Task Force on Autism
Video
Transcript
3 documents
Machine transcript
May contain errors. Verify important quotations against the official video.
About transcript accuracy
- Source
- Whisper
- Model
- ggml-large-v3-turbo.bin
- Processing date
- October 6, 2026
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
0:00
Good morning everybody we are now here I am happy to be here this is my first time being a
vice chair so forgive me I want to thank the speaker for putting me on this committee this is full circle moment for me and I see a few familiar people out there for all you who don't know I have a son who have autism and
about ten years ago I used to sit in the crowd and I used to come to these meetings before
I became a legislature so this means a lot to me and I'm happy to be here with my co-chair Senator
Senator Justin Boyd
Unverified
0:48
Boyd you have anything to say thank you for being here and welcome I also want to welcome representative Lee Johnson he's He's with us today, so just looking forward to getting the meeting organized, getting us organized and getting things moving.
We do have something that I wanted to make sure you, by the end of August, we're supposed to have a report that is due. I don't anticipate we're going to have recommendations, so there will probably be no recommendations this year, but we'll work hard to make sure by next August we have recommendations for the next legislative session. SO AGAIN WELCOME AND LOOK FORWARD TO WORKING WITH
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
1:36
YOU I NOMINATE MYSELF AS THE HOUSE CO-CHAIR
Senator Justin Boyd
Unverified
1:38
OF THIS TASK FORCE AND I GUESS I NOMINATE MYSELF AS THE SENATE CO-CHAIR OF THIS TASK
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
2:10
FORCE all those in favor of the nomination say aye any nays the ayes have it just just to clarify
Senator Justin Boyd
Unverified
2:19
That is not something we normally do
Speaker 19
2:21
for either of us. It's just a sign and we're ready to move on. So bear with us. Sorry. Okay. I'm just
Speaker 23
2:32
going to adopt the rules and procedures. Go ahead and do that. You go ahead. You're in
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
2:44
the chair. Okay. All right. We are adopting the task force rules and procedures in exhibit C.
ANY QUESTIONS? ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THAT? ALL RIGHT. SO, SOMEONE MAKE A
Speaker 30
2:55
MOTION? DO WE HAVE A MOTION OUT THERE? TO ADOP -- I'LL
Speaker 31
3:03
MAKE A MOTION. yes I made a motion I need a second okay
Speaker 33
3:10
we have a second thank you all in favor all in favor say aye
Speaker 37
3:23
aye any opposed any opposed motion passes motion passes thank you Alright, now we're going to hot
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
4:02
D I NEED A MOTION TO CONSIDER
the authorization of the special expenses secured by the task force all right do I have a second all right motion adopted motion second all in All in favor say aye any nays motion carries
All right, I I need a
motion to adopt minutes from December 15th, 2025 22 sorry All right, I need
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
5:09
favor say aye aye Any opposed nay all right we adopted those minutes
Speaker 31
5:16
motion adopted earlier senator boyd said that we will not have that report
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
5:37
done by the this fall so
okay I'm just reiterating and so we discussed that we will have something for next legislative session by this by next August
all right discussion of future agenda items? Do we
have any suggestions for anything in the future?
Speaker 54
6:21
What kind of suggestions? Any. Yeah. So when
Senator Jim Dotson
Unverified
6:30
you think of like it. Sorry. So for agenda items, if you're looking for future stuff, are you talking about more or less discussions about health nutrition alternative therapies things like that to bring to the table okay yeah then i would i would love to to bring some of those to fruition and just talk about alternative options outside of the mainstream
Speaker 16
7:01
so so basically what i would say is you know
Senator Justin Boyd
Unverified
7:04
Do we have experts that we would like to hear from? Do we have issues in the current, you know, legislation that we think could be improved? What is it that you think we need to do? Where do we need to go to make Arkansas a better environment to help those with autism, right?
Speaker 61
7:26
I would like to bring to attention just how ABA
Speaker 63
7:29
is applied in the school. I know for my own child, it's not accessible where she was in the public school.
