Education Committee - Senate and House

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. will come to order. We're going to start the meeting off. If you would stand and join us in prayer. Representative Magruder, I'm going to recognize you. If y'all would, keep Representative Carolyn Brown in your prayers. She's having a medical procedure today, so let's remember her. Father God, we thank you for each and every individual that arrived. Thank you, Father. We thank you for traveling the race that we stopped on the same highways and byways. Father, we ask that you remember thank you representative members moving to item b on the agenda i need a motion to approve the august 3rd 2026 august 26 2026 meeting minutes have a second all in favor say aye The motion carries. Moving on, we're going to wait on number C. I'm going to take just a quick moment of personal privilege, if I can, members here at the outset. So today is, I guess, probably the last time that we'll meet together in joint education because we have concluded our business from the standpoint of adequacy. There'll be maybe one or two early childhood subcommittees on the House side, but probably not a lot beyond that. So that would mean that today would be my My amazing colleague, Senator English's last day to sit up here as chair of Senate Education. And if you all know Senator English, she is extremely passionate about education for the kids in the state of Arkansas, not just kids, but adults and everybody in between. And she's done an outstanding job. It's an honor to serve next to her. And so we have a House citation for you, Senator, that I'm going to read. And it says, citation from the House for the Honorable Jane English in Senate. Obviously, you all have the latitude to do one if you want to as well, but I didn't have the power to create a Senate citation. So from the House of Representatives, Senator Jane English, Arkansas Senate District 13, which includes parts of North Little Rock, northern Pulaski County, was sworn in the Arkansas State Senate in January of 2013, will be retiring from her position on December 31st, 2026. And Senator English served two terms in the Arkansas House of Representatives from 2009 through the end of 2012, before tenure as a state senator. She's the chair of the Senate Education Committee, a member of the Senate, City, County, and Local Affairs, the Joint Performance Review, the Senate Efficiency Committee, the Joint Budget Committee of the Arkansas Legislative Council, and the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee. During the 95th General Assembly, she sponsored legislation to make school business more transparent by requiring school boards to allow public comments at every meeting, to publish a school meeting's agenda, and publish a school board names and email addresses on the school websites. Throughout her tenure, she has made it a priority of hers to improve vocational and career education by restructuring job training, working with local businesses to ensure schools are providing the training they need, and access to training in the fields in most demand by Arkansas businesses. Senator English is known for her commitment to Arkansas veterans and was a part of the coalition that successfully supported the location of a new veterans nursing home in North Little Rock. She served as the executive director of the Fort Chaffee Public Trust from 1984 to 1997, the executive director of the Arkansas Manufacturers Association, the Arkansas Workforce Investment Board, a cabinet position under former Governor Mike Huckabee, And in 2005, she served as an economics and workforce advisor to former Lieutenant Governor Winthrop P. Rockefeller. The House of Representatives of the 95th General Assembly of the state of Arkansas expresses great pride in acknowledging Senator Jane English for her extensive years of dedicated service to the state and the constituents she has represented. Now, therefore, pursuant to the motion of the House of Representatives this fifth day of October, 2026, please join me in recognizing Senator English. Thank you so very much. I think all of us, sometimes we don't realize how fast time goes by, but education, workforce training, and all that, helping all of our citizens to be more than they ever thought they could be, has been a major passion of mine all this time. I hope to continue working in that same vein, but I have enjoyed every single minute I have been in the legislature. Wonderful, wonderful people, all of us trying to do good things, but I thank you very much, Keith. Thank you. You're welcome. Senator Johnson, do you have words to say about Senator English? Be careful. Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to add to that, and you did a great job of her illustrating her public service. I want to mention something some of y'all might not know. I first got to know Senator English when she was an employee of what we then called AIDC, now AEDC. And she was tremendously instrumental in helping us gain a whole lot of Arkansas jobs, not the least of which Senator Wallace of the steel mills in Mississippi County and the things she did, especially prepping our workforce for the success we've had. So she was a great public servant before she entered the legislature, and I just want to thank you for bringing that, Mr. Chairman. And Senator English, it's been an honor to be your friend for this, I won't say how many years, but a lot more than just our time in the legislature. And thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank all of you. Representative Cozart. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Senator English, I just want to thank you for the three terms that I got to serve sitting along beside you as the House Chair. And you led extremely, extremely well every meeting that we've had. And for your dedication to career education, I don't know anybody that's ever put the work that you've put into that. I just want to thank you. It's been an honor to serve alongside you. serving in the House with you and then watch you in the Senate and what you do. We're going to miss you. There's no one big enough to fill those shoes yet. So they've got a lot of work to do to come in and take your place, and they'll never take your place, I'll just tell you that. Thank you for what you've done for the state of Arkansas and the education in Arkansas. Thank you, Representative Kozart and Senator Johnson. And I will say just from a personal standpoint, Senator English has been an outstanding joy to work with. are there are a few people i think who have the energy that she has continually she runs rings around most of us uh and so i don't i don't think there's ever a time where i text her or email her where it's not responded to in about 12 seconds uh and and if you don't call her back she's going to keep calling you until you do and so uh she's she's pretty outstanding at what she does and so it's a a great loss for the state of arkansas in terms of your service but we know that you still have much opportunity to continue to serve the people in your community so we sincerely appreciate you thank you members for that for allowing me to do that so we're going to move on to yes ma'am we're going to move on to item c in the on the agenda presentation on student cyber threats i'm going to recognize mr chris olson to come to the table members you've got a hard copy of this in front of you as we think about one of our most important jobs members it's obviously student safety is is the primary thing that we do and we oftentimes think about physical safety from the four walls to metal detectors to drones to vape monitors and all types of things in this world and I was presented with some of the work that that Mr. Olson and his organization is doing to keep students safe on the technology side of things and frankly this is nothing more than an opportunity I think for us to have our eyes open to some of the threats that are out there and see some of the challenges that we may not normally be aware of so with that mr. Olson I will recognize you for your presentation if you would please just introduce yourself for the record can you hear me yes okay thanks Keith thanks everybody for taking time with me today greatly appreciate it just quickly start off with who we are and who I'm representing so if you could mr. Olson move that mic just a little bit closer to you please sir uh start starting off a little bit about who i am so i i run two digital safety companies um the media trust is roughly 21 years old um i call that the corporate side our clients are amazon and microsoft and disney corporation walmart little