Education Committee - Senate and House
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Senator Jane English
Unverified
0:00
to order and the first thing we have on the agenda is a motion to approve the November 3rd minutes motion why second all in favor all opposed thank you very much so one of the things that we have with our education our focus is for all of our students to leave high school employed enrolled or enlisted so today Today we have some folks here to talk about those opportunities for our students and where
they can go afterwards. So we are welcome today to have Dr. Tina Moore and I believe Dr. Ross White and Ken Warden, who is the Director of the Department of Higher Ed, who will come and talk to us about all these efforts. And we've got a lot of things going on in the state, which is
really good. If you'll identify yourselves, you will be recognized.
Speaker 12
1:18
are you on the little green lights not going on we have anybody back here oh Oh, it's on. Okay, great. Ken Orton, Commissioner, Arkansas Division of Higher Education.
Speaker 13
1:49
Tina Moore, Director of Workforce Development, Division of Higher Education. Ross White, Director
Speaker 14
1:54
of the Division of Career and Technical Education at the Arkansas Department of Higher Education.
Speaker 16
2:01
Very good, thank you. You may proceed. Well, good afternoon, Ross White. So we're going to spend a little bit of kind of sharing some information that we hope will kind of feed off of each other. So if you recall, in September, I actually presented to you all a little bit about the work of LEARNS
Speaker 17
2:15
and what we've done within the Division of Career and Technical Education as we go forward with those pieces.
Speaker 18
2:20
Can you move your microphone up just a little bit? All right,
Speaker 16
2:27
that better? Very good, thank you. So in September, we talked a little bit about LEARNS and access and really the work of those two things together and how they're ensuring our success for any graduates, as Senator English just mentioned a moment ago, to really build that readiness piece for enlistment, enrollment, and employment, ensuring that all of our graduates from our K-12 systems graduate with that, and that being the ultimate goal. And so with that, we have our vision of success-ready graduates
that, again, in September we discussed a little bit, but really that continuum from grades 6 through 12, how are we ensuring that students are getting those early career experiences, opportunities in our system, then student success plans, which was legislated many years ago, and how we're using that as a planning tool to then put our students on pathways that can lead to that enlistment, employment, and enrollment piece. And so as we look at those things, our charge has been really how do we define this for schools and how do we put it as a piece of the work they do on a regular basis.
So we have success-ready pathways that we have identified that align across the state of Arkansas in what we call high-wage, high-demand pathways. And we look at labor market information, but also wages that are being earned in Arkansas. So we were able to identify 22 pathways within our state that those exist. And so our schools have to now require them to have at least one of these offered at their K-12 district as a part of their accreditation process. And then through that, our students have the opportunities to earn merit or distinction as they graduate.
And so this started with our current sophomore class and will continue being built in. So any student that's entering high school at this point or the previous year is now working towards that merit and distinction opportunity. And then that also became a part of our school accountability that I know you all have heard quite a bit about with our school letter grade system. And so this comes in as a piece for our 9-12 campuses into their accountability. And so when students are earning merit or distinction, we're really looking for two things. One, they're completing pathways, which means they're taking a series of courses, that being at least three courses,
that are preparing them for that enlistment, enrollment, employment. And the second thing is they're leaving with what I call a readiness factor, but they're leaving with something tangible, whether it be a credential, whether it be early post-secondary credit, whether it be work experience that they got while in high school, so it's something that they can add to their resume to continue that work going forward and gives them a tangible piece. And so that's really where merit and distinction come in. When you look at these two slides, they're very similar. Distinction is just at a little bit higher level, which means it's pushing them towards
a little bit more work or more opportunity or a credential that takes a little bit more time or additional post-secondary education opportunities as that continues to go through. And so those are things to kind of keep in mind as we're looking at success-ready graduates from specifically within the LEARNS Act that we're building out that readiness for enlistment enrollment and employment and so as this information has been shared in the past kind of where we're at now is really discussing this is where it fits into our school accountability grade and so it's been reflective in the grades that were issued this fall and will continue to
be the class of 2028 is where we're into full implementation for all students but we're already beginning to really see the impact in our enrollment and so that was kind of our big piece for today that's going to then lead into what Dr. Moore is going to talk about is our enrollment the the chart that's in front of you is really just comparing last school year to this school year we could put multiple years on there but I think this speaks volume to the changes we're already seeing so the lighter shade on the left is last school year so that would have been
the fall of 2024 our enrollment in just k-12 career and technical education on a public school campus was right at 161,000 students in seats. If we look at it for this fall, the semester we just ended, it was at 171,000 so we pretty much saw a 10,000 plus seat increase. That speaks I think tremendously the value that our schools are seeing and those opportunities that are there and how that fits into our students being able to be success ready graduates. The piece is it
fits in with merit distinction as it also then fits in with our school accountability system. If we look at the concurrent enrollment as well, we were at 12,000 last fall. This fall we sat right at 16,000, so about 4,000 more students were earning concurrent credit for career and technical education courses, which is also a pretty steady increase and a piece that we can speak highly to, the LEARNS Act, but also the ACCESS Act. And then our secondary career centers. Now, you'll notice there's a little bit of a decrease in that enrollment,
And part of that decrease is some of the changes that have been made at the secondary career centers around the programs they offer. And so to ensure that we're aligning those programs with what the biggest needs are in our state for workforce development-wise, there's some programs that have no longer been funded just because they don't align to Arkansas workforce needs. And through the review with the Career Educational Workforce Development Board, those adjustments kind of cause that to be, I would say, almost a flatline in enrollment this year just because we had some programming that's no longer counted in those secondary career centers as we go forward.
But across the board, we are seeing a steady increase in our enrollment in these programs, and we know that a big piece of that is due to the LEARNS Act and the focus on success-ready graduates and ensuring students are completing pathways and being able to achieve merit and distinction. But then at the same time, when we start to begin to discuss access, the piece around acceleration and providing those accelerated opportunities for our students, When we talk about pathways and being a Success Ready graduate, that is something that we truly look at as an accelerated opportunity for most of our students.
At the same time, when we look at those concurrent credit numbers that are in there and really having that conversation around the credentials that can be earned, that students can have before they graduate high school that are coming from a post-secondary, has also really helped accelerate that conversation. And those pieces wouldn't have happened without those two pieces of legislation going together and then, of course, being complementary to each other. And so Dr. Moore is going to talk a little bit about how access is really changing the landscape from the workforce side and then as our students are completing these pathways in the K-12 programming,
that what is that next step when we talk about enlistment, enrollment, employment, and that it's that seamless transition from their K-12 education experience to then the next step. And for a lot of them, it is that continuing education, employment, and enlistment. And so there's a lot of really important pieces that come from ACCESS that complement that to ensure that we're getting these students into the
Speaker 21
9:20
workforce needs of Arkansas. Thanks, Ross. And as I transition, I will be focusing on workforce scholarships and grants, but I want to first focus
Speaker 22
9:27
on some state scholarships that you're aware of
because of work that you did with ACCESS that both supports and rewards diplomas of merit and distinction. So you're likely familiar with access to acceleration, and the predominant way that students will receive merit distinction, we anticipate being through concurrent credit, concurrent enrollment, and access to acceleration makes that possible. And you're aware of the bullet points are on these slides, but I want to dig just a little deeper into what that really means. As a former math educator,
I had a little fun crunching some numbers and looking at some percent changes, because we just look at this, like, okay, it's a little more money, it's some more classes, but what does that really mean for students and their families? So I'm going to look through my notes here so I don't misquote anything. The former scholarship provided $125 per course, and the majority of courses that are taken concurrent, they're typically three-hour courses. So that would be $41.67 per credit hour compared compared to now being $65 per credit hour with A2A.
And that is a 56% increase in funding per credit hour. Now granted, the $65 does have to cover tuition fees and materials, which before, that might have fallen on the families or students to pay for. But 56% increase is quite large. Well, if we look a little further, the former scholarship allowed two classes a semester. and if we use that three hour per course example that'd be 12 hours per year compared to now 30
hours per year when you look at the funding for those hours 12 versus 30 you go from 500 a year to 1950 a year that's a 290 increase in funding the former scholarship designated 10th 11th and 12th graders as eligible while a to a includes freshmen this means total funding available to high school students for concurrent courses went from a total of $1,500 to $7,800 over the lifetime of their high school
experience that's a 420% increase so I just wanted to focus on that because we know that multiple studies including looking at our own Arkansas data shows that early college has a significant significant effect on two-year and four-year college and university enrollment degree attainment as well as early labor market earnings beyond high school and stronger effects happen for low-income and first-generation college students so as we look at workforce opportunities i just want to applaud you and thank you for making this available to
students and families it really can change the trajectory of lives and be a way out of poverty for many students. So that is how A to A makes merit distinction more possible for students and then students who earn merit distinction are then eligible for state scholarships to continue their education. So the Arkansas Academic Challenge, you added an access that a diploma of merit would be a qualifying criteria for that and then doubled the freshman year
award. So that really opens up a lot of opportunities. As Ross outlined the slide earlier with all the different ways to get a diploma of merit, that student is automatically eligible for this funding. Additionally, this is one thing that sort of, I think, flew low on the radar for our K-12 partners until recently, and now this really has everyone's attention. I want to apologize in advance for how many times I'm going to use the word distinction or distinguished over the next minute or so it's a little bit confusing so the governor's scholar
program as you likely know has two different levels it has the governor's scholar just regular we call it non-distinguished for lack of better terms and then the governor's distinguished scholarship the distinguished did not change it's in italics there and if you want more information you can contact alicia lewis our scholarship person but i want to focus on the non-distinguished which is the the four bullet points there that it's referring to students can earn the governor scholar non-distinguished scholarship by earning a diploma of distinction see why i apologized about
using the word so much like it's a little confusing but if the high school diploma of distinction is earned a student qualifies for this scholarship this is big money here we're talking five thousand a year and it's stackable with an academic challenge so this can open doors for students beyond what was ever possible in Arkansas's history so I'm very excited about those opportunities and you may say okay I thought you were going to talk about workforce well in my mind workforce is not just short-term training workforce is all education it doesn't matter if you're pursuing
a short-term commercial driver's license or a four-year degree in logistics it doesn't matter if you're pursuing short-term emergency medical technician training or you're pursuing a graduate at medical degree. That is all workforce training. All those folks are going to have jobs. So to me, this is still part of workforce, even though it's not short-term workforce training. So thank you for those opportunities that you have increased for students to have in our state. So now we're going to focus on those scholarships and grants that are specifically labeled as workforce.
