
And the waivers and the impact of waivers, again, some overlap where we were being asked to and you're already getting some analysis on what is happening out there and what waivers are available. And then finally, there are three sections of resource allocation. There's the school staffing, the school resources, and the district resources. In those reports, there is a survey that is done of districts, and then there's also
some individual information gathered from a sample of principals. Likely some of what we'll ask in our district-wide survey will be somewhat similar to what would is asked by BLR. We will say that our survey is going to be a little bit broader. Their survey has already happened. We will still need to put a survey out, but we want to make sure if there's information already gathered, again, we're not asking the same question of districts as they go. The professional development and categorical funding, again,
The overlap is most likely just in the survey information, and then equity. There's only so many ways you can do an equity analysis. It turns out if you're following good school finance literature, you're going to do an equity analysis within a certain constraint. We're taking a look. I think the equity analysis that's done now is well within the bounds of what's being asked. Lucas and Auden literally wrote the book on equity analysis, so you're following a lot
of those guidelines. We think there's some depth that we may be able to go to that isn't currently done. And bringing a couple other things to the table, but again, we're going
Speaker 56
30:08
to make sure that there's not severe overlap or conflicting ways of
Speaker 24
30:13
getting that done. And then the last two are teacher salaries and teacher recruitment and retention. There's a little bit of overlap in the teacher salary data, but again, in a lot of this, We are being asked to dig a little deeper, and we're going to be using our data analysis to understand the relationships in a different way.
Not just kind of correlations or that are going on, but actual detailed statistical analysis on that. So that will bring a different depth. And then, again, the main overlap on recruitment and retention is kind of why are salaries different across districts in the state. We think, again, we're going to go deeper into that detail in some of our analysis, But we'll make sure we're not bringing just the same thing back to you day to day because we just have, again, being able to use some of that deeper regression analysis will help us there.
Okay. So that is our presentation. We'd love to take questions on the timeline, the study approach, anything there. And then we hopefully will have a little bit of time left to talk about comparison states and we can get that knocked
Speaker 60
31:18
out at this meeting. All right. Here we go. Thank you, Mr.
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
31:23
Chair, and thank you for being here. Could you define what you mean by educator panels? What does it consist of?
Speaker 28
31:33
Amanda Brown, for the record. Senator, what we
Speaker 31
31:36
think about when we say educator panels is really a two-part approach, and then kind of a third piece. One is these opening listen sessions that we're hoping to have kind of regionally. I'm
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
31:48
talking about who makes it up. Who are you defining to make
Speaker 31
31:52
up the panels? Oh, thank you for that. For those opening listen sessions, educators generally, so anyone that is interested in attending. For the targeted panels, we're hoping to do one with superintendents,
CFOs, teachers, and school leaders. So each of those four groups in four different locations around the state.
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
32:11
Well, let me ask you this. Other than defining the fact that classified personnel have received a raise because of changes in state law what emphasis are you placing on making sure that our secretaries our bus drivers our custodians all of these individuals who make such an important part are you looking at them in this structure are they being
not looking because when we look at funding I know the transportation funding is critical and that would mean then that we need to look at what we're doing well and what we're not doing well as far as the recruitment and retention of bus drivers, for instance, is that going to be a part of this or
Speaker 28
32:52
is it solely for certified personnel? Amanda Brown, for the record, I don't believe we were asked specifically to
Speaker 31
32:57
look around equipment and retention for classified employees. So I think that would be something we need to work through with the chairs if that's an ask of the committee.
I think we encourage everyone to be a part of those open educator panels and can really place an emphasis on making sure that the information about the meetings is shared with the full full body of educators. I see and I noticed that
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
33:19
you said you're not focused on distressed districts what are you focused on
best practices I guess or explain to me why you're not focused up to some extent on that as we
Speaker 24
33:34
have so many in distress here. Justin Silverstein for the record. Senator, we are not, the point here is we are not replicating the exact fiscal
distress report. Our overall lens, again, is trying to understand what is working and not working for districts and what are really the variations in impacts based on student demographics and district demographics. So understanding the overall structure and to take a step back even with the classified staff as we either do a district survey or have those specific panels as we talk to CFOs and school leaders. That is obviously a place where if that is a stress on the system, that they could talk about that.
But it isn't a unique, specific, separate study that we're doing. While
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
34:18
you're doing these question and answer periods with these
folks, are you going to make sure that included in that are those individuals who are
being impacted by school policy as well, who are in the classified area? Will they be given surveys? Will they be a part of this conversation at all? That's what I'm trying to find out. Will our classified folks be any part of this conversation?
Speaker 24
34:46
Senator, any educator in the state, and at that time in that region, is welcome and will be invited to the... So you are
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
34:54
identifying education broadly. You're talking about anybody in the education community. Yes. And then
Speaker 24
34:58
with the survey, we're actually going to survey any stakeholder of education, which really in a state is every person in the state to get feedback. So that's business community folks, anyone, to get an understanding and a level set of where people are. Okay,
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
35:13
I need to be comfortable that you're going to include classified people in the survey.
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
35:18
That's all I need to know. Senator, we'll try to find that out at
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
35:24
some other point. Just don't press them too hard today. Well, if I don't get
Chair
Unverified
35:27
a yes or no here, I might never get one, but thank you. They're going to be back and forth for
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
35:35
quite a while. So Senator Sturt, you recognize. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess mine was along the same lines as Senator Chesterfield. I just kind of wanted to make sure as far as the educator panels and discussions and things were the broader community at large. So school board members, um, administrators as well, I'm not asking for us to be invited
per se. I don't guess we need an invitation. We could just come, but, uh, you know, a lot of times we are that connection to our local community. So sometimes if we're there, we can be the encourager to, you know, speak the truth, you know, tell them what you really think. them this you know or whatever and kind of encourage them as if you know y'all just showing up and they don't really have an understanding of what the background needs to be and that kind of thing so if y'all could just kind of keep us in the loop on that that'd be great so thank you senator elliott
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
36:22
thank you mr chair my first question has to do with schools that are doing perhaps unexpectedly unexpectedly well when maybe we wouldn't expect that to happen um will that include schools that maybe uh have over performed according to the way we think about them that have over performed in a sustained way there would be some definition around that not it just kind of quickie on what
would be the definition around whether or not we should be
Speaker 24
36:57
looking at that school yeah senator um And this is, in both of the pieces we're talking about today, we want to dig, spend a lot of time at the next meeting kind of going through both the educator panels and the selection process. But absolutely, what we are not looking for is a school who has a blip and stands out for one year but doesn't have any sustained success. And so we are clearly looking for schools who are, you know, for lack of a better term,
Speaker 56
37:22
beating the odds but doing it over a period of time.
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
37:26
So they're showing sustained success, yes. My second question is about the literature review. I am assuming this is going to be literature that's been well
reviewed, has had deep dive peer reviews, not just something somebody wrote without it being peer reviewed before you bring it to us. Is that correct or not? Senator, when we are looking at the academic research,
Speaker 24
37:50
we will hold it to that academic standard of the peer review. clearly as we're looking at what other states are doing
that is just a statement of fact this is how other states are doing things so there'll be the difference between the academic research and then a scanning of
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
38:10
what's happening in the 50 states and lastly for the surveys this might be somewhere in the RFP and I just don't remember are you going to
Speaker 91
38:20
at some point survey folks in the communities for any
Speaker 24
38:26
comparative purposes so the yeah the senator the stakeholder engagement survey we'll put out very broadly across the
state and where we have seen real success for this in wyoming and nevada has been when actual local newspapers take on the role of saying hey this is out there if you have you know something you want to share here's the link and it'll be a couple week window open and so part of this of course, and I think this is the Senator Storch's comment, it really does take kind of this community of getting people aware of the study and behind it and actively seeking feedback
for it to work really well. And so that's
Speaker 56
39:06
something we'll work with you all on is to
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
39:10
get that message out there. Well, on that, I think it's just going to be, this is something I think you really need to work with us carefully on and the education leadership in the districts because the one thing I've always tried to help people understand is if you are not used to being a part of something like this y'all come does not just does not work and when you say something like well I would have gone that's you but that's
the end of that story though all right so thank
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
39:47
you thank you mr. chair representative Annette thank you chair I have a question I'm confused
Speaker 24
39:56
about about how are you measuring special needs? Representative, we are looking at special education, English language learners. We will be looking at different measures
of economically disadvantaged or at-risk students. That's a big piece of this. We're working with the Department of Education to understand all other data collections around student demographics so that we have a full scope what's available because we need, it's got to be kind of data collected for us to use it in the analysis. But we're taking a pretty broad view. We don't have the specifics now of anything that might be collected that we just don't know about yet. You know, clearly you can also think about gifted and talented students. You can think about students who,
you know, in a lot of different ways. But we're first going
Speaker 56
40:45
to collect the data to make sure we have a way to measure all that, and then we can let you know
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
40:52
exactly what data we have available for those student populations. Dr. And I have another question. Will you be, will you have professionals that work in that arena to help
Speaker 24
41:06
you find out the information? Mr. Representative, we will be looking at, again, the academic literature in all of those. We've, as a company, have done a very deep dive over time in all of those, with all those
populations as it relates to sound structures for funding systems and have taken an especially deep dive over time into this idea of different proxies for students. We will reach out to kind of whomever we need to to make sure that we're getting that the right academic research and then we'll also be looking at what states are doing which hopefully is informed by what's going kind of what's best practice. Thank you. Representative Beck, you're recognized.
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
41:53
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll get it in a minute. I appreciate you guys coming. I guess this is maybe a kickoff meeting or something to get everything going, and I think that's important that we get a good line of communications flowing back and forth. The question that I had was, I was a little bit concerned, and it might just be the wording that's got me a little concerned here. But I'm very much interested in making sure that these surveys that we talked about, that you talked about, excuse me, that you get a balanced response. You know, I can go out there at 12 noon on a school day
or maybe right after school or something and ask everyone to show up. Well, who will show up? The educators will show up. And the general public doesn't get off work until 5 o'clock and they can't show up. So I guess my question is this. and I also noticed that there looks like there are several surveys that would certainly be easier for an educator to attend than it would be the general public so help me out in ensuring that we're going to get a balanced survey in other words if we try to get the public
and we try to get their input and they don't respond and it's like well you know we got 67 responses It just so happened that 67 don't came from educators and zero came from the public to make sure that we get a balance so that we get
Speaker 24
43:19
a really good feel on these school districts. Okay. So, again, for the survey, and the survey really is where we're going to have our most focus on getting that really broad range of folks responding. That, again, is going to be about publicity
and really making sure it gets out there so that folks know it's there. One of the things we can do with any results, of course, is also let you know kind of that waiting. Things will happen where some districts will respond more. People even who live in certain districts might respond more than other districts because their superintendent put it in the weekly flyer and someone else's didn't. So one of the things we'll do is put in all of the caveats with the results coming back to you about where that waiting lies because what we don't want to do is just say,
this is you know here's the results without any context about who actually responded to the to the survey I think that's a very important point again we have thousands of responses in states where we've had good publicity and that includes parents and teachers and business members and folks who have nobody in the school but it will take having an active approach to getting folks to respond to that so that's in a very important piece to the work but I I absolutely hear you that what you don't want
is to present any sort of results that only are coming from one background without any knowledge about who's taking the survey. And it won't be a sample, right? We can't create a perfect sample that represents the state and every constituent of the state, but we can actually carve the results by different respondents so we can get an understanding of folks from the business community are responding this way, whereas perhaps teachers are
Speaker 56
44:55
responding that way. It gives you some sense of the variance that's going on.
Speaker 31
45:02
And the last thing I would say about the in-person sessions is that's why when we go to a location, we tend to run at least two different sessions to make sure we're providing times that work for different folks' schedules. So we usually do one kind of in that right after school block that's a little easier sometimes for teachers to attend, and then an evening session. So we do try to accommodate folks being able to participate both through those in-person sessions and then the survey is where we really think we get folks that might not otherwise be able to attend an in-person meeting thank you all right our last one
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
45:36
I believe it's represent McCullough I'm gonna make a statement before I let you speak this will be the last time we will take non members asking questions on adequacy I'm doing it today just to be a little bit lenient but I'm making the statement if you have a question you're a non member just ask someone that is a a member to ask that it's just our policy we've always done on adequacy on other things we don't worry about it as much because it takes a lot of time on adequacy but tippy you are representative mccullough i'll say it right you are recognized
Chair
Unverified
46:05
punch your button again there it is okay thank
Representative Tippi McCullough
Unverified
46:21
you mr chair i do appreciate that um for your evaluation of equity will there be any expiration of the impact of state board takeovers on student outcomes outcomes or district data i can answer that probably i
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
46:36
don't think so that's not in their recommendation to look
at so thank you all right not seeing any more questions We're going to give you a break, and you have one more?
Speaker 25
46:51
Okay, go ahead. Yes. All right. Just want to come back with the comparison states. I think you got a handout, my favorite type of document, an Excel document in front of you that has a list of four possible comparison states. In our response, we said that we would use the SREB states, much
Speaker 24
47:11
like BLR does in many cases, as one set of comparison states. So we're going to look at all 50 states for all of our literature review work. We will bring back specific information on SREB,
but we had also talked about having at least one other type of comparison group, which would be perhaps some other top-performing states in the country. And then we got some feedback as we've worked with staff and the chairs over time that also in some other work that's being done in the state, neighboring states have tended to be kind of a smaller subset of that SREB that folks like to see. So we want to get a little feedback on kind of which groups you'd like to look at. And just so you know, with the top performing,
we went to Education Week just because they collect a lot of data across the country and they rank it, right? They do the ranking. Their overall ranking includes both performance of students but also the design and implementation of their school funding formula. formula, and so we have that list here. You can also just pull out pieces, and the other piece we pulled out is just those who are top performing on academic achievement, so not looking at the structure of their finance formula, but just how are students doing.
You'll see there's a lot of overlap, but there definitely is some repositioning of the states, and it adds in some states that aren't on the original list when you look at the whole picture of both achievement and design of the funding formula. And so we would really be open to perhaps the easiest way to do this. We are going to assume, unless we're told today, that SREB is something we're going to use in our comparisons. Then neighboring states, you'll see we read a map and we really hope we got this right.