company based in arkansas our job is to work with them to help reduce digital harm targeting people and i'm going to get into the difference between cyber security which protects machines and the idea of digital safety or reducing harm targeting people as we run through this today. Separately, a separate company which focuses on directly protecting people versus working with big tech to help them reduce harm called ProxyWare. We install in senior communities, in schools, in boys and girls clubs so that we can become a synthetic child in Arkansas. a synthetic grandmother, excuse me, living in a senior community in Virginia. The Internet knows us. The Internet curates our experiences. That know you and target you capability is the biggest driver of digital harm, targeting our kids, targeting our vulnerable in our states. So Proxware works with states. It works with senior living communities. It works with cities and then with churches and boys and girls clubs around the country. So digital harm is growing faster than enforcement, I think, as Keith was mentioning. A core job is making sure that our children are safe. Americans spend 8 to 15 hours per day online. These are things that all of you know. Unfortunately, crime has moved there as well. So, yes, there's still lots of crime on the street. There's lots of things we have to worry about outside of the Internet. But if you look at sheer volume of attacks and where bad actors are successful, it has moved online. Policing and protecting people has not been able to move as fast. When we become a child in Arkansas, and I'm going to run through some data. We are in a school in Arkansas, and I can show you examples of what we see here. 39% of each attempted crime that we see is running in one individual location, meaning it's targeting one geographic or one individual person. You can't look at this as a blanket problem. You can't just go say, hey, let's make the Internet safe. It's targeting us locally. It's targeting us individually. That creates a huge, huge problem for law enforcement. Less than 1% of digital crime is ever pursued. So roughly 10% of digital crime is reported. That's based on FBI and FTC information. One percent of that is able to be pursued by local prosecutors or police. It's a $300 billion U.S. problem, right? So financial crime as part of digital crime is absolutely massive. And when you think about the way that we've been approaching the problem over the last 10, 15 years, as it's been really starting to grow, what we're doing is not working. I'm going to run through a whole bunch of different things that we do today and some scenarios and ways to think about other things to do. But sextortion, right, a new type of problem that we have to deal with since the advent of the Internet, is up 248% year over year, so that's from 2024 into 2025. The suicide rate is up 40% nationally since 2000, right? The common denominator here is Internet exposure, Internet harms. So a couple problems to share with you to start. Problem one is defining digital harm, and this is really confusing. There's a lot to be thinking about. If you look at the meta settlement, or if you've looked out at other states, there's settlements with companies like Roblox. The primary driver of digital problems that are resolved or addressed there are mental health and social media addiction. These are big problems. These are things that we have to worry about, but they aren't even the biggest problems, right? So the framing of how we're dealing with social media today from a legislative and then from a legal perspective focuses on those two problems. We look at it from a larger scale. So grooming and sextortion, that's digital harm. Drugs, alcohol, and vaping, right? These are digital harms today. So even though vaping is bigger than the Internet, how are kids initially exposed? How can kids buy vaping products and have them shipped to their house? That's happening on the Internet. Sexualization. So there is an age verification law in Arkansas. Actually, Arkansas was a leader in getting age verification on adult content out. We're going to talk about that a little bit more, but that's part of the problem. Human trafficking is a digital problem. Kids are freely walking out of their homes and getting into the white van, right? No longer is it pulling up on the side of the curb, grabbing the kid and running off. We have kids that are willing to walk outside and leave. So mental health, social media, these are problems, right? But digital harm can't be defined as those two things. It's much, much bigger. I'm here today to talk about kids. This PowerPoint goes into seniors a little bit. Just to touch on that, we know that senior digital crime is a massive problem. I won't run through all of the different ways that they're being robbed of their livelihoods, of their confidence, the ability for them to be productive citizens. But what you want to know is that seven years ago, 80% of crime-targeting seniors started with the caregiver. Today, 85% starts online. And the way that we're tackling that problem as a society isn't changing in line with how we need to be addressing it. Okay, so problem two, knowing that digital crime and digital harm is this big list of societal problems, right? not always associated with digital, but all part of digital, how are we going to address this? And so right now, when we look at the ways that government is moving towards helping people, it revolves around adding more school resource officers, adding more mental health help, right? So more mental health resources, educating kids, right? Those are the three primary drivers. Those are typically happening after kids are already victims. And so what I want to show you today are examples of things that are happening, examples of things that you can see, and offer some thoughts about what you might be able to do with that in addition to helping the victim after they'd be harmed. So first, really high level, some confusing words like the cybersecurity industry and the privacy industry. Together, roughly $1 trillion in revenue. The primary objective for cyber is to protect your laptop or your phone. It is not to protect the child using it, right? So we don't want to confuse cybersecurity protecting networks, machines, and data with actually reducing harm. Privacy as an industry is a compliance tool for corporations, right? So privacy is used to check lots of boxes so that the company doesn't get sued when people's data is being used. that's unfortunately where privacy has come to and so what you don't want to think is that these companies don't have our data and when i say these companies it's just about everybody right surrounding us in digital privacy doesn't prevent the internet from knowing who we are the big problem in legislation isn't that there is legislation the legislation is good right age verification on adult content is a good thing the problem is in enforcement right we're going to get to that. And then victim and mental health support is good, but it's too late. I think the way to put all of this into context is, as we've added resources for all of these things over the years, take a look at the graph. The yellow is the resources spent on privacy, mental health, and cybersecurity. The blue is the increase in digital harm in context of dollars, right? So it's not causal, but we kind of have an inverse relationship on spend for what we're traditionally working on versus the outcomes that we're all seeking to achieve okay so we're in an Arkansas school I'm going to take a few minutes to just run through some examples most of you are thinking about these things are talking about things when you talk about digital safety and child safety what I want to make sure you're thinking is this is all in context of the internet the internet targeting children children's exposure to these problems when they're online so schools do a lot to protect kids and that's great right they're using web filters that's very positive monitoring children if they talk about things like suicide the teachers and the administrators are able to see that these are all very very positive they're educating kids on digital safety the problem is you can't block the internet kids know how to get around filters but it's also the filter that the bad actors know how to get around the filters as well and so they're targeting kids we see things past these filters right so this is the exposure that kids are getting targeted with so sexual and violent content right children don't just go looking for sexual content they're actually targeted with it right violence is a normal part of how they