And typically, we're referring to shorter-term training when we say that. And to show how important that training is the division of higher ed has now changed instead of calling it non-credit training we now call it professional skills training because that is what it is it's to get folks into the workforce with a livable wage now i know that you are familiar with this criteria because you're the ones who said it but the workforce challenge in review because there was quite a bit in access it expanded the definition of approved institution of higher education to
include those public or private vocational technical schools. In addition to our two and four year colleges and universities. It specified these five high demand occupational areas that you see on the screen and increase the maximum scholarship from 800 per program to 3000 per academic year. We anticipate this increasing significantly the utilization of this scholarship because of the expanded definition of training providers as well as that increase in funding. So because of that, we are developing policy to support implementation with fidelity.
We are looking at considering programs that are 80 hours or more as the intent of this legislation. The original Workforce Challenge legislation, as well as this, is to get folks into a job that has a livable wage. And we know that the training needs to be substantial. We're not one to provide $3,000 for a one-day workshop of some sort. So we're looking at that 80-hour minimum threshold and potentially tiered funding where programs that were 80 to 179 hours would receive $1,500,
and those 180 hours or more, or on the credit side, a certificate of proficiency would receive the $3,000. This might not seem like a heavy lift, but this is something that's new to us because we require, we started just a couple years ago, We changed the professional skills training reporting to include personal student-identified information as required. It's a quite exhaustive list of information that has to be reported for student completers. And that will now have to be reported by these private career institutions that have not
done that before, have not reported to us before, have not received funding through us before. So there are lots of logistics behind that. but we are working hard and we'll have that ready for implementation this fall. We've already been meeting with many of the private career ed providers, getting their thoughts on the guardrails that we're setting up and have had positive feedback. And it's really coordinating efforts among multiple folks at our agency. You may have heard about the Federal Workforce Pell Grant. I just want to make sure that's on everyone's radar.
And I'm just going to highlight some of the big pieces of this. This was part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, and the Workforce Pell expanded the regular Pell that we're all familiar with to include short-term training in high-quality workforce programs. There are many guardrails around this. Just the basic program requirements are listed here, these bullets, these four, 150 to 599 clock hours, or an equivalent number of credit hours, anywhere from eight weeks but less than 15 weeks of duration,
offered by an institution of higher education that's Title IV eligible and not a correspondence course. Those parameters alone knock out the majority of programs in Arkansas and in the United States. We're very happy that this funding is available, and we will try to find ways to utilize it more. But nationally, the talks are on, like I mentioned CDL earlier. A CDL program is typically around 180 clock hours. If you look, that's going to be, okay, great, you're in that guideline.
Well, this is an and, not an or. Most CDL programs are going to be around four weeks. It's not going to hit that eight-week threshold. And we certainly don't want to make learners stay in a program for eight weeks unnecessarily just to be able to get some funding. So currently, negotiated rulemaking is taking place. In December, there was a week of that, and now they're following up currently. They're probably sitting in a room like we are right now with negotiated rulemaking in D.C. We're very fortunate that someone from Arkansas is on that committee.
Eric Atchison from the ASU system is on that committee. So Arkansas' voice is being heard in that negotiated rulemaking, which is important. But they cannot change the legislation. They can, you know, provide clarity, but the guardrails are there. And when I say the guardrails, this is only the beginning of the guardrails. I do want to point out that very last bullet on here. it does open up Pell eligibility for those who already have a bachelor's degree because we know that folks may want to reskill and pursue something different especially with the impact
of technology and AI on our workforce. The bachelor's degree that served them well may not be meeting the workforce needs of today. So I'm going to go through each one of these line by line slowly. Just kidding I'm not. I just wanted you to have it for later. So the next couple of slides outline some more of the guardrails. I will highlight these guardrails are what the governor's office is in charge of determining. I will stress on here one thing to really point out, and it's
listed in several of these bullet points, is the point of stackability and opportunity for credit down the road. It behooves us to make sure that learners are not in dead-end paths. Even if it's short-term training we want them later on if they decide they want to pursue a career path that has more opportunity because a lot of times the short-term training might be a livable wage but it's at that bare minimum of a livable wage so this requires that training programs will
articulate to credit and or be stackable towards other programs and this slide lists what the department of education must do and this is where a lot of folks nationally are having discussions it's going to be maybe a challenge to meet some of these criteria you'll see that a program has to be in operation already for a year before eligibility the 7070 rules as they're calling it at least 70% of completion rate as well as job placement rate must be demonstrated and then the
value-added earnings metric. It makes me think a lot about, I'm scared to say it because he might jump up and down, the ROI metric that Dr. Warden is so excited about for our higher ed institutions here, and that's really important. This is taxpayer dollars, and we need to make sure that these programs are resulting in programs that lead to jobs that are paying for the training and that there's an ROI metric in there. It's important, but it can also be challenging on some of these short-term trainings like I said they're very entry-level trainings
many of these if they're short-term so with all that when we look at what the award is this is why some nationally are saying yeah I don't know if the juice is worth the squeeze for some of the programs this is just an example the federal Pell Grant maximum amount is currently seven thousand just short of $7,400. Well, a longer workforce Pell program, the longest one, the 14 weeks, 599 clock hours,
the maximum award a student could receive, and this would be the student demonstrating the greatest financial need, would be $3,980. The student who is Pell eligible, but for the minimum award amount, which is 10%, would only be $398. When we look at the shortest term of a Pell grant, workforce Pell of 8 weeks or 150 o'clock hours, that is as little as $1,232 even for the student who has the most need, and the student that is Pell eligible with the least need, only $123.
So that $123 may not make someone really want to go through the trouble of the FAFSA or the institution go to the trouble of all the paperwork that's required.
Speaker 24
23:09
So that is all the information I have on that and we're happy to
Senator Jane English
Unverified
23:15
answer any questions thank you very much okay representative
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
23:24
Garner thank you madam chair I just had a quick question at the very beginning when we were talking about the programs that have been
eliminated the workforce programs that have been eliminated is there a list of those somewhere or how is that done and is it done in a way that if someone is in that program that they can finish or maybe they didn't maybe you aren't using it at all I don't know but
Speaker 16
23:51
what was what was the so our secondary career centers through our operation the way they're set up functionally is they do department of commerce oversees that operation and so the career education workforce development board there oversees the funding and determines it so
they've had for years a tiered funding where they had different tiered levels so then it was a tier one a tier two a tier three that determined the level of need for that program and so what went into this year was the funding for what was considered like a tier three program which was had the least wage or demand threshold in our state were the programs that are no longer counting in that because those programs are choosing to close them because the funding's not there for them anymore holistically most of those programs the students are still finishing them out it's just been on a case-by-case basis also those enrollments were very small most of
Speaker 14
24:41
those programs and but we can get you a list with the department of commerce specifically from the office of skills development on which programs were
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
25:00
if you would like those okay great thank you oh thank you representative duke Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, guys. Thank you for being here. It's good to see you all. Hope you had a good holidays. I've got a couple of questions. One I'm sure is not going to surprise you. So my first one is when it comes to the letter grade that the schools get and with the,
I guess is the merit, I put my glasses back on, the merit of distinction where there are students having to be a completer using my words. I don't know if those are necessarily your words on this. So how much of a tick is it off if they have
kids who are not completers? How much does it affect their letter grade?
Speaker 17
25:38
Oh, thank you. So, I mean, when you look into
Speaker 16
25:41
the formula, it is looking specifically at students who achieve that. And so it's going to look at kind of the numerator, denominator of it is the number of students that are graduating becomes that denominator. The numerator becomes the number of students who achieved merit or distinction.
So, I mean, as we build that out, I don't wholly look at it as if there's a tick against them. It's just looking at our, reassuring our students have that success for the graduate piece. Now, if you get into the math teacher over here, start talking about the math side of it, then, I mean, there is going to be that, who is their four-year cohort graduation piece, the students who aren't achieving that. When we look at that, I think it's out of the total number of points, about a ninth of it. I mean, there is going to be some impact there long-term for them, for students who are not getting through a pathway. Okay,
Speaker 45
26:23
so this is a conversation that you and I and, what is it, director worked?
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
26:29
I don't know if I have the exact title, Commissioner Warden, whatever it is, that I've had a couple of times over the last couple
of years. But you know one of my concerns is the Duke children would be a problem for a school district, right? Because in a small school district, a lot of your kids who do your one, and there's a couple of layers I have on this question, do your sports and also do your band or your choir or your other pieces. So I see this a little difficult for them. My children, I encouraged, try things. You're in high school. I didn't have a single one of them complete. They completed their sports, but they didn't complete, whether it was accounting or whether they went to home ec or whatever the technology, whatever it is.