All the states without a parentheses are the neighboring states. And then we added three who are very close. They're not quite touching. We'd love to know, is this a group you'd like to see? And if it is, perhaps there's other states that you usually compare yourself to that we don't have on this list. Or we can exclude it entirely and just stick with our SREB. I
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
49:27
think that's something we will probably poll the committee and then give you the results of it. I think that's probably the easier way than because not all the committee is here today.
So we'll let everybody take up input on that. And I've got one that wants
to ask a question. Senator Sturge, you're
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
49:46
up. Thank you, Mr. J.B., real quick. On the last one, top performing achievement only, is that based on a national assessment, or how are they pulling that out from the overall column
Speaker 31
49:58
before? Amanda Brown, for the record. Good question, Senator. When you look at just the achievement only, I believe they are looking at performance on NAEP. eighth grade math and reading
and I believe they also incorporate graduation rates into that one and then as Justin mentioned the overall takes that information adds in a ranking on the overall fiscal system and then they also add an indicator of kind of how do I explain it kind of ranking the states on the chance for students to succeed so it also includes some information about their kind of family background and pieces
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
50:32
like that and could I just ask a quick follow up If we choose just one, I guess I'm confused about why you couldn't use one here for this section
and another one here for that section. Is that possible, or are you wanting us to
Speaker 28
50:47
choose one to go through the whole thing? Amanda Brown, for the record, ideally we'd use the same group
Speaker 31
50:53
across the studies. But again, as Justin mentioned, we'll be looking at all 50 states, irregardless of which ones we pick. And
Speaker 129
51:00
we'd suggest maybe picking one based on, you know, geography and one based on performance. Sure. Okay. Thank
Chair
Unverified
51:06
you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Appreciate it. You're welcome. Representative Lowry, you're recognized.
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
51:14
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to get clarification from you. I know that you had indicated that on this discussion of which category of schools that you were going to poll members. when you polled after you poll members are we going to have the discussion or are you inviting discussion at this point before polling i
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
51:37
wasn't inviting discussion i was just asking you know we'll ask your opinions and we can bring back the results to that and then talk
about it briefly we don't want to get too deep into the woods but i mean i think that's probably a pretty simple thing is which ones you want to hear or
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
51:57
look at well we've already got one members turned his in. Well, if I may, I just wanted to go ahead and put in a plug, so to speak, for us focusing on the SREB states. We invest heavily in being a part of SREB. I agree. And the other issue is that I know we have gotten for a number of years from BLR great
analysis of where we stand in relation to the SREB states and I think that that would be extremely helpful I know that you're trying to avoid a lot of overlap but it certainly is helpful if the data that you're giving us is also an apples to apples comparison with what we're receiving and have been receiving from BLR and I just think that if we if we go far beyond that SREB state list we really don't have the comparative data uh that would best fit what we're wanting to do so i
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
52:54
just wanted to raise that issue that's fine and uh like i said if you have this in your hands if you
want to mark what you want to do today hand it to michelle we'll have it now the ones we don't get you write your name on it please so we will have it and the ones we don't get we will poll uh
and send that out to them okay and then we'll come back and talk about all right thank you thank Thank you, Mr. Chair. Anything
else? That's perfect. Senator Dillett, do you have one question for them?
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
53:31
Go ahead. No, my light was not on. Just a clarification, Mr. Chair, as far as choosing one of these categories, I'm noticing that, say, in the SREB states, three of those states are reflected for in the top performing achievement only and and so is I'm just trying to
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
53:59
determine if there's that's really let
me tell you what Rick Beck did and I think this is probably what we might want to do and I'm not sure if it'll work for them he went through and mark the states that he wanted to hear comparisons on in all four of those categories right and i don't see that that's a problem to just pick them out and just pick them out if you want them to look because they're going to look at all 50 of them anyway they've already told you that so those they can pinpoint everybody's going to have a little bit of a different view so i think i think that's what you can do if you want to just pinpoint the ones you want to look at write your name on it
and we'll we'll come back and we'll see how many states we may get all 50 of them mark you know so i think that's kind of the way to do it okay that's that's fine that all right with everyone just make sure you write your name on it and hand it in thank y'all and i know you're gonna come back tomorrow and listen
or at least one of you will so we look forward to seeing you tomorrow now we'll make a note i think everybody knows this they are off limits to ask questions and to throw things at them that you want to do you cannot you can talk to them talk about their
kids talk about where they live do not ask them questions or things you want to see put in this you have to run that through jill and jill will get it to us and so that's how that needs to go that's the process thank y'all and i gotta find my next sheet here all right up next miss hyatt we're going to talk about some education division of discussion of proposed division of elementary and secondary education rules governing standards for accreditation for
the arkansas public schools and school districts
Speaker 148
55:55
and you are recognized. Deborah Kaufman, Division of Elementary and
Speaker 150
56:04
Secondary Education. Mary-Claire Hyatt, Division of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Speaker 149
56:09
I'm going to go through the PowerPoint on the screen if you'd like to follow along on the actual proposed rules. I believe they're in the documents that were provided to you. The PowerPoint kind of follows the outline of the rules, so it might be helpful to kind of look at them as we go through it. Arkansas law and the standards for accreditation require that we bring the standards before the Joint Ed Committee every two years. We've kind of incorporated it as part of our revision process,
process. So as we're going through and making changes to the standards, we'll bring them before this body for feedback, to answer questions, and to kind of review the proposed changes. So that's what we're going to do today. Ms. Kaufman is going to start off talking about kind of what the standards are and how they work, and then I'll go through the proposed changes
Speaker 154
57:07
afterwards. As you recall, two years ago, we came to you with a brand new organizational structure for standards for accreditation.
This organizational structure was needed because the standards had not had very much of an overhaul since 1985, when the committee really made some big changes to the standards. I think the organizational structure of the standards now helps you to access I know it helps us to be able to access the standards quickly in our efforts to assist school districts so on the slide you'll see the table of contents the
first 12 sections go over basically the rules for standards for accreditation and as Mary Claire addressed that biannual review which is why we're here with you today the appendix then is are the actual standards for accreditation those standards are organized around the educational system and if you remember in act 930 of 2017 this educational system was spelled out that we would
look at the systems within the state the district and schools to organize the standards in a way that makes sense as school districts are really thinking through those standards and thinking through the efficiency of those standards in the standards for accreditation in the appendix you'll see those six standards highlighted in this section and just as a quick overview
it's hard to read so I want to show you this a very quick overview you'll see that under each standard then are the subsets of standards so it's very much organized thoughtfully around how schools operate so in standard one it addresses all of the academic requirements of a school to be accredited standard to the student support services and you'll see C to C has been updated and Mary Claire will tell you about that in detail standard
three is district operations and physical governance how does the school the district operate effectively and efficiently standard four addresses the human capital how are superintendents principals teachers and all of those great support workers in the school how are they held accountable in this system Standard five is stakeholder communication, parent and family engagement, and standard six addresses facilities and transportation.
Speaker 149
1:00:02
Before I start going over the proposed changes, I just want to note that we kind of did a huge overhaul of the standards for accreditation in 2018, pared down what was in the standards and I think as Ms. Kaufman touched on revised something that had been around for a really long time we've had about a year and a half with this version of the standards we've listened to feedback that we've gotten from schools about things that are confusing or things that
we needed to rework and we've had about a year and a half of monitoring these standards to figure out what way can we make sure we're monitoring everything we're intending to monitor. So some of the things that we're going to talk about are changes just to clarify things that we're already doing. I'm going to go over the substantive changes. We've also made changes to change Department of Education to Division of Elementary and Secondary Education and other kind of just language changes throughout.
You can see it in the markup. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about those things in the interest of time. So we'll start. It's on page five if you're looking at the rule, section eight. This is in the rules part of the standards for accreditation, not the appendix part. So what we're trying to do in section eight, and we'll talk about it again in section 10, in our standards for accreditation monitoring tool, we have real-time access to deficiencies in the standards for accreditation.
So if a school is violating the standards or if there's an issue with the standards, that will immediately flag, and we can immediately begin the work to resolve the deficiency. Because of that, we're changing or the proposal is to change the timeline for curing the deficiency or submitting a plan to cure the deficiency. Right now, school districts have 30 days. The proposal is to allow 15 days either to cure the deficiency,
if it's something that can easily be done, or to submit a plan to cure the deficiency. So, for instance, if you have a school that wasn't offering a class, they might not be able to cure that until the next semester. Obviously, that's going to be longer than 15 days, but they can submit a plan that details how they plan to cure the deficiency instead of curing it within the 15-day period. It also allows us to notify school districts immediately when there's a standards deficiency
rather than waiting until May and allowing a school to continue to be in violation of the standards throughout the entire school year before it's fixed. In Section 10.01, which is on page 7, it brings the right of appeal section in line with the new proposed Section 8 to allow that appeal process to start immediately after notification of a deficiency, rather again than waiting until May.
In section 11, this is on page 8 and the top of page 9, we've added right now what the standards say is that you can ask for a waiver of the standards for accreditation, a one-year waiver. You have to notify the division 30 days before the state board meeting where it would be heard, and you can't ask for a waiver after April 20th.
We've added language in this proposed version of the rules to allow the commissioner to waive the timeline in an emergency circumstance. Last year, when Little Rock had all of the flooding, well, not just Little Rock, the entire state had all of the flooding, We had lots of schools that ran into some issues with meeting the 178 calendar days for school. We've also run into that with schools that had bat infestations. We've had, I think, we've seen a lot of interesting infestations in the past couple of years.
So this would allow the commissioner to allow a district to seek a waiver after the April 20th deadline or on a shorter than a 30-day turnaround in the event that there was something like flooding or some sort of infestation or natural disaster that was causing an issue with the school. I'm going to move now into the actual appendix. It starts on page 10. The first kind of substantive change is actually on page 11.
So some of what we've done is just reorganize things to make it easier to find. So in 1A, 1-3, which is on page 11, you'll see that we've added that the list of courses that can be taught to meet the 38 required courses each year. That's approved by the State Board of Education. Will be posted on the division website. That is already something we do and was in the standards at 1A-3. but we've moved it up so that it makes a little bit more sense kind of for the flow of the rules
1a2 we've added it previously just stated a unit of credit shall be awarded for a course which meets the 120 clock hour requirement we added the words high school in here to clarify that that only applies to high school courses we got a lot of questions about whether you know a K-5 or a middle school had to meet that 120 o'clock hour, so just to clarify that it just applies to the high school units of credit.
1A5, it's going to be 1A4 with the renumbering. We've added language that requires that the school calendar be posted on the district website by August 1st of each year. The standards already required districts to have a school calendar, but there was just no requirement that it be posted on the website. I think most districts do post the school calendar on the website, but this just allows that to be monitored and to make sure that it's up there by that August 1st date.
1A43, same page on page 12. This is to incorporate the provisions of Act 641 of 2019, which was the recess legislation. So we've added that in the section about the school day and the instructional time. 1B3.1, it's on page 13, is being added. And 1B3 is kind of a broad standard that says that districts have to comply with
the rules regarding nutrition and physical activity standards. Those rules, as I'm sure you're familiar, have lots of different components in them. It talks not only about recess, but physical activity, physical education, wellness plans, lots of nutrition rules. So in an effort to make sure that we're monitoring each individual piece of that and to make sure the expectation is clear, we've kind of pulled out that one piece of it
so that it can be monitored in a more efficient way and that is about the writing and implementing the health and wellness plan on page 14 you'll see three new standards written in 1C24 through 1C26 These are the non-academic course graduation requirements, so personal and family finance, CPR, and digital course.
We had one of these already in the standards but did not have the other non-academic course graduation requirements in the standards, so we've added them for consistency and put them all together so that it's clear what those graduation requirements are. On 2B3, which starts at the bottom of page 14 and continues on to the top of 15, we've incorporated the provisions of Act 676 of 2019, which was about vaccinations and immunizations
and the reporting requirements for school districts on that so that we can monitor that in compliance with the law. 2C1, and we've made some other changes later that I'll be sure to point out, is in response to the School Counseling Improvement Act of 2019, incorporating that language, changing from student support services, which was the language used in the previous act, to comprehensive school counseling plan, and changing that language from guidance counselor to school counselor.
Speaker 163
1:09:36
3B2, which is on page 18, and it deals
Speaker 149
1:09:44
with the annual report to the public by school districts, which is a report that's given to go over progress towards meeting school goals, explain policies and programs to the community and other stakeholders. date that was originally in the standards was October 15th we've had a
lot of feedback about how with when the ESSA school index scores are released it's a kind of a tight deadline for schools to meet the October 15th so to give a little bit more flexibility we've removed the October 15th date so that the standard just requires now that sometime annually you have this meeting to the community. I think that it will help schools do that on a timeline that that best meets the needs of their individual communities. 4C3 and 4C4,
pages 19 and 20, these are related to building and district level administrators. So 4C3 requires that any first-year administrator be registered with the division so that we can ensure that they're receiving mentoring and support for their first three years. And 4C4 is that at least once every four years each building and district level administrator receive a summative assessment. Both of these standards are current practice. They're
just being added to the standards so that they can be monitored. These standards really help ensure that first-year administrators are receiving the type of support that they need in order to make sure that they're effective administrators and that everyone kind of has equitable access to qualified administrators. The same two changes have been made in 4D4 and 4D5, but as they relate to first-year teachers. So 4D4, thank you, 4D4 to ensure that first-year teachers are receiving the three years of
Mentoring and Support, and 4D5, once every four years, teachers are receiving the summative assessment. Again, those are already practices. They just haven't been monitored as part of the standards, and as I think one of the goals of the state is to ensure equitable access to qualified teachers and make sure that teachers feel supported, we thought it was important to monitor that in the standards.
4E3, and I think this is the last one, 4E3 is just to ensure that the districts are allotting sufficient time to each of the school counselors to carry out the duties in the Comprehensive School Counseling Plan, and this is just pursuant to the School Counseling Improvement Act of 2019. Any other change that was made just wasn't a substantive change, which is why I didn't cover it. I'm happy to answer any questions or get any feedback from the members.
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:12:58
Senator Elliott. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to go through these rapid fire so that we can get to others. for the 15, I try to keep up with all these numbers. This is in Section 8, 15 days to submit a plan for a cure of whatever that violation was or a cure within 15 days.