And so that's a huge concern as a parent, is having that support of ABA.
Speaker 23
7:52
You recognize? Thank you. One issue that I've had several people bring to mind that maybe we're considering is... Turn your mic
Speaker 68
8:01
on. Thank you very much. One issue I've had brought by a number of parents, including in my own situation,
Thomas Smith
Unverified
8:08
is just the state working to make parents aware of Medicaid waiver services. There's a number of parents that, as the children age, are just totally unaware of it. Just basic awareness of that service is very important, and maybe something we
Speaker 71
8:26
could work on. Ms. Barnett, you recognize? Since this group was so instrumental in helping the autism waiver get started, I'd like to, at some point, bring to the group some of our outcome data,
number of children served and what the outcomes have looked like, because it's been a tremendously successful program, and not only for the changes we've seen in children and families, but in workforce development, which was really not something we expected when we started, We've seen a lot of the professionals who started in the program as paraprofessionals were so invested in what they were doing and seeing that they've gone back to school and now they're working at the master's level as interventionists in the program. So it's done lots of things all across the state.
73 of the 75 counties have had children served. So I'd like to share that data with people at some point. Ms. Scott, you recognized. I
Speaker 75
9:26
would love to hear that. An update on that data, Karen. I also, I'd love it, and I'm not sure who would be appropriate to do this or a number of people, but if since this group met, I'm sure there's been a change, hopefully improvement. I think it has improved just in general workforce
availability and sort of where we are in terms of access, where the gaps are. I feel like in clinic, I see that on an individual level, so I have some ideas about where I think the gaps are, But at a policy level, I may not have that picture correct. So I'd love some sort of update so we could figure out where the gaps are and where we need to work. And the other issue that I think always needs more attention is transition to adult services and supports. Thank you. Thank you.
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
10:12
And I would like to also say that's an interest of mine, too. I'm hoping that we can get the A-State and Fayetteville and the other and I think UCA who have those programs targeted for kids or for students to have autism hopefully we get them in the meeting so they can kind of tell us their program some good outcomes and
see what type of issues they might have if they have any so that's on the horizon representative
johnson do you have any input
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
11:01
meeting i was in town and saw this meeting was happening today and i you know i have an interest obviously i think some of you at the table know me and certainly the other legislators do. You know, I have a daughter who's an adult with a genetic deletion. She has autism characteristics. And so I'm empathetic in a true way to some of the challenges that parents are experiencing across the state. One of the bills that came up this session was around ABA therapy for adults, which is a costly undertaking, right? It was a bill that
made it through, I believe, through the Senate to the House and died in the House Committee. And I think that's a real challenging issue. You know, the history of the autism waiver, which I'm not as familiar with as people in this room, but my understanding was that
was centered originally around trying to get kids early into ABA, right, when we still didn't know what ABA was and is it effective and there was still controversy surrounding it. I think now we see that it's clearly effective in the right settings, but it's very intensive, right, lots of intensiveness to that. So, looking at how we, you know, looking at how we continue to provide autism services for people past the age of the autism waiver.
And then, and then specifically in the autism waiver,
you know, you mentioned awareness around waiver services. I think what, I don't know, I don't know if you mean autism waiver or, you know,
the other, other waiver, I don't know, the special needs waiver, I don't know even. yeah see yes right so so which waiver were you referencing really both right right because there's confusion you
know we had a i had a person in my community who um you know came late to the game
for the autism waiver um and was going to probably miss out on that because his child was near the age of five and and just couldn't get the stuff done in time and um and you know that that's there's problem there, right? And so how do we reconcile these two waivers? You know, is there something that we need to change around the autism waiver, around qualifications, time frame, and then to your point on the, on this, I'm going to say it wrong again. Yeah, I should know that. CES waiver.