experience the internet they see it very differently than the way we see it tobacco, vaping, and drug promotion. The only people on the Internet, it's not the only people, but the predominant people on the Internet who see vaping, and I'm going to get to gambling here in a moment, and gambling advertising are 7th to 11th grade boys, which means if you're not a 7th grade boy, you don't realize that they're being targeted to buy vaping products on the Internet. So the idea, if you become them, you can start to see these problems. And so big issues like the rise in gambling addiction with Arkansas boys, right, something that's top of mind for parents, top of mind for legislatures, the way that this is happening is through the Internet. By being a seventh-grade boy, you can see who's targeting them, you can see who's running this gambling content, and then go after it, right? So the current solutions that we have today aren't necessarily meeting the objective, and there's lots more that we can do. So to jump into a bit deeper, so vaping and drug addiction. When we turn on in the school, it takes roughly five minutes for us to start seeing vaping ads when we act as a young boy. So it's almost instantaneous, right? The Internet knows right away who we are, right? We're looking like that, and it's sending us all sorts of bad things. So this matters for all of the reasons you're thinking about. We're trying to reduce addiction. We don't want lifetime addiction to tobacco before a child hits the age of 15. It's normalizing substance abuse because they're exposed to it all day. It's right in front of them. It creates the pathway to purchase. So you can buy, have it shipped to your house. It just comes in a nice innocuous package. The parents don't even know it's coming. They don't have to go to the 7-Eleven or go down the street where someone's going to ID them. So the opportunity here is myriad. right so first these are if it's if it's tobacco this is a controlled substance right there are laws it's illegal to sell drugs to kids and so the suggestion is to actually enforce that law watch how children are being targeted with vaping content understand how it's being delivered and push back just like you would in a physical store reducing reducing opportunity for underage purchase is in the long view in the long run going to help reduce the overall harm adult content access and sexualization i won't run through all of the mental health problems that come from early access to pornography for for arkansas children you have a law on the books today it is illegal for adult content companies to present to people in arkansas without requiring age verification There's roughly 4 million scaled adult content websites and apps in the world. When we monitor from Arkansas, the top 500, 70% don't respect the law. So the change in the idea of having a law that's going to take care of the problem, now the biggest companies, the biggest porn companies, are meeting the objective or else they're going to get sued. How are we going to get resources out there to actually enforce the current law? Because the spirit of it is to reduce access to kids. And instead, they're being targeted and going to the places that openly flaunt that law. So there's a better way to do this. We've got to think about how to actively engage the Internet and protect kids. Cloaking, right? So this is a technical word. In Arkansas schools, what we see is that teachers are sent content and advertising that doesn't have any problem, right? In this particular example, this is an ad for shoes. So if you're an administrator or a teacher, you see buy your shoes here. If you're a child, you see drugs, vaping, and CBD. You can see this type of activity, right? So if you go after the problem, you're able to actually witness how kids are targeted versus how administrators are targeted and push back on the companies that are allowing this to happen to help reduce harm targeting kids. Gambling, so I've had a number of meetings around Little Rock today. Gambling is a topic everyone is jumping on, so let me frame this for you real quick in how this is working. The advent of the Internet in sportsbook betting has exploded underage addiction to gambling, right? That's something all of us know. The response from governments, and this is not just an Arkansas response, but it's true here too, is to require that the online sports book have a relationship with the terrestrial casino or sports book. So in Arkansas, my understanding is there are three primary casino sports books. If you want to run online, you must register with the state, join up with one of them. That's great. So for the companies that actually respect the law, you have oversight and you have tax revenue. When we become a child in Arkansas, we don't see the companies who are registered. We see all of the other companies. Most of the companies targeting your kids are not registered. So there isn't a correlation to what the good companies are doing and then the reality of what's happening with your kids here. So they're joining unregistered companies. And so three things happen, which provide three opportunities, right? So one, they're being addicted to gambling early. right? We can start to arrest that if we enforce current law. Two, you're not getting tax revenue. Unregistered gambling companies don't pay you taxes. They're based in places like Curacao and Costa Rica. They aren't concerned that you have a law because people aren't going after them, right? There is no detection as a child. There's no opportunity, right, to go after them and stop them from running. So the third opportunity here is to get in front of the problem by aligning with your casinos here in the state because they are completely aligned with you because they're losing revenue as well. So when you think about the problem being tactical, education to tell kids don't gamble so much when you're young, probably a helpful thing to do, but it's not the answer that we need we have to get tactical so then moving through let me one last example grooming and deception that leads to sextortion so again this is something that you can do something about right protecting children is number one priority educating kids on sextortion is not enough this is growing like crazy so this particular example this is a minecraft cheat code site. So if any of you have kids that are on Minecraft or play video games, they're always looking for cheat codes to get past certain levels, right? So it's very interesting to them, this type of content. They're targeted. They move to the cheat code website. This is actually a grooming site for sextortion and human trafficking. So what happens is they give them one and then they entice them for more. This is happening in Arkansas right now as we speak. They then are moved to find them on their social media platforms where they engage them in a conversation, next thing you know, they're extorted. So this is the kind of lure that you can see. And so becoming a child, understanding how the internet is engaging with them, but then reaching out to take this down is critical for child safety. So this particular example then led to a large social media platform where our digital persona was able to be found by the same actor that engaged with them on the cheat code website, and that moved towards harm. To help understand things like the current settlement, what social media companies are doing is reducing the hours. So can't access social media after 10 p.m. You can only be on a particular social media platform for two hours. Once we're moving down this type of cycle, It's 85 seconds, 85 seconds to go from a happy kid who may be somebody strange is talking to you and you've engaged with them a little bit to being pulled down the rabbit hole of being sextorted and massive problems ensue. Okay, so we are out just kind of sharing this information because we want people to be thinking. I think there's a real opportunity with how big this topic has become to change behavior, right, to think about how are we going to actually tactically engage the Internet. If an essential service is to make our kids safe, I think looking at the Internet as a place where we would take tactical action is absolutely critical. So right now, the after-harm engagement is victim services and mental health support. And these are good things, right, but they're not enough. Investigation and prosecution. Today, law enforcement requires a victim in order to take action. That's not going to work in digital. There's not enough resources to go after even a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the cases. But also