Now, whether they did ag or some of those other classes that they did, they tried a couple of those different things, which I encouraged. The way I see it is if you have students that do that, if they don't complete because they went into accounting and they took a business class, they took an ag class and went, okay, this is not necessary for me. I'm going to go a different direction. That's going to impact the school letter grade. I haven't seen anything that's ever convinced me differently. So is that accurate, even though the terminology may not be they're achieving versus a tick against them,
it's still kind of the same end result, right? We want them to be selecting in ninth grade and become completers in something. Dr. Warden's going to try to respond. I know, he's so used to this question with me. But
we don't want them to do a buffet,
Speaker 53
27:55
is basically. There he goes. So make me feel better. Representative Duke, thank you for the question.
Speaker 56
28:00
um so is it perfect no but i do think it's really good and for the students that you're addressing
the duke the duke kids that are encouraged to try everything uh we have more
Speaker 57
28:13
than one way for them to achieve distinction they can be an ap scholar and take a certain number of ap classes to get there they can do an international baccalaureate baccalaureate program they can also do a complete a technical certificate in a technical area or they can also achieve a certificate of general studies which is achieving basically 30 hours that satisfy partially satisfy the general education core so there are multiple modalities and ways for for children to reach this
Speaker 58
28:41
our problem is that we haven't had students having conversation the students that you're talking about are doing that with intentionality those aren't the kids we're missing the kids that we're missing are the other 58% of the students in Arkansas that don't attempt anything after high school. We only have 42% of our children in Arkansas attempting anything after high school. And when I say that I'm talking about technical education, pure academics, that's 20 percentage points behind the nation. Those are the children that we're missing that are in the bubble of the
belly of the bell curve that we've got to
Speaker 57
29:18
get to improve education in Arkansas. And I do believe that your children and those we're talking about who explore these different things with intentionality were probably bound to that destiny and that there are opportunities through the AP or IB or the other the Cambridge ACE certificate for them to get there is it perfect no and and I will tell you I am very open to any other ways where if we miss miss the ball here we're missing
something and we need to plug a hole we're open to those conversations i
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
29:51
hope that helps so if if a student there's a couple different and you and you went in one of the directions that i do have a question on as far as these diplomas but if you have a class of 68 and your 68 students do not get that completer part not talking i mean is that separate from the diplomas of distinction when they're graded on it or is it so if you don't have your kids complete but you have them
get this diploma distinction then their letter grade is not going to have any effect positive or negative from that because my understanding is they have to they have to complete over here to get that little tick on the letter grade to get an increased score so the what's up
Speaker 16
30:33
on the screen right now are the different pathways that we have when we say pathways kind of loosely because we start to include like APs on there I think it's the third yeah third line on the left it talks about advanced placement so a student taking three AP courses those courses might not
be in sequence to each other or have any correlation but they are advanced placement courses that then becomes their pathway their success ready pathway and so that's going to meet that indicator then the second part of having like taking something forward with them is going to be then earning that concurrent credit or the other options with their assessments when we start talking about the AP scholar designations that college board puts out because then that gives them a designation that would help them achieve that merit or distinction piece that's there so it's not necessarily always looking at them being a completer which is very much a career and technical education term that
we use within our pathways where our pathways are a little bit broader as we look at this holistically in many of the examples that dr warden
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
31:31
mentioned so if a student does a gets that example you use there gets the ap that is equivalent as far as the letter grade for that school district so if they have them being a completer yes
Speaker 64
31:45
ma'am so if they achieve that ap scholar designation which the ap scholar rules are specific
Speaker 16
31:50
to how college board determines an ap scholar that information that then is equivalent to them being a ct completer that let's say went through
our automotive service program and had their ase certification at the end it would be the equivalent of that and they would still be able to achieve that merit or distinction level it's been a while
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
32:06
since i've had the kids in high school so does that do they have to have like the end of course exam or something like that so
Speaker 16
32:13
with the past that to make sure that they get that so the ap they go to that qualifying score of a three that's set by college board and so we can send you all of the specific metrics that ap or college board specifically puts out for like the AP Scholar, they have the AP Scholar with Honor, they also have the AP Scholar with
Designation, and they have the AP Scholar with Honor Designation. Each of those are set by College Board with those designations mean, and it all revolves around the number of courses they have taken and the scores they have achieved on those exams they have to take at the end of that course. Okay, so I have,
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
32:45
and I'll get back in the queue for a couple of other questions that revolve around this a little bit, but they're
a little bit different. But I think, you know, And in the conversations we had the last couple of years, one of my concerns is, and I just want to make that reassurance from you all, that if you have students that are not completing
this because they try some of those different pathways and to see what they want to do in college, because you don't necessarily know ninth grade, you don't necessarily know your freshman year of college what you want to do, right? So they have additional, as long as they're maybe taking an AP class or is there another pathway besides that to make sure that school district isn't having that letter grade impacted by because those letter grades matter I think they're important right isn't being impacted because of that student that is moving around a little bit because they have the parent maybe that is saying hey okay you're not
Speaker 21
33:37
you don't like that okay try something different so if if I could just add to that and I know Ross and spoke about the AP scholar and
Speaker 22
33:46
of course I'm going to focus on the concurrent piece so if you notice on here where it says 12 or more post-secondary credits and we said most of the concurrent credit courses are three hours not all but majority of three hours so a student who takes four concurrent credit courses that counts as being on this previous slide in the top right column that's the concurrent credit pathway so they could be on any
of ross's cte pathways even if they weren't one of the h2 pathways listed here or they could start one here and to to your point change their mind and do something else and even if they were not a CTE completer if they took four concurrent credit courses or concurrent credit courses to to get to that 12 hours their pathway was then the concurrent credit pathway and I stress concurrent because the success rate in Arkansas for concurrent success rate being an a b or c meaning it'll transfer
once they pursue on to higher ed that success rate is 91 percent the success rate for ap on just one exam is only around 48 percent i don't have my slides with me it's it's less than 50 percent um so that if if your eggs are all in one bucket their concurrent is a safe bet and then the school would
Speaker 23
34:58
get credit the student would get credit everybody's good to go okay thank you i I appreciate that, and something came
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
35:05
to me when you said that, and then I completely lost it, so I'll get it back in the queue
and come back to it when I ask
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
35:21
my other questions. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Senator Flowers. Thank
you. I just have a couple of questions. One is, are there guidance counselors that provide the
information for students 9th through 12th grade concerning these career pathways or success-ready pathways?
Speaker 17
35:42
Yes, ma'am. I mean, we've done extensive training with our school counselors across the state through their professional
Speaker 16
35:49
organizations, but as the department hosting regular trainings to make sure that our guidance counselors in our schools, our career coaches in our schools are fully aware of the pathways and
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
35:59
how to achieve that merit distinction. every school 9th through 12th has a guidance counselor present present at
Speaker 17
36:06
the trainings I mean so our present at the school yes I mean we're they're required to have a
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
36:12
counselor yes ma'am 9th through 12th grade yes ma'am and the
other question I have is concerning the apprenticeships they're mentioned up there but I don't see a list of apprenticeships and how where are they fitting into these different subject matters so for both merit and distinction we offer
Speaker 17
36:38
our students have the opportunity to what we call
Speaker 16
36:42
work based learning we have multiple levels to it but we have certified pre
apprenticeships which are through the Department of Commerce and I believe mr. waits might hear in a little bit discuss that and then we also have youth apprenticeships that are registered through the department of labor that students can complete those as well and those are going to lead to that distinction opportunity so those are both folded in and we have numerous students participating in both those versions and then we also have
Speaker 17
37:09
career practicums in our state which are also students engaged in work experience while in high school gaining credit and work experience
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
37:17
related to their interest and the guidance counselor is aware and provides that
information to students yes ma'am is there a list i'd like to have a list of the
Speaker 17
37:30
apprenticeships that are available we can get you the number of students that are enlisted in apprenticeships throughout the state by district broken down we
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
37:37
have all that information available and are the districts required to have
Speaker 16
37:41
apprenticeship no that's their they can decide at the local level whether they want to which programs they offer so that is a choice of theirs i'm
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
37:49
wondering if if it's available apprenticeships are available within every school so i will speak for a lot of
Speaker 16
37:56
our apprenticeships that we have in the state that are registered with the dol most of the business industry that we're engaged with are traveling all across the state to engage with apprenticeship opportunities we have specifically we can use a construction trade we have some specific construction companies in the state of arkansas that they have a person solely employed for apprenticeships and then specifically even youth apprenticeships and they travel to any community that is interested in working to engage those students in those apprenticeship opportunities to some of our most rural to our most urban so I would say anybody who's willing
to have the conversation with them it's there and available right now
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
38:32
well I certainly would appreciate a list of those apprenticeships thank
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
38:42
you madam chair representative meeks thank you Madam Chair. I have just two questions. I'm over here by the pillar here. So it's kind of ironic that we're discussing this today because in a few minutes my daughter will actually be taking her placement so she can take advantage of the access scholarships. So this is a very timely discussion
for me. So it leads me to two questions. Number one, you'd mentioned earlier that the guidance counselors are trained to promote these opportunities within the the public schools can you talk about your efforts maybe how do we reach charter schools private schools home school students to let them know that these opportunities are available for them as well are you looking specifically
Speaker 68
39:26
for like merit and distinction or are you looking more at
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
39:29
scholarships i'm thinking like with concurrent uh uh credit classes so while they're still in high school if i've got a student who's going to a private school or in our case my daughter's homeschooled uh what are we doing to let those families know that they can you know that there's this opportunity available that they can take these concurrent classes i think dr warden's going to try to answer you if we can get him
Speaker 17
39:52
on you're not working in some things are just best
Speaker 56
40:01
left unanswered right can you use tino oh there it goes oh yeah okay there you go operator error i'm sure uh represent
Speaker 57
40:16
me thank you for the question so we do uh visit with our private schools and home schools as as we're asked um and i'm happy to pull together uh an effort you know to focus on that uh in more and better ways to make sure that they're aware of those opportunities it's it's it's new and it's gaining traction real fast there's a learning curve sure uh our high
school or junior high counselors you know those are some of the most important folks in the lives of our young people especially when those young people may be first generation students who don't have parents that are pushing them hard or showing them the options I know so you know that's a that's a hard-working group of individuals that have a have a lot of rule changes in front of them so we're providing support as we can and happy to do more to that but if we're if we're missing something with that that you're aware of we're happy to anytime since some of our folks over have those folks in to discuss these options and make sure that they are accessing them
in the best way possible that's what
Speaker 22
41:14
that I said on the charter panel and our charter office at the division of elementary and secondary education work closely with APSRC and with the charter schools throughout the state to make sure that they are aware of the changes whether it's related to legislation or or policy at the department to make sure that they they are aware of the changes and what's available
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
41:35
for students okay and then my follow-up is I was kind of curious the this federal workforce Pell grant you
were talking about with the 150 to 599 clock hours you you'd mentioned that almost everything is disqualified right that there's very few things that do qualify can you tell us some things that do qualify i mean what what was the federal government what was their focus of putting i mean if you know whenever we're doing legislation if we're putting very narrow guardrails there's a purpose for that what is the purpose is there certain like careers you're trying to promote or Or who could take advantage of this?