My daughter has that. It's a wonderful thing. You know, that's
something that I think people are woefully undereducated on. And people have this perception that, well, I'm not going to do that because I don't think I'll need it. Well, you do. You need it. And the wait list is long, you know, and
getting off the wait list takes time. And so anyway, I would love to see us look at this task force, look at those two things in particular. How do we support and pay for these therapies moving into adulthood for autism? And then, you know, is there a time to like take
step back and look at the autism waiver again what are the differences specifically between the autism waiver and the CS waiver and and how do we reconcile those I would
Thomas Smith
Unverified
13:55
just thank you very much I agree with everything you said I'll just say my experience there is significant confusion between the two and there's a lot of overlap between the two and even someone who works in this space almost every day with parents it is difficult to delineate exactly where you're supposed to be but awareness in general I'm just running a parents consistently for kids in their 20s and 30s who've never heard about either one of these.
Senator Jim Dotson
Unverified
14:18
I agree. Yeah, I agree. You recognize? And if I could add to that, I think that's really great stuff. And really what I was going for, for the health nutrition alternative therapies is more or less kind of right around inside of that. It's expanding the idea of what could be covered to help parents that maybe don't want to necessarily go the medication route and they want to try something else that's more therapeutic. that gets incredibly costly. And so it's already expensive to begin with. And so if you can provide more opportunities for access and healing in different ways,
I think it's definitely worth discussing. But also, thank you for getting the waiver going. I mean, it's something that we've benefited from really just now in a short amount of time because we came late to the game, didn't really know about it. Our daughter's 20. We learned about it when she was 19. We luckily got rushed through incredibly fast, and we're already shrinking our monthly spend that we have to spend. We're not 100% covered with everything that we do, but it has helped exponentially, and it's been fantastic.
So for anybody who is involved in that, thank you for the hard work
Speaker 71
15:33
that you did. You recognize? Just in terms of awareness, I'm amazed that we still run into people whose children are teenagers in special education in schools, and they don't know about TEFRA. So we hear people all the time saying, no, we don't have Medicaid because we're above income. And that just is astonishing to me that somewhere along the way, someone hasn't said, no, if you have a child with a disability, you will be eligible for Medicaid.
And I don't know the answer to it, but it is an issue that as much as we try to get information out there, it's just hard to get it to
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
16:07
everyone who needs it. Yeah, I don't know. I
think talking about brainstorming ideas around solutions to that, I think it's not a letter in the mail, probably, right? I don't know if, you know, the problem is, like, if we have a lot, I don't know, Laurie, do you
know how many people we have on the wait list?
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see you up there. Do you know
Allison Guthrie
Unverified
16:34
how many people we have on the wait list? Yeah, as
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
16:37
of yesterday, we have around 1,700. Yeah, and so, like, we already have 1,700 waiting. There's a little bit of a catch-22 because if we go out and advertise this and publicize this and there's, now there's people, there's these expectations and all of a sudden there's another 1,700. Like, I believe there's twice as many out there that, at least as many out there that aren't aware or don't think they need it. And, you know, and again, these are, I've talked to people that are really like yourself,
who are really entrenched in it, and they don't even know. And that's hard for me to believe. But the more we publicize it, the more we have to be prepared as a state to step up. And, you know, the problems around workforce are real. You know, that's part of the issue. I think this anticipation of when we start getting out and publicizing this, we need to be prepared as a state to step up both financially, But then from a workforce perspective, you know, there's, I mean, there's an obligation to take care of these folks that we're not maybe prepared to meet from a workforce perspective.
Speaker 71
17:35
We have 76 on the waiting list for the autism waiver and another 373 who have packets in process that parents are working on. And they're coming in, like, so far this month we've had 64 applications that have come in. So they're coming in like crazy for that program. beyond what we've ever would have imagined. And a lot of those kids are going to age out on that waiting list before they get services because you have to be five before you get in a slot. So, yeah, there's a huge issue.
