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Senator Jane English
Unverified
6:00
For all of you who were here yesterday, thank you for being here. It was a very informative day, I think. We all learned a lot. This morning, let me see. Representative Cozart, do you have comments? well i don't have a
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
6:28
comment but i want to recognize some people that are here today
i think and i see some over in this group i'm not sure how many are if y'all are all in one group wide but uh leadership hot springs would y'all stand and we'd like to thank you for being here today oh you're all everywhere okay good crowd got quite a few y'all brought a big bunch today thank you all for coming and enjoy your time here and i know you'll have to leave in a little bit to go do your thing
Senator Jane English
Unverified
7:00
so just enjoy thank you okay so moving right along we're going to read the review and discussion of the adequacy
recommendations considered in the 2018 and adequacy report so miss Nell Nell Smith good morning I'm Nell Smith
Speaker 15
7:22
with the Bureau of Legislative Research The first thing
Speaker 16
7:27
we're going to talk about is a requirement in the Adequacy Study Statute that calls for you to review the most recent, which is the 2018 Adequacy Report and the
recommendations ahead of the fiscal session to make sure there aren't any changes that you'd like to make. So the statute is in Exhibit B and it's behind the first tab, but I'm going to be going through handouts C1. So this is a letter, a November 1st letter, that was written to describe the changes, the recommended changes from the last adequacy study. So just to review the statutory requirements, you're to meet and review the most recent adequacy report.
You're to review any other matters that may affect the state's obligation to provide an adequate and equitable education. And if you identify any needed amendments, you're to advise the speaker and pro tem in writing by March 1st. So handout C1, this lists the recommendations from the changes from the 2018 final report. And the letter provided the recommendations for the FY20, which is the current school year we're in, and for FY21.
And the fiscal session will deal with funding for FY21, so the second year of the 2018 recommendations is what's at issue. So I'm going to talk about the recommendations the committee made for both years just so you have a little bit of context for FY21. So the first item in the table is that you recommended a change to the definition of educational adequacy to include a reference to career and technical frameworks. Special education catastrophic
funding the House and the Senate committees had different recommendations. The House wanted to add $4 million to get to $17 million in FY20 and then stay at that level for FY21. And the Senate wanted no changes to the funding level in either year, which would have meant staying at about $13 million for FY20 and FY21. On the next page, Teacher Salaries, the committees recommended increasing all steps of the statutory
minimum teacher salary schedule by $1,000 in FY20 and again in FY21. The partnership program, committees recommended no change in the partnership funding in FY20 and then a $90 million increase in FY21. For the adequacy study, the committees recommended undertaking a new educational adequacy study, which is currently in process. For categorical funding, NSL, which is now ESA, the per-student funding rates were to remain as they were for FY20
and FY21, but the funding for the matching grants was to increase by $1 million to $5.3 million in FY20 and to remain at that same level for FY21. So for professional development, the recommendation called for the per-student funding rate to remain at the existing level for FY20, but increasing the funding for the professional learning communities by $4 million for a total of $12.5 million in funding for PLCs.
In FY21, the PLC funding was to remain at that same level, $12.5 million, and the per student funding rate was to increase by $8.40 per student for a total of $40.80 per student. language learners, the recommendation was for the per student funding rate to increase by $7 in FY20 and another $7 in FY21 for a total of $352 per ELL student in 21. Alternative
learning environments, ALE, the recommendation was for an increase of $60 per ALE student in FY20 for a total of $4,700 per ALE FTE student, and the recommended ALE, the recommendation for the ALE for 21 was that it remain at that same $4,700 level. On to the matrix. There was a recommendation for a 2% increase in the funding that's provided for teacher
salaries in FY20 and another 2%, excuse me, in FY21, and that means that all of the school level staff who are tied to that component of the funding, so the guidance counselors, librarians, school nurses, those are all recommended to increase by 2%. So the other matrix items that there were increases for were for an increase in instructional materials. That was 0.6% in FY20 and 2% in FY21. Operations and maintenance was an increase of 1.82%
in FY20 and 1.18 in FY21. There was also an increase in transportation. It wasn't to the line item in the matrix. That remained the same, but there was an increase of $2 million for that supplemental transportation funding. So $2 million increase to $5 million in FY20, and that was to remain at $5 million for FY21. So the committees recommended that all other components of the
matrix receive no increase in FY20 or FY21. So after the November 1 report was published, the chairs provided an addendum to the final report that indicated a need to provide funding to cover an increase in the teacher retirement system. They were implementing an increase to the employer contribution rate, and that rate is increasing over four years by a quarter of a percent starting in FY20. And so to adjust for this additional cost, the chairs opted
to provide an addendum explaining that the addition of $16 per student for FY20 to the total foundation funding rate and $33 per student for FY21, and that brought the total per student foundation funding for FY20 to $6,899. That was a 1.74 increase over the previous year, and then for FY21, $7,018 for a 1.72 percent increase to the bottom line.
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
14:32
chairs for discussion. Senator Elliott. Thank you Madam Chair. Ms. Smith for the
NSL that's now ESA for those grants do you recall or do we have information somewhere at our disposal maybe that I've
just missed the a list of school districts that have gotten those grants I
know somewhere I think I've seen that that list and I think I think you
Speaker 16
14:58
asked that question when I when I gave the NSL report or the ESA report in November January
Speaker 15
15:04
if it's a list that you sent us sometime I
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
15:07
can go back and look for it I'm willing to do that rather than take up time. Yes,
I'd be happy to resend it to you. Okay. Because I really am curious about how equity is being operationalized in our funding models for legislators to think about.
Because if grants are not going to the most needy districts, you know, we might be missing the boat there. It's a good idea, but when it's operationalized, I kind of worry about it. The other question I have is for which of these items are a reflection of equity instead of equality? For example, I know that the NSL funds are closer to an example of equity
because we're not just treating everybody equally. um what else in here reflects equity when it's operationalized of the items would
Speaker 16
16:13
you say generally i would say that the foundation funding is the the equal part is everybody's getting the same amount the categoricals are except for professional development the ell ale nsl are intended to provide offsets for different student characteristics. I would also argue
that the special ed catastrophic does that as well and to some extent isolated declining enrollment and student growth
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
16:48
issues. But for each for let's
say for ESL, ALE, alternative learning, we've got people in the audience that need to be careful here, for alternative learning funding and for English language learners funding,
when that goes to the district,
doesn't everybody get an equal amount per
Speaker 15
17:11
student? They get an equal amount per student that they have. So some districts aren't getting any ELL funding because they don't have any ELL students. So it is per the, you know, they have an increased need because they have increased ELL students. So they're getting it per ELL student rather than per student all across the board. So the
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
17:36
assumption would be, say, if it's school A and they have 16 ELL students
and it's school B and they have 16 ELL students the equity would be informed by some other realities in that district I would think if it's truly equitable we're given an equal amount but we're assuming when we give the equal amount the school district has everything in place then to use that funding in a way that is going to I guess get the most bang for its buck without thinking about all
of the other issues at hand yes
Speaker 43
18:17
that would be correct for each of those categories
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
18:20
yes in the categories right so the only thing I want us to think about going forward and this is my last thing to say about this madam chair is I think I think we need to examine our assumptions when we give equal amounts of funding is does that really accrue to equity at that school district if you take two school districts and compare them does that really accrue to equity for example if it's ell
can can that school district is that school district in a position to really get a teacher for ell students as well as the school district a or are there some other factors like geography and everything else at hand that might cause us to really think about how is that equitable depending on the situations and i think that's something we've missed doing that's
it thank you madam chair thank you miss smith i appreciate it thank you so there are no further questions
Senator Jane English
Unverified
19:23
thank you very much appreciate it okay moving
right along we will go to Julie
Speaker 49
19:47
waivers good morning Julie Holt with the Bureau and as senator English just said we're going to start this morning talking about waivers from educational laws and
Speaker 51
20:02
Arkansas have applied for and been granted and you might consider this oh no this is working earlier I came in and did this There we go.