Speaker 22
42:14
Well, so I will say that, ironically, federally, the examples that they gave included CDL and nursing assistant. Nursing assistant programs in our state and other states typically are around 90 o'clock hours. So that's not going to get the hour threshold. And I gave the example that CDL earlier wouldn't either. So as I pulled the data for our professional skills training in our state and narrowed it down based upon both of these criteria, there was one program that qualified, and it was a CDL program that ended up being eight weeks
because it can be one that maybe someone's attending part-time. So we are moving towards, for this, we're going to work with our colleges, and my partners in crime back here from Arkansas Community Colleges are here and working with them on this as well, to work with our colleges to stack programs. Like one example might be programmable logic controllers, PLCs. They may be offering courses in PLC1, PLC2, PLC3, and those are all separate.
Say one of those programs is a 50-hour clock hour course, and then each of those are 50 hours. Well, if you put those together, that makes a program that would be 150 hours. So as things are packaged right now, they may not be eligible, but we feel confident that our institutions can combine training to make them more of a robust package. Often employers may want one type of skill, but they want additional ones. Like, it's going to benefit everyone if they add in their OSHA,
where right now OSHA might just be a standalone training by itself. So they're just going to have to be creative in combining programs. And one thing that I left out when I was talking about this is the importance of braiding funding, both state and federal funds. So that's why we're being very intentional with the Workforce Challenge, that we're capturing programs that may not be covered by the workforce Pell, as well as we think about WIOA funding goes towards short-term training. The Office of Skills Development funds much of the short-term training in our state.
So just making sure that there's something, if not more than one, funding stream for all programs is really critical, because in our state, we are working with colleges to develop what are often called micro pathways or micro credentials that are stackable and we want to make sure as we're encouraging institutions to develop those programs that there's some way to fund them. Okay all right thank you. At risk
Speaker 62
44:42
of repeating Dr. Moore she's absolutely right we anticipate that our institutions are going to repackage programs so that they're able to better
Speaker 57
44:50
take advantage of federal opportunities but also we are on the data looking at ways that how what we have complements what the Fed is doing but also complements our colleagues at OSD. Cody's year is going to talk about apprenticeships, I think, later, but working with them to ensure that OSD funds and workforce challenge funds, all those things, in the whole, addresses the entire landscape of education, workforce education in the state. And one
Speaker 22
45:16
thing I forgot, but with Dr. Warden speaking, it made me remember conversations
we were just having yesterday about this. We do have some programs that currently live on the credit side that are part of technical certificates that require some general education type training in addition to the specific workforce training and they have been moved over to that side primarily so they would be eligible for funding we anticipate some of those programs moving back over to non-credit because that is part of the reason some students choose to do other routes besides our community colleges because they want
to go somewhere that they're not having to do the general education courses so some of those programs even like welding. Welding lives on both the credit and non-credit side, but we could easily move some of those non-credit programs over to some of the credit programs over the non-credit side without requiring the English composition course
Speaker 57
46:10
or the math course. The way our schools are rewarded now is for completing or producing academic credentials. So with the new workforce or professional skills formula that we're working on now, they will be more encouraged to let,
they won't be as negatively impacted because if a student comes to a welding program and gets the certifications they need and go to work before they finish an academic credential, that impacts the institution negatively. And that's not what we want. That's not fair to the institution or the individual. Once they've met their skill goals to get the employment they need, they need to get on with it when they so choose. Now, if they want to come back and stack or skill up or get more on more uh academic credentials that's fine but we're we're trying to mold and adjust the system
so that that's positive for the students are not staying any longer than they want or need and it's also that the institutions are better recognized for students that are meeting their employment goals that may not have been meeting the metrics that we have previously set does that Does that make sense, I hope? Thank you. And congrats to your daughter. Representative Duke.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
47:28
Thank you again, Madam Chair. Okay, so here's my
next question. And it kind of goes around with the Governor's Scholarship. And I guess I have initial just questions on kind of a little bit of the history of it. I want to have some clarity on it. So the traditionally, at least what I had knowledge of, is on the governor's scholarship, I guess I should ask first, is that $2,500 versus the whatever the other terminology was for the governor's scholarship, is that relatively new or has that been there this whole time?
I mean, since, I don't know, the last 10
Speaker 23
48:04
or 15 years. So I do not lead scholarship work at our agency. I don't know if Dr.
Speaker 111
48:10
Ward knows offhand without looking what the historical
Speaker 62
48:14
funding was for that. Representative Duke, are you asking
Speaker 112
48:17
about the funding per individual? I guess so. So you all mentioned the changes of
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
48:23
this with the Diplomative Distinction piece, because that is
Speaker 57
48:25
a new piece, right? So what we've done is we have broadened the eligibility opportunities.
Speaker 58
48:31
So now, on top of all the ways you could become eligible for Governor Scholar, you can now achieve
Speaker 57
48:40
that eligibility by achieving a Diploma of Distinction. And what that will do is, rather than getting just your Academic Challenge Scholarship, if you achieve a Diploma
Speaker 58
48:49
of Distinction, you're automatically eligible for that $5,000 award, $5,000 a year award, the Governor's Scholar, and can stack
Speaker 57
48:57
Academic Challenge to that. So it has the potential, if a student, you know, is in college for four years
and they achieve distinction, of enhancing the financial support through the state and
Speaker 58
49:07
lottery by $20,000. So, okay, so you're saying that what they're getting right now,
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
49:14
or the kids who are currently in college right now or previously, my understanding is it was a 32 on the ACT, and I think you had to have a GPA of maybe 3.5 or 4. No, that's why I was saying that part's not
Speaker 22
49:27
changed. Right, but we're adding another piece to it. The other piece was already there, but it did not include the Diploma of Distinction.
Speaker 57
49:35
And you're talking about Governor's Distinguished Scholarship.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
49:38
Right, so I'm saying the $2,500 piece and the $5,000 semester piece, right? Those are two different pieces? It's two different scholarships. But the $5,000 one, are you saying the
$2,500 one has always been here? That's the same thing. The one is per year and the one is
Speaker 24
49:58
per semester. Okay. So $25 each semester is $5,000
Speaker 58
50:01
a year. I think you're confusing Governor's Distinguished with Governor's Scholar.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
50:06
So is Distinguished a part of this at all?
It is above and beyond. It's above and beyond this. But that
Speaker 22
50:16
now will require a Diploma of Distinction. So this is why when I said Distinction so many times it was confusing. Whether the $5,000 increased or not, that's what I wasn't sure about since I don't oversee scholarships. But there has always been two separate parts to the Governor's Scholar. There's the non-distinguished, which is the $5,000 a year. And then there's the distinguished, which is the large amount in italics at the bottom that's $10,000 per year.
The distinguished had no changes. That's the very rigorous one that requires that 32 super score. The other one was already in place, but the criteria for it changed. And that criteria for the smaller scholarship, the $5,000 a year, now includes a diploma of distinction. What I can't speak to is whether it was $5,000 last year. It was. Okay, that's the part I couldn't speak to. So the money didn't change on that one. It's the same. The big change on it was
Speaker 120
51:09
adding that diploma of distinction. That was an added criteria that made that eligibility increase.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
51:15
Okay. So because I know initially the way that this distinguished one was one per county. for several many years ago and then the legislature or the governor I don't know who decided we don't want to lose our 32 ACT kids to other states because we were losing them and so they broadened it up to I think start awarding it to just everybody had a 32 and then I don't know if they've shrunk it back down again I have no idea what the rules and things have been on that but I get that leads into my next question so you're saying that one the distinguished one with our kids who are
scoring 32s on our ACT in our Arkansas schools We're not putting any other thing on them. It's still the 32 and the GPA. It's not the distinguished scholar. So say you go through and you get
a different type of diploma, but you hit a 32 on ACT, right? You're still eligible for that. You
Speaker 22
52:02
don't have to have the other pieces. You could not earn merit or distinction, either one. And if you have a 32 on your ACT, you still would get that distinguished.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
52:11
Perfect. That's very helpful. That leads me to my next question that has to do with as far as your private schools and your homeschool.
So if they're wanting to get the diploma of distinction, if they want that governor scholarship that is the $2,500 that ends up to be $5,000 a year, then they've got to get a diploma of distinction. Is that correct? Are
Speaker 22
52:35
they eligible for that at all? Well, you'll see the other bullet that I didn't mention, but an associate
Speaker 57
52:43
degree from high school is also an eligibility. All of the other eligibility requirements for the standard governor's
Speaker 58
52:48
scholarship apply. We increased eligibility by adding anyone who achieves a diploma of distinction.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
52:54
So let me just kind of get to where the question. Are they, if you are a homeschool or a private school student, obviously the governor's scholarship, the distinguished one, 32 on the ACT, I assume that they're eligible for that. All they got to do is hit the 32 on the ACT. But if you have the $5,000 one, are they under having to get hit those same requirements for diploma of distinction in order to be able to receive that award of a scholarship? Because I assume in a private school, they're not under the same diploma distinctions, but maybe they are.