So are we saying that if I have some kind of violation, I have 15 days to submit a plan or I have 15 days to get it
to get the plan done that's we I heard both those things and I'm confused it's both
Speaker 149
1:13:46
those things so within the 15 days either fix it or submit a plan of how you're going to fix it okay some of the standards can't be fixed within that amount of time so we have to allow additional time I think one of the examples is not having not offered a course that's
required you might not be able to change the calendar right then it might have to be cured in the next nine weeks which is outside of the 15-day period so either fix it in the 15 days or submit a plan that details how you plan on fixing it outside the 15-day timeline well this is
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:14:24
this this kind of this concerns me a lot just because of the experience I've had with Little Rock School District where when we thought we knew by the black and white letter writing for example that the school district was going to be handed over
back to the people if blah blah blah that was a clear thing and then we got an interpret this is what this reminds me of I don't want to get into that same thing again and then we had an interpretation oh no what it really means it means is we could get started so this so and this is confusing to people could you tell me on the one hand you have a deadline but seems like there is no deadline here I'm a person out there trying to figure it out so if
I can't do it in the 15 days I need to submit something to you saying just like we're doing right now so with the Little Rock School District you can't do it within 15 days we're gonna submit your plan saying
we're gonna do it I don't know 10 months from now is that
Speaker 149
1:15:28
the same kind of thing that we have going on here I I think the reason for allowing them to do either is some of the standards cannot be fixed in the 15 days. So if it can't be, then we have to know that you're working on it.
It can't just continue to be a deficiency indefinitely. So if we get a plan that details how you plan to fix that standards deficiency or violation, then we know that you're working towards a resolution of that issue and that it's just not a perpetual violation of the standards. Okay, but this sounds like
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:16:02
doublespeak to me because that's the kind of interpretation that I've been seeing coming from the Department of Ed where we give all this wiggle room so that you can do whatever it is you want to do.
And this sounds like the same thing here to me because you're going to decide whether or not the plan makes sense. Is that what you're going to decide at the Department of Education? If I can't do it
in 15 days, I give you a plan, then you're going to tell me if that
Speaker 149
1:16:34
plan is okay or not okay. And, Deb, you might want to jump in, but I think that the idea is you have to show that you're working on curing the deficiency. We can't allow school districts to have an indefinite amount of time to cure a violation of the standards.
So if you can't fix it, then you have to show that you're working towards fixing that by submitting a plan for carrying it to the department so that we can ensure that you're
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:16:58
working towards that. Okay, Mr. Chair, I'm going to get back in the queue because I realize I spent a lot more time than I wanted to on this one. But I want to say the last thing about this one. This is a kind of thing that I think we need to do some more making up of our minds about because I'm only curious because of what I see as just a gross misuse of a school district
with this kind of rule that like the Department of Education tells us no this is not the day you're going to get your school district back and I'm using this as an example this is not the day no matter what it says on the paper we're interpreting this to mean we can just start a plan by this time and that plan could just go on ad nauseum until you decide you have met your plan after you've done everything you want to do so that's my concern with this kind of it won't make
much sense to most people unless you have lived it and it's ugly
I'll get back in the queue Mr. Chair I
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
1:18:04
think these go to ALC after this is this correct yes so you
have Senator Elliott you have a chance to talk and vote on them over there in rules the others I think we're just up
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:18:19
or down but if you brother me wait and go to ALC which I think you're not gonna vote on them here
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
1:18:25
so but they may have some time to rethink what
they're doing that's well and I agree you've talked to them I think so let's move
Representative Gary Deffenbaugh
Unverified
1:18:38
on to representative Diffenball Thank you, Mr. Chair. A real – Ms. Hyatt, a real quick question is what kind of activities are you proposing in recess? That used to be my favorite part of school, so I'm interested
Speaker 149
1:18:53
in that. I think what the law says, if I'm remembering off the top of my head, is it has to be structured and unstructured, social time, and outdoors, weather permitting.
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
1:19:04
So hopefully fun. Okay. All right. Thank you. Senator Elliott, do you have anything
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:19:26
else? I'm going to give you that one more chance. Okay. Hold on. Let me get you on. You're on. So I need to get a clarification just overall here. can you just apply to waive any standard any whatever the standard is you can just apply to
waive it is that a that's kind of
Speaker 149
1:19:44
a yes or no thing no there are some limitations on which standards can be waived and let me it's no curricula student performance school performance or standard required by law may be waived for any time period that's in section 11.01 okay and this Just to clarify, this is through the waiver process set up through the standards for accreditation for a one-year waiver, not the 1240 or the charter waiver process.
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:20:12
All right. Are there any school districts that don't have a website at this point? Not to my knowledge. Because I was really surprised when I was told by the senator from Corning they don't have a website. Sure enough,
Speaker 149
1:20:25
they have one now? I'm not sure. I would have to check. I know we have
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:20:29
requirements that they have a website. worth checking because I was surprised to find that out and when it comes to the this is a long one I'll skip this one the difference between guidance counselor and school counselor what does what does that mean so we're just
Speaker 149
1:20:43
updating the language in accordance with the school counseling Improvement Act of 2019 which was Act 190 updating the language so that it's consistent and
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:20:52
for the recess folks what what kind of impact is that having on teachers preparation time do we still allow the rule the rule still allowed so that their preparation time can
be impacted is that right or not I think I don't
Speaker 149
1:21:07
think I think the recess legislation made it part of the instructional day so I think it's still they still have to have their planning and their duty-free
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:21:16
lunch that's prescribed by law but in the process of doing that though there are school districts who are lengthening the school day and saying they had to do so because of this law which is patently not true are we still letting districts do that linking lengthen the school day and saying they have to do it because of the recess law that is just
Speaker 149
1:21:41
patently not true i i don't believe that the division has told anyone that they have to do that although i don't think it's
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:21:51
prohibited i think well never mind i'll work with that one later
and the last one for the summative ratings i know we have them for the administrators and the teachers what how are we using those
Speaker 179
1:22:07
summative ratings to do what that's a great question and i think she
Speaker 152
1:22:12
might better answer it for you senator elliott the total score the number of teachers that receive a summative rating at the top two levels is part of the reporting process under essay it's a federal requirement that we note the number of teachers that are proficient
the number of administrators that are proficient on their evaluation system so are there are
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:22:36
there reports are these reports just for in for inside use or the these reports i don't know if these teachers names are public or not public okay thank you mr chair and
Speaker 152
1:22:48
i may add the school report card was gone live today okay so um that information is available and there are some brand new features on the report card representative dodson
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:23:03
thank you mr chair um looking through you had a few different places
uh on 4d1 and and a couple others where you'd crossed out an approved waiver and inserted a licensure exception. Why did that change, and what does that effectively do? So there's
Speaker 149
1:23:29
a difference between a waiver that's granted through a waiver pathway like 1240 Charter
or a waiver from the standards, and then a licensure exception such as an emergency teaching permit or another type of licensure exception, not just you don't have to be licensed at all because you have a waiver from the standard. It's done, and somebody from licensure might come up and help me, but there are licensure exceptions that can be granted through the department. I know an emergency teaching permit is one that's different from a waiver that's done through a 1240 open enrollment charter or a standards waiver.
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:24:09
So this was kind of expanded to allow the department to grant a licensure exception in additional cases versus where an approved waiver would be more specific to a school requesting
a waiver for their area under like 1240? So we've always had
Speaker 149
1:24:25
the ability to do, not always, but we've had the ability to grant the licensure exceptions. When we use the word waiver in these sections, what we meant was licensure exception, but because we also have waivers that are done through 1240 and charter, that is kind of a term of art,
and we kind of conflated the two when we were writing it. So we changed the language so that it's clear that what we intended in the standard was a licensure exception, not a
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:24:58
waiver from the standard altogether? I guess where my concern is that on this, if there are currently 1240 waivers out there where districts might have been utilizing something like a licensure exception,
but now they wouldn't qualify for that licensure exception with the programs they've created under the 1240 waiver, is there a chance that that might happen if this
Speaker 149
1:25:25
changes no sir it won't impact the 1240 waivers so for instance what 41 says is every classroom teacher has to be licensed unless they have a licensure exception if you've got a 1240 waiver or a waiver through charter or the standards for accreditation you would have a waiver from that standard altogether meaning your teachers didn't
have to be licensed or have a licensure exception to the 1240 waiver wouldn't be
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:25:51
affected by this at all that's correct thank you just for your info you should have
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
1:25:58
some information on waivers in your email from nail for tomorrow so you will could read on all of those all right I see no more questions you have anything
else no sir all right thank you very much thank you mr johnny key are you you are okay
still says commissioner on here but we'll call you whatever you want to
Speaker 209
1:26:48
Department of Education. I guess officially I'm still both, so under transformation, the governor said you might have to take on more than one duty,
and I'm pretty sure that's fulfilling that. Well, that's for us because we make
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
1:27:00
mistakes, so we're liable to call you
Speaker 209
1:27:03
either. That's okay. I had somebody call me Representative Key a few weeks ago, and that's still okay. i also have with me dr ivy pfeffer deputy
Speaker 212
1:27:11
commissioner all right y'all recognized okay okay i might need some help because it's showing on this this
Speaker 209
1:27:23
screen but it i don't think it's showing on your screen i'm not sure who we have here to do
Unknown speaker
1:27:32
that but there it comes got part of it on there
Speaker 208
1:28:02
We are happy to be here today. A few weeks ago,
Speaker 209
1:28:14
Senator English asked us to prepare a presentation because she wanted to hear and wanted you all to hear about all the great things that are happening. One thing that I have learned with the department and the work we're doing is we spend so much time doing the work sometimes it's hard to remember that we need to publicize
our work and really get the word out although we we have communication efforts sometimes there are so many things that are taking place that we we don't have all of our stakeholders in the loop so we appreciate the opportunity to do that today the where I'm going to start is where I always start with our vision and mission. We have established since 2016 a vision to transform Arkansas to lead the nation in student-focused education. We feel like we are very well on the way to doing that, and we do that
by carrying out our mission of providing leadership, support, and service to schools, districts, and communities so that every student in the state of Arkansas graduates prepared for college, career, and community engagement. It takes all three to have successful graduates here in arkansas and when i took this position y'all may remember that i talked about changing the conversation really working to go from adequacy to excellence you all have talked about that here and in the work that we have been doing really what encapsulates where we think
we can make that happen is those first three levels this is from the high reliability schools research it's not new research it's research that's been around for for some time but concentrating in these three areas of a safe and collaborative culture effective teaching in every classroom and guaranteed and viable curriculum so the initiatives that we have are really focused on getting really sharp razor-sharp in those three areas the so there are a number of
initiatives that you've heard about many of these. Arkansas Declaration of Learning, we were the first state in the Union to sponsor or to partner with the U.S. Department of State. What this program does, it utilizes authentic artifacts in the classroom. So artifacts that are on loan from the State Department, our librarians, library media specialists, social studies teachers, special education gifted and talented there's a wide range of teachers that
can use this and we want them to learn about historic art objects and resources partners with organizations like the Clinton Foundation Crystal Bridges and and we're even trying to expand that to have a local flavor where we're working with Department of Arkansas Heritage to create opportunities there our computer science initiative obviously first in the nation to do some many of the things that we're doing there we continue to get a lot of feedback positive feedback and other states looking to us to see how can they
move their states forward in the same way Arkansas math quest you know when we kicked off rise a few years ago we started immediately almost hearing from math teachers well you know we need work in math too and we said yes we do we're gonna get this started and we're gonna come back and work on math so the Arkansas MathQuest is a professional learning opportunity for teachers that promotes exemplary teaching through evidence-based instructional practices. It's a two-year process with coaching and our Stacey Smith's team has ramped up
to make that happen and we're getting a lot of good feedback on that. And then as I mentioned RISE, we had three goals with RISE Arkansas. To build a culture of reading across the state, to grow in collaboration with our state partners, and Strengthening Instruction, and that's what I want to focus on now is strengthening instruction. Since we launched this in January of 2017, we have really, again, been one of the leading states in refocusing how we train teachers to teach reading using evidence-based practices,
and a lot of that has come from the dyslexia research and from the legislation that Senator Clark, Senator Elliott, others of you, Senator English, have been so focused over the last several sessions on making sure we get reading right in the state. So far we have over 7,000 teachers who have completed either K-2 or the 3-6 RISE Academy, and we have another 9,000 that are in the process. In the past summer we launched
our Assessor Academy. The Assessor Academy is for principals. It's for principals and administrators because it's one thing to have the teachers trained, but the principals, in order to support the teachers, they need to know what they're looking for as well. So we're not asking our administrators to be experts, but we're asking our administrators to at least know what they need in order to support those teachers. And that has led to some very exciting recognition that we've seen recently.
about our ed prep programs because if you're going to strengthen instruction it can't start with the teachers that are already there you have to get those teachers prepared but you really need to go back and get the ed prep programs on board and that's what we've been working on for some time now and arkansas was just recognized as one of the top states in the nation with one of our institutions arkansas tech receiving an a plus rating as one of 15 exemplary programs in the nation on teacher prep as far as preparing our incoming teachers to teach
reading. Fourth in the nation overall for our ed prep programs in early reading instruction based on the science of reading. Beginning in May of 2021, our in-state university graduates will either enter the profession with the required designation, or they will enter with the required designation. And then as the law that you all passed, we'll continue working with those that are already in the classroom to make sure they meet the requirements for those who are either
in elementary or K-12 special education. And then the awareness training that needs to happen for those who are in secondary, non-special ed. And then while we're talking about English, there have been a number of conversations about providing greater opportunities for our students, not just your traditional English 9th grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, 12th grade,
to really provide some opportunities there so that English teachers that want to deliver something different that meets the standards but goes a little more in-depth on some of these areas to provide these courses. and we have a list here of some of these courses that really take it up a notch with respect to what students need going forward and what we have heard students are interested in. A few years ago we did a student survey and some of the feedback we got from students told us that they needed,
they would like to see more, especially in the English courses at the high school level, really provide that deeper learning and provide relevance. I'll point to you a couple of these areas. Business and professional communication. This is beyond the standard oral communication course that we're talking about. This really gets specific in the areas of need. U.S. history seminal documents. You think, well, how does that relate to English?
