House Education Committee
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Speaker 1
0:00
I'm not sure Mr. Carnine can get free back there soon. Members, the
Speaker 6
0:18
chair sees a quorum. We appreciate everybody being here today. We appreciate everybody in the audience being here today.
Representative James McLean
Unverified
0:33
Members, we have two bills on the regular agenda. And when Vice Chair Clemmer makes it, we're going to go ahead and announce the chairs and vice chairs of our education subcommittees. And we'll also announce the various memberships of those committees. But before we do that, I want to just take an opportunity to talk a little bit about the Lakeview decision. And, you know, I've said before that Lakeview shades just about every policy decision that
has to do with education in Arkansas. And it's a wide-ranging, very in-depth decision that totally impacted and changed education policy in the state of Arkansas. So with many new members on the committee, I just think that it would be wise if we get the viewpoint of folks who can, with authority, tell us about the Lakeview decision, give us some historical context, as I said before, the who, what, when, and where, and what impact it had.
So at this point, I'd like to introduce Jeremy Lasseter, who's a general counsel with the Arkansas Department of Ed, and also Mr. Scott Richardson, who's a senior assistant attorney general over at the AG's office. And we're going to be seeing a lot of these gentlemen through the session. But, guys, we're going to give you all about 15 minutes. And I've spoke with you all about, you know, we don't need a legalese type situation here, but just a general overview. And I know you all are prepared.
And at this point, Mr. Lasseter, Mr. Richardson, you all are recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chairman,
Speaker 9
2:13
members of the committee. I'm Jeremy Lasseter, General Counsel with the Department of Education. I'm joined by Scott Richardson, Assistant Attorney General with the Attorney General's Office. We are their, I think, number one client. And so oftentimes, Scott Richardson and I are joined at the hip. And as you mentioned, Mr. Chair, we're here to give you just a brief overview of the Lakeview case. We have 15 minutes. It was a 15-year-long case, and so we're just going to cover the high points.
And I want to say at the outset that there are people in the room who lived and breathed the Lakeview cases and the General Assembly's response to Lakeview, and they've forgotten more about that case than I'll ever know. But they've all begged me not to mention them by name so they don't get called to the table today to talk to you. So we're going to focus today on the areas of adequacy in funding, assessment, and accountability. Your staff, I think, has prepared for you a more thorough written explanation of the Lakeview chronology.
And Mr. Richardson is going to get us started off by
Speaker 13
3:19
talking to you about adequacy in school funding. Good morning. Lakeview is really, it's about four decisions from the Arkansas Supreme Court and two decisions from the Plastic County Circuit Court. And they're important because they all interpret Article 14 of our Constitution, which is the Education Article, which sets the constitutional standards for what the state must do in education. They also interpret the equal protection provisions of the Arkansas Constitution,
but for our purposes today, I think we'll stick with Article 14. I thought I'd just start out by reading part of Article 14, Section 1, which is the main portion, which is where we get the adequacy standard and the standards that guide what the committees do, this committee, the Senate Education Committee, and the legislature in education. And Article 14, Section 1 provides that intelligence and virtue being the safeguards of liberty and the bulwark of a free and good government,
The state shall ever maintain a general, suitable, and efficient system of free public schools and shall adopt all suitable means to secure to the people the advantages and opportunities of education. And that's what we're about here, or what you're about here at the General Assembly and what we try and help you with. What that means for your day-to-day operations is the basic requirement is that the state must provide an equitable opportunity for an adequate education to students in the
state. Those three terms that you heard in Article 14, general, suitable, and efficient, are collapsed down at that term adequacy. What is an adequate education? So in order to determine what that is, the General Assembly must perform what we know as the adequacy study. And the The reason that exists is because in Lakeview the court decided that education decisions affecting adequacy need to be based on evidence, and that the General Assembly needed to do
a study every biennum, and this is partly the General Assembly's decision too. The General Assembly decided to do a study every biennum to determine what constitutes an adequate education. The first study was done by Auden and Pikas. You'll hear about them some during the session. They did the first adequacy study that really established the foundation funding system. Foundation funding being the base amount of money that we provide to school districts
to fund education for students. And we determined that foundation funding amount by looking at what's called the matrix. Some of you will know what the matrix is, some of you are going to get to learn. It is essentially what Auden and Pikes did is they said, let's look at a prototypical school of 500 students and let's see what it takes to run that school. And they decided it needed a principal, it needed a certain number of assistant principals,
secretaries, a number of teachers that is based on the classroom size requirements that the General Assembly had set for classrooms. And that all appears in the matrix. there's a dollar amount associated with each item in the matrix originally it came to about fifty three hundred dollars per student we're now up to I think sixty eight hundred dollars per student so in the in the Supreme Court said that adequacy study that is the linchpin for maintaining adequacy to
that's that's the linchpin that's the key element to maintaining a constitutional system of education funding so the work that gets done in the biennum it is is it definitely of constitutional significance in in performing that function I think there's there's a balance of the General