I don't know. I just kind of
Speaker 21
53:32
assume they have their own sets of rules. So I've pulled up,
Speaker 22
53:35
just from our scholarship website, the criteria that Dr. Warren has mentioned still remains the same, and this was just added to it. So homeschool students or private school students could still meet this criteria of being the highest scoring student on the ACT or SAT score, cumulative GPA, and class rank for an Arkansas county that a Governor's Distinguished Scholar was not selected, or they can earn the associate's degree.
The diplomas of distinction are awarded by the school district per legislation. So
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
54:03
they're not eligible for those. Is that correct? For
the diploma of distinction for the $5,000 scholarship. So that's a nuanced question
Speaker 57
54:11
that I need to make before I affirm that. But that is not the intention. The intention are if they meet the thresholds of a technical certificate that we're going to award them, if they meet the same expectations of someone that's attending a public school, then they should be eligible for their scholarship. So we can ensure that happens on the application of the implementation process.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
54:32
I mean, that's the piece that concerns me a little bit, however you feel about it. It seems to me the way that reads, the diploma of distinction, if that's governed by what you do in a public school, then you're out taking out your private schools and your homeschool kids for being eligible for the $5,000 a year of scholarship. Now, I may not be reading it correctly, that's why
Speaker 110
54:50
I asked the question. I think it assumes that a homeschool student cannot
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
54:55
be awarded a diploma of distinction. Which that's what I would assume if that's a private,
Speaker 62
54:59
if that's a public school standard. Well, I don't know what would preclude them from being, if they hit the requirements, being awarded the same or something of the equivalent.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
55:08
So if they hit those, so they will have to hit those requirements that a public school has to hit in order to be eligible for that scholarship. I lost you on the last part. I just want to clarify the diploma distinction, everybody applying for that has to hit the same requirement, which means their school, their diploma that is from the Duke School of Education, they have to, my degree requirements for them to graduate and receive a diploma
from our school has to hit this diploma distinction in order for them to be eligible for that. So we have to parallel that diploma distinction for them to be eligible for that particular scholarship. On top of all the
Speaker 58
55:53
prior eligibility opportunities that existed. So this is a value add. This is not taking anything away. If they were
Speaker 57
56:00
eligible before, they're still eligible. This is another way they can achieve eligibility. Okay, but they do have to do the same hoops.
Speaker 131
56:09
Yes, for this one particular eligibility criteria.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
56:13
Which is a little bit, I mean, like the ACT is a very cut and dry one. Everyone's taking the ACT. That's why the $10,000 one, there's not as many. But whenever you tie that diploma to it, which is an add a new piece to this scholarship, correct? Then you're adding a new thing to it for the private schools and the homeschool kids as well to be eligible for it. It's not just a public school. So everyone's eligible to receive it,
Speaker 116
56:39
but they all have to jump through the same hoops. Yes, and, you know, the determination
Speaker 57
56:44
and the communications piece of that we're ironing out as we speak on when that's submitted.
You know, we've already set the deadlines. And this first year of implementation, there's, you know, a few things that we've got to really figure out some details, sort of like the questions you're asking,
Speaker 62
56:57
but we'll get there. Yeah, because, I mean,
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
57:00
I'm thinking of those a lot of different directions, But one of them, too, is if I'm
a school, a private school, this is also just another potential guardrail for my kids. And so I think it's something that private schools and homeschools and all of them are going to have to, you know, obviously life's about choices. It's about choices. So you've got to choose. But people
just need to be aware of if you want this particular scholarship, you've got to jump through these particular hoops.
So you better know if a private school or the homeschool or whatever you're doing starting in grade nine, what does that look like?
Speaker 57
57:30
Yeah, but keep in mind, this is an or. This is another way. You don't have to do all that plus something else. This is an additional eligibility opportunity. I do
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
57:40
understand that. Sometimes my questions are to make sure the people that we represent understand that as well. And
Speaker 58
57:46
we're happy to go dive deeper if we need to. So thank you. Thank you.
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
57:55
Representative Beck. Thank you, Madam Chair. So two quick questions.
One is a follow-up on Representative Duke's question. The question is now, as I understand, you said homeschoolers can do it. They have to meet the same requirements as the public schools were as far as the diplomas of distinction. Do we currently have those listings available to where, like, someone who is homeschooling would say,
okay, well, here's the things that we need to be doing, starting at the ninth grade uh to to make our child eligible for that and i don't i'm not asking what they are i'm asking do we currently have that list and is it available to someone that
Speaker 62
58:43
would be homeschooling so we have posted that information and our
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
58:47
and our yeah all right so that's a the other question i had see i easy question quick so the other question i had is uh looking at the the merit uh requires one of the requirements is uh certified
pre-apprenticeship leading to a registered apprenticeship and i was looking back on the previous page so could you just walk me through one of those apprentice to that step by the way i'll ask this question is electrical one of them an electrical apprenticeship one of them so i mean with our certified
Speaker 16
59:18
pre-apprenticeship yes i mean electrical all your traditional apprenticeships are going to be that so so that's going to be specific like when cody gets up here and he talks a little bit about what the department of commerce is doing with apprenticeships so
arkansas is doing certified pre-apprenticeships which is
Speaker 14
59:34
unique and he can speak a little bit more about what that looks like but that is through
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
59:41
the office of skills development with their apprenticeships that they're certifying so maybe maybe this is a question for later on or you can offline this thing but the pre-apprenticeship programs do not uh they they get the education part they do not get the hours required for the registered apprenticeships is correct and i'm
Speaker 14
1:00:05
going to let cody answer those questions when he comes up here in a little bit for you because he can
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
1:00:20
speak specifically about our state's rules regarding that okay all right thank you thank you chair I have a I have
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
1:00:30
a question as it relates to you mentioned earlier about 50 percent or higher percentage of of students are not entering or attempting career pathways work
for career readiness pathways etc I think it was a little over 50 percent is that Yeah, so
Speaker 56
1:00:44
what I was speaking to you earlier was that in Arkansas, our higher education participation rate, and when I say higher education, I mean anything beyond
Speaker 57
1:00:52
high school, not just a bachelor degree seeking. Yes. Our participation rate is about 42% in the state, and the national average is about 62. Okay. That's a problem for us. We have this whole package in the Access Act is all about having better connectivity between K-12 and higher ed
and increasing access and eligibility and opportunities for students to participate in something beyond, in post-secondary education, technical, academic, or otherwise. Yes.
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
1:01:20
Okay, thank you. So 42% in Arkansas, one of the lower, we're kind of on the lower end of the other states. So I was wondering, since we're looking at that in K-12, looking across the board, ensuring that we can reduce that percentage, 42% down, What are we doing when it comes to K-5 for pre-career preparation experiences
or exploration opportunities for K-5 students and their families so that they can hit the ground running by the time they enter sixth grade? Because the vision of a success-ready Arkansas graduate, this one, this slide right here, It starts at sixth grade, and I know that in the past, in nonprofits that I've worked in in the past, whenever there has been opportunities for families to visit a post-secondary institution,
they take their children, for example, just one example, and the excitement is there because now the questions are, you know, they're asking a lot of questions about post-secondary in elementary school so i i was just wondering i this starts at sixth grade i'm wondering what we're doing prior to that so
that overall k-12 we're doing something k-12 so i don't think we
Speaker 56
1:02:47
can start early enough right i think that's your point uh i've known i don't know that i'm equipped
Speaker 57
1:02:53
to answer the the efforts i'm sure my colleague stacy smith will be glad to it knows what those things are be glad to share on those but
Speaker 147
1:03:00
i'm not equipped to speak to those at this time i'm happy to follow up though
Speaker 13
1:03:05
yeah and I would only say the slide shows this because this is what the legislation requires and learns yes not to say that there's not a
Speaker 22
1:03:11
lot of great work being done in k-5 this is just per the legislation what's required because I know Ross and his team when we worked on these even the early career experiences if I heard Ross say it once I heard him say a hundred times referring to kindergarten and community helpers how we
Speaker 149
1:03:27
have to talk about more than just the community helpers that students learn about have talked about all the different careers, even
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
1:03:34
in their backyards? Yes, that's what I was curious about, because we have a lot of first-generation parents, low-income parents who may be working multiple jobs, and how can we serve all of the families where these two pieces are married so we're all, you know, aligned? That was my question, yeah, my concern. Thank you.
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:03:59
Representative Brown. Thank you Madam Chair. I have simple questions. I've let my colleagues ask all the difficult ones. I understand that the academic challenge scholarship that comes from the lottery and I assume there are finite amount of funds. Have we ever exhausted the amount of funds in the scholarship lottery? No ma'am, not in recent history.
Speaker 147
1:04:25
I think maybe early on in the evolution and creation of the lottery there
Speaker 57
1:04:31
may be a concern. Right now, and I don't know, my CFO's not, the last I knew, I know, and don't hold me to the number, but it was over $350 million in the fund in excess of what we have spent over the past several years that we have accumulated that has not been spent.
Speaker 58
1:04:53
So we are producing, in prior years, we are, the lottery is generating more than it's spending.
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:05:02
Okay, and then my next easy question is now that we have LEARNS and it was implemented a couple of school terms ago, are we seeing that our students are achieving more and better? Have we been able to track that yet? So, as far as learns
Speaker 56
1:05:21
and implementation, I'm not equipped to speak to that, but I can say just by the participation rates, you
Speaker 57
1:05:28
know, the numbers that Ross, you know, we're not even a year in implementation.