Well, not every subject in history can be covered by the history teacher. but some students want to go deeper. I've heard some of your colleagues say we think we need to go deeper on things like the Mayflower Compact, the you know the Emancipation Proclamation, those seminal documents of our nation's history and our nation's government. This provides the opportunity. You see these highlighted portions. What we've done here these are linked so you should
be able to, if you're looking at this online, you should be able to click and link to these so that you can see what those standards are. Something else that we did, and it's, look in the lower left-hand corner, we want to talk about RISE and our reading work. You know, in the past we had what we call remedial reading courses. Those courses were not attractive to students because they got no credit for those courses. They might need it, but they weren't going to get any credit
for it. Now, some of these things are policy decisions we made, and we made a policy decision to create reading courses that could be credit-bearing. So now districts have the option of providing these courses for their students that support those struggling readers, those readers that have not had the benefit of the RISE training, that missed out on some of those fundamental pieces this doesn't replace english ninth grade english 10th grade 11th and 12th this is in
addition to but it is something that we are seeing as a matter of fact clarendon had a conversation with their principal they said in the first year of using the critical reading course they saw a double digit increase in the reading scores for the students taking that course these are students that were a little behind and needed that boost i brought ivy with me because there are some of these that that in her previous roles in the department really had a hand in kicking getting
the ball rolling on them so i asked her to join me so she
Speaker 221
1:38:26
could talk about some of this work so on this slide when i see the student focused education and i see the um the list of things there it takes me back to my first year as a high school principal and i think about the the focus that i had and when i thought about what do my students need my focus was solely on okay they've got to get their graduation requirements and a big part of my job that first year was managing the master schedule and making sure that my teachers were certified so i didn't have any
kind of a standard violation beyond that though i was not equipped for the kind of student focused education that our students have today i remember distinctly after that first year i had some students who wanted to and wanted us to offer an additional ap class we were offering the minimum requirements and they wanted to take an ap art class and we didn't have ap in that and we were a smaller school district and with my staff i only had enough staff or so i thought to
offer one AP course one time a day and you had to spread that out so that boys and girls basketball players and football players and band students could take every single AP course the long and short of it was for years we didn't expand our AP offerings because we were too afraid that student not that all students wouldn't have access to it at one time or another that's not the reality today for our students today we have a lot a lot more flexibility and
options in how we can offer a high quality student focused education to students so that when we say student focused what we're saying is that students are afforded the educational opportunities the rigor the quality of instruction that they need at the right moment to meet their interests to meet their needs so that begins with the student success plans that is part of legislation that was passed in 2017 with the development of a student success
plan by the end of eighth grade and that student success plan is not just about a list of courses that student success plan is an interactive conversation between the student the parents the educators and we are planning out we're using opportunities like the college and career readiness tools that between the Department of End Department of Career Ed we now provide for every student used to that was mostly just offered within an isolated CTE programs now every
student because of that partnership has access to the a type of planning tool that will help drive that student success plan we are working on not just expanding course offerings but creating pathways diploma pathways so that a student actually gets engaged in a series of courses or a series of learning experiences that are going to better prepare them for their next step beyond high school and when we one thing too in looking at those career pathways are in
2019 legislation that was passed supported the ability for us to approve weighted courses for career tech classes and we've started the process of identifying some of those capstone courses that can be part of weighted credit that's going to encourage student participation in CTE pathways and with the weighted credit that's also going to help show the importance and also increase the rigor of those courses to better prepare students all of this is
really focusing also on ensuring that students have the six the personal success skills that they need and how how do we continuously develop those because when you think of college career and community engagement thinking about what are those personal success skills that students need so that they can become engaged in the communities where they live
Speaker 208
1:42:41
and just talk a little bit about access and equity one of the areas we've been working with school districts is for
Speaker 209
1:42:49
growing the access of traditionally underserved students with
respect to AP so we've had a number of successes around the state there and looking to grow that out also can which those of you familiar with the aims program it doesn't replace the aims that works in addition to aims the the other thing is is looking for those opportunities to get CTE back in schools Lee County for example example representative Murdoch you you know a few years ago they they pulled the ag rap program out of there and we're working now to get that back and next year we will have the opportunity to do
that if you think about in in mariana arkansas to not have an agri program that that doesn't make sense so you know we want to make sure that those opportunities are there for all those students regardless of whether you know whatever their interest area is we want to make sure that they have access to it the one
Speaker 209
1:43:51
had a lot of feedback regarding is whether you want to call it social-emotional learning,
whether you want to call it soft skills, depends on whether you're from the Chamber of Commerce or whether you're from the education world or where you're from is what you call it. We prefer to look at it as these are skills that are necessary for success in life. And the Guide for Life is an initiative that we created and launched last year. In your online version of this, Hopefully, you'll be able to click and see the Guide for Life webpage and the Guide for Life video that we created,
but just really looking at the personal competencies, not as an add-on, not to say, hey, teachers, here's one more thing on your plate, but a lot of the professional development work that we've been doing is looking to see how these elements can be incorporated into what they already do on a daily basis. and when we talk about access and equity one of the areas that we definitely felt like we needed to do some work on was with the assessment system and you look at what we did a few years ago with
the k2 formative assessment we have four options now in the past we had one option it was the iowa test of basic skills it was something that by the time the teachers got the results back It was so late in the school year that they took the results, put it in their desk drawer, and that was it. There was no legitimate use for that test other than it met a state mandate. Well, now districts have that opportunity for these. They select one of these four, and they offer it multiple times a year,
and they can actually get results back in a timely manner that helps them inform instruction. Our work with the ACT Aspire, we have submitted for final peer review in December. Independent third party conducted an alignment study and found with a great deal of accuracy that the ACT Aspire does align with our standards. And we're working in those areas where it did not align, working with ACT, to make sure we get the changes in place that we need to.
And then the ACT itself is an area where over the last several years we have now with every 11th grader having the opportunity to take the ACT. It's optional for students, but it's not optional for districts. So districts have to administer that. There's no cost to them, no cost to the students. 94% of our 11th graders tested in this last year. One thing we learned was that may be the only time some of those students took that exam. So we launched the No Limits campaign to encourage and make students aware and teachers aware that for low-income students, you have fee waivers so that they can take it another time besides just the one state furnished opportunity.
There are ACT prep programs associated with that to really boost the knowledge out there that our students can take this more than once and data show that students that take it more than once score better and are better prepared in the long run for whatever their next step may be, whether it's college, whether it's technical school, whatever it is, this does show that they have a better preparedness. And then feedback about mental health. We received a federal grant, I think, maybe toward the end of the last ACQUISI study, so it would have been in 2018.
We reported on that to you, and just to say we are continuing to work with Arkansas AWARE. That was a federal, the federal AWARE grant of $9 million, providing 741 school personnel were trained in mental health first aid. And we have 45 trainers that can now go out and do that training around the state. We established telemedicine agreement for behavioral health services in the pilot schools. working with co-ops around the state so that there are mental health trainers in every co-op
working on making sure that we have SeaArk, Southeast Arkansas, and Dawson included in that. Those two we haven't gotten to yet. And then website development and podcasts. That has been very successful. We've had a lot of great feedback on that with respect to using those tools to get information out to
Speaker 221
1:48:40
our school personnel. So the K-12 education workforce is the largest single employer group in the state.
So if you think about that for just a minute, you think about the large corporations, think about state government. The K-12 workforce is the largest single employer group, and we think about all of the teachers, all of the support staff that make such a difference for our students, and it's obvious that in all your discussions you realize the importance of them, and so anytime we can celebrate great work and celebrate teachers, that's something we always want to do. so you've got a few pictures here of some some educator highlights the picture
there on the left is our newest Milken Award winner that was recognized from the Pine Bluff School District last week Miss Jalisa Thomas and there in the middle is our will be the incoming teacher of the year Mr. Joel look-a-do so two new additions to recognition for excellent educators and I would say that both Secretary Key and I that's the very best part of our jobs
when we get to go and travel and we get to recognize educators because education is not an easy job and we know that because we've seen over the last few years get it it's increasingly harder to recruit and to retain quality educators the prior to a few months ago the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education had one position that focused solely on teacher recruitment and
retention um we realized in in looking at several things and when transformation came along realized we had an opportunity to do some make some changes to really address something we all know is a need so we were actually able to triple the size of that unit so without adding any new positions so i want to make sure um secretary key doesn't hit me here but we didn't we just repurposed folks We looked to see who were the, what was the support that was needed.
So we now have a recruitment and retention being led by a recent principal. And we also have someone who moved from our educator licensure unit, who had a lot of skill in working with schools, working with the Division of Career Education. And then we've had someone that had worked with our higher ed ed prep programs. So we've got a really great skill set right now working in our recruitment and retention, and they're overseeing all of the initiatives related to teacher recruitment, teacher retention, and development of teachers.
So about two years ago, we started a campaign, and we have everything under the umbrella of Teach Arkansas. That's our mission. that's what we're wanting to to really achieve so you can see the goals there we have five goals increasing number of candidates enrolled in preparation programs increasing the number of novice teachers decreasing the teacher attrition rate increasing the number of teachers reentering the workforce and
increasing the number of minority teachers and we set specific metrics to those and within two years for most of those goals we are more than halfway there we've made significant increases and we're well on our way in several of the areas to meeting the five-year goal you can see that the one area where we're not is in the decrease of our attrition rate the the rate at which educators are leaving the workforce so that that continues to be an area where we're
going to need to work, but we definitely want to make sure that we're highlighting this increase in our educator preparation program enrollment. For two years in a row, we have seen an increase in the number of candidates in educator preparation, and I think what makes that even more exciting is the fact that these are in both traditional and non-traditional programs, with last year traditional programs actually having the largest increase. That is a signal that we're going to have a well-prepared workforce we're going to continue to see these teachers
who are well prepared that coupled with the National Council on Teacher Quality review of our ed prep programs these teachers are going to be well prepared and they're going to be able to teach our students how to read well with that kind of a foundation we will continue to see success so I'm gonna skip to here real quick and then I'm going to go back. So when we look at the area where we, according to our campaign goal, where we're not probably moving in the direction we want, that was the teacher
attrition. So while we're increasing the number coming through in the pipeline, so building up a really strong pipeline, we still have about 20% of our educators who leave every year. And the good news is they're not leaving during their first three years as quickly as they were but on down the road we're having about that number leave so the percent of teachers who are considered inexperienced teachers within their first three years is between 18 and 20 percent annually the percent of
teachers leaving is about 20 percent so we've got about as many coming in as going out which is not is it's a pretty good balance however we don't know which teachers are leaving and which teachers are necessarily coming in so the supply and demand doesn't always bear out that the that we're filling the pipeline with the types of educators who are leaving so obviously we would like to have a greater supply in the workforce in the waiting to fill those jobs and give
districts some more flexibility so we're going to continue to work through that and we're going to go back to looking at a one way we feel like we can meet both the recruitment and the retention goals okay recruitment because we're starting with students in high school who have an interest in education so this is a pre educator program of study we already have all the pieces in place for this however we weren't fully maximizing all of these pieces between the division of
career ed and the division of elementary and secondary education prior to transformation so the the coming together with transformation has really given us that opportunity to say alright we've been doing this the teacher cadet program which has become very popular I think this year we have over a hundred high schools that have a teacher cadet program but that's limited to one or two courses and it can be offered for concurrent credit which is a good thing for students however it's still just one or two courses we also have a CTE
pathway in teaching and learning but again you sometimes because in the past and CTE programs have not been as elevated and not having things like concurrent credit always or weighted credit you often don't get students participating so we've brought those two programs together and we're going to be really encouraging school districts to put these together as a pathway so you get the benefit of CTE programs the ability to use Perkins funds and the
students at the completion of that pathway will be able to earn an industry recognized certification and they would be eligible once they leave high school school to work as a paraprofessional all the time that they're going to go into college and working on their degree and so we'll be working to engage higher ed to give them credit for experiential learning and also with school districts to think creatively about how they can keep these students employed because we know that students typically go to work or teachers typically teach within 50
miles of where they went to high school so if we can really strengthen the grow your own programs keep them connected keep them in the school we think we'll see tremendous returns in the retention of effective educators the other things we have in place to support teacher retention and this was legislation that was championed by representative Vaught in 2017 is the development of our career continuum this gives the opportunity for teachers to lead from the classroom
without having to leave the classroom it's recognition for accomplished educators so that they can be recognized and have a license or designation beyond just a standard five-year license that gets renewed and today we've had 265 educators receive the master professional designation and 28 who have earned the lead professional designation now there's not money attached to this
automatically and so the work has been with our school districts to help them understand what they can do when they have educators who have earned a lead or master designation what that actually means and so we're starting to see more and more districts look for opportunities like are in found in the opportunity culture model and so we're using this is also one of our teacher
retention models and we currently have about 28 let me see six six school districts with 28 schools and the idea here is for those districts to be able to utilize their effective teachers and extend the reach of their effective teachers whether they are teaching more students through partnership with new teachers whether you have a lead teacher or a master teacher who is the teacher
of record and helping to mentor novice teachers helping to instruct teacher interns working with prepare paraprofessionals who are working on their degrees so this is a this is a model that and schools around the country are finding to be very successful they're able to increase teacher pay while maintaining their current budgets another effective tool that we've already seen this we've had two years of data in a row that has shown
success has been allowing our education service co-ops to take over mentoring each co-op develops a plan with their school districts and they tailor the mentoring to fit the needs of the teachers in their community I was at the southeast co-op not too long ago and the new teachers were actually there that day and I got to go and talk to them and they were divided up with the different co-op specialists working with them and because some of them had come from a
traditional educator preparation program and they needed different type of support in general they were a little bit younger a lot of them did not have children of their own and so and the support that they were getting was more around discipline and understanding child development a little bit better in terms of, you know, how children interact and behave with each other. In another room were a group of new teachers who had not gone through a traditional training program, and they were either MATs or in a different type of preparation. So they had come straight to the classroom with good
content knowledge. A lot of them were older and had children of their own, weren't struggling so much with interacting with the students, but were struggling a little more with trying to think about, okay, I may have a very strong math background, but how do I teach this math to the students? So providing those mentoring supports more individualized has become very important. The other thing that has been something new but is showing great promise is that each
co-op now has a recruitment and retention specialist and those recruitment and retention specialists are helping helping to lead all of that they're working with districts on their human resource approach helping them to really think through the talent development and at the Arkansas River co-op we've added some additional support so that we're looking at a more regionalized approach to teacher recruitment teacher hiring and i'm
starting to really think differently about how do we how do we create a talent pool for an entire region so we're not always going out and just trying to find one person or steal one person from one district to another and
Speaker 208
2:02:41
getting very proactive with that so i'm really excited about giving you this update on the professional learning communities at work process you know
Speaker 209
2:02:48
this body sponsored or passed legislation that really set us in motion many of you have been to some of these plc institutes and we are now if you can
believe it we are accepting applications for cohort four now for the plc pilot we've had over a hundred letters of intent that have been submitted so something new that we're looking at this year has been looking at the professional learning community's process. How can we do a better job of using that process for inclusive practices for special education? Special education is meant to be something that a student needs for a period of time until they no longer need it. Too many of our
students find themselves in a special education. It becomes a life sentence, and that's not what it's supposed to be. We believe using the PLC concepts, and we've seen it taking place in some of our pilot schools, is really working for these students, and where they are now able to exit some of the students that have been identified in need of special education services. But, you know, if you think about where we've come in 2016 and some of the legislators attending, and 2017 began
the first cohort. We've actually began bringing higher education into this conversation where higher education leaders have actually attended a PLC Institute. We have had a number of the leaders within the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, just had a group of leaders from the Division of Career Education that attended one of these. And the reason is we want to be able to understand what is happening in those school buildings in this pilot.