So anyway, you might consider this an adequacy extra because this is not one of the topics that's required under the adequacy study statute, so you won't find it listed on that gold sheet in your binder. It is a topic that the committees had requested be presented last time, so in 2017 and you asked for it to be repeated this go-round so back when I was a reporter and writing news stories often tried to figure out how I was going
to lead a story so that people would want to read it and and stay with it so sometimes when I got lucky those stories the lead would be obvious and I kind of got lucky with this waiver presentation because there were two leads that were pretty obvious one is a lead that would be considered the wow factor and that's when you have a single statistic or fact that kind of makes or you hope your readers will go wow that's crazy I want to keep reading about this another way is to start with an anecdote so a narrative that sort of sets the
tone tells you a little bit about it and also draws the reader in so this time I decided to start with the wow factor because this year our public schools in Arkansas are operating under more than 10,000 waivers from Arkansas laws and
Speaker 50
21:59
rules and you might remember that when we presented this in 2017 that number was 3,000 and while to be fair it's not really an apples to apples comparison because at that time the data that we got on waivers from the department was at the
district level it's not really apples to oranges either because back then districts were likely to only have one conversion charter school or one school of innovation and even the Act 1240 districts which were your district wide waivers were far fewer than they are now so while we didn't really jump from 3,000 to 10,000 there is a pretty good jump there
Speaker 51
22:42
and another way you can tell bet is that this year we have 329 of our 335 public school districts operating
under waivers and of course all 25 open enrollment charter schools
Speaker 50
22:55
are under waivers as well within those districts we have more than a thousand schools and there's 97% of Arkansas's public school students are attending a school that's operating under at least one waiver so it is worth looking at so one way to give context to that 10 000 numbers is to do what we just did compare it to what's happened in the past another
Speaker 51
23:22
way is to compare it with with what's happening in other states and so that brings me to my anecdote in the summer of 2018 so pretty soon after i presented the waivers report last time i got to attend the National Forum
Speaker 50
23:38
on Education Policy put on by ECS, Education Commission of the States, and NCSL, National Conference of State Legislators. And this was really a great conference. And the last part of it is big and there are all kinds of people attending it, but the
first few days are for people like me, so legislative staffers who deal a lot with education. And it was a small group. There were about 40 of us representing 15 to 20 states. And we really kind of dig
Speaker 51
24:06
into those policy issues that are affecting states in terms of education. So one of our
Speaker 50
24:12
presentations during that meeting was on teacher shortages and how states were dealing with it. And I had a couple of my fellow attendees comment, and you could hear the angst in their voice when they were talking about this,
but that their states were having to start providing emergency waivers to teachers to be able to have enough people in their classrooms. And I thought, well, gee, we've been doing that for quite some time. So during the break, I thought, well, I wonder what they do about these other waivers. And I asked a couple of people I was sitting with, so do y'all give waivers to public schools from your other education laws? And you might have thought I had asked them, you know, do you like living on Mars or something, because the quizzical looks I got back from them.
So I came home, and I told Nell and my other colleagues about this because I really found it fascinating. And one thing that ECS will do is let us give them questions, and they'll send it out to people in all the states across the nation. So I worked up some questions about charters, you know, do you give them, I mean, about waivers. Do you give them to charter schools? Do you give them to your regular schools? And sent that out and waited, you know, very excitedly to get my results. And when they came back, only three states had responded. Two states said no. They did not do it.
One state gave a very nice answer, but it was actually mine that I had submitted. So, it did not add any value. When I had presented in 2017, I'd already done a literature review or search for research out there and repeated that again, and what I found mostly when I put in the search terms were articles and research papers about states getting waivers from federal laws. If you remember, especially at the end of NCLB, there were a lot of waivers out there.
So again, nothing. So then I did something which I probably should have done at the very beginning, which was a simple Google search. And then I got lucky. So I landed on this spreadsheet, which was on the South Carolina's Department of Education website. And I know you can't read it, but I really just put it up there to let you know I really did find something. And you might notice I've got little red tick marks down one side. So I counted these up. And South Carolina's been giving waivers, according
Speaker 51
26:27
to this sheet, since 2012. And since then,
They've given their districts 323 waivers, so a far cry from our 10,000. A lot of these in the early days seem to do with testing dates and testing periods. There are also some, and if you can read it on that sheet, that had to do with seat time or teacher class loads, and those have become more common as the years have gone by. But again, 323. So then I repeated that. I just went to different states and looked at their Department of Education websites and searched for the term waiver.
Speaker 50
27:02
So what I'm about to give you is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the things I did find. One, I just told you about South Carolina. So then in Georgia, Georgia has something called Strategic Waiver School Systems, and there's a map on their website that
Speaker 51
27:21
shows these. And most of the state, 132 out of the 180 school districts, are one of these strategic waiver school systems. Of the rest, there are 46 that are charter systems, so they must also have waivers.
And then there are two that do not appear to have waivers. Next, I found Mississippi, which is closer to home. And Mississippi grants waivers to districts and schools to become districts or schools of innovation. And their website said that they had seven districts and six schools of innovation at the time. And then finally, I
Speaker 50
27:59
came across North Carolina, and their waiver is very new and very specific because in the 2019 session there, they passed a new law decreasing the maximum size loads for their early grades.
Speaker 51
28:12
I think kindergarten, the maximum size is 16. And apparently they must have gotten some pushback from school districts because they also passed a law saying that, well, you can apply to get a waiver from that law. But that was all I found regarding waivers there. Like I said, this is not exhaustive and may not even be complete for each of these states. But the point being is that we're not alone in granting waivers from education laws. But it's probably safe to say we're leading the pack there.
so how did we get here well waivers have been part of the
Speaker 50
28:50
legislative lexicon in Arkansas for about a quarter century now it started in 1995 when the law was passed to allow traditional school districts to become conversion charter schools and the point was that legislators wanted districts to get really creative in how they were going to improve school and school performance And so they said, you know, if you can design a system and if you need to not follow all our laws so you can be really innovative, we're going to let you do that.
Well, four years later, no
Speaker 51
29:24
traditional school had applied to be a charter school. So there was another law passed, and this allowed other organizations, usually nonprofits or universities, to create schools from scratch. and they could attract students from across state lines, they too could apply for waivers from state laws so they could be innovative. So after this was passed, you started seeing both open enrollment
and conversion charter schools popping up around the state. So that pretty much remained the only two ways you could get waivers from education laws until 2013. And that was the year we passed our school of innovation law. And schools of innovation looked a lot like conversion charters in that there was a lot of planning it was a traditional school they had to get buy-in from their constituents and the purpose again was to improve school performance and student performance so 2015 we got another waiver pathway and
this one differed from the others because the others all really focused on how are we going to improve our kids performance this one was a little bit more about leveling the playing field so this law said that if you were a school district and a charter school attracted a student from your district to their charter school then you could apply for any of the same waivers that that charter school was operating under and that proved to be quite a popular pathway and I'll show you that in a little bit but then our most recent
legislative session Act 815 was passed and that amended Act 1240 and really expanded the access for traditional schools to get waivers even more because this law changed the language so that any public school district can apply for any waiver that's held by any charter school in the state. So that really opens the doors more than it had been even with Act 1240. So the first half of your report, I've gone through and given you a pretty detailed legislative
history of each charter pathway I've described application processes I've described or talked about how long you can get waivers so I'm not going to go through all of that detail during this presentation but I did want to quickly go through recent trends for each of the pathways just so you could get a sense of how these are changing over the years so open enrollment charter schools are still growing quite a bit and when the law was first passed back in 1999 there was actually a cap placed on how many charter schools that was three charter
schools per congressional district over the years that cap went away now we operate under a rolling cap so essentially there is no cap because every time we get close to it the cap goes up the other thing
Speaker 50
32:18
that's changed though is now a charter can not just be one school but it can be a whole system so it can open up other schools under its same charter so now we have not counting the Excel Center which caters to adults we have 25 charter open enrollment charter school systems operating almost 60 individual schools
in the state and most of those
Speaker 51
32:40
are clustered in Central Arkansas and Northwest Arkansas and those schools operate under an average 70 plus waivers from Arkansas's laws. Charter and conversion charter schools have also grown over the years, not as dramatically as the open enrollment charters, and they don't operate under nearly as many waivers. So we've averaged about 30 conversion charters
each year for the last few years, and they operate between 20 to 25 waivers. schools of innovation have been popular they're newer remember but we now have about 40 schools of innovation operating around the state and they you'll see operate under far fewer waivers than even conversion charter schools so they average about eight waivers apiece and then this is where you're going to see the real growth is the act 1240 schools and you can see we started
out with nine districts back in the first year that we had act 1240 schools that's grown to I'm sorry 32 districts operating under nine waivers that's grown to almost a thousand schools and I'm sorry that was 32 schools back then and 988 schools within the districts that are operating under about five waivers a piece and as I said we've now got act 815 we've got 329 of our
districts already operating under waivers so there probably won't be a lot of growth in numbers of districts because they're just not there but there may be access to a lot more waivers for districts that they can look at and apply for if they think it will be helpful now the division offers guidance to districts or organizations or school districts that are considering applying for waivers and recommends pathways regarding on what the district's needs are so if districts are really wanting to plan some new innovative school
setting for their students they're directed toward the either the district conversion charter pathway or the school of innovation pathway it takes about 18 months to go through that application process and and have approval now for schools that an unanticipated issue arises so maybe their media library specialist is quit they can't find another licensed one in the area so instead of being at risk of getting cited or probation status in terms of
accreditation they can come apply for a 1240 waiver and be okay for that for the year so those those are the pathways and like I said there's more detail on each of those in your report I did want to spend some time looking a little deeper into just what describing what the pathways are and do so I did some analysis to try to look at this through the lens of both equity and adequacy. So let me tell you real briefly how I did this. I pulled together a data
set, and I used the 17-18 school year, because that was the year all of my data points were available when I was doing the analysis. And I wanted to look at schools in terms of whether they had waivers or didn't have waivers, and did it make a difference in performance, or was there a difference in performance, or was there any difference in spending patterns? And so I thought to do that it would be fair to look at schools that had been operating under waivers for at least two years so I went through all the schools figured out which ones had had their waivers for at least two years and I counted like
before August I mean October 31st of that initial school year and then every other school I called a no waiver
Speaker 50
36:45
school so my no waiver schools include schools that really didn't don't didn't have waivers that year or had just been operating under them
Speaker 51
36:52
a year for a year and there are one or two charter schools that had just opened that year and so I counted them since they hadn't been open two years as a no waiver school so that left me 850 schools that year that
fell into my no waiver category then I paired that with enrollment data demographic data accountability measure data and expenditure data to get this better sense of what was going on and then I also thought well it may not just be having waivers it may be having certain kinds of waivers so I created six categories or five categories of waivers and this was my grouping so it's not Desi's or and somebody else might you know categorize these differently
but basically I looked at if it was a waiver from anything to do with curriculum or material being taught I called it a curriculum waiver I also had teacher paying qualifications waivers teacher work environment waivers student services waivers and administration waivers and I'll go I'll describe these little better as we go through the analyses so there are two
Speaker 50
38:03
ways to look at this data every graph I show you will be this is what happened between those
schools in the 17-18 school year and so there's value in knowing exactly you know, yeah, this is what happened. But I also wanted to look and
Speaker 51
38:19
see, well, are these patterns that might repeat themselves? So to do that, I looked, tested for statistical significance, and trying to make this not too wonky or tedious, every time you see a graph with blue and white bars, that means that's what happened in 2017-18. And then every time you see that there's some
red and orange bars, that means there's statistical significance. And so that's a pattern that indeed might show up again, or is likely to show up again. And I found these using a statistical process called crosstabs and tested with chi-square. And I've got all that kind of spelled out in appendix A of your
Speaker 50
39:03
report, and I'll be glad to answer questions, but I'm not going to do a statistics lesson this time. I did hold it to the, it needed to meet the 95%
Speaker 51
39:14
confidence threshold, so that means we're 95% confidence that, yeah, this pattern would hold through time and time again. Okay, so let's get going. The first thing I looked at was, you know, what do these goals with waivers look like? And I was a little surprised because it was not one of your typical patterns, I didn't think. So the schools in 1718 that had had waivers for two years tended to be larger schools. They tended to have fewer students qualifying for free and reduced lunch,
and they tended to have larger percentages of white students in their populations. And when you look back at early schools getting waivers, It does make sense that the waivers aren't really targeted at a specific set because some of our early open enrollment charters were House Hall, which is northwest Arkansas, mostly white, very little poverty. In Little Rock, you had Covenant Keepers, which was the exact opposite. If you look at conversion charters, you have the high school in Blytheville that's a new tech high school.