This access legislation didn't pass until last spring of 25. And in this fall, we've seen a 30%, 32, almost 33% increase in the number of students participating in concurrent credit. And we've seen huge increases in CTE. So I know or I feel like that the numbers show that these strides that were that we these steps we've taken are making significant strides in participation. And I know that I feel strongly that those those those numbers are going to continue to grow next year and beyond.
We the thing about the bill is was it was an omnibus bill. It touched a lot of things, but we've encouraged students and parents through better financial opportunities if they stay in school their senior year. We had less, about half our kids their senior year had a full schedule. And they were coming, trying to go to college without a full schedule, not taking a math class their senior year, and our remediation rates were high. So we've got to keep them in school their senior year, even if they're going on with taking more concurrent credit so that they don't have that time of forgetting. So we've got students and parents encouraged to do that with financial aid opportunities.
We've got districts encouraged to keep them there to get them to this merit distinction opportunities, the accountability, enhanced course, the accountability. And then we know that our higher ed folks are going to be connected because they're going to have more enrollment. So it's really the trifecta of the package and encouraging all the entities involved to bolster this participation in this enhanced
Speaker 58
1:07:05
skills and opportunities for our Kansans.
Speaker 23
1:07:08
And to add to the trifecta, I had a fourth thing as well.
Speaker 22
1:07:15
The part of acceleration that we also talk about is the standardization, making concurrent credit weighted. So that is just an additional reason. Dr. Ward mentioned some students not having a full schedule their senior year. Sometimes that was due to they had already exhausted the AP courses offered at their school, and they did not want to take concurrent credit because it would actually lower their GPA since it was not weighted. So with that change, because of access, now students are incentivized to take concurrent credit. It will help their GPA rather than hurt it since it's weighted just like AP or IB courses.
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:07:49
Great. And maybe you can explain that to me offline about being weighted. My other question has to do with the governor's scholarship. Where did the funds come from for that, and is that
a limited amount of money? Because it looks like we might be dipping into it
Speaker 57
1:08:08
a lot. I just got a text from my CFO. So the lottery count right now, but the balance right now is like $330 million. Good. Correction on what I said earlier.
And now you're, so in access, I think, don't hold me to the number, but I think that the governor's scholarships, governor's government extinguished was funded at around $18 million. And what we did in access was that should the governor's scholarship amount need to the need exceed the balance, that we could use lottery funds to supplement any overages from what was currently budgeted in the governor's scholar amount.
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:08:51
Does that make sense? Yes, it does. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Representative Mayberry. Thank you. I'm sorry. I might be a little confused, so I'm just asking for some clarification because that number just kind of perked my ears a little bit with saying that we've got, I guess, $330 million.
So the people of the state of Arkansas approved the money for the trade schools. Is that what we're talking about here, or are we saying that this $330 million?
Just help update me and understand where we are. I know if Robin were here, I'd ask her, because I know this is the issue that she really knows about. But if I'm questioning, and maybe some others are questioning, where do we stand with that? Are we using that money now for the trade schools? Yes,
Speaker 56
1:09:46
ma'am. So prior to access, lottery proceeds could not be used at private career tech schools. They could be used at private colleges
Speaker 57
1:09:52
and universities, but they could not be used at private career technical schools. So we have opened it up for use there.
So that should increase some of the utilization of lottery scholarship funds. Yes, ma'am. So do
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:10:05
we know what that amount might be because it hasn't started yet?
Speaker 57
1:10:12
So we did a financial fiscal assessment on that when the bill was ran. I can get you the number on what we estimated that spend to be. Okay, is that
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:10:24
this school year is the first year that that would be in effect?
Speaker 57
1:10:30
Next fall. So we're working out all the implementation and the rules and processes for that with our friends at OSD and all the public private career technical schools. There's a lot of legwork. We require a lot less of the private career tech schools than we require of our public schools. So there's expectations of reporting because we can't give them taxpayers money or lottery money and not be able to gauge its effectiveness, so post-completion outcomes and such. So we are setting the parameters on all the metrics that we're going to gather from them,
including unique identifiers for students so that we can track wage growth and those type of things. But we are doing all that now, and the target date for those schools and
Speaker 128
1:11:14
those students, attending those to apply for that will be
Speaker 149
1:11:19
fall of 26. And in access, it outlined that $5 million would be allocated specifically for those private career ed.
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:11:25
Okay. Do you remember what that amount was, what it was estimated at? I
Speaker 57
1:11:31
think, well, Dr. Moore just reminded me that that was the $5 million.
So we set the fiscal impact at not to exceed $5 million for first year because there are hundreds of private career technical schools in the state, hundreds, but not all of those are eligible because they don't offer high-wage, high-demand programs. It's a limited number of programs graded to, I think the list was placed up there early
Speaker 116
1:11:58
on the slide, what skill sets that we will spend those proceeds to support. Okay.
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:12:04
Well, I guess my question would be if we have $320 million that's not being used,
Are we thinking about maybe increasing that lottery scholarship amount to the students to get it into the hands of the – I know we did this last session, yeah.
Speaker 57
1:12:21
So we increased the freshman award from $1,000 to $2,000. We increased the utilization to private career technical schools. We also are on the cusp of we just – this past year was the first time we did Challenge Plus, so it wasn't just merit-based, it was need-based. And that had an impact of the lottery. I can't remember the number, but I think it was around $10, $12 million.
So we are seeing an increase in the utilization rate of lottery proceeds. And I think we've done so much now over the next probably biennium. We need to look, say, okay, how many more kids are using access to acceleration? How, you know, how is it going with our private career tech? So are we using that $5 million? What is the Challenge Plus doing over more than just one year's worth? So we are, that's very on top of my mind to make sure that
Speaker 127
1:13:06
that money, That money in the bank, that's great, but it's not helping students. No, it's not doing what it's intended to do, so I
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:13:14
guess I'm just making sure, where are we now?
And you've given me the information I wanted. I knew that we have done some things, so you're updating me. Thank
Speaker 57
1:13:22
you. So we have had conversations with our friends at the lottery director, Sharon Strong. We have good support from them. We know we need to increase the utilization rate. There does need to be an amount in the bank, so if something happens, the lottery steps, we can finish what we started with those students. But we think $330 million is too much, so we are working to bring that down. Okay. Thank you for
Speaker 173
1:13:42
the update. Thank you. I appreciate it. Representative Barnes.
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:13:47
Thank you. I have a question, probably two questions in one. Number one, do we have any data on how many students and where they are from who are getting the distinguished scholarship, and what journey did they take? Did they take the SAT or the
ACT to qualify to get there? do we have that so yes sir
Speaker 62
1:14:08
we do have that information and i can get that to you i will say we're we're
Speaker 57
1:14:14
a heavy act state so most of the students have used act now we did open up some
other testing options recently because we we opened up for the classical learning test clt but yeah you can use sat act clt now so any of those can be used but by and large the the most able to utilize is the ACT and you can give us that information yeah I can
Speaker 134
1:14:38
get that information for you I'm happy you send that to Emily yes
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:14:45
thank you are there any other questions this has been very informative no seeing no further
questions we appreciate your attendance thank you very much for the information and I'm sure we'll be back with you again thank you very much thank you thank And now I'd like to introduce Cody Waits, who's the director of Workforce Connections. And the state of Arkansas was fortunate that the federal government chose us and the Department of Workforce Connections to be the administrator of a $34 million national apprenticeship grant.
So Cody's here to tell us a little bit about that and what it means for the state
Speaker 180
1:15:31
of Arkansas. It's quite an honor. It is. Thank you, Senator, and
Speaker 181
1:15:35
thank you, members of the committees. Just real quick, hats off to counterparts and colleagues from Department of Education, higher ed. They're doing a great job with everything they're working on, so always appreciative of the conversations we have together. And I know there's some apprenticeship-related questions. I think maybe Senator Flowers, Representative Beck, think you had some, so we'll dive into those here in a minute. But just real quickly, over the last probably six months or so, we've been working with the federal U.S. Department of Labor
on a cooperative agreement that's been signed and executed by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, and the Arkansas Department of Commerce Division of Workforce Connections to administer the American Manufacturing Apprenticeship Incentive Fund. And really what brought this up was, you know, there's a lot of conversations around how do we address the urgent need to grow and modernize the U.S. manufacturing workforce, and in direct response to Executive Order 14278 of preparing Americans for high-paying, skilled trade jobs of the future, which is to expand access to high-quality registered apprenticeship programs.