And it's growing beyond the pilot. I'll talk about a school district here in a minute that I have some really exciting news about. But each year we try to grow how we approach this initiative. And in 2019, administrators, we started them off last year receiving the High Reliability Schools Handbook, which professional learning communities and high reliability schools, it's made from the same DNA all right and if you look at where I was saying we could get from adequacy to excellence this is where we believe it can happen working with the state takeover
districts in implementing these these concepts we had cohort three seeing great success there and just a number of areas where this is growing and it's not just growing because the department has been working on it it's been growing because a number of administrators and school leaders look at it say hey it worked for the school down the road we want to be involved in that too so as you see this year the list continues to grow what we hope to have is a coalition of
principals and teachers who can act as coaches for other educators in other schools where they can be part of going out to the other schools that want to learn about this process and actually see get support in implementing it outside of the pilot that's what the pilot was intended to do was to get us started and then roll that out statewide so here's some some some good news Warren School District just received the first level one certification for high reliability
schools in the state. The second bullet point, we'll have model PLC schools within the state this year. Well, we just got the announcement that Ballman Elementary School in Fort Smith has been, will receive the model PLC school recognition. That announcement just came at the end of last week. So continued increased interest in this. We know that teacher attention in the plc schools in many cases we hear from the principals that they say every one of my teachers
are coming back i'm not losing any teacher and that's significant mentioned ballman so we expect there will be more schools added to that list as we move on something about laurie griffin the principal at ballman elementary that you need to know this is her second time to do this she did it once when she was at the ozark district and leading a school to become a model plc school and now she's done it again in fort smith fort smith as a district has said
it's working so well we want to be we want to see this in all of our schools in our district and they are working to use local money to bring in the coaching and do the things that need to take place to move this along i don't know if any of you heard the last monday i think it was on channel 11 the story about three entities in arkansas that got hacked city of clarendon one at a local library and then another i can't remember the other town that got hacked but i know i think it was clarendon lost about 90 something thousand dollars cyber attacks are
happening all the time and schools are not immune to it there was a school in south arkansas that last year had a cyber attack. They were held hostage, so to speak, with a ransom demand for their data. Our team created this P-12 Cyber Threat Response Team. And the purpose of this is, one, to let districts know they're not alone. They don't need to be embarrassed about it. They don't need to feel like that they've done something wrong.
One, that there's somebody there to support them. It also is to increase communication between the districts, the co-ops, DIS, the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, when a district is under attack, so that response can be more timely. And then build that internal capacity within the division, outside the division, into co-ops to respond to cyber threats. working with the technology coordinators this is something that don benton our assistant
commissioner for research and technology took that initiative to go out and say look we need to have these technology coordinators better prepared to support their school districts and their co-ops so really excited about that last couple of slides we want to talk about cte february cte month i would encourage you all i know that the meeting will be going on here but if you can break away and see what's happening. There will be a number of presentations and discussion up in the rotunda
about career and technical education month. And then I want to really talk about what your passage of transformation has done to help your schools, because what we have seen with the cross-division projects now is a better delivery of approvals, stronger course offerings, more collaboration the silos as we talk about being broken down between what we consider regular education the old ADE and the old CTE or the old ACE now
working collaboratively to make sure that our districts are better supported when it comes to delivering these options for their students also this CTE is a great place for professional learning communities to thrive so we are pulling that's why I mentioned the CTE team went to PLC Institute all those things are meant to help us get better in providing the support to our schools all across the state so mr. chair madam chair with that our present presentation
is concluded we'll be glad to
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:10:52
take any questions thank you we
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:10:57
do have a question from Senator Johnson thank you madam chair mr. secretary your slide about the cyber security issue brings to mind a hearing that advanced technology committee had a couple of weeks ago or so about cyber threats to buildings not data like are you talking about in this case but where the HVAC systems and
the security systems for a building state-owned buildings are subject to hacking and we had a presentation from a firm that consults with the General Services Administration for those problems at the federal level do you see this situation I didn't even think from the standpoint we were thinking of state-owned buildings as opposed to schools obviously if this becomes epidemic in the arkansas schools it's our problem just like the state buildings would be our problem
would your department be amenable to joining with those that are looking at this to expand that that portion of cyber security as well yeah absolutely we understand
Speaker 209
2:12:11
that anything that can be hooked to a network is a pathway for hackers to get in so if it's whether it's hvac controls or whatever you have and the more automated we get the more openings possibility possible openings there could be so yes we'll be happy to get uh aaron franks to follow up and make
sure that we're on the list to help support that
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:12:35
effort okay thank you very much mr secretary thank Thank
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
2:12:41
you, Madam Chair. Representative Kavanaugh. Thank you, Madam Chair. My question is, when we're talking about the retention on teachers and you're talking about how we've got as many coming in the pipeline as we've got going out, when you're talking to teachers that are leaving, whether you're doing an exit interview or whatever it is, what's the top reason they're leaving the
Speaker 209
2:13:02
education? Well, and that's where I wish we had better access
to have some of those direct conversations, but I do know that just from the reports that you all have been presented from BLR, among the top reasons in the list are competitive salary and support. And, you know, it interchanges, you know, those flip-flop, depending on where it is. So I think that's one of the reasons that you all took measures and the governor took measures to work on that minimum salary in the last session.
And I know that's one of the reasons we are working so hard on the support side, to help make principals, assistant principals, superintendents, better at supporting those teachers. So it is a common theme that we hear, but those are usually the two top reasons. What we always hear. I was just wondering if y'all were hearing anything different. Nothing
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
2:13:53
different, no ma'am. Thank you. Representative Murdoch, maybe? Yes, ma'am. Thank you.
Speaker 237
2:14:07
Thank you, Secretary Key, for being here. I want to kind of piggyback on the recruitment and retention, and one of the methods that you focused on is the grow your own. And I think that's very critical and important, especially in certain unique districts, and to have leadership that understands that and believes in that. I think that's a big part of the application of that type of tool So I want to applaud you for that because that's definitely necessary because some places and some areas of this state, only those that are from there or live there want to stay there.
And it's important that we find those that are there and give them the opportunity to stay there and become qualified to be good educators. And so I think that's great that that focus is there and that's an understanding that you have. Thank you so much. Thank you. thank
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:15:05
you representative thank you i i really appreciate you all coming to to give us this presentation i know there's a lot of information but we spend a lot of time talking about adequacy and in reality there's some really great stuff going on here in the state in our schools that
can help with that move towards excellence and i think that's the the role and what you all are trying to do and i think it's what we're all interested in is to making sure that our young people our future citizens or whatever have the very best opportunity for an excellent education so I appreciate y'all being here thank you very much for all
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
2:15:47
this good information all right last on the list today discussion about
issues related to educator compensation reform program act 170 of 219 dr. abernathy you are up and whoever you would like to bring forward with you i'm not sure how many you have or who all you have here today you have
10 minutes to do this no i'm just kidding i'll just tell everybody that's
here i'm proud for the ones that have
stayed and listened because this is very important what they're going to tell you is something you need to really consider and figure out how we can work on this issue so you can bring more chairs in if you
Speaker 245
2:16:55
need to up there Thank you, Mr. Chair,
Speaker 246
2:16:58
and if you allow me to make a little personal comment,
you know, we always chide Secretary Key for stealing good administrators around the state and bringing them to the department and all that kind of stuff, and I just want you to know that we are very proud to steal one from him as Dr. Mike Hernandez will be taking my position at the association. So we're very proud to have Dr. Hernandez. That's very good news. And also very proud to stop the bleeding from Secretary Key. Well,
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
2:17:25
I want to know something before you get started. Did you catch any fish
Speaker 249
2:17:30
Saturday? We did, and it was a little slow, but we did catch a few.
Well, I wish I could have been there
Speaker 246
2:17:42
with you. It was a beautiful day. Well, you all are recognized to present. um well thank you mr chair and you know we have talked about the educator compensation act for a while and try and find a way to raise teacher salaries above the minimum and of course legislation was passed additional funding was provided for some schools to get their salaries up to 36 000 over a four-year time period and but there's still some concerns and as you know those
that some of that funding sunsets in four years and so we wanted to allow superintendents to visit with you about what their implications are at their budgets and what they're having to deal with so we invited four different school districts one of the superintendents had to go home today they had an emergency back home so they went went back home and we had three superintendents here they're going to discuss their particular issues and in we didn't set any you know format you need do this, this, and this. We just said, y'all just have a visit with legislators and see any questions
or what they're going to be looking at on their budgets. So we have Dr. Beth Shoemake and Dr. Wayne Fawcett here first to present from both Magazine as well as Paris. And then Tracy Streeter down there will be presenting right after that. And one of the things, I guess, for implication purposes this legislature is is really in my opinion needs to come up with a solution for this as you go through it and it's not all about the money because
sometimes you get down here we just want more money more money more money there are districts out there who are really having to make tough decisions and to the result that is going to hinder what they can do with kids at some point in time other other districts are not going to be in that same boat so So it's not going to be an even amount of money split about. It's something that you're going to need to take a look at on how you can resolve this issue going forward. So right now, it's not a solution so much. It's just making sure that you're aware of the issue and ask questions
so hopefully we can all get a little better understanding about where our current situation is, if that makes any sense. So if there's any questions for me, I'm going to turn it over to
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
2:19:56
Dr. Shoemake and Dr. Fawcett. Okay. hit your microphone please say your name and who you're
Speaker 252
2:20:00
with when you uh start would you please that's you mate i'm the superintendent magazine we're having a little technical difficulty already because i'm seeing y'all
Speaker 253
2:20:06
don't see what i see here so i'm not sure how to fix that
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
2:20:33
may have to get secondary key to come back up and fix it again you know he's pretty good at it i'm sorry
Speaker 259
2:20:41
you're gonna make a good secretary one of these days
Speaker 264
2:21:13
Wayne Fawcett, superintendent of the Parrish School
Speaker 252
2:21:17
District. So to start, we'll tell you that we are both from Logan County, and I think this is a great comparison for you guys because you can see the difference in an isolated area. So just to tell you a little bit about ourselves, I introduced myself, I'm the superintendent magazine. Our enrollment is 512 students, and if you think about the old matrix, I'm sitting at 500, right, so everything should be good.
you're about to see why that's true and not true. We have 51 certified staff. We're at about 78% to 80%, depending on the year of free reduced lunch. Now, my teacher retention rate is about 80%, and it's what Representative Murdoch said, those that live there stay there, and we truly recruit our own when we can. We are sitting at 39 meals. The bad part for us is that each meal only generates $32,000.
We are the ninth lowest or the ninth highest, depending on which direction you look at. We're number nine as
Speaker 264
2:22:28
far as money generated per meals. And you can see our demographics. We're just about twice the size of Dr. Shoemate's district, 97 certified staff. and those numbers fluctuate really from day to day almost. You can see we're 78%, so we've got an impoverished population in both districts.
Our millage rate is 39, and then we generate way more than she does with an assessment of over $91 million. So she's a smaller district, I'm a larger district, although I'm not large. but for Logan County, Paris and Boonville are going to be the larger school districts. On the next slide, when we talk about the Educator Reform Act, we talk about teacher raises, which we are all for. Okay, so let's not get this confused that we're not for this.
But it costs money. Everything costs money. You know, show me the money. And so we have to start making decisions about how we're going to fund this beyond when the money runs out in this current biennium. For us at Paris, my cliff is not going to be nearly as quick as what Dr. Shoemate's cliff is. But I still have to look down the road two, four, six, eight years. And I know that at the time that I'm going to have to absorb all this,
I'm going to have to reduce my staff, which we do appropriately as we lose students. But we know that we're also going to have to rely much more on categorical funds to fund those salaries that we can pay out of categorical funds, like nurses, counselors that are above the ratios, different things like that. So I
Speaker 252
2:24:20
think something important to realize at my district is we were sitting at the minimum to start, okay? So those schools that you know that are in your districts that are sitting at minimums,
you're going to see a lot of the same top numbers from them. So this year, since we gave a raise this year, and just like Dr. Fawcett said, we are so thankful. Thank you, thank you for that, okay? And in no way do we want to say any of these state, I call them state unfunded mandates, are bad things. They are not bad things at all. Everything that has come to us, and we'll show you later in this presentation some things, are all very, very good things.