we don't need to wait for victims. There are digital solutions to these problems to scale it up and move So before harm is predominantly education We don't have a correlation yet to education actually reducing harm Education isn't a bad thing, but it's not meeting the objective And so what I don't want you to do is to say we're increasing mental health and we're increasing education so we're good to go. That's not going to reduce the harm. It's not going to hit the metric that you all want to hit. So becoming the victim, understanding at the actual tactical level what's happening to them is possible. This is the internet. There's AI, right? These things are possible. And then moving that back into the digital ecosystem to actually take down crime, That's a required mechanism that we've got to start to do as a society. Just real quick, I'll end here. So we've run pilots like this in Virginia, and we're scaling. That happens to be where I'm from. We have very good interaction with many, many big tech, digital media, and ad tech companies receiving the notifications that we're sending. So we're in a different time today. They're willing to cooperate and participate with you. We have a 77% takedown rate for harms that we see targeting children. And what that means is if you see a vaping ad and you know where it's coming from and you tell the social media company or the big tech company that they're running that, they will shut it off today. A couple years ago they might not have, but the world is changing in large part because a lot of the work that you and your governor and AGs are doing. So good work. In seniors, it's a little simpler because it's almost all financial, so there's a really easy ROI. But a tiny fraction of spend towards this can have big, big reductions in digital harm. So our first year in Virginia, by detecting and taking down crime, we saved $20.1 million. That's verified by the FBI and the FTC's dollar calculators. Today we're pasted $35 million. It's a 207x, not percent, 207x ROI on spend. So I'm going to leave it at that, open for any questions, but thank you again for hearing me out today. Members, we have some questions for Mr. Olson. I will start with Representative Duke, you're recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the presentation. It was very informative. Just a couple of just very basic questions on this. You mentioned that you were in a school in Arkansas. Are you just in one school, and what school are you in? We are in one school, and I'm going to just not bring any attention to their name, so if I can hold that. It's a private school. Okay. Okay, and then are you in any other schools besides Virginia? Yes, we're in schools in other states. So we're in Texas and Arizona and a few other. Yes. Okay, can you give me kind of like an idea of just like – Because I get this is an emerging business, I guess, for lack of a better description. Can you give an idea of how many schools and work are you doing in other states, like percentage-wise, number-wise, and for how long? So this is new. So in Virginia, which is the longest we've been in schools, that's a year, and we are in six. And we're talking to a school right now that wants to, you know, put one in each school district. So that would be more in the hundred, but we are talking about implementing that. So this is relatively new. And you said also Texas and Arizona? Yeah. Do you have a rough idea of how many schools you're in there? Handfuls. Handfuls. Okay. Okay, that's all I have for right now. I just was trying to get kind of an idea, but I think I really do appreciate your presentation. I think there's, obviously, we know we have issues there, and this is very helpful. Thank you. Representative Meeks, you're recognized. Test, test. There I am. Okay. All right. Thank you. So I chair our technology committee, so just a few quick questions. So, number one, you brought up one of the concerns that I've had, and I don't know if there's a good answer, so I'd just be interested in your take on it. Arkansas laws obviously stop at Arkansas's borders, and our federal laws stop at, you know, our country's borders. And so we're dealing with bad actors that are located outside the United States. I have no expectation that they're going to honor or respect our laws. And so I'm wondering, I guess kind of expound on that idea. how do we stop the bad actors that are in Europe, Canada, Mexico, you name it, even China? Okay. So we're, how much time do you have? So I think the first step is what is in digital, what's the last touch point to the child, right? And so if they're on a social media platform, that's the last touch point. That's the connection to the, it may not be a bad actor, but it's an online gambling company that is perfectly happy to be doing business in Arkansas, whether they're supposed to be or not, right? We'll frame it that way. The first step is to push back on that digital infrastructure that is that last mile touching kids, right? So that is a mechanism that can happen. So today in a school that uses a web filtering and kind of child monitoring solution, right, so you're talking to companies that do that, they're trying to block the Internet, and that's kind of the beginning and the end of that process. it's not enough because it's a never-ending cycle of what's coming in. So bringing that back, understanding attribution of delivery is critical to this function. It may be warehoused on a U.S. company cloud system, right? So it may be on AWS or Azure. If it is, you're sending signals to the infrastructure to say this company is violating Arkansas law. We actually automate that message delivery, right? And they're going to be pretty happy to explain to their customer who's based in Uzbekistan or France that they shouldn't be doing that, right? So you start the ball rolling that way. I think in things like gambling, you're going to want to make decisions over time on who do you want to invite in because once you've invited them in, many will be happy to join you and actually register to do business in the state. you start to collect tax funds that can sponsor your addiction right in mental health that's good but there's not a lot of in Arkansas you're not going to have a lot of response from a company based in Curacao and so what we're doing is we're building increased infrastructure towards moving and changing society's relationship with the internet and so many of the things that we're talking about are going to have instant, immediate impact. Some of this is a longer view goal of changing how we deal with, we are victims of the internet, and we need to stop acting that way, right? We can take a lot more ownership than we are of actually making ourselves safer. Does that help? We're integrated into the data sharing with Interpol, with the NCA in the UK, We're in the FBI Deconflict Department, right? So we can move the data to the right places, but that doesn't fix all of the problems you're talking about. So just so I understand your technology, so you're not actually acting as a web filter per se. You're acting as a user, and you're trying to get them to pick on you. You're trying to get them to make you the victim, and then once you see the issue, you report it so that it gets resolved. You're not actually trying to block it from getting to the child. You're looking for the holes, and then when it gets through the hole, you're asking the companies to plug the hole. We work alongside the web. Web filters are awesome. I don't want to come away and need it. So we give them incremental information, but we then also go take action to take care of the crime or the harm itself to take it down at the root. We share that information with local law enforcement. If it's a sextortion handle, that's given to law enforcement because they're the ones who need to go move on that. So, yes. And so cyber, these systems are designed to protect machines. They're used to protect machines and children, right? And there's gaps. Every time something's blocked on a web filter, the first signal goes to the criminal. They see that they're blocked, and they modify. That's the Internet. The whack-a-mole, gotcha, yeah. That's how it works. So you're trying to be the victim in the school before a kid is the victim in the school. We are the victim before they become it. That's the goal. Okay. All right. Awesome. Thank you. Representative Gonzalez-Worthing, you recognize for a question? Yes. Thank you, Chair. And this might have already been answered. So you operate sort of like undercover, so to speak. And then what happens to the bad actors? I mean, I know you're taking them down, but