Arkansas will serve as the lead grantee and convener to establish this incentive fund. The incentive fund will support the expansion of advanced manufacturing registered apprenticeships nationwide to include 120 occupations currently in the advanced manufacturing subsectors such as, but not limited to, aerospace and defense, automotive, biotechnologies, maritime industrial defense and shipbuilding, supply chain and automation, nuclear energy, semiconductors, just to name a few. Through an incentive funding model, the Arkansas Department of Commerce will
motivate sponsors on a national scale to develop, expand, and or join existing advanced manufacturing registered apprenticeship programs and hire apprentices. Incentive funding will be distributed through a pay-for-performance model where payments are linked to specific performance criteria and predetermined outcomes. The incentive fund aims to stimulate innovation and reduce barriers that prevent sponsors from committing to registered apprenticeships thus promoting program scale and sustainability. Just a couple of other things I want to talk about here just in the opening
before I talk a little more plainly is you know there's a couple of things here so this initiative supports implementation of several presidential executive orders related to expanding registered apprenticeships. I've already said the one about preparing American high-paying skilled trade jobs for the future, advancing artificial intelligence or education for American youth, reinvigorating nuclear industrial base, and restoring America's maritime dominance, and serves as a significant pillar in the President's goal to reach and surpass one million active apprentices. Additionally,
this initiative aligns with pillar one of America's talent strategy, a comprehensive plan to re-industrialize the U.S. economy by investing workforce systems that deliver measurable results for employers, workers, and communities. This initiative is designed to incentivize growth and expansion of quality registered apprenticeships and advanced manufacturing, thereby accelerating the creation, expansion, and sustainability of registered apprenticeships. It's not usually like me to read from a piece of paper, so that was a little bit different for me. At the end of the day, you know, what we're working on now is we've already had conversations with many businesses,
both here in the state of Arkansas and across the United States. Other state workforce agencies, Iowa, Montana, Virginia, Mississippi, Wisconsin, just to name a few. You know, I mentioned companies. You know, there's companies here in Arkansas, such as Verco Manufacturing, Strong Manufacturing, Lockheed Martin, others that already leverage registered apprenticeships in the manufacturing areas. We've reached out and had site selection consultant groups actually reach out to us. as it relates to their interest and awareness of what's happening in Arkansas
as it relates to workforce development. So it's a really exciting opportunity for us, as you mentioned, Senator English. And I think it really helps put Arkansas and what we're doing in workforce development on the map. Obviously, this is specific to apprenticeships, but we've witnessed a lot of growth in registered apprenticeship in this state over the last few years. I think at one point in time, when I first came to this state back in 2017, I think we had somewhere around 4,000 active apprentices. Now we have north of 10,000 active apprentices, as reported by the Department of Labor, and obviously a big share of that.
We were talking about electrical and things of that nature. Obviously, the construction trades are a big piece of that with the licensing aspect of it, but we've seen expansion of apprenticeship, obviously, and teacher-registered apprenticeships, right, of which we work with the Department of Education on, manufacturing, IT, data analytics, health care. There's a number of different apprenticeship programs across the board in the state now, and that didn't exist previously. So we've made a lot of great work. Additionally, this year and just recently, we submitted our application to the Department of Labor to be the state apprenticeship agency.
That legislation was passed during this last legislative session. So as you were listening to my counterparts from the Department of Education talking about kind of the certified pre-apprenticeship, which is governed and oversaw by us, and then there's registered apprenticeship programs that get approved by the U.S. Department of Labor before the probably beginning of the next fiscal year, we'll actually be administering all of that through here at the state level. So, you know, this pay-for-performance model, $3,500 incentive payments will basically be cut. Two organizations, sponsors of registered apprenticeship programs,
either here in the state of Arkansas or outside the state of Arkansas as part of this effort. Once an apprentice has been employed and registered for a period of 90 days, we will verify that that has occurred and that they've met those eligibility criteria and that they're in within the 120 occupations that we've agreed upon as part of this effort to begin with. This first six months is kind of a pilot phase for us in the Department of Labor to see how this grows out. But at the end of the day, we'll be cutting those incentive payments to companies and organizations who sustain those individual apprentices
for a period of 90 days until the $35.8 million is expended. It's a four-year grant. We don't know that the funds will last four years. We're hoping that there's a lot of activity over the next few months and years to come. But, you know, with that, Senator, That's really the gist of what it is that we're doing and what we're leading at a national level. There's only been a couple of these cooperative agreements signed with the Department of Labor. We're obviously one of them, and we're focused on advanced manufacturing. And I think that puts us in a really good position to do some great things, both at a state level and a national level.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:21:53
So with that, I'll answer any questions. Thank you.
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:22:05
Senator Flowers? Thank you. Thank you, Mr.
Waits. The $35 million grant, you say it will be administered by Arkansas. Is that for the whole
Speaker 181
1:22:17
United States? It is, yes. So we were given a $35.8 million cooperative agreement, of which we'll hire staff for, 100% funded by U.S. Department of Labor,
Employment and Training Administration. We're in the process of, we just went through legislative council a week or two ago, so we're in the process now of posting positions and hiring positions 100% dedicated to. in administering this fund. So how much is the administration? We're going to try
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:22:40
to stay under 8% or 9% of the
Speaker 181
1:22:43
total amount of money, and I think that's one of the things that the Department of Labor is really looking at in their model is how do we put more money at a state level and try to not spend it so much in NGOs
and a lot of administrative and overhead of putting these funds together. Because historically what you would see is you'd see a bunch of discretionary grants that would come out, and states would get a little bit here and there, And a lot of it would be taken up in administrative. And by doing it with us, I think we're going to highlight the fact that you can do a lot more
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:23:15
with less. Is it going to be a portion equally across the United States, the states of the United States? No,
Speaker 181
1:23:23
no, there's no requirement that any sort of amount of money has to be expended in any way.
There's no formulas or percentages. It's really a first come, first serve basis, which is why we're trying really hard as the administrator to make sure that all of our Arkansas companies and organizations are aware of it. So I hope that you all will help us spread that word in your own districts and communities around this ability for manufactured employers to
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:23:48
take advantage of this. But we want Arkansas to get their fair share. Arkansas agency, your agency, or whatever work group comes together to administer the funds will be the decider of where the money goes.
Speaker 196
1:24:02
Yes and no. I mean, we have certain criteria that we've worked on with the U.S. Department
Speaker 181
1:24:07
of Labor, Employment, and Training Administration. So there's eligibility criteria. There's actually a landing page that's live. Well, I think it's live right now, but ArkansasOSD.com slash MFG fund. So if you want to go to that website, there's a lot of information on there just around documents and eligibility criteria that organizations will have to adhere to. They'll have to sign up as vendors with the state of Arkansas. They'll have to follow our procurement policies and things of that nature. They'd have to sign up as a vendor?
Yeah, for us, in order to make payments to them, they'll have to be a
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:24:37
vendor. In the state of Arkansas, what would
Speaker 181
1:24:40
that include? It's really just going through the process of if you're going to receive a grant or if you're going to receive a contract or something like that with
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:24:49
the state of Arkansas, you sign up as a vendor. That's a normal process. I mean, so do they have to get a certification from
Speaker 183
1:24:55
an agency to be a vendor? No, that's
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:24:58
something they do through the Department of Finance Administration. Okay, not through the Secretary of State. They don't have to be a business organization recognized by the Secretary of State?
Speaker 181
1:25:06
Yeah, and I'm not the expert on that aspect of it, Senator, so I'm not going to weigh too far into that. But, yeah, that's just part of the normal process for anyone that we provide funds to or that we grant funds to.
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:25:21
They have to register as a vendor with the state of Arkansas. Okay. So
technically or realistically, just one or two states could end up with all that money. No, I
Speaker 196
1:25:32
disagree. I mean, again, like right now, we're already having conversations with about 10 different states
Speaker 181
1:25:38
and organizations that are within those states that as they begin applying for funds, the application opening is January 28th, I believe. So as of January 28th, we'll actually start receiving applications. And whether that's, you know, we're obviously one of the things that we're focused on is small and medium-sized businesses. We don't want extremely large businesses and corporations that have locations in 7, 10 different states to have access to a majority of the funds. So we put some limits and some caps kind of in this first six months of a pilot phase on how many apprentices an organization can receive and apply for funding for.
But we're not really concerned about one or two states taking
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:26:15
up a majority of the money. And so Arkansas, this group or whatever administrative
entity is created, I mean, are the members of that team from different states, or is it all Arkansas born? No, so this is administered within the
Speaker 196
1:26:30
Arkansas Department of Commerce Division of Workforce Connections. And so we, through the Office
Speaker 181
1:26:35
of Skills Development is where this is going to be administrated at a very local level here.
We're hiring additional staff through the federal grant funds that we received. order to administer this grant and answer questions and facilitate the funding and some of
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:26:51
those things and then I had the last question which was about the kind of slip in my mind here now but it was concerning I know you had
Speaker 208
1:27:07
asked a question previously I think about
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:27:09
it was about marketing how do other
states companies or business entities across the United States get information about this is that something that is going to be part of the administration yes it is yeah and and we have funds available within the the budget that
Speaker 181
1:27:29
we have that we built with the Department of Labor to provide for marketing and outreach and things of that nature we're obviously going to leverage some of our national associations, National Association of State Workforce Agencies, National Governors
Association, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, our own kind of Department of Commerce, economic development, ways that we deliver messaging to companies and corporations and organizations across the U.S. to help build the message. But also the U.S. Department of Labor has it on their website. They've put it out through publications. The U.S. Department of Labor's secretary put out a press release a couple of weeks ago around this. And so a lot of that momentum and a lot of that
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:28:10
marketing advertising has already taken place okay and this program is designed for youth k-12 no this is not
Speaker 181
1:28:17
necessarily youth k-12 this is for uh employers that are that are using registered apprenticeships or are looking to use registered apprenticeship within their business as a workforce development strategy but the targeted apprentice
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:28:29
who would that be i mean would it be a young person i mean mean it could be
Speaker 196
1:28:36
anybody that's working in a manufacturing plant anybody that's working in a manufacturing industry anybody anyone
Speaker 189
1:28:42
that's working in a manufacturing sector whether they're 17 18 60 um if they're working
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:28:47
in that support what the other group before you were talking about
Speaker 196
1:28:51
well i think you got you got to think of this as kind of a separate situation
Speaker 181
1:28:57
right this is a one time cooperative agreement that we're working on with the u.s department of labor well our relationship with department of education and current tech ed more specifically is with the certified pre-apprenticeship framework and how that kind of comes together with kind of what they're doing at the Department of Education which ties into a little bit what Representative Beck was asking which is you know we at the agency have a set up a certified pre-apprenticeship framework that organizations can apply to those organizations have to be in connection with
employers they have to have employer acceptance agreements so that employers will honor the hours that those students receive as they're going through the pre-apprenticeship training and those typically are registered apprenticeship program sponsors that are applying for that through our agency when we approve that then organizations are partnering with elementary or not elementary schools but they're partnering with high school secondary career centers and things of that nature to offer that pre-apprenticeship in a lot of ways whether it's electrical plumbing it might be HVAC it might be manufacturing it could be a different it could be data
analytics web development whatever the case is I don't know all of the exact pre-apprenticeships that are offered at the high school level but that's a little bit in terms of your office the certified pre-apprenticeship framework yes high schools and for the public schools well the organizations that apply to be a
Speaker 189
1:30:16
entity for a certified to have a certified pre-apprenticeship apply through Arkansas Department of Commerce Workforce Connections so you wouldn't have the
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:30:24
list of apprenticeships in Arkansas we do we do yes we have them all
Speaker 181
1:30:29
we can send that to you yes yeah thank you and if you also if you go to arkansasosd.com there's an apprenticeship title there and you can go on there and there's an interactive map and you can zoom in on different areas of the state and it'll show you all the apprenticeships within that specific
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:30:45
area including those offered to high school students it should yes and if not then we'll get it
Speaker 180
1:30:49
updated okay thank you very much yes thank you representative ladyman
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
1:30:59
Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm way over here. Yeah, this is really interesting. I guess my main question is, what type of entity would apply for these grants? Now, we're talking about companies that would need certain skills, apprenticeships, but would a lot of times a company will work with a college or junior college and set up a program where the school actually does the training,
but the company benefits from that by getting trained personnel where they don't have to do it themselves, right? So who would apply for the grant? Would it be the company or the college, or would it be a joint application? So there's really kind of
Speaker 223
1:31:47
two different ways in which you can do this. So companies are registered apprenticeship program sponsors in some
Speaker 225
1:31:52
cases. So in some cases it could be a company,
Speaker 180
1:31:56
right? Take, I'm trying to think of a good example real quick that I might be able to tell you.