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
18:05
It feels like maybe the pediatricians. I don't know. It feels like most of these kids, if you have a disability of some kind, most of those kids' parents are finding their way to their physician. So maybe working with the Arkansas chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, I don't know how often they're, you know, my wife's a pediatrician. my when our daughter was born we didn't know anything about it she trained here at Children's Hospital we are from Arkansas and someone came to her after our daughter was born and fortunately and said hey do you know about the waiver and she was like no I don't know anything about it and so like there there really is still probably a gap even in our in our clinicians and
providers around you know educating people around the process and then the you know the value I can unfortunately confirm
Speaker 75
18:49
that to be incredibly true I was in my second year as a board certified developmental behavioral pediatrician before I understood the difference between the two waivers probably completely I've been doing this for a long time I have an adult son I'm still not sure I know exactly what to tell people about a pass versus the waiver
yeah um took me nine months to get tefra sorted and signed up for so i i think there's um there's a lot of education to be done i think those of us whose job it is to educate people still have questions i think i hear i i think that's a good point and i understand the concern about um drumming up business for something that we're having a hard time funding in workforce i think that's real and it's it's uncomfortable to say to parents here's what your child needs and then not be able to provide it. On the other hand, I think we
have, for better or worse, a patchwork of a variety of different programs and services and, you know, there's TEFRA, there's passes, there's this waiver, there's that waiver, and the whole thing and how it works together. So not necessarily any individual part of that, but at least to be able to help people, clinicians as well as parents and professionals understand like here's the big picture here's where you fit there's a waiting list for this but in the meantime you can do this I don't know how best to go about
doing that on a large scale but it's a confusing landscape I
Thomas Smith
Unverified
20:22
agree and just this does point more towards the the overall waiver than autism waiver but by and large the entry point for parents to waiver services is through the pass. And in my experience, the education, the knowledge level of that specific pass worker to that family is going to be the key to whether or not they're years ahead of this thing. And it's really just luck of the draw. I would feel like the most effective way to
address that is make sure that people working in the pass programs actually understand it themselves. It's amazing how many people have a pass who have never
Speaker 101
20:54
heard the word waiver in their life. So we have some, we passed
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
20:58
some legislation this session requiring the passes to have some accountability um to have um develop a website to post things on their website to interact with their uh with the idea behind it was to provide some clarity around people trying to choose between the passes right because if you're in a pass and and you you there are differences
between the passes and depending on what your child's needs are you may be better served in one pass over another right so for my daughter she gets driven a lot of places she has a lot of activities during the day. And so some passes cover more mileage, some passes cover less mileage. Like, we didn't know that. Somebody had to tell us that. That was hard to find out. And we switched passes, partly because we were trying to get a coverage set that better suited. So there's maybe an avenue or an opportunity in this interim as this law becomes, you know, comes into effect to maybe create some accountability in the passes around education, around the waivers. So just a
thought when we're listening for you know through ALC for rules to come through there's gonna be
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
22:10
rules around that we can look for that I just attended a disability summit in Seattle Washington last week and our neighbors Tennessee and Oklahoma are doing some really innovative things and this space and so it's my hope that we can get them to come to this meeting via
zoom or since they're so close to Arkansas maybe even come to a meeting and enlighten us on some things that they're doing in this space. So this is what I think
Senator Justin Boyd
Unverified
22:47
I'm hearing so I've been on autism task force but it's been a few sessions since I've been on the autism task force I need to be caught up on what's going on you know one what I forgot and two where we are today so what I think I'm hearing is maybe the first thing
we need to do is talk about the waiver outcomes clarify provide some clarity between the two waivers understand how the passes fit into that maybe we need to have a legislative review so that we understand you know what laws are already on the books before we start talking about changing or adding let's understand what we already have and hey there's always the possibility something's not working and we just want to get rid of it right like it's just out there it's extraneous um and then either come in and discuss aba specifically in schools
and then uh workforce whether we whichever one we do first um i don't know the the answer whatever the group thinks or just whatever we can do um do we have any feedback on that as a place to start with our agendas going forward i'm hearing or see not hearing i'm sorry it's still early for me apparently i'm seeing some heads nod i don't see any heads shaking so if anybody has a concern or thinks we should start somewhere else now would be a good time to express that
representative johnson you're always welcome and we always appreciate your feedback including on what this what i'm proposing as our agenda moving forward no i appreciate that
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
24:26
and when i can come i'm going to try to come because i am interested in what this task force is doing i do think you You know, coverage for adults is important. It's going to come up again next session. We have some invested legislators across both sides of the aisle that want to see how we can make this happen. But it's a budgetary, it's a real budgetary challenge. Like, I'm empathetic with DHS and the payers out there about how to approach this without breaking the bank.