what keeps them from returning? So this is a really hard problem. The goal is that they're arrested, right, no matter where they are. That's the goal. In the United States, this is kind of burgeoning, right? It's becoming. As we speak, the federal government is going after it. You've got Strikeforce and Jeanine Pirro, you know, looking out at transnational criminals and organizing and cooperating with governments outside of the U.S. to actually do takedowns. The key low-hanging fruit is to identify the signals digitally, have that information go to the big tech companies who know the ID of the delivery of that content. So this is the, call it the buyer, the person who's trying to get access to your kids. That ID belongs to a proper noun that only they know. This is you, right? We're doing this, but this would be you bringing crime right up to the point where they have to cooperate. What you have today, the world is moving more and more big tech and social media cooperation with global law enforcement to go after the problem because you're all watching, right? And so I think now is the time to pounce. Is your local law enforcement going to get immediate gratification by seeing, you know, some people in Cambodia getting arrested tomorrow? Probably not, but you're leading, it could happen, right, but you're leading up to that. It's your local crime data that is the key to getting those actors in these other countries, and that's part of why this is so difficult. Representative Duke, you recognize. Thank you again, Mr. Chair. Just another quick question, I think. How are the districts that you are already in in some of those other how did they connect with you? Did they I mean we know that these are issues that schools are dealing with especially The kids get around the filters and all those different things are happening at schools. How did they connect with you? Or with this company how'd they find out about you? We are yeah, so so We helped the Tim Tebow foundation. So when you see those ads on television, we're I don't want to overstate right or Take credit for that, but we're connected into the networks where there's big scaled goals to reduce harm targeting kids, right? And some is human trafficking, some, right? So introductions around the horn on those types of things. We initially implemented with a Republican AG in Virginia, and he introduced us to lots of Republican AGs, but then he didn't win. And now there's a Democrat AG, and they're very excited about it. And so it's pulling on those threads and getting introductions around. What's also changed is, and it's amazing because we've been doing this 21 years, in the last two years, if you go to a big, I'm not suggesting you should, but a big global anti-scam, how do we fix this problem conference where you've got big tech and banks, right, and then the people talking about it, federal and state governments are present, right? So A.G. Bonta and A.G. Brown from Utah were both present in San Francisco a month ago. And so there's a lot more access for us, for people like us, towards governments than there used to be. But I think the answer is it's a lot of shoe leather, right? That's the answer. And the districts are just finding their own district dollars to contract with you guys right now. Yes. How all these are working. Yeah, honestly, it runs the gamut. But the answer to your question is yes. uh there are federal grants that we're trying to figure out are these going to work for this but we're working through all of that now so you're just seeing districts that are trying to be proactive in issues that they're seeing that have also made contact with you guys or through some way or other okay thank you represent walker you're recognized for a question thank you mr chair uh my questions i'm just going to use the virginia slide if that's okay um so it shows a a 93% success rate, which I think is pretty good when you're dealing with cybersecurity. But why only five schools with that high of a success rate? So I'm assuming there's a large entry barrier or something that's in place, whether it's lack of funds, the expertise to implement within a school. I'm just curious with what you've seen there. No, it's a great question. And this goes back to the being new, right? So for me, too, I have a company that's 21 years old. I have other companies that, you know, I don't run anymore, and then this is the baby new company, right? So we would have gotten started with one. They said five. Great, right? And so the goal now is to expand into more. This is a really interesting stat. It's good to bring it up. This is shooting fish in a barrel. It's not hard, right? So now we do this for a living. We have infrastructure that allows us to do these things. but it's minutes. You become a seventh grade boy and you're targeted with vaping. It's just bang, right? And so I think the easier to find things, we're sending back and they're getting shut down, right? It's very positive. As we get further and further out down the line where we've taken down a lot of the low-hanging fruit, it does get harder. I'm not sure, you know, how this number is going to remain here. But that's going to be out of a much smaller set of harm targeting kids and seniors and the vulnerable. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Representative Garner, you're recognized for a question. Thank you, Mr. Chair. We've kind of talked a little bit about this, but I just want to know the logistics. So a school contacts you or the State Department, or whoever contacts you, and then what? So then we FedEx a device to the IT director. I don't have my cell phone on me. Often a Raspberry Pi or something, if you know that. It looks like a cell phone. They plug that in outside of the core DMZ. We don't want to be anywhere near child. There's no PII, right, in what we do. And so we look like a student that just connected to the Wi-Fi. So they're kind of plugging it into the router that's their Wi-Fi that everybody connects to around the school. It's a safe place. There's no access. You can't go in and get students from there, right? So we try to keep it in the safest. We want to look exactly like a kid, right? They plug that in. It takes about 15 minutes. That handshakes with our systems. And we have machines in 122 countries, but we run this out of mostly Virginia, right? So that's where we're based. We have a lot of capacity there. It's like the gates of Mordor, right? On one side are green blinking lights, and on the other side is all the bad stuff on the Internet. It shakes hands with that. It's live, right? And that's all the school has to do. So we try to make it really, really, really simple. If they want to get involved, we have sextortion case studies that we send to the school resource officers, the people who do digital safety. It's amazing. It shows trigger points, and it's the real-world thing that's happening there, right? and they can give that to kids. We have schools that are asking us how do kids get involved. We have senior communities. How do the seniors' residents get involved? If kids want to see what it is, we'll figure out ways to make that happen. I think it might get very interesting having school students sending the notifications to the tech companies to say, please stop targeting me with this stuff. That might go somewhere. But I think the actual setup itself, we're doing all of the work centrally. The school becomes a node, right? So we look like we're sitting there. So is the cost for the physical piece of equipment and then a license? Yeah, the cost is for we are then rendering the Internet from there, right? And so the cost is bandwidth and storage and data analysis and that. The device is inexpensive. Can you give us an idea of the cost for school? rate card, so this is if you get one, is $25,000 per year for the location. It scales down, right? So if you want to do lots of places, it goes down from there. We have a separate way to talk to states about cost per student or cost per 2,000 students or something like that as well that I think probably fits more into how the school looks at cost. Just a general idea is what I was looking for anyway so that's okay that's great yeah thank you very much represent the vault you get your question answered are there additional questions from the committee seeing none and mr. Olson thank you for your time thank you members staff is going to pass out the adequacy recommendations draft and then we will have a brief discussion on that so let's give them just a couple minutes get those passed out the committee please Thank you. And if non members of the committee want a copy, there may