the larger school, or you
Speaker 50
40:23
might have Minor Academy and Bauxite, which is a small ALE school. So all kinds of schools were getting waivers, and indeed now all kinds of schools have
Speaker 51
40:33
waivers. So the first thing I looked at performance-wise, and I'll tell you how I looked at performance, I divided schools up into whether they had gotten above-average scores or below-average scores on three different measures. The ESSA school index score, which is that overarching index score that school's grades are based on.
Then I looked at two components of that. The weighted achievement scores, which is based on test scores, giving schools a little bit more weight for those higher scores. And then at growth scores, which are also based on test scores, but compare students' performance based on their past performances. So those were the three measures I looked at. And you can see that in 1718, the schools without the waivers were slightly more likely to achieve those above-average scores, although, if you'll notice, these bars are all blue and white, so this was not a statistical significant finding.
It could be, you know, just a matter of that's how the cards felt that time. However, knowing that performance is closely correlated with poverty levels, I did want to control for free and reduced lunch counts. And when I did that and looked just in that set of high-poverty schools, so schools with above-average free and reduced lunch populations, I did find statistical difference. And the schools without waivers were twice as likely to get an above-average score
than the schools with waivers in terms of the SS school index, and about a third more likely when it came to achievement. So the first set or category of waivers I've wanted to look at were those having to do with curriculum. And I had 92 schools with at least one of these waivers, and these included things like not having to offer a gifted and talented program or not having to teach any or all of the required 38.
So anybody who had a waiver that was in that kind of category counted as a waiver school. Everybody else was in no waiver school. So again, the pattern was kind of similar to what we just saw. And again,
Speaker 50
42:52
these findings were not statistically significant. Yet, when I got
Speaker 51
42:55
down to just the high-poverty schools, again, it was significant with the schools without waivers more likely to get those above-average scores than the schools with the waivers. Next, I looked at schools with waivers that had to do with teacher pay and licensure.
And there were 147 schools that had waivers, or at least one waiver of this type. And there were also individual waivers. These are all waivers that were gained through one of the pathways that I described. There are also individual waivers that are given to teachers that I did not include in this data. and that year there were about 2,200 teachers in the state that were teaching on either what was called an additional licensure plan which meant they were a licensed teacher but they might be licensed in math and their school needed
them to teach chemistry or there were another about 825 that year that were working as long-term substitutes so who were not licensed at all but had the waiver so that they could teach so again the differences for schools that had those kind of waivers versus those that didn't weren't great big but and neither were they statistically significant so it could be a matter of chance but again
when you look among those high poverty schools you find the difference is statistically significant though the gaps are still pretty small and I don't know if that's because there are all these other teachers out there and that might muddy the data or it may be that this is just how it is. So the next category of waivers I looked at I called teacher work environment waivers and these were waivers from laws from things that might affect how a teacher feels about coming to work each day. So things from like class size laws
or teacher fair dismissal laws or the supplemental money for instructional materials. So anything that
Speaker 50
45:00
a teacher might go, hmm, you know, could be better. So in this one I was surprised because I did find larger gaps between schools without
Speaker 51
45:11
those waivers being much more likely to get those above-average scores than the schools with the waivers. And the other interesting thing was that even across all schools these findings were
statistically significant on the SS school index and the achievement measures. Then when you look in that high poverty band of schools I thought this was interesting because it's significant across the board with every indicator but if you look at the SS school index in high poverty schools the ones without the waivers were four times as likely to get an above average score than the schools with the waivers next I
Speaker 59
45:55
looked at a group of waivers that I called
Speaker 51
45:58
student service waivers so these are waivers that I thought would affect students more than than teachers maybe and there were 48 schools that had one of these waivers and these were things from like not having a school health program not having a media library services and again the gaps were not as big as with the teacher work environment waivers but fairly significant and again across the board these were significant for all schools on all three measures
with the schools without waivers and tending to perform a little better interesting thing with this measure is that when I looked at control for the free and reduced lunch there was only one indicator in the high poverty schools that proved to be statistically significant and that was on this the school index score the other two measures however proved to be statistically significant in the low poverty schools and with the same pattern of the no
Speaker 50
47:01
waiver schools performing better so i don't really know what that means but
there's something interesting going on there the last
Speaker 51
47:09
set of waivers i looked at were administrative type waivers and there were 62 schools that had one of these and these are waivers from laws of having to have a full-time principal having your superintendent participate in
Speaker 50
47:24
a superintendent mentoring program and I was surprised because I really didn't think these would make a lot of difference so no offense to any administrators out there but they
actually did for there were some big gaps
Speaker 51
47:38
and again they all proved to be statistically significant with the no waiver schools outperforming the waiver the ones with waivers. And that held true when looking at the high poverty schools. And you might see something really interesting on this chart. High poverty schools with these waivers did not score above average on either the SIS school index or the achievement scores. So I had one other hypothesis that I wanted to look at
with these waivers. And the thought being that Well, there are three waiver pathways that the organizers and administrators and educators
Speaker 50
48:18
are really having to sit down and be very thoughtful and spend a long time planning and have justifications for the waivers they're asking for. So maybe these are producing higher scores than the other schools. And my hypothesis was not proven with my analysis because it's actually the Act 1240 schools that,
Speaker 51
48:41
and these are their average scores, had a tiny bit better scores than the other three pathways and performed about the same as schools without waivers. I also wanted to look at what's happening with expenditures, and when I did that, I used three measures. I looked at average teacher salaries, which in my school are reported not at the school level, but at the district level.
So I'm not getting quite as fine of analysis as everything else. I was able to get data at the school level. But you still see that schools without waivers tend to spend a few hundred dollars more than schools with waivers on teacher salaries, even though it's at that district level. And while this did not prove to be statistically significant, it missed it by that much. because you look for a coefficient of 0.05 for that 95% confidence level,
this had a coefficient of 0.056. And I was tempted to cheat and say it was, but it didn't meet my threshold. Per pupil instructional expenditure, schools with waivers tended to spend less on instructional expenditures, though they tended to spend more when it came to total per pupil expenditure. And I controlled both of all of these analyses with not only with
Speaker 50
50:09
free and reduced lunch but also with the school size because we know from Nell's resource allocation reports that she'll be giving come up and
Speaker 51
50:19
that she's given in the past that larger schools tend to have more efficiencies and so their expenditures per student tend to be less.