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
1:32:02
Can't think of one. Well, let me give you an example that I think might work. So I worked for a company that we had a university in the plant. So these were like wind technicians. This was a specific skill that they needed. And so we could do that at the plant or we could do it at ASU. Sure. Or some other university. So in that case, the company could apply to have that program run through ASU
or it could be run through the plant where they could hire trainers at the plant. Is
Speaker 181
1:32:39
that correct? Yeah, and, I mean, in most cases, you know, our two-year colleges or four-year universities are not the apprenticeship program sponsor themselves. They're the training provider, right? So, you know, ConAgra, for example, over in Russellville, you know, for an example, their their own apprenticeship program sponsor. So for this fund, they could apply directly and we would work with them directly. And in other cases, right, I mentioned companies like Virco Manufacturing or others. They're not their own registered apprenticeship program sponsor. They
work with an organization called Apprentisley. Apprentisley is the registered apprenticeship program sponsor who would actually apply to this funding on behalf of that company. And as part of that application process, they would have to highlight to us that they have an employer acceptance agreement with Virco Manufacturing. They would have to highlight that the occupation is part of the 120 occupations that are tentatively now approved in order to be a part of this effort. So those are really the two kind of organizations that can apply. In some cases, a two-year college or a four-year university is a registered apprenticeship program sponsor.
University of Arkansas Fort Smith for a number of years has ran their own program. ASU Newport, for a period of time, I still think they run their own apprenticeship program. Black River Technical College is another one that has their own apprenticeship program sponsorship. So there's a number of different types of organizations. Consultants, firms can be registered apprenticeship program sponsors, but you have to be a registered apprenticeship program sponsor to apply for this fund. Now, what type of entity you are, whether you're the business itself or a two-year college or a third-party provider, that's who's eligible to apply for this funding on behalf of the employers.
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
1:34:13
So we've had discussions with Arkansas Tech about developing a nuclear program for technicians. So in that case, if Nuclear One, Entergy, wanted to do that, maybe they already do, I don't know, but Arkansas Tech had to develop a program. So in that case, would that be a partnership or who would initiate that? Yeah, either way.
Speaker 181
1:34:41
really the business wants to do it.
If the business wants to take on the ownership of that on themselves, then they're more than happy to do that. If they want to outsource it to an intermediary, right? We use that term intermediary in a lot of ways. So whether that's an organization like an Apprentice League who functions as an apprenticeship program sponsor or whether that's the college and they want to take on that ownership of it, they can do it. Sometimes the college likes to be the training provider. Sometimes the business likes to be the business and they like to outsource it to somebody else. So it just depends on kind of the nature of the parties involved and who wants to have ownership of that. There is some legwork that has to be done if you're the business, you know,
just in terms of getting the approvals, getting the documentation, tracking all that documentation, things of that nature. So the beauty about this, though, is typically that in the past has been done by the U.S. Department of Labor field office in Dallas. Once we get our application approved, that will all start happening here at the Department of Commerce Workforce Connections here in the state. So when that time comes, if they choose to do an apprenticeship program, we'd be at the table sitting down from the beginning to the end. if they choose to do an apprenticeship of establishing that, roles and responsibilities, making sure the documentation and paperwork was in order.
And, again, it's really just the choice of how the business intends to operate it.
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
1:35:53
But the college or university could do all of that as long as they had a place for the students to go once they're certified. Is that right? Correct,
Speaker 232
1:35:59
yes. Okay, all right. Thank you. Yes, sir. Oh, what happened? Did you
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:36:08
– oh, okay. Representative Rye. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Cody, let me ask you this.
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
1:36:18
That $35.5 million, that's across the entire United States. Do you happen to know how much is the figure for just the state of Arkansas alone, and are we utilizing that fund? We are going to be
Speaker 196
1:36:33
utilizing it, yes, and that's why we're trying to be very intentional about having
Speaker 181
1:36:39
conversations with all the industry associations state chamber of commerce we're working through our manufacturing extension partnership and having conversations with manufacturers we already have interest
across a number of different manufacturers in the state i mentioned a few already but there's no set number for example there's no set percentage there's no set hard number that we're going to have specific to us here in arkansas we just want to make sure that we get our companies that are interested and engaged in any part of this in early and often so that
Speaker 205
1:37:07
we can have access to as much funding as will be available, again, because it's a
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
1:37:15
first-come, first-served basis. Follow-up, ma'am, please. Go ahead. Cody, let me ask you this. Of all of this top situation that we're going through here with this,
do you think that the parents of these children and all of the teachers, are they actually in tune with what's going on
Speaker 196
1:37:34
here? Well, not specific to this specific grant because this isn't really targeted at that K-12
Speaker 181
1:37:40
population, right? This is really targeted more towards the businesses that are using registered apprenticeship currently as a workforce development strategy or have been on the fence or are trying to mitigate costs as it relates to getting into an apprenticeship model. So I don't know that that necessarily impacts the students, but holistically, right, like more generally and broadly speaking,
not just specific to this grant yeah I mean we're trying really hard to you know put out the message of around what apprenticeship can be and how it can help support you in many ways I mean we we've heard you know earlier just about how many different pathways and opportunities there are for young students and and adult learners and things of that nature right and a lot of time we get caught up in the k-12 piece but there's an adult ed population out there as well that we're targeting and trying to get into more apprenticeships whether it's manufacturing construction healthcare it um you name it energy um so yeah i mean we're trying to change that be pro be proud
Speaker 205
1:38:31
obviously helps us with that every single day through the state chamber um yes
Speaker 241
1:38:36
thank you cody and thank you mr chairman representative
Representative Stetson Painter
Unverified
1:38:43
pater right here in freddie uh will you be able to provide us some data on maybe the apprenticeships and so forth that arkansas companies take advantage of I think you said something about you know 90 days or something like that can you provide us at least with art within Arkansas who's taking advantage of maybe of what those apprenticeships are absolutely okay thank you thank you madam
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:39:08
don't see any further questions thank you very much for the presentation has been very enlightening we've learned a lot and now Now we will, we have consideration of adoption of an interim study by Senator Kroll. If you'd like to come up, please.
Senator Steve Crowell
Unverified
1:39:33
Thank you. and you're proposing an ISP yes Senator Kroll district 3 this is just a simple ISP on the four-day school week just a fact-finding mission I mean that's what ISPs are all
Speaker 157
1:40:10
about I have questions I need a motion okay all in favor all
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:40:16
- All opposed? Thank you very much. Okay, I'm seeing no further business. We are adjourned.
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Consideration of a Motion to Approve the November 3, 2025, November 4, 2025, and the December 2, 2025, Meeting Minutes [Exhibits B1-B3]
C. Updates on the Arkansas Acceleration, Common Sense, Cost, Eligibility, Scholarships, and Standardization (ACCESS) Act, Workforce Pell Grants, and the Arkansas Workforce Challenge Scholarship [Exhibit C]
D. Presentation of the National Apprenticeship Program Administered through the Office of Skills Development
E. Consideration for Adoption of Interim Study Proposal (ISP) [Exhibit E]
F. Other Business
G. Adjournment
Documents
Speakers
Senator Jane English
Unverified
Speaker 12
Speaker 13
Speaker 14
Speaker 16
Speaker 17
Speaker 18
Speaker 21
Speaker 22
Speaker 24
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
Speaker 45
Speaker 53
Speaker 56
Speaker 57
Speaker 58
Speaker 64
Speaker 23
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
Speaker 68
Speaker 62
Speaker 111
Speaker 112
Speaker 120
Speaker 110
Speaker 131
Speaker 116
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
Speaker 147
Speaker 149
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
Speaker 128
Speaker 127
Speaker 173
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
Speaker 134
Speaker 180
Speaker 181
Speaker 196
Speaker 183
Speaker 208
Speaker 189
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
Speaker 223
Speaker 225
Speaker 230
Speaker 232
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
Speaker 205
Speaker 241
Representative Stetson Painter
Unverified
Speaker 15
Senator Steve Crowell
Unverified
Speaker 157