be extras. I'm not sure. I'm looking for somebody to give me a, I don't see, there may be some, there are extra copies. So if non-members want copies of it, obviously only committee members will vote on it, but there are extra copies should non-members want to look at them. I believe everybody has one now. So let's just go through just kind of a high-level overview of what the committee recommendations are, and I want to thank the committee for their work. I want to thank BLR for the hard work. As you know, this process is extremely exhaustive, and it takes not just a couple months, not just a couple people, but it takes an entire team to put together not just the data that we work off of, but the process for recommendations. And so I really want to thank BLR for being very conscientious as well as the committee for providing recommendations for us to review and then to decide on a joint recommendation. This will be a joint recommendation, joint Senate House recommendation. Just a couple foundational discussion points about where we've been and where we're going. So when you look back at the history of the matrix, we've got, obviously, it comes out of the Lakeview decision in 2003, and the idea of the matrix was in fiscal year 2005. When we look historically at what the numbers have been, we have roughly about an average 1.89% increase year over year has been the historic average when you put all the years together. One of our goals, obviously, is to remain strong with the recommendations that we make as a committee and to provide as much as consistency as possible for schools as they plan for the future. Some of the things that we have heard, and you've got a sheet there that looks at what the historical changes have been over time since fiscal year 2005, if you want to review that. Hopefully my math is right. I believe it was right at 1.89%. Obviously, the last couple of years are higher, and since COVID, we've seen a little bit higher, which has bumped the average up. So consistently, the things that we heard were surrounding special education, special needs, things like dyslexia, high cost occurrence students. On the non-funding side of things, consistently we heard about paraprofessionals and where those fell. And so just from a generalized overview of what the recommendations are, on the non-funding side, you'll see that we've zeroed out the line items for classified staff salary, and we've combined those. So that's combined into the line item for supervisor and other aides. What that's done is it's taken some of those that were outside of the matrix that were pretty difficult to track. there's no change of the dollars or no decrease in the dollars, but we're difficult for the Bureau of Legislative Research to actually track what was being spent on those. And so combining that category allows the Bureau to better track those, the spend on those, so we can have better data moving forward. So, and then when we look at the health insurance recommendations, we're required by law to make a recommendation on the health insurance side of it. As you remember from the last general session we pulled the health insurance contribution out of the per pupil spend and so that is being sent directly to EBD and so the recommendation is going to be whatever the EBD recommendation is is that we concur with that and we will make adjustment technical adjustments to the adequacy bill or the adequacy law in the upcoming session about that since we no longer have included that in the per pupil amount and then we get to the part that everybody is interested in obviously which is going to be the baseline funding recommendation again as i said when we look historically we've been in that 1.89 or so percent range of increase we wanted to remain consistent with that my goal is always to to remain at or above where we've been at historically and so the first year recommendation is a 2.51 percent per pupil increase to eight thousand two hundred thirty nine dollars uh year two is a 2.34 percent that year two number represents the um the cost of living um the cola index average for the four years uh and so we wanted to remain consistent with that so that's uh you know that's probably the the most notable part so eight two three nine is the number for fiscal year 28 eight thousand four hundred thirty one dollars is the number for fiscal year 29 and the other substantive change again based upon the things that we've heard from feedback from administrators and from the recommendations that were sent in by committee members is relative to the special needs funding pretty broad there but we obviously know that we've passed legislation a number of years ago relative to dyslexia intervention that's a significant focus for us as a state as it should be and the primary focus is on k through three and so this year we're adding an additional categorical the reason we add categoricals is so that we have a better focus on exactly where those funds are being spent and so last year we had maybe off by a student or two but i believe we had 25,974 students receiving dyslexia intervention services in K through three. Again, that being a primary focus for us. And so this categorical is focusing on that very specifically. So we're going to add a thousand dollar categorical per student. So per student in that K through three population that's receiving dyslexia intervention services. So that's roughly $26 million of new spend in year one, then bumped up through the COLA in year two. And then the other supplemental that we have in addition is going to be the high-cost occurrence student. So last year there was roughly, according to the Bureau, about $14 million that was left to districts to fund for a high-cost occurrence student. After set-asides, Medicaid reimbursement and other sets of offsets that were there, left about $14 million. and so we're going to create a supplemental to make that fund whole to ensure that that cost is met for districts. So that's about another, roughly based upon last year's dollars, about $14 million. And so that represents roughly $40 million or so in new dedicated specific special needs funding in fiscal year 28 and in fiscal year 29. So that's a high-level overview of it, and I believe we have separate motions from the Senate and the House. I'll recognize Senator English if you want to call on a motion for the Senate. Do I hear a motion to accept the recommendations? Senator Davis? Thank you, Madam Chair. I move that the Senate Committee on Education approve the final 2026 Adequacy Study Report, including the recommendations made today in the handout, proposed recommendations for adequate adequacy f y 28 and f y 29 thank you do i hear a second second all in favor all opposed thank you very much motion is passed and yes we will have discussion on the motion on the house side uh so i understand there's there's a desire for that so uh i would recognize representative um i'll recognize representative Furman. Representative Furman, you're recognized for a motion on the house side. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I move that the House Committee on Education approve the final 2026 adequacy study report, including the recommendations made today in the handout, proposed recommendations for adequacy, FY28 and FY29. Is there a discussion on the motion? Representative Meeks, I'll recognize you for discussion. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Now, the one number that I didn't hear is um the what is the total spend based upon these recommendations we've got the per pupil amount but we don't have what that translates into total to the state budget uh that's not normally been a part of the recommendation but i will recognize jasmine do we have the data on that readily available Jasmine, if you would recognize or introduce yourself for the record and then you recognize to answer that question. Jasmine Ray, Bureau of Legislative Research. So this is an estimate, Representative Meeks, because it's obviously based off ADM. We don't know what the ADM will be for fy 28 29 so this is taking what the adm was in the published state aid for 2026 using that number it goes from i don't have it's i have 3.69 for fy billion for fy 27 to 3.79 in fy 28 and then to 3.88 billion in fy 29 but i can provide the whole numbers again those are estimates though okay that's why i was interested what the what the estimate was there that's perfect thank you representative mayberry you're recognized for discussion thank you i'm really kind of lost in trying to figure out um the process that that we're in because i felt that we would be having more of a discussion and now we turned all the information in and i really have no idea what anybody else turned in so i'm trying to understand who who came up with this information and said okay we're going to analyze all this and and this is what it is like who who is that committee sure so the historical practice in joint education has been for the committee to provide recommendations again that's been generally sparse over the years but the committee provides recommendations, and then committee leadership meets with the Bureau of Legislative Research and puts together all those recommendations and looks for trends and then decides what appear to be the most prevalent trends and the most consistent recommendations and then bases the full committee recommendations on that. And so that's what you saw with this. You saw a pretty consistent trend with a strong funding recommendation from a year-over-year base funding standpoint um i would say the majority of the recommendations uh talked about cola increases and so cola again with the most recent estimates from dr silva was 2.34 percent over years and so you saw stronger than uh than typically recommended cola increase year one and then match it in year two and then the others were around high cost occurrence and just like has been we're the most consistent that we saw and do we ever get an opportunity to as legislators maybe see what other people had I mean I I just really felt like that's kind of a little bit more what this meeting would allow us to do and then would give us time to process that before we actually voted on it so we're just getting this information I haven't even had time to really process all of it and now I'm being asked to approve it and I'm just wondering if there's a way to delay it a little bit so we can have a little bit more discussion sure i appreciate that so historical practice has uh has been this which is uh is not to provide other member recommendations uh and and uh um and then to vote on it as a committee so we're following what the historical practice has been in this committee uh as long as we've done this okay um i i guess i i'm can can i asked for a little bit more explanation so I am very thankful if you read my comments I was concerned about the dyslexia funding I was concerned about special needs high cost and special education teachers that's kind of primarily where I focus so I'm glad to see that there's some increases here but I'm I'm still a little perplexed it says special needs high cost occurrences is increasing funding by 14 million for fiscal year '28. And the information, I'm going back on what I shared and I'm just gonna read it so I'm not missing something. Let's see, in the '23-'25 school year, there was a 36% increase in claims under special education high cost occurrences from 1,605 to 2,180. the total eligible claims, amount of claims rose from 46.9 million to 65.6 million with only 17.5 million available and 25 to pay those claims. Districts had to use other resources to pay those expenses. 30.1 million was the maximum amount of reimbursements based on the formula. So the increase of at least 30 million at minimum is what's needed. And I'm seeing that it's only 14 million to cover the cost so we still are not covering that that high cost with the 14 million so the information that we got from the department was after offsets and so there's a number of different offsets such as Medicaid reimbursement and some other offsets that the the amount after offsets was about 14 million in this most recent fiscal year and so that's that's what was was part of the recommendations obviously the committee can choose to adopt recommendations or not adopt recommendations uh you know from from my perspective and i believe from the perspective of other members that have were a part of the process this is these are very strong recommendations that again have not been a part of what our funding approach has been in the past and uh you know i talk with uh representative cozard on a fairly regular basis about uh some of the ideas he's had about modernizing the funding model and as you look at potential for a a more of a spending model that might give credence to tiered special needs or some other really broad categoricals. And that might be where we're going in the future. The current adequacy framework doesn't allow for that based upon how it is. However, I'm certainly supportive of what Representative Kosar has been doing to modernize the way that we approach this entire process. But for this year, that's what the recommendation is. I just wish there was a little bit more time for us to have greater discussion. That's all. Again, I'm very happy to see a lot of the things that are in here. I really am. I just wish that we had a little bit more overall discussion because I don't think this committee has had that chance to have those discussions. So if I vote no against it, that's the reason why it's not that I'm voting no on the incentives that are in here. Sure, and thank you for that. Again, the committee had the opportunity to provide our recommendations, and then we tried to take the balance of those recommendations to come up with a joint one. Representative McGruder, you're recognized for a question. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the hard work that we've put in, getting the information. I do have some concerns or some questions. My first question goes to fiscal year 2027, where there will be a decline in the funding, approximately 1.53%. I'm trying to get a better understanding of that. I do know in 2028 there will be an increase, and in 2029 there will be an increase. But how do we come up with this equation to decrease the funding? So we're currently in fiscal year 2027. So fiscal year 2027, if you'll remember back to the 2025 general session, we had the adequacy recommendations, and it is an average of 2.48% increase year over year for each of the years in the current biennium that we're in right now. However, because we took the health care contribution out for fiscal year 27, and it's being directly contributed from the department to EBD, that's why it shows a decrease. There's not an actual decrease in per pupil funding. It's just the removal of the health insurance. So, again, that's a fiscal year that went right now. Okay, and I do like how we're outlining the salaries here in the matrix, but I do have a question with some of the new information that we've received about some of these school districts, and especially to help out BLR. I don't see the superintendent funding in here either, and I know we've had some concerns about how superintendents are operating. So did I miss that portion? Specific to superintendent's salary? Yes, because I see base for the principals and educators and the secretary, but I don't see anything in regards to the superintendents. Jasmine, which line item is that? Central office, yes. Sorry. So that's within central office. Representative Duke, you're recognized for a question. thank you mr. chair thank you for your hard work on this and the committee as a whole I guess I mine is not so much on the matrix itself but I guess I would say on the process here is we spent a lot of time coming up here and looking through the listening to all the different reports and listening to the information BLR gave us and reading through it and and submitting this stuff and I would prefer to have more time to look at it than just the handout and then come in here and have the motion and the vote I'm not a super big fan of that happening that quickly although I mean I don't know that I have issue with with the you know a lot of the recommendations I mean I agree with I think that they're on on point but I guess I would say for a future I think the intent here was for at least in my opinion to have some discussion about this and I would agree I would like to hear the other members um I don't know that necessarily to hear all the recommendations but I do think I make better decisions whenever I hear the feedback from other members many that have been here like yourself and and Representative Cozard and and Senator English and Senator Davis that have been here for quite a long time and have done this and I can learn and glean from the decisions and the reasonings of why they maybe made some of the recommendations that they made that will make me better in making decisions in the future if the Lord wills for me to return. And so I guess I just would say for future reference, for myself personally, I would appreciate either getting this information a little bit ahead of time or maybe having a pre-meeting or something that we can do. I don't know what that would