Assembly has to keep in mind as well because you're doing two things really you're you're trying to determine what are the educational services that the state needs to provide to provide adequate level of education and then what is the amount of money that the state must provide to support that adequate adequate educational services so the foundation funding number is how much does it cost to pay for what we think are the adequate elements of
education and Jeremy I'll talk a little bit more about how we analyze what's going on in education in the state to and assess and monitor to make sure that we're maintaining that those educational services part of that balance since the the matrix and the foundation funding is based on a prototypical school of 500 students there needed to be some assessment of of school district sizes because in 2003 the time
this legislature reviewed lakeview and we had that revolution all the changes we needed to look at you know can can we support all school districts of all the various sizes that they are based on this foundation funding model and it was determined that since since we were basing on the 500 student school district there was a point below which school districts should not fall and that number was 350 students it was determined by the general assembly
and if you that that 500 student school consists of basically two sets of elementary classes one middle school one high school if you trim that down to one set of elementary classes according to standards in a middle and a high school you get about 350 students school so we generally you know there'll be there are usually bills that come forward that affect that
consolidation number at 350 there are a lot of people that don't like it but we generally have to come to the table and speak about that because it affects adequacy it's it hits that floor of funding that needs to be available for those students so that we know they have that adequate amount of funding available. There are some other miscellaneous kind of issues that occur as well, and one of the big ones that was debated a lot like Bukay's was what they called unfunded mandates.
And the school districts that were involved in the litigation complained a lot about the legislature would set a funding amount before and then add requirements on the school districts for what they needed to do but then wouldn't provide additional funding to cover those services now some of this is required last session I think it came up with regard to professional development training and their standards added to professional development and what need to be covered in those
professional development hours that we require school teachers and school administrators to take if you expand that you're at you're adding cost to a school district and what those teachers need to be trained in but not necessarily adding in additional revenue to cover that so it's something that that the legislature needs to keep an eye on and there's it's a difficult one to assess when is you know one or two many additional standards too much but it's
definitely one to keep an eye on because it's it is a difficult area to assess so with that I'll turn over to Jeremy to give some more information well mr. Richardson just
Speaker 9
11:24
talked to you about the funding I want to talk to you a little bit about the assessment and accountability programs that came around after a Lakeview particularly the November 2002 Lakeview decision was was fairly critical of the state when it comes to student performance and the General Assembly took that criticism to heart and they they took action many of
you already know that the 2003 year was a very busy one for the General Assembly there were a couple of special sessions in addition to the regular session that addressed education and there were several acts that were passed in the area of accountability and assessment but I just want to talk to you about a couple of the more prominent ones. First, there was Act 1467 of 2003, and it's commonly referred to as the Omnibus Quality Education Act, and you'll hear most people refer to it as omnibus in shorthand. But it required all schools
and school districts to meet the standards for accreditation, and if they didn't, it set up a process where ultimately schools and school districts could either be dissolved, consolidated, or annexed. It also created a single comprehensive testing and assessment and accountability system it required the State Board of Education to adopt rigorous curriculum standards and to constantly review those standards for improvement and it also created the requirements related to academic distress for those school districts that
did not meet certain academic standards you may have read in the papers recently where the State Board over the last about year and a half has looked again at its standards for academic distress and has tried to strengthen those in addition to act 1467 there was also act 35 of the second extraordinary session of 2003 it provided for our benchmark exams in grades 3 through 8 assessments in grades K through 2 and end of course assessments in high school algebra 1
geometry and literacy and for those students who didn't meet proficiency on those state mandated tests the law required schools to develop an academic improvement plan this is a plan that was created for each individual student that didn't meet proficiency to help them correct those deficiencies and to demonstrate proficiency so it was highly student focused it also created a school rating system that was to be publicized to parents and finally it created the Arkansas Opportunity Public School Choice Act which allowed students who
attend failing schools to transfer to other better achieving public schools so if I could sum up really what these acts did into one general process it would be this it was to create a common research base and rigorous rigorous curriculum that would be made available to all students in the state it was to ensure that teachers have access to the appropriate professional development they needed to teach that curriculum we would measure the extent to which students mastered that curriculum through our state mandated assessments we'd collect
the data from that and report that data with regard to the test results we would assist students as I just mentioned who were not proficient to become proficient through remediation and academic improvement plans and then to hold schools and school districts accountable for their performance so that's really painting all of those acts with a really broad brush and I'm sure I've left some things out and I'll hear about a little bit later from members of the audience But that's kind of the thumbnail sketch, Mr. Chairman. Well, you all do.