So when I controlled for those, I did find some statistical significance. It mirrored these patterns. And I'm just not going to show you all nine charts, but there was some statistical significance when you got down to controlling for larger schools and high-poverty schools. So the other reason that it's interesting to think about waivers in terms of expenditures is there are a number of line items on the the adequacy matrix that these laws that schools are getting waivers from touch and I've listed
those here in your report I've got the whole matrix and I've highlighted the items so until this year there's never been any kind of condition given like well okay if you want to waiver from media library specialists that's fine mind, we're going to adjust the funding to reflect that. That's never, ever happened. But this year, in December, DESI issued an emergency rule that has to do with that $60 million pot of money to help schools reach the higher minimum teacher salary that's going up $4,000
over the next four years. And so this emergency rule said that if you have a waiver from the minimum teacher salary law you don't have access to this money so that was a real shift that I've not seen before and when I looked through the data it looked to me that most all charter open enrollment charter schools do have that waiver but there were less than a handful of school districts that I could find that had that waiver so also look coming back to waivers this year and all those
10,000 waivers there is one that every school district that's operating under a waiver does have and I think it was representative Lowry two years ago he said you know it's worth looking at this because if there's a school that or a law that everyone's getting a waiver from you know it may be worth looking at that law and this waiver was for 610-106 and it's that law that says you got to start somewhere in those that week where August 20 August 19th falls and when
that law was first passed apparently it worked with the calendar for about 10 15 years but recently the calendars such that it's a really difficult for schools to meet that start date and I think align their first semesters with winter breaks so many many many of the Act 1240 waivers that have come before the State Board have been for this law and in fact when I remove this waiver from my analyses for this school year the number of districts that are
operating under waivers falls to only 118 with only about 500 schools so there are a lot of schools that are operating under this waiver only so if If you remember at that chart back at the beginning where I showed you that Act 1240s tend to operate under about five waivers, that may be artificially low because there's so many that are just operating under this waiver. So that
Speaker 50
53:53
brings me to the end of my presentation, and I'll be glad to take questions.
Speaker 62
54:00
Okay, let's see. Senator Sturge. Thank you,
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
54:05
Madam Chair. Julie, I have just a couple to make sure I understand this right as far as how we're counting. So you said beforehand there was about 3,000 waivers. Now there's 10,000. Is that schools or is that district-wide? Because I'm trying to figure out then how is it being counted. Because sometimes they request a waiver from a certain law or a certain piece or requirement or whatever, but then they have to request a waiver from the rules themselves.
Speaker 51
54:30
So sometimes they're double counted. Right. And that was true back then. Both the 3,000 and the 10,000 numbers are truly just the number of waivers that are granted. Okay. And, you know, and it gets even more complicated than that because sometimes waivers are granted for very specific, you know, 21-0, blah, blah, blah, AEC, you know, or it could be for the health statute. So, and especially that's true with curriculum and the curriculum stand, or the standards for accreditation. There's some that are, you know, we're just not going to, we don't want to teach oral comms, so we're getting a waiver from that.
Or the whole high school curriculum, we're going to get a waiver from that just to be safe. It doesn't mean they're not doing it. So it's really hard to quantify even the waivers. But the spreadsheet lists over 10,000 waivers that are out there this year. Okay, and my other question was this last slide that
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
55:24
you had just before this the law with the most waivers and school start date I guess my question
falls along the same lines I'd like to know if you can find or if you can tell us as far as
one particular waiver or two or three that 90% of the schools are using or 90% of the schools are requesting because to me I'll just be honest with you if 200 and School districts out of 230 are using it. Maybe it needs to be a change in the law not necessarily the waiver process So is there a few waivers out there that you can give us or can you go back and research and tell us? Yeah, these five are being requested the
Speaker 51
56:04
most often. Well, I've got and I can go back and find the next two I did list the next three in the report on page 13
I did not show that in the presentation. Okay and these three 617.902 and 617.309 are licensure related to teacher licensure. And then that middle one is the standard
Speaker 50
56:27
for accreditation that deals with hiring a licensed library media specialist. Okay. Thank you,
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
56:34
ma'am. Thank you, ma'am chair.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
56:43
Okay. Senator Johnson. thank you
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
56:49
madam chair Julie thank you for all the work you put into this I had kind of a question about methodology you were obviously comparing schools with waivers against those without waivers and obviously the ones that didn't need a waiver there was something okay about their situation vis-a-vis the regs uh if you do you have a way to or did you consider maybe comparing
schools before waivers and after waivers of that that group just so we could see the effectiveness of the program rather than you know comparing uh you know the just i'm not saying that this is not a good analysis i'm saying it might even be more helpful to have the analysis of because there had to been a reason for the waiver and and see was that effective you know within that particular universe of schools that sought them and that's a
Speaker 50
57:50
good question i did do something similar to that
not exactly like that and we weren't really getting um a lot of statistical significance But I
Speaker 49
57:59
looked at these same schools and looked at changes in these performance indicators over a year's time. And I probably should have gone back several years, and maybe
Speaker 51
58:08
I would have seen more differences. But that would be a worthwhile analysis, and I
Speaker 49
58:14
agree that would be a good way to look at it. Well, again, I'm not telling you
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
58:21
to go back to your computer and start all over again.
But from what you've gathered, I just wondered if that might be a helpful tool for us to analyze. And, again, when you throw waivers into one big bucket, that's maybe not a fair thing. As they say, there are waivers and then there are waivers, you know. Something that might be, you know, insignificant in the whole scheme of things and other things are very significant in the whole scheme of things. But if you could just look at that long term, not go back today and start crunching again, but i think that might be helpful thank you again thank you madam chair
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
59:01
representative kavanaugh thank you madam chair um my question is do we know how many high poverty schools that we have
Speaker 85
59:15
do you happen to know the number oh that's a good question i know that the
Speaker 51
59:21
when i divided the median was right at 63% which was a little bit higher than when I presented I did the same kind of or similar analysis when I did academic standards and there it was
62% so any school with for these purposes any school with above 63% poverty would be considered high poverty and I could go back and look at my
Speaker 49
59:45
analyses and get that exact number of how many schools I'm just curious about how many schools
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
59:52
that we actually now are considered high poverty schools for this because there's significant differences in these waivers and the performance in certain areas and so it'd be interesting to try to find out is it
because of the waiver or is it because it's a high poverty and so that's what you'd kind
Speaker 50
1:00:11
of like to well and that's why I did look within just that band of high-poverty schools, because you are looking at similar schools there, and
Speaker 51
1:00:20
seeing those differences. So, but it doesn't say, sorry, it does not mean that the waivers are causing the change in performance. There could be something that's, you know, affecting both things, or it could
Speaker 49
1:00:32
be that these types of schools with lower performance were more likely to ask for waivers.
And I can't answer that with this analysis. May I have
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
1:00:41
a follow-up, Madam Chair? Also, were you able to find out if a
school needed a waiver on an emergency? We were talking about that they couldn't find someone to fill a position that was certified that they got a waiver to do this. In your analysis, were you able to find out if that school ever stopped using that waiver,
Speaker 51
1:01:05
or it just continued on? Well, waivers are, and it depends on which waiver pathway you've gone through,
but there are limitations to how long waivers can last. So I did not go through and check specific schools, but you can see in the data set, and I did this two different ways. In 2018, that summer, I went through each school on my school info site and downloaded waivers. Right before this, I got the full data set from ADE, and you have to be careful with it because it's active waiver, so you
Speaker 49
1:01:45
lose some of that past history.
So luckily I've gotten my data in 2018. But schools do fall off that list as their waivers expire, unless they come back and get them renewed. And that's one of
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
1:01:58
my curiosity was, if they ask for a certain waiver, and after it's expired, do they ask for it again and
Speaker 85
1:02:06
again and again? A lot of times they do. I couldn't tell you percentage-wise how often that happens, but
Speaker 51
1:02:13
I know from watching state board meetings that that happens.
And especially with schools that are like open enrollment charter schools, they're going to renew their waivers under their
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:02:38
charter. Thank you. thank you madam chair miss Holt for
the waivers I think maybe one of the major points of the waivers was to impact equality or equity I'm not sure which
one is the correct one to use at this point but based on the findings that that you just presented us can you draw any conclusions on whether or not the waivers have had either a negative or positives positive effect on equity do
you know enough to answer that kind of question I
Speaker 85
1:03:17
don't I don't think I can draw any specific conclusions about that i guess the one thing when i look at the data and i see
Speaker 51
1:03:28
especially among the high poverty schools that those differences are significant and like i said i don't know that you can or i can't say from this point without really you know going and doing on the field or in the field work and seeing what's happening saying what's causing what But there wasn't any place where waivers were associated with higher performance. So I guess that would make me question if there are not other means of going about improving student performance
and addressing equity problems other than granting waivers. That appears to be,
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:04:09
and I want to be careful because I know we've not done a deep
dive, that appears to be a logical statement based on what we've been presented. And what I just want us to consider is no matter what you feel about waivers, one way or the other, to ask ourselves, are we doing what we need to do to reach equity?