look like to be able to have a little bit more conversation after we make the recommendations or maybe make the recommendations as the group together. I mean, I don't know what that looks like, but it happened very quick in here. We read through this really quickly, and it takes a little bit to absorb, you know, what we did here. So I'm not saying that I'm going to vote against that because I think that that is problematic for just our schools and just moving forward. But I just want that to be noted that I would like to see a little bit more opportunity to talk about the recommendations after we've made them. So thank you, Mr. Chair. And I appreciate that feedback. So, you know, from my perspective, I think it's important to understand that everyone's recommendation is their own personal recommendation. And should other members want to access recommendation that your colleagues have made, you certainly have the latitude to ask them for what their recommendations were. It's not been committee practice to pass the full recommendations of each individual member out to everyone else or to the public, because, frankly, not everybody gives recommendations. And that, you know, I don't want to publicly shame or out members who may, for whatever reason, not give a recommendation. And then, you know, they have to deal with that. And I know everybody on this committee does a tremendous amount of work. And so I will leave it up to the individual member. If they want to share their recommendations with their colleagues, that's up to them. But everyone may not choose to do that because it's possible their recommendations may not be in line with what their local superintendent asks them to do. that may have had a different perspective. So I definitely appreciate the feedback. But again, just from the practice of this committee, as far as from an efficiency standpoint and the overall approach, I think we continue to do it effectively. And I want to always go back to the fact that these recommendations, they're not just strong. They're amongst the strongest this committee has ever made in the history of this adequacy, of the adequacy study, including giving a strong credence to the concern over special needs funding with significant funding there. So I'm proud of the work that we've done. And again, if members want to share their own individual recommendations, then they are more than happy to do that. You can follow up, sure. Thank you. And I definitely do not want that to appear. My apologies if it did, of any kind of criticism of the decisions that you guys made as you compiled these. I just, and I understand, not wanting to send all of them out, you know, this is what Representative Duke put as her recommendations, completely understand that. But having that opportunity as a committee, for those who want to discuss it and have a little bit more of a deep discussion on it, I think would just be beneficial. Again, I'm just one member that gets to make that. But also, this committee looks a little bit different than it did when we first did adequacy and we were required to do that. And the makeup looks different. So logic would dictate to me that there would probably be some changes on how members would want to navigate it. Again, it may just be me, but I do think that it would be helpful for those that want to discuss it a little bit more in depth in the future to be able to see, even if it's just this part here, right? Like, even if it's not everybody's recommendations, but if it's just the summary and what the leadership's recommendations are for us to have a little bit more time and opportunity to look through it, I think would be helpful. But I do, again, appreciate, I think it's a strong recommendation and I'm not opposed to it by any means, but just some food for thought maybe in the future on how we could maybe hit in the middle somewhere so we can balance both of that for the needs of the entire committee. And of course, part of it's a statutory process as well, that this is due to the governor, required by November the 1st. And so just from a scheduling standpoint, we want to make sure that we are doing our work expeditiously so that everybody sees these and can prepare effectively. Representative Garner. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I, too, just want to echo the concern about not having time to see the recommendations and to have some discussion. But my question is, is there an opportunity to get a digital copy of this piece of information? And is there a spreadsheet or something that doesn't have anybody's names on it, but is there a spreadsheet of the recommendations and how they came in? I, too, feel like we make better decisions when everybody's at the table. And I would like to hear those from the other side of the aisle and from those who have talked forever, and those who are brand new. And it doesn't matter to me that names are on there, but I would love to see the spreadsheet that you went by to gather that information, if that's available. I believe there is an electronic document for these recommendations that are in front of you today. I don't know about the remaining portion of it. Again, you know, from the standpoint of the process, if I can just speak to the process. So the process is, you know, it's not perfect in every way. No process is. It's what we've done historically, I think, has been done well and effectively. The old adage of, you know, too many cooks in the kitchen. I'm thankful that we have a lot of people who provided recommendations this time. In the past, that's not been the case. So we had a good bit more data to take off of. But just from a practical reality, if we got 28 of us in a room with joint House and Senate Ed and said, all right, here's mine, here's mine. And we had 28 different recommendations. We might in a few years come to a place of agreement on what actually gets put in place. And so just from a process perspective, we have to come to a point where we say this is what is the most common denominator that we see as a committee. And this is what we're going to move forward with. And, again, I'm very proud of the recommendations that have been put out there because they are very good for, especially when you look historically in the investments that we're making. I agree with that. I just put it in my own personal knowledge. I agree. I think this is the first time in a long time that I felt like we really had some input or guided input. I think we've had input, but this process, I think, has been better than it has been the whole eight years I've been here. So I agree with that, but I'm just saying that I would love to have that information, as much information as possible to look at after the fact so that I can see how everybody else was feeling. Thank you, and I'll have staff send out an electronic copy of the recommendations that are in front of you. Representative Meeks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. so as the senior member of the committee and this being my very last time to have input on this just a reminder this is actually this is not the end of the discussion this is just the recommendation so that the appropriations and all that can be developed ready for session so as we get into session this committee is still going to be able to be able to massage this and change this and work on this this is just the first step in finalizing that process for session so you know Those that are concerned about, hey, do I still have ideas and input, continue to make that available. Again, this is not the last step of this process. This is just the first step in finalizing things, getting it ready for session. So for whatever that's worth, Mr. Chairman. That's outstanding, Representative Meeks, and I would expect that from the senior member of the House of Representatives. So thank you for bringing clarity in. And that point is accurate. You know, I'll run an adequacy bill, hopefully sooner rather than later in the 96th General Assembly, and we'll have the opportunity to vote that up or down. I hope that we will vote yes on it because, again, I believe that we've come to a place of extremely strong recommendations for our public schools in the state of Arkansas, historically better, frankly, than we've done in the past in a very positive way. And I think it continues to show our commitments to keeping students first. Seeing no additional discussion on the motion, we have a motion by Representative Furman. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed? No. Motion passes. Seeing no additional business to come before joint education, this committee is adjourned. Thank you.