And so, you know, trying to find, you know, in that adult coverage space, trying to figure out how we're going to transition people and still keep coverage. And what coverage is needed? Like I don't understand ABA well enough really as a modality of treatment to say with confidence that there's value at starting at age 16 versus starting at age 4. I don't know. You know, so I'd lean on some of the colleagues here that have more expertise. But definitely keeping that front of mind, too, Because I'm confident, based on the legislators that ran that legislation last session,
that it will come back and being prepared for that and having some
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
25:37
thoughts around that would be important. At this time, I'd like to recognize Representative Tracy Steele for being here and Senator Love back there in the crowd. And I also want to recognize Lori McDonald. We've discussed this ad nauseum, particularly with my son. And so she's been very helpful and I can count, hopefully count on you to help us through this as well. We did talk about some of the difficulties with TEFRA and making it more streamlined so the average person can fill these papers out because my husband had to do it.
It's impossible. So hopefully in this working group or this task force, we can figure out ways to streamline the process so parents can feel empowered to do these things and get help for their children. You recognize? For those of y'all
Allison Guthrie
Unverified
26:32
who haven't met me, I'm Jennifer Brise. I'm the new DDS director at DHS, and so it's great to be here. And I volunteer to help pull together some information on the current state and what's available.
Speaker 108
26:46
And I can explain the current waivers and the PASS system. That would
Speaker 71
26:58
be great. You recognize? I just wanted to say thank you to Representative Johnson for the legislation he championed a session ago that changed our diagnostic criteria. We had originally had to have three professionals, an MD, a psychologist, and a speech language pathologist, and it was such a log jam for families to be able to get that that the two out of three is really helpful.
Now what we need to do is make sure people know about it because we're still running into people who think you still have to have three. But thank you for
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
27:26
doing that. Of course, that was a great effort of people in
this room, people in the city of Little Rock that brought that to my attention. Like, I didn't even know it was a thing. So great way of the legislation working. I would have never passed that without being told about it from folks in this room.
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
28:34
all right task force um so me and senator boyd we're discussing um we supposed to meet every three months and so we need a consensus on how that looks what time of day um that will work best for you all and we're looking at
september right because probably the second week of september around the 16th,
around ALC week. So if we can get a consensus on how that looks for everybody,
so we could try to set a date so we can get the ball rolling.
Senator Jim Dotson
Unverified
29:21
Just a question with the funding. Where does the funding for all this stuff come from, Essentially, so is it just like federal dollars and state dollars, or is there private funding that comes in
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
29:31
the mix? No, no to private, but again, I'll get outside my wheelhouse pretty quick, right? But it's a blend of federal and state funding, and depending on which program you're talking about
or which waiver you're talking about, the funding, and, you know, everyone knows that's a little bit of a moving target right now, too, right? There's anxiety around any changes that might happen federally and how they might, you know, filter downstream to the state level. And so I think there's, but I think there'll be clarity around that, you know, in the next six months. We're going to know what passes federally, and we're going to be able to
prepare for that. And, you know, but the simple answer is it's complex. And, but it's a blend, and I don't know, I would lean on my DHS colleagues here,
but I don't think there's any private funding that blends with the state and federal dollars. Now, with that said, I mean, there's a, with that said, there are states doing private-public partnerships in a variety of different spaces. You know, this was the, New Jersey did some real successful things in maternal health with private-public partnerships. So it's
not to say there isn't a pathway for some private-public partnerships around autism. It would just, I don't know how that looks or how that would work.