Because we talk a great deal about adequacy, but there is an equity component that we have not been addressing, and I just want us to think about that. because so many times rather than our addressing the real issues we reach for you know something else that might work and we don't know if it will or not but the other question I have um can you just what what is it for which you cannot get a waiver
Speaker 51
1:05:02
there and I've got these and sometimes it varies with the pathway but there are some special education laws you can't get
waivers from there's some civil rights laws you can't get waivers from some federal requirements that you can't get waivers from um but other than that it's
Speaker 97
1:05:18
a but our state laws pretty much that's we
Speaker 51
1:05:22
can right and of course school districts you know have have been more limited because um until act 1240 it was only by creating one of the either conversion or school of innovation Act 1240 gave them access to a few more waivers, and I haven't looked to see how much Act 815 will expand that,
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:05:46
expansion. And the next question is, would you explain to me again what I characterize, my words about the just, it seems like the just-in-case-I-need-it waiver. You said something about just to be safe. maybe a district might not need all the waivers say regarding a curriculum issue but they might apply for it anyway and that's my example about the curriculum you didn't say that just explain to me about what that means again because I thought I was pretty much up on the
waivers but it seems like
Speaker 55
1:06:20
there's a just in case I need it well and this is from you
Speaker 51
1:06:26
know going back several years of watching state board meetings of waiver applications and and I think the department or DESE and state board work to get define those waivers as narrowly as possible I think sometimes there's an attitude well if I'm going to ask for a curriculum waiver maybe and
and there are school schools out there that are have waivers from all of section nine in the standards for accreditation or the former standards for accreditation and that was the whole you know curriculum section and standards so and they have
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:07:02
waivers for the entire section nine there yeah there's
Speaker 51
1:07:05
some that do and then there's some that are very specific and I would imagine you know
Speaker 49
1:07:13
that they're teaching most of of the courses but it just gives them that flexibility I guess from
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:07:19
year to year. Okay. Thank you,
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
1:07:29
Madam Chair. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you for the presentation. I'm way over here. I moved on you. It's very informative. And this question I HAVE IS RELATED TO SOME OF THE WAIVERS IN CURRICULUM.
ARE ANY OF THESE RELATED TO, I KNOW SOME OF OUR SCHOOLS ARE TRYING TO DO MORE OF THE TECHNICAL PUSH EARLIER ON AND THEY'RE WORKING WITH SOME OF THE COMMUNITY COLLEGES AS FAR AS SOME OF THE REQUIREMENTS TO GRADUATE. ARE ANY OF THESE WAIVERS RELATED TO THEM TRYING
Speaker 50
1:08:11
TO DO THAT? There's a waiver that I included that is from a rule regarding technical centers.
And I'll be honest, I haven't read completely
Speaker 49
1:08:24
what all that rule says a school should or should not do. But that one jumps, it comes to the top of my head. But you're saying there's just like one of those or something? Well, there's one rule. There
Speaker 111
1:08:37
may be more than, I can't remember how
Speaker 51
1:08:39
many waivers were from that rule, but that came up in my list of waivers. Thank you. So could
Speaker 50
1:08:54
I don't think I quite heard that. The waiver that I could think of that has to do
Speaker 51
1:09:02
with CTE or technical education was there's a rule over technical centers or about technical centers with schools, and there are some waivers from that law. And I can't tell you who has those waivers or exactly how many. So it's more like career centers? The two-year colleges? Yeah, and I would have
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
1:09:25
Okay. All right. Thank you. Let me see. Senator Hammer. Thank you, Madam Chair. Let me ask you first of all about a statement that's in bold print. It's on page 2, and it says currently more than 1,000 public schools in Arkansas operate under more than 10,000 waivers from the state laws and rules. Those 1,000 public schools, there's how many public school
Speaker 85
1:09:53
districts, 235? 235 public school districts, yes.
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
1:09:55
Okay. Okay, so the difference between the 235 and the 1,000, can you explain that to me, what that's comprised of? Well,
Speaker 91
1:10:04
there are over 1,000, and I don't have an exact
Speaker 50
1:10:09
count. The year I did, the 17-18, there were 10,000, I mean 1,029 schools that year. Usually we are working with district-level data, and this working with school-level data has been very interesting because there's a lot more fluctuation
Speaker 51
1:10:24
from year to year, whether a school's there or not, than I ever imagined.
So I don't know the exact number this year, but I know they're well over,
Speaker 49
1:10:37
I would guess about 1,050 individual schools out there this year. All right, so
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
1:10:43
like take Benton, for example. You've got the senior high, junior high, middle school, four elementaries. so that's off the top of my head six or seven schools there's 235 districts but there could be the seven schools that go in to make up the thousand is that the way you're getting at that
thousand number correct so a district could ask for a waiver for one particular school within its district that wouldn't apply to the other
Speaker 50
1:11:12
schools within its district that could be true and the the department does provide information about waivers at that school level now so we can see a lot more what's
Speaker 51
1:11:22
going on so a district of i mean a conversion charter school those districts would be applicable to that school to act 1240 waivers in most cases although i saw a few where
Speaker 49
1:11:35
it's not applied to every school in the district but usually if you have an act 1240 waiver that applies to every school in the district and do schools
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
1:11:44
ever ask to be removed from the waiver that they asked for if it didn't produce the results that they thought it was going to as far as when they initially asked for that waiver
Speaker 50
1:11:57
i'm not aware in the department or the division may be of being asked to be
Speaker 49
1:12:02
removed from a waiver but just because you have a waiver you
don't have to use it and you they may not come and ask for it to be renewed
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
1:12:11
okay and last thing is could you get me a list of the thousand schools and what the waivers were that they asked for or
Speaker 50
1:12:20
I can give you the list with the ones that they are up they have they may have asked for some that worked that they weren't granted but I
Speaker 49
1:12:28
can definitely give you the list and the ones that they're operating under if you're gonna do that
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
1:12:32
I'd like to know how many waivers were asked for and
denied and if reasons for why they were denied and I'd talk offline to develop that thought. Okay. All right. Thank you. Julie, do we have
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
1:12:45
a list of all 10,000 of those waivers? Yes. Can we get that? And I think that's something that would be beneficial to us. We're all sitting here thinking about 10,000 waivers. What are they? So if you could just get that to Michelle and she'll get it out to us. Thank you.
Speaker 127
1:13:06
representative evans thank you madam chair and julie as always
Representative Brian S. Evans
Unverified
1:13:14
very well done very thorough little digging a little deeper but yet a higher level question than senator hammer asked i would like to see out of curiosity not by school but just by district 235 plus your charters a list of each district and just the number of waivers that that district has okay
i really don't want to read through 10 000 different waivers
Speaker 132
1:13:49
it's good reading but we want you to so i'll send that to michelle as well in case other people want that if we could get that please yes i will gladly
Speaker 136
1:14:11
thank you representative birch thank you madam chair and i may have i may be getting this from several different places what
i was trying to do is find out whether you there's standard waivers so i'm really wondering about the charter schools if there is a block of waivers that you expect based on your research to come whenever
Speaker 137
1:14:32
a charter school is in operation that's a
Speaker 49
1:14:36
good question and I haven't really tried to divide the schools out so much that way but the charter schools I do know tend to have the teacher licensure or teacher
pay type waivers um they frequently or more frequently probably have waivers from things like gifted and talented or library media specialist um that kind of thing but i could pull waivers specific to open enrollment charter schools and and look at that more specifically for you i
Speaker 136
1:15:08
would really appreciate that thank you
Speaker 143
1:15:17
I'm sorry were you finished thank you representative Murdoch thank you madam chair thank you for your
Speaker 144
1:15:35
report as well well done along the lines of the performance related the outcomes of waivers initially like you said when I I brought 1244 to level the playing field, and it was in a direct reaction to, in my area, where I represent KIPP Charter, KIPP Delta,
was really affecting our public schools in our area, and the specter was that. it was because of these flexibilities and these things that they could do with these populations that I represented. And they could do them so much better because of those flexibilities or those waivers. And so it became pretty simple to me to say, okay, well, if it works for them, it should work for public schools as well. So, but since then,
so from your data that you report, and as I look at performance, even of charter schools, and specifically Kip Delta. The correlation between the waivers and the flexibility and the outcomes of what we've seen from your research, it seems to me that it's not necessarily a correlation here now that says that those flexibilities have yielded the performance
uptick that we thought may be. Is that an accurate assessment of what I'm looking at?
Speaker 51
1:17:09
That doesn't show up. That relationship does not show up in this
Speaker 144
1:17:16
analysis. Obviously, my reaction then was to something I was seeing happening and I was being told and me not being an educator was being told that that form of delivery that allowed for the waivers or the
flexibilities was this is the way and they were obviously getting a lot of our population from various public schools in the area so there was a reaction now as we go forward I mean I'm not stuck to anything enough that if it's not performing if it's not proving to be what you intended it to be then one thing was population, another thing is performance, right? So we may have solved the population
deal by giving the access maybe, but I'm certainly interested to continue to see how these flexibilities, and I'll be interested because I have some, there's other people in the room that I know believe in the flexibilities and that form of delivery and to see how that can affect specifically those districts that I represent the impoverished and some of the lower performing districts that we've
and we're still trying to close that gap. So anyway, I thought I was reading that that way and I wanted to hear that from you but I'd be interested to see what's a better way of changing performance or do you have an
Speaker 50
1:18:51
opinion on that? Well, you know, I can't have an opinion. You can't give me your opinion. And so I also want to be careful saying that I'm showing the relationships. I'm not saying one thing is causing another in
Speaker 49
1:19:04
this. You know, I think there's a relationship that merits closer looking at and further study.