But when good things come, just like in your household budgets, when good things come, sometimes you have to cut some of the other things. so we have had to reduce staff already obviously we're sitting at minimums we replace only that what is required and you can imagine how popular I am this year as I said we cannot take field trips that was that was super fun and then we've reduced all our budgets by 5% and I can answer questions about the
Speaker 264
2:25:38
field trips later if you want me to because I'm sure you will. Dr. Shumate made a good point. As far as the Educator Reform Act, our teacher salary schedule, our bachelor's level salaries was above the minimum, the floor. In fact, next year we will only still be at $100 below the floor. So I'll give my bachelor's level people a $100 raise next year. But our master's level salaries was anywhere from 900 to a thousand dollars below so in the first year
this year all of my people with master's level salaries received a 900 raise next year it'll be a thousand a thousand after that and then 1100 in the fourth year my bachelor's level will go up 100 100 next year and then after that is the thousand and the thousand so you can see when When I talk about a cliff, I can still see it in the future because I was below the floor where Dr. Shoemate was not. One thing also, when you look at the next slide with the minimum wage, we were already
paying above the minimum wage. So the impact you look and see, her cost $75,000 versus $37,000 for me, we were already paying some of our employees $10 an hour. when that hit didn't really affect me we were we already absorbed that but when we add that extra dollar for january 1 of 21 over that period over that two-year period it'll cost me about thirty seven thousand dollars okay not that much money but it starts to add up so i know you can all read
Speaker 252
2:27:21
so i'm not going to read you all of that but here's what i do want you to know and i know that you all as a body are not responsible for the minimum wage but i want you to understand the impact so what has happened in my district is we were not paying we were paying the old minimum wage so now we're paying the new minimum wage but imagine for a minute a cafeteria worker who now gets an increase of ten dollars an hour next year i'll get eleven dollars an hour you know how that works but my cafeteria manager who i have always paid more than a cafeteria worker which just makes
since is now making or will soon make the same amount of money that that cafeteria worker is making so you can see where i'm going to have a a very big supervision issue really quickly that is not figured into any of my numbers as we go forward so just know that that that's a wild card kind of hanging out there for me and we have we have
Speaker 264
2:28:27
big picture numbers at the end of this for
you to look at but we wanted to skip through some of the considerations before we looked at the actual cost so for me i can absorb minimum wage impact i can give i think it's going to cost me about forty three thousand dollars to give raises to all my bachelor master's level people this year Next year, I'll have to give that $43,000 raise and $100 to my teachers, bachelor's level. But I'm absorbing the initial $43,000 because the amount that we'll get from the state in the Educator Reform Act does not compound.
So what I'm paying out this year, and I'll get back a portion of that from the state, and we appreciate that, but then the next year I won't get any for the first year. so it starts to it starts to grow and that's where I have to look out further she has to look closer I have to look out further and in 2024 is when we get to the last slide you'll see how much at that point assuming everything sunsets how much then I'll have to absorb over that period of time so when you look at
Speaker 252
2:29:37
the big picture and what that means for magazine here's what that here's what it could mean and I want to preface that it could mean if we if something doesn't give this is what will happen or could happen so we have you heard Secretary Key talk about mental health and community health so we have a wellness center matter of fact we have a model wellness center that our community even uses and allows our community and our students to get blood drawn and things
Things that they would not have access to because they just won't drive into town to do that. So that is something that we may look at getting rid of. We have a birthed pre-K center. That is something we may have to look at getting rid of. Now, you know that no superintendent ever wants to cut athletics because it's a kiss of death, right? But we may have to look at that. We will obviously go down to the minimums on our counselors,
which means for me I have a counselor at the high school and I have a counselor at the elementary school, which is divided by Highway 10. I will have to look at doing 1.25 because that's how many I need based on my numbers. Guys, I can't service the kids that I need to service and the things that they need now without those counselors. My SRO, my security officer, I may have to look at that. My nurse, I'm probably going to have to look at that.
So all of those things that are so, so important are things that we're going to have to look at and evaluate and figure out we've got to cut something, so what are we going to
Speaker 264
2:31:25
do? Okay, I'm going to skip through the next couple of slides pretty quickly. You'll notice that a lot of these things, I didn't put cost out beside it because we had a lot of these things in place. Those things as a bigger district, larger district, we already had them there. I didn't figure it into my cost.
I'm already – it's already there. Like student meal access, we're a community provision school. None of our students pay for any of their food, but I take some of my ESA money to make up that difference for those non – or the students that generally would pay that do not there. You can see, as I mentioned, $43,000 to our master's level people and then what that cost would be over a four-year period. And then on the next slide, you can see some of the other costs
that I will absorb now yearly moving forward, the minimum wage, the .25 that goes into teacher retirement that's going up every year for the next two or three years. background checks that we're having to do the health insurance match and you can see that just in raw numbers all the way down to the right and at the bottom right corner over a four-year period all of these costs for me will total up to over $700,000 for a 3A size school district
Speaker 252
2:32:49
Okay, so as far as mine go, and here's what I was talking or referring to earlier when I said these are all very good things. They're all very, very important things. Who wants to say we don't need to background check our classified staff? Of course we need to do that. These are all things that are good. We want to help our dyslexic students. We want to have computer science.
Those things are super important, but they all come with a cost. So what you're seeing is you're seeing a 2019 expenditure and then what it's going to cost at the end. Now, you'll notice that some of those costs are the same in both columns. That's because the price does not increase from one year to the next, and that's why those numbers look like that. For us, though, it looks like 936, a little over $936,000. This is a problem for us.
We think we can possibly make it, if nothing happens, maybe three years, we hope. After that ax falls, we hope.
Speaker 264
2:34:10
that really where most of the numbers are, so let me kind of explain this. In the Educator Compensation Reform Act, we will get a certain amount of money back from
the state to help with these increased costs. But it only really goes down to about year 15 in the salary schedule. My bachelor's level salary schedule goes down to year 20. So from 15 to 20, I don't get anything back from the state, even though I have to give those people raises two and three years from now. Same thing with my master's level people, but their salary schedule actually goes out to year 26. So I know what you're sitting there thinking. Well, why do you have a salary schedule that goes out that far?
If I didn't, I would lose those 10-year teachers to Fort Smith, Russellville, Clarksville. they're going to stay with me long enough to get those years in and then when they max out or cap then they're they're bailing on me i understand getting new hires in first year second year teachers they're going to stay with me long enough till they can get a job in russellville or fort smith i get that i understand that but if i don't have a salary schedule and that's a local decision if i don't have a salary schedule that goes out that far i'm going to lose those 10-year teachers
But you can see over the period, I'll get about $268,000 in the Compensation Reform Act in that. Once again, that is not compounded every year. So the first year, this year, none. Then $11,000, $128,000, and it's going to cost me, over the period of time, it's going to cost me about $656,000. So there's a difference there of about $380,000, somewhere in that range.
So I keep going back to, I can absorb that, I can absorb it this year, next year, even the third year. But when it starts rolling on me and I'm not getting a compounded amount for the salary increases, then I go back to those previous slides where I'm going to have to start making some tough decisions. But my cliff doesn't come until 23,
Speaker 252
2:36:27
24, 24, 25, somewhere in that range out there. So $871,000 is what the approximate cost for us is.
Please know that when you look at that number, how we've calculated this is we've taken our cost minus what the Reform Act gives us to give us the total cost. So that's why you're seeing a little bit lower number than what you saw originally. And like Dr. Fawcett said, you know, it is important to know the first year. So for us, we got $42,000 this year. It cost me $51,000.
Now, next year, it will cost me $81,000. But understand that it is $51,000 plus $81,000. and then 51 plus 81 plus 90. That's your cost all the way through. It is not a single, here it is, because you're getting your funding first and then you don't get that funding anymore. We have to absorb that and then we go to the next year. And also, like you said, we're funded 1 through 15,
bachelor's and master's. So for us, our salary schedule was set up, So bachelors, bachelors plus 15, masters, masters plus 15, 1 to 22. And for the same reason that Paris has, because we've got to keep who we have. So the first question was, what are you going to do with 15 through 22? Are you going to cut us? Are you going to freeze us? What are you going to do? So that's something we had to deal with.
Are we going to lose them? Yep, we're going to lose them. and those are our really good teachers those are not teachers that you want to lose when they've got that much experience so this next year I will tell you and my board hasn't voted on it yet but it is proposed PPC has signed off on we will not have a bachelor's plus 15 or a master's plus 15 we will move to those two columns we're going to leave the two columns in place in hopes that something will happen but we won't fund those two columns this year
Speaker 264
2:38:43
so one thing i will say about these numbers just to give you some context these are based on obviously our current enrollment our current staffing looking forward for four years if we have a drop of enrollment obviously we're going to have to cut some staff So these numbers are changing. One thing that none of this considers, there's no numbers in here, if our bond payments increase over the next four years, which ours do, we've got to attend to that.
If our utility costs go up, which they could, if there's a drop in assessment, this year our assessment was flat. we've generally had a little bit of a uptick in assessment but around us there have been issues especially oil and gas industry when it's pulling out there's been districts that had that has had drop of an assessment so instead of raising 91,000 I may be you know I may drop below that fuel cost who knows in 2008 when I took over superintendent down at Drew Central
diesel went over four dollars a gallon and i was having to transport kids over 553 square miles and it was costing me nearly 600 a kid and i was having to subsidize that with 300 because i was only getting about 289 so fuel costs are low right now hey hey we're glad but who knows substitute costs there's costs that are going to go up that's not figured into this so i want you be be aware of that um so i'll turn it over to tracy streeter
Speaker 288
2:40:34
can you hear me good tracy streeter hamburg school district superintendent
Speaker 289
2:40:46
while she's pulling this up i'll go ahead and get started i know you guys are really tired So let me just give you a quick background on Hamburg School District. We are in the southeast corner of the state, and our enrollment as of this morning was 1,704. Our free and reduced lunch percentage is 68%, so you can kind of see the problems within itself that that gives us with being so close to the 70%.
We'll go ahead and get started. We were really fortunate this year. I call it our buy year we did not have to give an increase this year to get to the requirement and what we're looking at for this upcoming year is a thousand dollar raise across the board if you look at our figure if you look at our figure what's presented is based on FTE of a hundred and forty three point forty four is think these guys were talking about the reality our reality is it's
actually 158 employees when you take the ones that are paid for out of federal funding. So that's something I definitely wanted you guys to consider. If you look and you do true calculations, this $1,000 each plus benefits plus extended contract is going to equal about $214,000 a year. And if you look at what you guys were probably presented a few months ago, it's that bottom bullet of the cost over three years to meet this requirement would be a cumulative of $1,009,745.
Well, what the state is providing is $531,445. You can see the shortage there. And before we recognize that shortage, I do want to tell you thank you for that. That has helped us so much in this process and in the thought process. these figures are accurate as you read them but they're not accurate in our world because we have more staff than that I'm gonna go on and go quickly through the minimum wage again I totally agree with what they're saying we know
that that was decided by the voters we are not against minimum wage requirements we want our people to make more in Hamburg Arkansas our school district is our largest employer we want to keep them we want to attract them but it's really important for you guys to understand that's just part of the list that's bleeding us when we think about budgets. Let's look at how the increase will affect our budgets. Over a period of three years you're looking at six hundred forty two thousand dollars increase plus that hundred and thirty
one thousand dollar increase of minimum wage. You can subtract that hundred and seventy three thousand dollars of anticipated foundation funding which is another thing that we're very grateful for and so you can kind of look over a period of time what your school district is gonna or what our school district is going to be faced with it's not that we can't handle it right now I have a board meeting tonight where we will be asking for that thousand dollar increase it is the years to come and I hope that we can show you that so if you go a step further
and you think about building fun we were super excited about something two years ago we were actually able to move some money to the building fund that had not been done historically in our district and we did that with intention and I'll be glad to show you that intention as we move along so what does it mean four years down the road and what does it mean in this journey we're going to meet the minimum salary schedule we're going to meet the minimum wage increase this
year we've already planned that's taken care of in looking ahead at 2021 we're gonna we're gonna ask for that thousand dollar increase across the board and you can kind of read read that out our plan for the next thousand dollar increase and over the next two years is really depending and that's what we're telling our staff we're having honest conversations we kind of call it we're looking at every box if you look at those salary scales that's how we're describing it to our people and that's that's how real we're trying to be with them because in essence those boxes are
those lot their lives and those have people's names on them um if there's no funding we're going to have to look at the minimum salary scale through the 15 mandated steps i'm going to tell you what bothers me the most about that there's many things naturally but when you think about those people in your district that have been with you the longest and have put in the most time and you look at the loyalty, you think about that person that's been there 20 years and they're to the right of that salary scale. Those are the ones that will get nothing. And that hurts.
That hurts morale and that hurts their loyalty to your district. This becomes a big problem for us when you look at operating and you look at the future. We've prided ourselves the last three years of trimming the fat in our district and I want to be real clear with that we've analyzed every department gone in set down with supervisors classified certified it doesn't matter and we've done what you would call an internal audit in every one of those departments we've calculated
adding subtracting and dividing exactly how many kids we have exactly how many teachers we have we hire just what we need and we've been moving people around accordingly which can kind of get scary when you think about real academic improvement so there's a little concern there if I had to give you one slide to me this tells our story this is what we've cut the last three years this is trimming the fat with no sarcasm intended there's days I kind of feel
like noah now it's raining outside today and and you know you guys get that analogy but this is why i say that we've made those cuts preparing for things smart financial planning regardless of what you guys have done causes us to think like this and i would be irresponsible if i did not and so you can kind of see for yourself what we've done there uh we've worked on efficiency we've gotten rid of waste and so this is my biggest fear what more can we get rid of and continue to be effective
that's really it in a nutshell however we have to plan so this is what we've come up with naturally we will continue to look at enrollment we will continue to look at the number of teachers that we need instructional facilitators we have four three of those teach a half a day for us so I mean we're utilizing them any way that we can. There's such a demand on professional development when you look at additional professional development. You guys remember probably seven-ish years ago when our PD was cut
about 49 percent? We've worked within those constraints. That's what you do when you have a budget, so we do that, but schools that are trying to implement high reliability PLC, the new guide standards and do the rise and do the quest, it's really easy to go over those 10 days if you're a school that has those 10 days. So that's a concern. Technology, it wears out. There's no better way to say it. It gets old and it has to be replaced. Project League the Way courses. I don't know what
you guys know about those courses, but I will tell you they're very costly. They're very effective. And it's something that we don't have a lot of, but what we have, we pride ourselves in that. And it's really good for our community. It lines directly with our data for our community and what our community needs. East Classes, you guys know what they do. Community outreach with technology and a whole lot more. CTE opportunities. You have worked with the State Department the last few years to help us move those technical classes ahead.
We're fortunate enough right now, we send 21 kids to CTC and cross it. We're paying about $25,000 for that. Those guys are going to be certified in four different welding areas at the end of their senior year this year. That's opportunity for them and our community, something we certainly don't want to give up. Early childhood, that's a big one for us, hippie program. Our district currently spends $30,000 on hippie. That's salaries.