Chair
Unverified
14:52
What you gave us is exactly what I wanted you to, because
Representative James McLean
Unverified
14:56
we were going to hear a lot of terms throughout the session, several of which you touched on, and they all are going to refer back to Lakeview. I just have one question about the 350. If you could just briefly touch on how we
Speaker 13
15:12
came to that number specifically. That number was a compromise, and there were several numbers that were put out that different groups felt like the consolidation ought to be at.
There was – 350 was the compromise. It's what the legislature landed on. Some people felt it should have been 500 since the foundation funding number is based on that prototypical 500-student school. Governor Huckabee at the time thought that it should be 1,500, that we shouldn't have school districts smaller than 1,500 students. and that was you know that one didn't carry we ended up with 350 but but the key there is just to make sure that there is a sufficient amount of funds
available in each school district to pay for those educational costs and there are a lot of other things we could talk about today too I mean we haven't talked about facilities at all here but that was a big big part of Lakeview it gets very complicated but the system that we've set up now the court said satisfies categorical funding which is there to provide equity for students that have special educational needs but we just try to hit the highlights for it's hard to sum up fifteen
Representative James McLean
Unverified
16:24
years of litigation in fifteen minutes y'all did such a great job stand by because you may be making a comeback here in the next few weeks but thank y'all very much and before you leave I think Representative Linderman you
Representative Homer Lenderman
Unverified
16:39
have a quick quick question sir yes a very quick question in 1948 the legislature consolidated a tremendous number of
schools down and they used the number 350 at that time was that one of the factors that was used in that and had there been data that supported the success of those schools in that number
Speaker 13
16:57
or do you know that I don't know that I do know that since early on the state has been in the process of consolidating school districts to reduce the number of school districts out there. And I think back in the 40s, we were up to somewhere in 1,000. 700, I believe. Yeah, thousands of school districts out there, and we're down to, I believe, 239 now. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Well,
Representative James McLean
Unverified
17:25
listen, thank you, gentlemen, very, very much.
That was very informative, and we appreciate your time. Appreciate you all coming here and giving us that briefing. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At this point, I'm going to turn it over to Madam Vice Chair, and she is going to announce the chairs and the vice chairs of our subcommittees and also who will be serving on those subcommittees. Madam Vice Chair,
Representative Ann V. Clemmer
Unverified
17:49
you're recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chair. First, we'll start with the Early Childhood Permanent Subcommittee.
Sheila Lampkin is the chair. Brent Talley, the vice chair. Serving on that early childhood subcommittee, Jody Dickinson, Homer Linderman, James Ratliff, and Skip Carnine, the chair and vice chair, ex-officio on that committee. On the K-12 vocational technical institutions subcommittee, John Catlett is the chair, Charlotte Douglas, the vice chair.
members on that committee Gary Deffenbaugh, Deborah Hobbs Mark Viviano and Bruce Cozart chair and vice chair as ex officio on the higher education subcommittee, Karen Hopper chairperson, Charles Armstrong vice chair members on that committee, Mark Lowry John Edwards John Eubanks and Robert Dale with the chair and the vice chair as ex officio And that's it.