But I'm carefully not saying that one thing is causing
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:19:25
the other. Thank you. Senator Elliott. Madam Chair, I just have two questions. One,
Ms. Hote, has to do with the GT gifted and talented programs. I think heretofore charter schools have traditionally gotten waivers for GT.
But I don't think that's ever given a green light to our traditional public schools to forego GT. So now, is it because of Act 1240, or is there some other reason that a school district can get a waiver from having a gifted and talented program? Do you know the answer to
that? well it would be because of
Speaker 53
1:20:15
act 1240 so if there were a charter school
Speaker 51
1:20:19
that drew students that had that waiver i'll i'll have to look in this schools in this because i considered all schools as equal whether they were open enrollment or conversion so i was kind of trying to be blind to that difference when i was looking at what's happening with waivers and not waivers so i i'm not sure how many um gte waivers were achieved
Speaker 55
1:20:43
either through the act of 40 um i don't think there were any in the conversion or or i don't think there were either
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:20:51
because of an equity issue if nothing else and this could probably
even be an equality issue because if we if we have always required school districts to have a gt program um and it's it's been i know there's been a question in charter schools that you don't have a GT program how is that equitable or and I mean they're not required to be but at least within the charter realm there should be a question of how is this equitable when you have this group of students you are not serving at all so I want us to understand if we have
exacerbated an equity or equality issue with with with the waiver now that it can go throughout even the traditional schools um and my other question has to do with um what you said about the emergency rule i didn't quite understand what you said about the emergency rule regarding the 60 million dollar pot of money that people are not um eligible for if they are something something if they have a waiver from the teach
Speaker 51
1:21:58
minimum teacher salary law if they had a waiver from
Speaker 50
1:22:03
the minimum teacher salary. So if they have gotten a waiver that says they don't have to pay the minimum teacher salary, then they don't have
Speaker 51
1:22:11
access to that money to help increase teacher
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:22:17
salaries. Wait, I'm not. Okay, so if I can't, I assume people are getting a waiver because they're saying they can't meet the law. Right? And then we've said, if you can't meet the law, you're not going to get any help meeting the law. is
Speaker 59
1:22:37
don't know if that was um spurred because somebody did ask
to do that and wanted to increase their teacher wave i don't i don't know what spurred
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:22:45
the rule i just know okay okay then i'll explore that i guess later with the department of education because i truly don't understand that one and i'll just say this is not a question i just want to say that I've watched the board meetings and one of the most common requests has been for library media specialists and that happens time and time again and I can't for the life of me
think of a time where we need library media specialists than right now so I think we need to think seriously about that in a time when information is coming at us that is a function of the library media specialists to help students learn to think and navigate through all of the media that's coming at them and how to evaluate a source and learn how to think about
it. And I think this is a huge denial we are heaping up on our kids.
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:23:41
Thank you, Madam Chair. Representative Niv-Dotson. Thank you, Madam
Chair. So I've got a couple of different questions, but the – I guess in your analysis overall, these waivers that – are they primarily for charter schools or are they primarily – I mean, is this a breakdown of the 10,000 or so waivers that we've got?
Do they largely go for districts, individual schools within districts, or open enrollment charter
Speaker 51
1:24:24
schools? Well, in those graphs at the beginning, I showed you, open enrollment charter schools operate under the most waivers. They, on average, have about 70. Traditional schools have far fewer waivers. So, but when I was looking at some of
Speaker 49
1:24:42
these categories and I had 147 schools, that's going to be both types of schools.
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:24:48
So, I guess of the traditional ones, are they for individual schools or are they for the
Speaker 54
1:24:55
whole district primarily? Well, it depends on which pathway the waiver was granted. so if
Speaker 51
1:25:01
it was a 1240 a district applies for it and they can have all of their schools and in most cases all of their schools can operate under that same waiver but if it's a school of innovation then that particular school or a conversion charter school that
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:25:17
specific school so I guess if if a
charter school I mean if they're not performing or operating they I mean we can close them down for for not performing correctly but what do we do if an individual school has a waiver and is operating like a school of innovation
Speaker 51
1:25:38
or something like that, do they get shut down or? The state board does get reports back on most of these waiver pathways. And so they do monitor what's happening. When there's a school of innovation
and there have been justifications or a charter school and there's a charter, so an agreement, I think there's more authority for the state to say you know these things need
Speaker 50
1:26:02
to be happening because you said this is why you're doing this that's not always as much of the case with Act 1240 though I think in recent years the state board has
Speaker 51
1:26:13
tried to say okay well you know why do you want this waiver there needs to be justification and then we want you to come back and tell us how what kind of impact that
waiver is having so I think there is some
Speaker 54
1:26:26
definitely some follow-up that goes on
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:26:29
with those so if a district created a school of innovation or whatever it is specifically with a waiver and that waiver gets revoked the district
would just reabsorb the school into just a traditional regular school or it would
Speaker 50
1:26:44
start operating it's already it's still part of the district it gets to operate a little bit differently but if you know and I don't know of any instances where
Speaker 51
1:26:55
the state said you can't be a school of innovation anymore there may be some instances where schools said you know this it's hard to go through all these steps to get this so we're just gonna go back to being a conversion charter school or now we have Act 1240 waivers so
Speaker 55
1:27:13
we can just use those so there may be some instances where schools
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:27:18
on their own decide not to continue may have to ask the department
a little bit more in depth on that and then finally it goes back to a question of measuring if we're measuring things I mean I think what
Senator Johnson said was kind of critical if we've got to if we're measuring waivers and non waivers it may not be a realistic measurement on the effectiveness of waivers if we're not looking at how who was getting the waivers who has the waivers now how they were doing before they got the waiver you kind of have to have that measurement in there and is the waiver actually fulfilling the intended purpose that it was there for so is there any measurement or performance measurements that we're doing like if a if a school
is getting a waiver to be a more of a CTE type school that's career pathways that are specific like that they might not be performing in all these other categories measurement wise but they may be very effective at turning out what they were intended to turn out which is students that can go to work in a particular field is there any way we're looking at that data and measuring to see how effective particular waivers are
Speaker 160
1:28:32
that may be something Desi's doing I did
not slice and dice it down to
Speaker 49
1:28:37
that level to look at I'll get together with the department
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:28:40
for all my questions on there thank you but very informative information here thank you very much okay that
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:28:53
looks like we're at the end thank you Miss Julie we appreciate all that good information and you might want to read your report it does does give us some good facts in there but this has
been a good conversation so then moving right along let me see Adrienne Breck is going to talk to us about declining enrollment and student growth funding. Miss
Speaker 163
1:29:27
Elizabeth Bynum. Two ladies. there's three
Speaker 9
1:29:40
ladies no two i'm sorry julie's leaving
Speaker 167
1:29:44
i'm elizabeth bynum with the bureau and i'm adrian beck
Speaker 168
1:30:01
also with the bureau of legislative of research, and Elizabeth and I are going to be talking today about student growth and declining enrollment funding. And as you will see in your yellow handout, these are both required topics to be reviewed as part of the adequacy study. So these funding sources
are both designed to help districts cope with incremental increases or decreases in their student population. The adequacy study oversight subcommittee noted in its 2006 report that the loss of one or even 25 students does not necessarily correlate to the reduction of a teaching position. By the same token, the addition of one or 25 students does not necessarily correlate to the addition of a teacher. So in our presentation today, we will describe how these funds are distributed and how districts and charters spend this money. So you've just
heard Julie talk about charter schools, but our report will only include open enrollment public charter schools and before we get into either of these funding sources I want to go over statewide changes in enrollment and you can spine that in chart one on page one this shows the increase in enrollment since 2011 for districts and charters overall the student count has increased by just over two percent since 2011 however the total average daily membership or ADM in
school districts has stagnated since 2014 while the total ADM and charter schools continue to increase as more charters are granted starting on page three we included state maps that look at enrollment increases and decreases over the past five years by district the first map looks at the actual number of students over time to illustrate the highest increases we use dark green and and those in red indicate the districts with the highest decreases.
And below each of the maps, you will find a list of the top five districts with the highest increases and the highest decreases. The second map on page four looks at enrollment increases and decreases by percentage of students. So this will vary a little bit from the first map. And I also want to note that even though the Jacksonville School District did not exist until 2017, we did pull out its enrollment data for the previous year so we can accurately compare that against the Pulaski County Special School District.