We give them a place to stay on campus, that sort of thing. You might say, well, that's not a huge deal. We are experiencing a big issue with early literacy. Our children are not coming to school talking in complete sentences. Our speech numbers have tripled the last three years. This is what they know. They can slide. They can glide. They can download. They can do all of that, but they're not talking. This is important. Those hippie ladies go into those homes, and they're working with these young parents.
They're telling these young parents, look, this is what we need, and it's helping us get those babies ready for learning. ABC programs. I'm very fortunate in Hamburg to have six classes with 120 slots. My neighbor down the road, Gary Williams with CrossFit, he has four. He pays for two of those. So you see the discrepancy and the need there. Foster grandparents. Not a big issue, but it is in our community. Those people come in and they're listening to kids read. They're getting them and helping them talk in complete sentences. AmeriCorps workers. There's been a lot of talk today about growing your own.
And through a course of 12 years that I know of, we've grown eight certified teachers from the AmeriCorps Workers Program. That's big for Hamburg School District. That's very big. So I just thought those things out there to kind of give you some background on how that's helping us. Of course, personnel outside the matrix, we know that that can be an issue. And then there's been mention of field trips and extracurricula. never something you want to address you guys know the pride in small towns in
any school district of that area but it is a reality that we have to put out there and we have to work through I know that there's been a lot of work through the department on helping us with the funding of early childhood special ed it's something we're still working through and that's part of that some other concerns I've mentioned the pre-k so I won't go back through that safety and security we appreciate so much the flexibility that you've given us to use with our ESA funds I wish I had more flexibility in that and I'll share that
with you mental health is the same way we do have some flexibility but keep in mind that money is is earmarks for other things vaping issues and discipline I'm not gonna go I'm not gonna beat that dead horse you guys are probably tired of hearing that but i think there's one thing that we can all agree on children are very different their needs are very different today than they were 10 years ago and that leads me to the other thing unpaid lunch charges um i've got a very strong statistic with that we pulled up the
ade website we've gone through all of the recommendations we've gone through our policy we've done all of that so telling our community that we don't have money for safety needs and mental health needs as I said is hard but guys then on the other hand we're allowing them to run up these charges that's hurting us four years ago Hamburg School District was a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars in the read in child nutrition I was child nutrition director three years ago where we worked and we
worked and we worked and worked to get out of that well we have a lot of that was cutting staff if you remember that slide I see us inching backwards and this is why our hands seem to be so tied on that so that that's an issue that we're concerned about just a little brief I want you to know in case you look at our data. I don't want you to think, hey, that woman has money in the bank and she doesn't know it. I want you to know what it's there for. We did pass a millage last spring. Very
excited about that. Very much earmarked, so that's your first fund there. The second fund is bond savings. We have a building where structural engineers were in two weeks ago. I'm waiting on that report. I don't have to tell you how nervous that that can make you when you're talking about what's housed in that building six pre-k um classes our district i.t our special ed offices our mental health provider as well as hippie obviously that building needs some work done
on it and that's what that's there for if you go over and you look at the um overage that we've been talking about there's some things that need some work our cafeteria i've got plywood on the outside treated or not over a period of time you've got to cover it and that's what we're up against our band hall ceiling is is bad shape buses I think Wayne referred to square miles we cover 772 square miles in Hamburg School
District and if you look at the the map it would blow your mind at those that gravel we dismissed it too today because of flooding not because we needed to but just because we had to so buses we could buy five buses a year for the next three years and our head would be above water that's that's where it is it's just a cycle and then moving some spaces around I think it's important if you have money that money needs to beat your mark I don't dare want to give you the impression that we're sitting there holding money but I will tell you up
front I'm scared to spend it I'm not sure where this thing is going and it's again my responsibility to be responsible in that academic achievement so that's all good and fine but how are you doing academically it's important we're on a journey to show improvement we have three campuses that are C schools we have one campus that's an A school high school is involved in the two-year cohort a PLC model and we have schools involved in a plus there's some great things going on and this is just a snapshot of my district there's some
great things going on in southeast Arkansas and just wanted to point that out I will tell you our concern is how do we keep that going ESA funding this is important for you to see our school district budgeted as you can see six hundred thirty seven thousand five hundred seventy two dollars and ninety look what it covers there's only $30,000 basically left for computers and supplies
those are those things that helps us keep things going this is a big deal for us, we use this money we need this money and I will tell you we appreciate this money so I'm going to leave you just with my greatest fear And I think I can speak for the superintendents in southeast Arkansas. We don't mind working. That's what we know to do. We don't mind rolling up our sleeves and putting our boots on and doing what has to be done.
We just need a few resources to
Speaker 264
2:56:56
do it with. Thank you. And I'll kind of sum this up. Obviously, our concern is the next biennium, the $60 million that was there, Mark. from the governor is very much appreciated appreciated we've said that it'll help us it'll keep us going but in the 21-23 biennium there's a lot of unknowns i think you've seen
a lot of that today so we we don't know exactly where to go with that um we're obviously there's going to be a lot of school districts are going to need some help now there's going to be a lot of school districts that will say well hey i'm above the minimum and so why should these folks get money and it's not hurting me excuse me it's not hurting me we had already been above the minimum and that's all true I have good friends that that I see their point but as a general rule the smaller the district the quicker the cliff comes and the next biennium we're going to need
some help from from you folks thank you all right we
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
2:57:59
have a few questions senator Cheatham you've been hanging in there the whole time you're wrecking
Speaker 297
2:58:06
me sure and most of my questions been answered I think I cued in before I was trying to beat Senator Henry before he cued in he left on me but Tracy it's good to see you here it's you know one of my schools say mr. Lefoon from Star City to excellent schools in
my Senate district matter of fact I have eight schools in my Senate district plus parts of two more all right and i hear you but i've got two that probably won't make it more in a year or two that's what i'm really concerned about uh i'm concerned about everybody but um i'll just say appreciate what and wayne good to see you i appreciate what you do and i know that we're going to try to work to come to some resolution on some of these issues thank you for for being here thank you
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
2:58:58
very much representative all thank you mr. chair i appreciate all that
y'all brought today and i've had a lot of those same conversations with my district you know i'm in the southwest corner and and i've got a lot of small schools down there my question though is for the super from hamburg you said you had a millage increase can you tell me what that millage increase is ear tagged for because i know schools that are building big gymnasiums big football fields putting down turf and when those schools come to you and say
they want more money it's kind of aggravating when you know what's coming down the pipeline so can you tell me i can i'll be glad to
Speaker 289
2:59:33
share that journey with you we did an analysis of each campus and this started when i was finance director and what we did was we had needs on every campus we have a school at portland elementary and they needed an update on their PE facility I will tell you if you know anything about the history in that area it was Portland High School 29 years ago and it was bad we had mold we had mildew it yeah just it was bad at the
elementary the elementary in Hamburg as well as the middle school had the oldest bathrooms in the district and the tile blocks were coming off so redoing those bathrooms we have a building that is probably about a hundred yards from the main building and our special needs kids are in that building and the only thing that was separating the main building and that building was a chain link fence and the chain on the other side of that chain link fence is where
buses line up every day that one kept me up at night we're connecting those buildings at the high school we are the south end of the building there's an old agra building and needed lots of update our ale is in a portable building right now where we've redone the floor twice and so we're doing a shift and we're bringing that south end of the building in as one piece it's a safety issue when we wrote the cops grant to redo our doors we kept thinking what are we going
do on the south end building we've got to have it accessible but it's just not safe so we're doing that we're doing an auditorium expansion and update it hasn't been done since the high school was built we have a huge theater group so that was big in our area we are let me think is there anything else academically that I have forgotten okay so now let's get to that turf okay so we go into a public forum meeting no mention of any of that on there because i'm thinking needs
that's that's what we're up against and i have a group of people that were very much for the turf we had spent several thousands of dollars um in the spring and uh and then again in the fall we have a plumbing issue underneath our football field and i mean man holes ankles bad stuff and And so we were going to have to unpeel, or peel, if you will, the football field and redo the plumbing. And so when we did a cost analysis, it was not that big of a deal.
And that's what the public wanted, of course, was a turf field. So, yes, we will be adding that in
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
3:02:23
the end. Sounds like you're doing everything you can, though, that needs to be done. We've
got needs. We really do have facility needs. With that, can I ask one follow-up, sir?
Thank you. So, I know schools that have five, six, seven football coaches. Can you talk to that? Do you have an over number of coaches? I mean, I know coaches that are teaching things that they probably shouldn't be teaching now because –
or they're all teaching PE. Does that make sense what I'm saying? Do we have a lot of that overage? I just hate that my people are here. Coach, Coach, you want to
Speaker 309
3:02:56
chime in? I have a coach. I've got a coach coming out
Speaker 289
3:03:01
on the front line. Let me tell you a little funny. I will go on the record and tell you the highest ACT score that's ever come through Hamburg School District is now the head football coach. Love it. I love it. He teaches the computer science and he's written programs. He just completed writing
a program for us to implement an RTI schedule at the high school. So yeah, our coaches teach. They have to.
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
3:03:24
That's smart. Thank you. Senator Starch, you
Speaker 80
3:03:30
recognize? thank you Mr. Chair this may be a question for each
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
3:03:36
of you if you want to answer that's up to you but I need to know two things I think Ms. Streeter mentioned it maybe in her presentation about the spread across that you've been able to do so beyond just the minimum I think there was
a misunderstanding or maybe just a miscommunication as far as when we increase the teacher salaries everybody thought that across the board they'd get the same amount that's not the case never was ever going to be the case with 60 million dollars basically i'll just be honest with you so i want to know what the spread was that you were able to do or you're planning to do across the salary schedule that's at your individual districts if you can give me just an idea you know i know what the minimum is of course but if you could say okay i have a thousand dollars a year or whatever we were able to give 500 to the teacher that had
15 years or the teacher had 20. if i may senator i'll
Speaker 317
3:04:26
answer that i'm john spradlin i'm the chief financial
Speaker 319
3:04:28
officer for hamburg school district we went through those slides bottom line what i was showing you a while ago which is just what you said if we give every teacher and y'all just set up to 20 while ago y'all we've got teachers been there 30 years okay so you're talking about anybody over 15 i'm i'm telling you in three years when the money's gone we don't have any more support our budget will go up six hundred thousand i don't know if that stood out a while ago but our thinking in the future is that 600 000 added
our budget for salaries okay if you looked at our overage that we've been operating over that 20 percent you know to keep us out of financial distress we've been running about 600 640 to 680. you can see and it won't take many years unless you do some changes that's not going to add up to address your question our plans are we'll ask the board tonight to get a raise for all of our teachers we just think for morale and something like that we've got to show our teachers because we don't know what we're going to be able to do too we don't know what's going to be down three
years down the road so we've got to make an effort this year we're trying y'all for morale after that depending on what the you know the funding looks like in the future we'll just have to maybe go one through fifteen we may have to shrink our salary schedule down and to answer your question that'll still going probably with minimum wage and everything it's probably going to still add about four hundred thousand dollars just trying to meet the minimum to our budget did that kind of answer your question sure we will do we will
Speaker 264
3:06:04
do very similar we'll give a thousand dollars going forward to those with a master's degree to bring everything up to the minimum even those that are that have maxed out on the salary schedule to reward them for that longevity same thing with the bachelor's level people at some point we will probably squeeze ours i guess horizontally i don't have any intentions of squeezing it vertically i don't want to take steps away because as i said that's what i think helps us retain a lot of our teachers but at some point
depending on how the next two to five years go I can see us going to a mass bachelor's master's maybe an ed specialist or doctorate and that's it there'll be three vertical categories and and that would be it and and for us it'll be very similar it'll be somewhere in the 350 to 400 thousand dollar range going forward that that will be
Speaker 252
3:07:03
not funded for us so like I said earlier we you already this this next year will squeeze those bachelor plus 15 and
master's plus 15 but now understand that even doing that this is the crazy part so even doing that every teacher in my district will receive a raise because of how those were all divided out and it doesn't seem like it would work the math would work like that but it does so every teacher is still getting a raise race which was very important to us we eventually will have to squeeze down to the 1 to 15 I really don't want to I really it's gonna it's gonna hurt it's
gonna hurt real bad but here's the here's the thing and this is true of a lot of small districts and you know it those that are in your congressional district they will do whatever it takes to keep their school that's how my teachers view it and not everybody not every district is that lucky i've been in other places that you sometimes that's not the truth but my teachers have said to me if we have to give up xyz if we have to give up instead of doing 60 hours of professional development we'll go to 36
and we'll take that cut then if that's what it means to keep us open then that's what that means so everybody is willing to sacrifice it's just how much sacrifice and how long can you hold out all right representing back thank
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
3:08:39
you mr chairman um first of all i'm glad that apa is still here um because i think this is you know you probably already know this but but and please don't take any of my comments as a negative comment about school size or anything
like that that is not the intention but i have looked a lot at school funding and so what i find is when you get down a close round of 500 your your teacher to student racial goes way or your the student to teacher racial goes way down your cost per student goes way high as compared to the state average in others in other states and and while y'all were here you probably guessed i i school info'd all four your school district so i've got your information here in front of me but so here's my question all right to me it seems like that and I'm just going to
throw some numbers out here the matrix is funding somewhere around about 14 to 1 all right state average is about 10 to 1 talking about student to teacher racial you know some of your school districts are down below 7 to 1 some of them are up considerably from that so my question is is how much is that disparity how much is that discrepancy between those numbers a problem because to me it seems like until we address that issue and I'm not saying we should
raise or lower it I'm just saying okay until we address that issue because I'm going to tell you and they might not raise their hands to this but a lot of people were shocked on this committee when they said we gave $1,000 in the matrix and then everybody's saying well you're shorten me 180 that one of my school districts said you're going to short me 180 thousand dollars and when I this is when I got involved with all this thing and I don't know that I don't think that's a single bullet I understand that but I think that's the issue we got to start looking at because until we do
that the matrix is kind of like a joke right I mean we put a big old stack of money here we push it through to you guys on your school boards and and you guys decide how to spend it and I'm not saying you don't spend it well I'm saying it seems a bit of a joke because we don't get the feedback we think that we're doing something in the matrix and we're actually not so with that anybody wants to attack that and say how much does that student to teacher racial thing and all that I understand that also that the
excuse me the minimum wage thing hit some of your school districts pretty hard
Speaker 252
3:11:13
thank you okay so let's talk about my numbers because i brought i brought my numbers too um so last year we were six to one district wide that's ridiculous right um at the high school we're four to one at the elementary we're 13 to one which you would think if you were if you were really thinking about academics those two ought to be flip-flopped right here's the issue because those 38 credits that those 38 courses that we have to offer that
skews our numbers for the high school that doesn't you're looking at me so I know I'm not making sense okay so with I have 200 and I think today I look 254 kids at my high school. I have to offer 38 credits, right? That's, you heard Ms. Kaufman talk about that, okay? So, at the elementary school, I've got two classrooms for each grade level, about, okay? So, that makes a difference in what my ratio is. Is it too much? Do we
like that it's four to one at the high school? Absolutely not. This is my first year at magazine, And I can tell you we've cut about six positions, both on the elementary side and the high school side, because of that reason, because the ratios are not good. But, yeah, it's part of the process, but those 38 do play into that.