Representative James McLean
Unverified
19:01
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair. Okay, at this point, members, we're going to go into our agenda. And we are going to begin with House Bill 1134. Representative John Eubanks, you are recognized to present
Chair
Unverified
19:18
your bill, sir. Representative Eubanks, you are recognized whenever you're ready, sir.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is a very straightforward
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
19:37
bill, but just in case, I've asked Richard Abernathy, Executive Director of the EA, to join me. A few years ago, the legislature decided to set a uniform time for spring break across the state, and they had set up an advisory committee to study and see how it worked out. To the best of my knowledge, there's no opposition to setting this as a permanent time as the 38th week.
I don't know of any opposition to this. I think hospitality folks are on board, and if there is any, they haven't communicated it to me. So with that, if there's any questions.
Representative James McLean
Unverified
20:22
Members of the committee, do we have any questions in regard to this bill?
Speaker 36
20:36
Representative Devenbaugh. It's not going to be a
Representative Gary Deffenbaugh
Unverified
20:41
hard question. Good. Who will set up the spring break date?
Did you say that? Pardon me? Who sets up the spring break week? Who sets that up? The legislature did, I guess, as a trial, to see how it worked out and how
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
20:55
receptive it was to the folks in the state. So we're just going to leave it like it was? We're setting it permanently at this particular time. Okay, thanks. And the language at the bottom of the first page and the second page, all that language that has been struck, is because we don't need that advisory committee any longer.
Representative James McLean
Unverified
21:18
Thanks. Members, do we have any other questions? Okay, at this point, do we have anyone who wishes to speak against the bill from the audience? Anyone wishing to speak for the bill? If not, Representative Linderman, you
Representative Homer Lenderman
Unverified
21:41
have a motion? Yes, sir. Motion
Representative James McLean
Unverified
21:44
do pass. We have a motion do pass. All in favor? All opposed? Motion passes.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, committee. Thank you, Representative Eubanks. At this point, Committee, we will be taking up House Bill 1015, and Representative Hobbs will be handling this. Representative Harris is tied up in public health, but Representative Hobbs has agreed to handle this for him. And, ma'am, you are recognized to present House Bill 1015. Thank you.
Representative Debra M. Hobbs
Unverified
22:20
Thank you, Ms. Chair, and members of the committee.
As you know, we live in a brand-new world than we did just even probably a couple of years ago, and Representative Harris's bill will simply leave it up to the school districts as to making policy as to how it affects cell phones, beepers, pagers, et cetera. Currently state law, I mean, if you'll see the bill that's being struck, state law would forbid it unless special exemptions.
This just is very permissive to the school districts to set the policy.
Speaker 28
22:57
So this essentially allows the school to create their own policy as it relates to phones? Yes,
Representative James McLean
Unverified
23:06
Mr. Chair. Okay. Do we have any questions from the committee? Dr. Kimbrell, would you like to add anything? Okay. All right. Once again, any questions from the committee? Anyone in the audience wish to speak against the bill? Anyone here wish to speak for the bill? If not, what is the pleasure of, excuse me, Mr. Abernathy.
Speaker 46
23:33
Are you speaking for or against the bill? Speaking for the bill, Mr. Terry, I'm Richard Abernathy, Executive Director of AAEA, and
Speaker 47
23:41
we just wanted to publicly come down here. Mr. Representative Harris got with us several weeks ago about this particular bill, and we are fully in support of it, and it allows us to move particular curriculum issues, which what some schools are doing now anyway in a positive direction so we are in favor
Speaker 40
23:58
of this bill thank you mr abernafi okay anybody
Representative James McLean
Unverified
24:01
want to speak against the bill okay if not what is the pleasure of the committee
mr chair i move do pass we have a motion do pass all in favor all opposed motion passes congratulations from stop you did a great job thank mister okay committee i believe that once again we have put in a hard day's work it is ten twenty five uh... enjoy it while you can have a motion to adjourn not meeting is adjourned
Agenda
Call To Order
REVIEW OF LAKE VIEW DECISION
HB1134
HB1015
Documents
No documents posted.
Speakers
Speaker 1
Speaker 6
Representative James McLean
Unverified
Speaker 9
Speaker 13
Chair
Unverified
Representative Homer Lenderman
Unverified
Representative Ann V. Clemmer
Unverified
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
Speaker 36
Representative Gary Deffenbaugh
Unverified
Representative Debra M. Hobbs
Unverified
Speaker 28
Speaker 46
Speaker 47
Speaker 40