And most of the districts with the highest increases also had among the highest student growth payments in those last of those five years, and all the districts with the highest decreases also received declining enrollment funding in those five years as well. So moving on to student growth funding, which begins on page five. Student growth funding was first created in 1995 with Act 917. And while the calculation for determining the actual amount distributed has changed multiple times since its first creation,
student growth funding is used to provide foundation funding for new students. Since foundation funding is based on the prior year's ADM, when a district gains students, its foundation funding is not accounting for the new students. So student growth funding essentially serves as a supplement to foundation funding by filling that gap and ensuring that districts have enough in their base funding to educate each student in the current school year. And you can see a better example of that on page six with table three. so one of the recent changes to student the student growth calculation came in 2017 with
act 741 now without getting too in the weeds of that calculation the formula for student growth funding is based on quarterly changes in enrollment and you can see how that formula is calculated in more detail on page seven act 741 allows the final student growth funding amount to be calculated before the end of the fiscal year whereas previously that amount was often not finalized until July when the fiscal year ended this means that districts now have a better opportunity to spend those funds sooner
and DESE doesn't have to make quite as many adjustments to that total amount student growth funding varies from other forms of state programs for high growth districts like the facilities partnership program and ESA growth which both look at growth over time whereas student growth looks at quarterly changes in enrollment act 741 also made another change impacting student growth funding it introduced a provision that can reduce the amount of student growth funding that some districts can receive
the affected districts are those that generate enough revenue through their uniform rate of tax or urt that they do not receive any state foundation funding if any of these districts are eligible for student growth funds that student growth funding amount must be reduced by the amount of excess revenue they generate in their urt above the federal the foundation funding amount and you can see that reflected in table five on page eight there are four of these districts in 2019, Armorell, Westside and Cleburne County, Mineral Springs and Eureka Springs.
Of those four districts, three were eligible for student growth funding. Since their excess URT amount exceeded the amount of student growth funds they were eligible for, they did not receive any of those student growth funding. So another change impacting student growth funding came with Act 933 of 2017. This change specifically impacts charter schools so prior to act 933 charters that were newly opened or added new grades receive foundation funding based
on the current year ADM instead of the typical prior your ADM took and this was done to accommodate for the additional new students in these cases the charter did not receive any student growth funding since the current foundation funding was already providing for those students which again shows that student growth funding is serving as a supplement to foundation funding. With Act 933, the triggers for current year funding expanded to include existing charter schools operating under a new license in the first year of adding a new campus.
So there are now more options for charters to receive current year foundation funding and subsequently become unable to receive the student growth funds. So table six on that same page shows a number of districts and charters that receive student growth funding and the total amounts received over the past five years. In 2019, 110 districts received almost 21 million dollars in student growth funding. This is a decrease of about eight million dollars since 2017, though
the number of districts receiving student growth funds increased by nine. In the same school year, seven charters received about three million dollars in student growth funding and as you may be able to see in table six student growth funds tend to be a little unpredictable since the amount is based on quarterly changes in enrollment districts and charters that receive that funding and the amounts they receive can vary greatly this unpredictability is especially true for charter schools due to the frequent changes like adding new
campuses or grades and new charters being granted for example in 2019 13 charters receive current year foundation funding amounts due to existing charters opening again operating a new campus adding new grades or being a new charter table seven on the next page shows that districts and charters with the highest student growth payments bentonville and arkansas virtual academy had the highest which both exceeded two million dollars for charters and districts student growth payments vary from $882 in Conway to $2.2 million in Bentonville. Since student
growth funding looks at quarterly growth, this can cause a wide variance in those payment amounts. For example, Conway had a small amount of growth in one quarter, whereas Bentonville had a large growth in all of those quarters. Since its creation, student growth funding has been considered unrestricted, which means that districts and charters can spend the money however it best fits their needs. We broke down expenditures for student growth into the categories shown beginning on page nine. The categories are also the same for declining enrollment, but
Elizabeth will get into that a little bit later. So chart two on the next page shows that in 2019, regular instructional programs were the most common use of student growth funds for districts and charters. This was followed closely by operations and maintenance and student transportation regular instructional program expenses include classroom teacher salaries and instructional materials chart three on that same page shows a breakdown of student growth
expenditures over the past three years and as you can see there these types of expenditures have also been the most common over that time frame as well chart three also shows that transfers to debt service has used to be a common student growth expenditure so in past years this use of funds accounted for between 15 to between to over 30 percent of student growth expenditures they are not a traditional type of expenditure and that they are funds that are moved to a debt service account to be used for construction or maintenance payments so but once it's in that debt service
account it can't be tracked as a student growth expenditure at a later date so these trans types of transfers dropped off entirely in 2018 and DESI noted that this drop off is likely due to the fact that they have emphasized the importance of spending funds directly out of their student growth account that districts are now more aware of that need to do that additionally a change in DESI rules effective January 2019 now prohibits districts from transferring student growth funds and declining enrollment funds to another fund prior to being
so they have to be used out of either the student growth or the declining enrollment fund before they have to be sent from that fund so this allows for better tracking of those expenditures so table eight on page 11 shows the amount of student growth funding provided to districts and charters and how much of these funds charters and districts are spending this table shows that districts student growth expenditures have consistently exceeded their student growth funding for the past five years. In 2019, districts received nearly 21 million
dollars in student growth funding and spent just over 22 million. Excluding 2017, this trend is also the case for charter schools. In 2019, charters received about three million dollars in student growth funding and spent nearly five million. These trends indicate that some districts and charters have been spending from their fund balance carried over from previous years in addition to any student growth funding they're getting in the current year so this results in smaller ending fund balances being carried over at the end of the school
year and with that I will hand it over
Speaker 165
1:41:23
to Elizabeth I'm going to start by going through declining enrollment and then I'm going to discuss the ways in which declining enrollment interacts with student growth funding and special needs isolated funding but
Speaker 172
1:41:35
I want to start with the history of declining enrollment funding declining enrollment is a much newer program in Arkansas than student growth funding and it came came about as an issue during the Lakeview case the
special masters noted that a decline in students and the subsequent loss in funding does not necessarily result in a subsequent decline in the district's financial need so acts 20 and 21 of the first extraordinary session in 2006 established declining enrollment and appropriated the first funds for declining enrollment. The adequacy study oversight subcommittee in its report published in 2007 recommended further study of declining enrollment funding,
but the calculation has remained the same since that time. If you'll look at the top of page 12, table 9 is going to give you an example calculation, and And there's a few important things I want to note about this calculation. Declining enrollment takes the average of two, the two prior year ADM, subtracts the prior year ADM, and multiplies by the foundation funding amount. So the first important thing is that we're looking always at prior year ADM, we're looking
at the full year as opposed to looking at quarters like in student growth. The second important thing is that this is going to result in funding about half of the foundation funding rate for each student that the district lost. So the district lost 20 students or the declining enrollment is going to pay them the foundation rate for about 10 students. And that's a change also from student growth where we're funding a full, the full foundation rate for each student gained.
The next important thing to note, in declining enrollment, the districts are actually receiving more in foundation funding than they actually, the number of students that they are actually responsible for educating, and you can see how this plays out in Table 10. So as you all know, foundation funding is based on prior year ADM, and so when districts lose students, they are receiving more foundation funding than the number of students they're
actually responsible for educating. And then declining enrollment is providing them more money on top of that. And so what that results in is that the districts are getting about one and a half times the foundation funding rate for each student that they've lost. So you can see in Table 10 districts that are consistently losing 20 students is going receive foundation funds and declining enrollment funds that are going to add up to about 30 students next I want to go into the funding table 11 at the top
of page 13 is going to show you the total amounts that districts and charters have received over the past five years and the number of districts and charters that are receiving funds and you can see for 2019 the total amount was about $12.6 million, and that's down from a high of almost $14 million in 2016. I think one thing that's interesting to note, in 2018-19, the payments ranged from a low of $305 in declining enrollment to more than $1.1 million.
