House Education Committee Part 2
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Wilson Rathbun
Unverified
0:00
Residents, and he recommends rural education. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Wilson Rathbun, Vice President of the University of Relations for the University of Arkansas System. Before we've been working with all of you, we have five universities within the University of Arkansas System, five community colleges, and then a slew of about, I'd say, ten or so more entities within the U.S. System Division of Agriculture, at the Clinton School of Public Service. And it goes on and on, and I certainly didn't mention them all. If you have any questions or any questions concerning any of the University of Arkansas campus,
Speaker 3
0:34
I would certainly encourage you to reach out. Call me David Alley. I don't pretty much, I don't think any of the folks at most of the life during the session. We're all in the evening, so feel free to call. Thanks very much. Judge, what associates would represent the University of Central Arkansas? Thank you, Mr. Emmerich, for that bell. In the early 60s, he had a right arm that he might call him Schwarzenegger. Good morning.
Speaker 7
1:08
Good morning. I'm Elizabeth Underwood. You know, I'm Steve. There's at least three members of the Bureau. Good morning. I'm Governor Shackelford. I'm Technical Operations Manager for Employee Benefits Division. We administer the life and health insurance plan for state and public school employees. I will be here sometime with Deputy Executive Director George Platt or, of course, our Executive Director Jason Lee. So if you ever have any questions about the health and life insurance plan,
Speaker 4
1:38
please let me know. I'm John Bacon with Easton Public Charter Schools.
I'm also the current chair of the Bureau of the Charter. The last five years in the charter world but prior to that, 13 years, We also have some staff
Representative James McLean
Unverified
2:01
members from the Bureau. If you ladies would just introduce yourselves quickly.
We thank you all very much. And also we have a couple members of the press here that you all need to get familiar with. Sarah Weyer, Andrew DeMillo, who are with us today.
We appreciate you all being here. Don't run away from them. They're good people. They'll take care of you if you take care of them. At this point, what we need to do is you have a blue packet at your seats, and Mark's going to run through this quickly. Do take a moment, though, to look at the Senate Education Committee. You're going to want to get to know your counterparts on the other end of the building. I think we're really lucky. Johnny Key, Senator Johnny Key, will be chairing the Senate in.
I had the good fortune of co-chairing the peer committee with him, so we have an excellent working relationship, and I think we're going to have a
really good synergy between the House committee and the Senate committee. With that, Mark, would you please
Speaker 17
3:37
go through the packet? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Excuse me. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. On the left side, obviously you have the members of the Senate Ed Committee. Behind that first document is a list of important session dates, such as the bill filing deadlines, when bills related to retirement had to be filed, that kind of thing. That's for your information.
You also have a copy of the Quality Counts Report for Arkansas that was released, I believe, on Monday. You have a copy of that for your information. In addition, on the right-hand side, you have a list of acronyms, Which I think particularly for the newer members you'll find helpful as you start hearing about ACCEPS and different Acronyms we tend to speak in in this committee Behind that you will have a list of all the bill at Bureau of let's say research staff assigned education in some way whether it be legal fiscal policy or
the committee staff behind that you have a list of contact information for the representatives of state agencies and advocacy organizations that are interested in education it includes many of the people that introduced themselves this morning so I hope you'll find that helpful you have some historical information which is the matrix funding levels from 2005 to 2013 you have a chronology of the Lakeview lawsuit on that right side and you also have basically a chronology of changes or the
history of the public ed system in arkansas from eighteen nineteen to twenty twelve hopefully you
Speaker 5
5:10
will uh... find that information useful and we will also send you an electronic copy of all this materials afternoon
Representative James McLean
Unverified
5:17
mark will keep you up to date uh... the email uh... all
through the session all through this term uh... anything that is material to education policy in the state of arkansas you will you'll get a hold of that information. The lake view chronology, that's really, really important.
So if you're not interested in anything else in the packet, kind of familiarize yourself with the lake view chronology because that's something that we're going to really be referring back to and is something that is dominant in terms of how we pursue our business. At this point, Mark, if we could go ahead and kind of have just a small little primer on the tablets just to kind of let folks know how we turn them on, the stylus, all that stuff, because, quite frankly, the chair needs
some help. So if you wouldn't mind walking us through that, we'd
Speaker 17
6:13
appreciate it very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think we're all going to have the same learning experience with this tablet, Mr. Chairman. We're all going to learn this together. Normally, when you come into a committee meeting on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Ms. Giles will have already set this tablet up, turned it on, logged it on for you, opened it up to your agenda. So hopefully those will be done every time you meet. I think some of the more important
things to tell you is that the tablets are not supposed to work outside the committee rooms. They're also not supposed to be accessible to any of the internet. They are strictly for use within this room please do not take them with you please leave them in the room because if you're on agri or the committee that meets in here on the on the B committee days you're going to deprive yourself or one of your agri colleagues of a tablet not to mention the fact that my boss is going to send
me to find that tablet generally if the screen that goes dark you can tap the screen and it should pop back on. If it does not, you're going to find in the upper left-hand corner a little button with a light on the top of it. Just pull that button over real quick and it should pop back on. If it doesn't, please wave at me or wave at Juanita and we'll try to assist you with that. We'll be kind of be your first line of assistance with this,
But I assure you, much past that, we'll have to be calling IT to come over and help us with it. So we will certainly do what we can to help you.