Speaker 268
3:12:43
And Dr. Shumate's right. It's skewed. I'll just use one example. We'll take AP courses.
Speaker 264
3:12:50
We have to offer one AP course per content area. so let's just take science and let's say we've got an AP biology course I have roughly about 300 students in my in my high school we may only have five students that will take AP biology and we're required to offer that those five students are getting the benefit of that but that's going to affect your ratio when you have when those 38 course units have to be offered and you have real
low class sizes you're going to have some that are a little bit larger but but that's going to affect it at the elementary level it depends on what your enrollment is sometimes our kindergarten fluctuates like this and we have to move kindergarten teachers up and down the line so uh ours is higher than dr shoemates ours is probably about 14 to 1 somewhere in there but each district is going to be skewed a little bit because
Speaker 268
3:13:47
of of each individual little quirk for that for that district okay i i
Speaker 289
3:13:52
think ours as a whole is 11 to 1 but i want to throw in
another side of that when you think about ratios let's think academically you saw the slide where i said three of our schools were c schools and one was a a school that a school is portland elementary small school awesome school i invite you to visit anytime let me tell you a little something about that numbers can be really tricky we had the highest scoring fourth graders in the state last year from portland elementary i will take nothing from those kids they are truly
amazing but let's talk about that i think there were 12 or 13 very unique group every other class in portland is full when a student shows up they they're sent to hamburg because we would not add another teacher for that however just do a little thinking about that 12 or 13 to 1 a school those scores numbers matter they really do like i said we're 11 to 1 overall but if you go in that
elementary and you count heads and you count very highly qualified peer professionals it makes a difference there's no
Speaker 264
3:15:07
doubt that there are schools that are overstaffed i mean any school can be overstaffed depending on what area you want to look at that go back to answer your question I've I've cut two coaches over the past eight years all of my coaches teach either math or science courses so the numbers sometimes can get skewed depending on the uniqueness of the district
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
3:15:42
I do appreciate it, and again, as I preference my statement, I'm not criticizing, I just feel like a lot of times we're dancing around the bush, and there are people, yourselves included in that group, that know what these issues are, and I think we have to start looking at this because personally i'll stir up a little bit i got to stir up a little bit
the lady on the end's got some really good academic numbers in her school and and it tells me that these schools can perform and i like the performance that i see in some of the smaller schools but i just think that we have to address what the issue is you know cost is cost is higher it's it's it's higher per student it's it's out there but i'm not saying that we can't do this but i think we have to look at everything that we're causing what is the things that we're doing that is hurting your small schools that are are costing them a lot of money and that's it so
wouldn't you agree i'm supposed to ask the question so
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
3:16:51
wouldn't you agree we just need more teachers that can teach multi-courses most of those kindergarten and first grade teachers are very good at that so um okay let's go to uh
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
3:17:06
John Eubanks. Senator Eubanks. Thank you Mr. Chair. I think this questions for Dr. Abernathy. When the 60 million dollars sunsets what is your estimated amount
that we would have to fund to make up that difference per year and when would we have to include it
in a recommendation to be ready for any Any potential, Cliff? Just off the top of
Speaker 246
3:17:34
my head, because I haven't done these numbers, but we've got $60 million over four years, so $15 million a year. I think within that $15 million, though, there's probably some things as policymakers that you would want to consider. For example, there may be districts that are receiving part of that $15 million now
that may not be a state obligation. They may have made decisions, conscious decisions at their district to cause them to spend their money elsewhere and so I think there probably needs to be some things looked at like staffing I mean 80% of district budgets or 75% of district budget goes to staff so that's gonna be a key component but I may have made decisions over the years that instead of funding my base pay which is all the compensations only based on the base bachelor salary in instead of funding that maybe I funded 30 years or 40 years or you know paying a
Bachelor's degree salary with 20 years of experience, $75,000. I'm just saying the salary schedule probably needs to be looked at before you just determine that all the districts need those dollars, if I'm making any sense. But I've got it in my head. I'm not sure if it's coming out. But I just think there's other things that need to be considered besides just base bachelor's salary in the
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
3:18:49
distribution of those dollars. Follow-up? And how would we address that issue? We can't just put it in the matrix. if we're going to be trying to address the needs of the schools that we're impacting now.
That would be a great reason to have hired. And like I said before, we're working on a recommendation. We're doing this adequacy study. When do we have to address that issue? Are we going to have to look at putting something in this recommendation? In my
Speaker 246
3:19:18
opinion, yes. It needs to come from adequacy committee. I mean, you're the ones that's in charge of studying schools and coming forth with a recommendation. If it doesn't come from this committee, then that means that whoever files a bill in January and then you'd have that discussion there.
But y'all are the ones that are studying this issue. You're the ones that's going to have the resources available through the department, through APA, to try to come up with some valid recommendations for this particular issue. But it's going to take some time. and I think there's multiple areas that need to be studied before you'll need you'll be ready to make that recommendation like I
Speaker 251
3:19:54
said it's not just money there's other issues that's going to come in play in that recommendation so you're
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
3:20:01
going to tell us what those other issues are correct before you
Speaker 251
3:20:04
leave well I'm kind of dangerous because administrators may not like me by the time
Speaker 246
3:20:10
I leave nor y'all so I'd be glad to visit with whoever stayed on the issue but you just my opinion you just don't need to write a check based on the bachelor's salary you need that a little more in depth as far as what all the factors are on why schools can't meet that minimum salary and then fund those schools
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
3:20:31
but thank you is there any way I know every school has a different salary
schedule is there any way there could be
Speaker 135
3:20:38
a standard schedule written I think they've offered to take Springdale's
Speaker 250
3:20:47
something else so much of that goes back to the
Speaker 246
3:20:52
the resources that are available outside of the matrix you had the efficiency the inside the matrix that large efficient schools they they block the matrix I mean they can fund
you're paying them for more positions than they actually fund you have other schools that may not be as beneficial for and their millage like you saw here don't raise the the millage above the
Speaker 250
3:21:17
urt that some districts can raise with their millage yeah i know when i was at lake hamilton we had to rework ours
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
3:21:23
to make it work out right for because some teachers just weren't getting anything and some were getting too much um it was it was the superintendent before that that had kind of done what he wanted to so had to fix that to make it work for everyone i have one last
question senator starch you are up for a second question that i cut you off on thanks sir i appreciate it i guess
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
3:21:44
i'm going to go back to what representative eubanks said you know we have this distinguished panel we have a man who's you know leaving us after so many years of hard-earned experience and so i want to kind of echo what frank cavanaugh said one time in a meeting and i thought it was brilliant i never would have had the guts to say it but i want a solution so you're talking to a group of people who we understand the problem we probably know the
problem better than most of our colleagues that are in the house and the senate elsewhere so i hear all these ideas being thrown out there but you got to remember our challenge is that we work within a uniform system and we're having to try to fix individual district problems so i don't care what you throw out there but i'd like to hear at least some idea as far as whether it is going to be that we mandate a salary schedule but that also then goes back to the local control issue or that we changed the URT instead of 25 mils
something different or that we put a cola of two and a half percent or three percent which is going against what you're saying because you're saying some schools need
it and some schools don't so tell me then what is something that you can come up with or
Speaker 252
3:22:57
you can say while you're here first that you think okay so let's let's take myself and paris as we stated before i get thirty two thousand dollars a meal he gets about 90 his property tax and assessed value has either stayed flat or gone up
mine continues to go down can i tell you why that happens no i can't and neither can anybody else so at the crux for us is properties assessed values that kind of thing and i mean even my assessor can't tell me why that's and i know that's not this committee but that that's a problem for us i'll give
Speaker 264
3:23:43
you a couple suggestions and these are not well thought through okay
line item for school districts that are not that are actually below the floor there are actually below the minimum whether that be bachelor's or master's degree we're not looking to make money we just want to keep our head above water so if if there's a line item for those school districts and that they're easily identifiable all you got to do is pull those salary schedules up look at what is going to be what they are right now second suggestion is maybe some sort of
temporary sunset on a categorical fund for those districts that cannot meet that salary schedule easily a lot that's fraught with all kinds of issues and i get that that's your problem that's what you guys do great one-time money for an ongoing expenditure i
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
3:24:36
get it i'm sorry say that again the problem
is that would be one-time money for an ongoing expenditure yeah it's when you're
Speaker 264
3:24:46
looking at you guys make a commitment for a biennium and then the next biennium and the next
you know i understand you can't make commitments for 20 years down the road at some point we're the absorption is going to happen we get that the the issue is instead of falling off the clip if we can step down somehow and if you guys can help us over the next two four six years to step that down i my board already knows that at some point probably in the next four years we're going to have to go to the voters for a millage increase and it's not going to build a building it's going
to be we got to pay the bills operation we got to pay the bills and pay the teachers now either we got to pass a millage increase or all those things on the second third and fourth slide we're to start making the hard choices that's probably
Speaker 325
3:25:44
about time i'll retire right there all right you said be creative
Speaker 289
3:25:47
right okay well i'm i'm not necessarily against a standardized salary i think a lot of thought has to come into that i think that the adequacy study you're going
to get a lot of input a while back there was talk of in looking at that matrix could you add things to that and there was discussion of SRO being added to that you know that's planning with intention in my eyes very much of a need there's been a whole lot of talk and a lot of research done with school safety and quite frankly schools are struggling paying for those so that's an issue I would really hope no pressure or anything but I would really hope before dr. Abernathy leads leaves
that he can really bring you a plan of some of our thoughts some of the input from the adequacy study that would help we're really hoping that this study gives you some answers to that if you want a to-do list we can certainly provide that that's not a problem at all but I think we need to do it with intention and there's not a one-size-fits-all mr. chair one
Speaker 348
3:26:54
parting comment if one of the things that
Speaker 246
3:26:57
i think is just a must when you're looking at solutions i think
this i think it is a state responsibility to fund up to the standards and i think if you did that it would help a lot of small schools that struggle and what i mean by that is just a simple example example kindergarten requirement you know that the matrix provides two teachers for 40 kindergarten students if i have 44 kindergarten students i have to hire three teachers but the matrix is not going to fund me for three teachers so instead of looking at class size ratio as a district or as a school how about class size ratio as a class first grade kindergarten second grade
but if you do that you're going to have to pull out my reading teachers my rti teachers i mean just look at classroom teachers what is their ratio and if you fund it to that level at the salary that you have in the matrix then if districts won't go above that well that's on their dime but
Speaker 349
3:27:56
at least fund up to the class to the standard that's required
Speaker 146
3:28:02
by a statute all right thank you each and every one for your
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
3:28:06
time of patience waiting on us but for being here and thank you each
with one of the members that stayed if there's no more business for this committee we'll be back here in the morning at 9 o'clock and we are adjourned
Agenda
A. Call to Order – 1:30 P.M.
B. Remarks by the Chairs
C. Approval of Minutes of the January 6, 2020 and January 7, 2020, Meetings [Exhibits C1 & C2]
D. Discussion of Activities/Timeline for Augenblick, Palaich and Associate’s Study of Arkansas’s Current Educational Adequacy Study Processes Mr. Justin Silverstein, Co-CEO, APA Consulting | Augenblick, Palaich and Associates Ms. Amanda Brown, Senior Associate, APA Consulting | Augenblick, Palaich and Associates Mr. Jason Willis, Director of Strategy & Performance, Comprehensive School Assistance Program, WestEd
E. Discussion of Proposed Division of Elementary and Secondary Education Rules Governing Standards for Accreditation of Arkansas Public Schools and School Districts [Exhibit E] Ms. Mary Claire Hyatt, Staff Attorney, Arkansas Department of Education
F. Presentation by the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education Mr. Johnny Key, Commissioner, Division of Elementary and Secondary Education
G. Discussion of Issues Related to the Educator Compensation Reform Program, Act 170 of 2019 [Exhibits G, G1, G2, & G3] Dr. Richard Abernathy, Executive Director, Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators Dr. Debbie Smith, Superintendent, Paragould School District Ms. Tracy Streeter, Superintendent, Hamburg School District Dr. Beth Shumate, Superintendent, Magazine School District Dr. Wayne Fawcett, Superintendent, Paris School District
H. Other Business
I. Adjournment
Documents
Speakers
Senator Jane English
Unverified
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
Speaker 9
Speaker 11
Speaker 14
Speaker 15
Speaker 16
Speaker 24
Speaker 25
Speaker 31
Speaker 28
Speaker 56
Speaker 60
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
Chair
Unverified
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
Speaker 91
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
Representative Tippi McCullough
Unverified
Speaker 129
Representative Mark Lowery
Unverified
Speaker 135
Speaker 146
Speaker 148
Speaker 150
Speaker 149
Speaker 154
Speaker 163
Representative Gary Deffenbaugh
Unverified
Speaker 179
Speaker 152
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
Speaker 208
Speaker 209
Speaker 212
Speaker 221
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
Speaker 237
Speaker 245
Speaker 246
Speaker 249
Speaker 252
Speaker 253
Speaker 257
Speaker 259
Speaker 264
Speaker 278
Speaker 288
Speaker 289
Speaker 297
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
Speaker 309
Speaker 80
Speaker 317
Speaker 319
Speaker 268
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
Speaker 251
Speaker 342
Speaker 250
Speaker 325
Speaker 348
Speaker 349