Table 12 is going to show you those five highest declining enrollment payments for 2018-19 districts and charters i think the one of the most interesting things about that table pine bluff is receiving the highest payment at more than 1.1 million and the next district receiving the second highest payment is little rock and they're receiving about half of what pine bluff is receiving in declining enrollment for that year on page 14 and chart four is going to look into
expenditures so this is showing declining enrollment expenditures for 2019 and as Adrian said this is using the same categories that Adrian used for student growth and you can see that regular instructional programs operations and maintenance and student transportation services are the main declining enrollment expenditures for 2019 if you look at chart 5 on page 15 this is going to show you the same information over three years of time so
the same categories you can see that those three categories that I mentioned that are the top spending categories have remained consistent over time but districts actually spent less a little less in these categories for 2019 and are spending a little more in other categories and like LEA indebtedness facilities acquisition and construction instructional support services and other instructional programs the final thing I want to note on expenditures is table 13 and that's going to show you the difference in the funding and
expenditures for districts and charters for the last five years you can see for 2019 and districts received about the same amount and charters received about the same amount of funding that they spent as well as I'll discuss in a minute and Adrian talked about student growth being very hard to predict and because of the interaction that I'll discuss and it's often difficult to predict which kind of funding districts will receive so that that's another
thing that may contribute to districts and waiting to spend the money they're declining enrollment funds until they're sure what kind of funding they may receive in the next year
Speaker 165
1:47:28
okay I wanted to move now and talk about the interaction between student growth and declining funding so I grew up
Speaker 172
1:47:35
in Springdale and so if you say student growth to me I think about a district like that that's experiencing high levels of growth over long periods of time and conversely when if you say declining enrollment I tend to think of
something like district like Pine Bluff or Dalloway that's receiving or that has large declines over a long period of time but what's interesting is there are a lot of districts that are kind of in the middle and it's possible for a district to qualify for declining enrollment one year and for student growth the next year so we've got an example of that on table 14 on page 16 and this is showing the Midland School District so you can see that for 14-15
and for 18-19 they're receiving declining enrollment funds but for the three years in between that they're receiving student growth funds and you can see that the amounts that they're receiving vary from you know just over forty two thousand to more than two hundred thousand so it's entirely possible for a district to receive receive student growth or declining enrollment funding and for for smaller amounts of decline or growth in their ADM just as a school district may be eligible for one funding one type of
funding the next year and another type of funding or one type of funding one year and another type the next year because of the difference in the formulas it's in it's possible for a district to be eligible for both kinds of funding in the same year and so table 15 is going to show you the number of districts in the past five years that have been eligible for both kinds of funding state statute does prohibit the districts from receiving both kinds of funding so each of these districts is only going to receive one or the other but they're eligible for these numbers of districts are eligible for both and
DESE rules specify that the DESE awards whichever funding is going to give the district the greatest amount I want to talk briefly now about the interaction between declining and special needs isolated funding, and Adrian covered special needs isolated funding in a separate report in October, so I'm not going to get into any detail about that. But districts are prohibited from receiving both special needs isolated and declining enrollment funding. So table 16 on the last page of your report will show you the number of districts that
have been eligible for both of those types of funding over the past five years. And in nearly all cases here, this is going to result in the district getting special needs isolated funding because that's going to provide the district more funds. That concludes our prepared remarks, and we're happy to take some questions. Okay. And thank you
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:50:22
very much, ladies. Senator Starch. Thank you, Madam Chair. I just
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
1:50:29
had a quick question about that last point that you just made.
Sure. Under DESE rules, you said that they could not receive special isolated and declining enrollment at the same time. Right. Although, if it makes sense, if they're an isolated school, a very rural area, they're most likely going to experience some period of declining enrollment based on whatever other factors they're in. So I guess my question is, and this might be a department question, I don't know, But how then do we rectify as far as the growth funding and declining enrollment funding are not as, how would I put it, restricted as special needs isolated funding?
So special needs isolated funding usually is with transportation costs and different things that it takes for that special isolated district. so is that a consideration that DESE makes or is the school allowed to make a case or how do we kind of I guess balance that those needs I'm
Speaker 165
1:51:28
not aware of anything going on at DESE that would anything any considerations that they
Speaker 172
1:51:33
make but but as far as I know and I mean the rules state that they will award
the highest type of funding and that's usually going to be special needs isolated and I don't know if there's any if there's any other calculation
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:51:58
that goes into that. Okay thank you. Thank you Madam Chair. I'm kind of at
a loss to figure out how we're going to continue how we're ever going to be out of the box of having declining enrollment where there is significant decline as we
continue to create more school districts and and by school districts i mean charter schools for example i look at a look at a place i'll just choose blightville for example a small town a relatively small school district and they are splitting their students between charter schools and their regular school so we've created another district there and i'm trying to figure out if we are in a box of we're forever might going to be having declining enrollment
so in in cases like that do we know for school districts that are receiving funds for declining enrollment do we have a way of knowing where those students went because i'm not i'm not assuming they all went to charter schools but do we have a way of knowing that what's the cause of the decline I'm not aware of any way that
Speaker 165
1:53:09
we know if those students are going to a charter school if they're you know moving to you you
Speaker 172
1:53:16
know into another district moving out of state moving to a private school I'm I'm not aware of that and the division may have a
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:53:27
way to do that but I'm not aware of any method for doing that because it seems to me something we perhaps should be thinking about as policymakers I guess I'll just ask if this seems like psychological assumption if if we are going to meet efficiency as required by our Constitution if we're constantly spreading funds over several sources as
opposed to I'm paying for one I'm paying for two homes rather than one but I don't I barely have the money for one that's a problem I think we could all agree that we are spreading funds thinly it seems to me we need to understand why we have the problem of declining enrollment if we are going to address this as a matter of adequacy equity and efficiency those are the three components
I think we're supposed to consider do you know or am I right about that or do you do you remember it that way or is that
Speaker 165
1:54:37
something you pay attention to or you're just giving us a report
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:54:42
I think those are the things that the committee is supposed to consider yes okay I guess so madam chair and and mr. chair maybe there is somebody in the Department of Education who can for schools districts that are receiving declining enrollment funds we can find
out what's the issue here where are these students going and then look at our policies in terms of are we just exacerbating the issue as opposed to solving the problem so at schools where students are so they have great schools where they're where they are because while everybody wants to have a choice to go into whichever school they want to I don't think that's our responsibility as much as in our public schools as required by law we need to make sure we
have it doesn't say great schools it says adequate but I do think we owe the public great schools if we're going to operate within those three guidelines of equity adequacy and efficiency and it seems to me we have thrown efficiency out the door because we keep creating the possibility for less and less efficiency every time we create a new school district so I would just like to have that information I guess through you through you guys where what are the
declining schools districts and where the students going to the extent that we can know that
because that should inform how we create policy is that information you're asking for i am yes through
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
1:56:22
the chairs we'll get that for you all right before i go to the next we have one more question up here i just want to remind everybody that cte is in the rotunda
today because i know some of y'all are leaving out i don't want to miss someone that doesn't know that's over there happening so if you get a chance run by the rotunda that's going to be going until 12 o'clock so that's about another hour it's really yeah it's really important it's something we've worked hard
to get back going so uh represent dottson you're recognized thank you mr
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:56:53
chair um back to something on declining enrollment that you mentioned uh i think it's on page 12 here but i'm just confused in how we we get to it it says that uh you receive one and a half times the number of students the district lost. How does that come about where they're getting one and a half times the funding for declining enrollment?
Speaker 165
1:57:18
So this is combining the foundation funding and the declining enrollment.
So the declining enrollment funding, the calculation for that is
Speaker 172
1:57:26
going to give the district about half the foundation funding for each student that they lost. But what happens with the foundation funding is that the foundation funding is providing a bit of a cushion. Because it is based on prior year ADM. So if the district's got 1,000 students in the year before and they've now got 980 students, they're still receiving foundation funding for 1,000 students.
And then they get an extra. And then they're getting an extra. If they're losing 20 students, they're getting an extra. Okay. What amount, what declining enrollment for 20 students, or for, according to the calculation, would give them about the foundation amount for about 10 students. So they've lost 20 students, and then the foundation funding and the declining enrollment funding is going to give them the funding
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:58:21
for about 30 students. So financially, they're actually further
Speaker 172
1:58:25
ahead. They're getting money for more students than they're actually responsible for educating in the current year.
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:58:31
And then if they have student growth the following year on some of those districts that are in between, they pick that back up and then it falls back off again. If they go back and forth, they could continue to get extra funding every single year, potentially. Right. Yes. Okay. Thank you. That's
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:58:53
it. That is – thank you very
much, ladies. We appreciate your presentation. Thank you. You did a great job. Anybody else have any other questions? If not, I believe we are concluded for the day, and we're adjourned.
Agenda
A. Call to Order – 9:00 A.M.
B. Remarks by the Chairs
C. Review and Discussion of the Adequacy Recommendations Contained in the 2018 Adequacy Report Pursuant to Arkansas Code Annotated § 10-3-2104 (d) (1) [Exhibit C] Ms. Nell Smith, Administrator, Policy Analysis and Research Section, Bureau of Legislative Research
D. Discussion of Issues Related to Waivers of Statutory and Regulatory Requirements Ms. Julie Holt, Legislative Analyst, Policy Analysis and Research Section, Bureau of Legislative Research
E. Discussion of Issues Related to Declining Enrollment and Student Growth Funding Ms. Adrienne Beck, Policy Analysis and Research Section, Bureau of Legislative Research Ms. Elizabeth Bynum, Policy Analysis and Research Section, Bureau of Legislative Research
F. Other Business
G. Adjournment
Documents
Speakers
Senator Jane English
Unverified
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
Speaker 15
Speaker 16
Speaker 20
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
Speaker 43
Speaker 48
Speaker 49
Speaker 50
Speaker 51
Speaker 59
Speaker 62
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
Speaker 85
Speaker 97
Speaker 55
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
Speaker 111
Speaker 70
Senator Kim Hammer
Unverified
Speaker 91
Speaker 127
Representative Brian S. Evans
Unverified
Speaker 132
Speaker 136
Speaker 137
Speaker 143
Speaker 144
Speaker 53
Representative Jim Dotson
Unverified
Speaker 54
Speaker 160
Speaker 163
Speaker 9
Speaker 167
Speaker 168
Speaker 165
Speaker 172