Representative James McLean
Unverified
7:54
Well, we have some technical support available during the meetings if we have some issues.
Speaker 25
7:57
Yes, sir. There will be people around that we can call, and they'll be in here within probably three to five minutes to help you with this. That's the estimated time
Representative James McLean
Unverified
8:05
frame. Now, the reason I'm kind of harping on this tablet thing is we've had a few issues here this week. And I think if we can approach the tablet issue with a smile in our hearts,
It will, it's going to work out, but I'm not saying, I'm not saying, I think there may be some bumps in the road, but as Mark indicated, we will have some staff folks here to kind of get us through the, if there are some issues, and they'll be here to get us through those. And we've saved trees. And we are saving trees. So that's another, that's something else that's important. And,
Vice Chair, you had a comment you wanted to make, and I forgot to let you do that.
Representative Ann V. Clemmer
Unverified
8:50
Well, I just wanted to reiterate what you said about how helpful our staff is, whether it's folks at BLR helping you with information to find information you've not been presented in committee. But I really have to say something about Mark, but I do want him to hear my compliment. i mean you know you work for a lot of places and 4 30 people are gone or five o'clock people are gone i've sent mark emails thinking on a saturday night at midnight thinking that oh he'll see it
monday morning i need to do it while i'm thinking of it and sunday morning i wake up and i've got an answer now i don't want you to expect that of him but i want you to know that he really works without ceasing from the best I can tell. And I want you to know, Mark, I want to say that publicly in front of everybody how much we appreciate your work. Thank you. Yes. Thank you.
Representative James McLean
Unverified
9:53
Most of the bills that if members of the committee
are going to run a bill having to do with education, you're probably going to have to have a fiscal impact statement.
Ms. Heather Tackett, that's her area of expertise. these, get with her, and she'll make sure that that gets taken care of. So yes, go right
Speaker 17
10:10
ahead, Mark. One thing I'd like to call the committee's attention to, Ms. Hackett and Mr. Ms. Tackett and Mr. Wilson will be working on the impacts. There is a requirement, it's a requirement of the rules and also of a statute that once the impact is done, it has to be on the desk three days before it can be brought, the bill
can be brought up for final action in the committee. So if you looked at the tablet today and clicked on one of the bills and went down, you will see that there is a fiscal impact on the two bills that you have on the tablet in front of you. It still has to be three days from the receipt of that fiscal impact before that bill will be placed on the regular agenda for action. So if you get an impact back on Wednesday, it won't be on the Thursday agenda. It will be on the following Tuesday agenda because by the rules and by statute, it has
be on the desk three days before we take action on it so i just want to and i also want to point out that every time you amend the bill substantively not answering spot adding sponsors but do a substantive amendment to a bill that you have on k-12 it has to have a new fiscal
Speaker 35
11:13
impact to it so if you amend the bill three or four times it's going
Speaker 17
11:18
to be three or four fiscal impacts on it so i just want to make y'all aware of those kind of procedural issues you know up front and And, of course, Ms. Tackett and Mr. Wilson will be through every day right before session starts in the chambers to give you the impacts to explain them and that kind of thing.
And then Mr. Wilson will post them to the web. But I just wanted to kind of bring you up to a minimal level of awareness about what their impact on the process
Speaker 5
11:44
is. And Ms. Tackett can go into it in much further detail. I'm sure she'd be happy to do that with you all. Thank
Representative James McLean
Unverified
11:50
you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, sir. I think, you know, thus far it looks like we've got a couple of bills coming up next week that we'll be talking about. Typically it takes a little while for things to get going, but this committee will be humming here in a couple of weeks.
We're going to have a lot of stuff going on. And judging by just the amount of people that are here who are involved in education, you see how important this committee is. And we're going to do a lot of good work. And I think this is, I feel very, very, very fortunate to be in this position and to be with you. At this point, we've got just a little bit of time left. Do any of the members of the committee have any
Speaker 37
12:30
questions? Okay. I think we had a good first meeting. Mark, you have anything else? Vice Chair?
Representative James McLean
Unverified
12:35
With that, we are adjourned. We will see you Tuesday at 10 a.m. Thank you.
Agenda
DISCUSSION OF ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES
PENDING FISCAL IMPACT
Documents
No documents posted.
Speakers
Wilson Rathbun
Unverified
Speaker 3
Speaker 7
Speaker 4
Representative James McLean
Unverified
Speaker 17
Speaker 5
Speaker 25
Representative Ann V. Clemmer
Unverified
Speaker 35
Speaker 37