Speaker 122
30:55
But there's probably no regulations against it? There's always regulations against it. But
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
31:03
with every regulation, there's always loopholes, right? So, I mean, there's going to
be regulations, but I think it's a valuable thing to ask, right? There are lots of
people in the private space. I don't know if you've looked at what they're doing in Northwest August around the SLC communities, but I mean, there's some really good stuff happening across the state in private sector and making sure we're working in conjunction with them
and not in silos, I think, is important. Ms. Barnett,
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
31:38
I have a question. On the agenda, it said that it was the creation of white papers in order to assist families in identifying quality ABA therapy. Have we gotten anywhere on that? No, I saw that on the
Speaker 71
31:52
minutes and thought, oh, okay, that was three years ago. We can certainly do that if that's something that people would like to have.
There may be other things people are more interested in at this point, but we provide the kind of information to families all the time. Here are the questions
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
32:13
you could ask if you're trying to choose a provider. I
have a question. We did pass some legislation this session around maybe there's a lot of bills around registering or ABA therapists. We did something this session to try to create a bona fide, like, maybe we weren't licensing them.
Do you have some insight on that? I know we tried to get it done
Speaker 125
32:39
last session, and it got through this session. Yes, I can give a little bit of clarification on that. There
Speaker 126
32:46
was a registry that was passed, so that it's through the Arkansas Psychology Board. And so, board-certified behavior analysts, BCBAs, can now, it's a voluntary registry, so it's not required, but they can become registered through the Arkansas Psychology Board as a board-certified behavior analyst in the state.
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
33:05
I believe Representative Clowney did that bill. And I
forgot, can we take a couple of moments for everybody to introduce themselves and what filled you in so we can have an
Thomas Smith
Unverified
33:16
idea of what everybody's specialties are? Thank you. My name is Thomas Smith.
I'm an attorney. I live in Hot Springs. I also have offices here in Little Rock. A lot of my practice is in transaction law, but we have a special needs son, so we work a lot with transitioning special needs families, developing special needs trust for long-term care, and we also represent a handful of trustees around the state that serve as trustees on special needs trust, and obviously running a lot of parents at this age, 18, 19 point, and that's where the waiver question comes up.
Speaker 129
33:50
I'm Tranesha Hill, I'm a psychologist at the DDC and I do diagnostic evals and research, especially in black autistic girls and then also co-occurring mental health conditions in autistic populations. Jennifer Brise,
Allison Guthrie
Unverified
34:16
I am the newest addition to the DHS team.
I've been with DHS one year as of last week. I came from the PASS world, so I actually was in the leadership position and implemented two of the four existing PASSes here. I'm also a licensed clinical social worker, and I'm excited to meet all
Speaker 133
34:39
y'all. I'm Dr. Patty Gibson, and I'm an adult psychiatrist, and I've been in the clinical world coming from the opposite end, from the VA, adults, and then working in primary care, and I'm now the medical director for behavioral health for Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield just for the last year and a half.
So I'm on a fast track of learning about autism, and I really want to learn all that I can from you all and see what we
Speaker 71
35:11
can do to improve access. I'm Karen Burnett. I'm the Executive Director at Partners. We're part of the University of Arkansas Fayetteville. We have offices here in Little Rock. We're the University Center of Excellence for Developmental Disabilities Education Research and Service, funded by the federal government to provide a connection between higher education and research and
evidence-based practice and the communities. And we've been managing the autism waiver for DDS since it started.
Speaker 61
35:45
I'm Rachel Dodson. I'm a parent of an awesome daughter that's eight with autism, but then I'm also a school counselor at Benton, and so I talk to parents
Speaker 63
35:56
daily about autism and how to get their children in services and how to, what, what TEFRA is. So I'm also
batting a lot of questions um for parents that know i'm a parent of a child with special needs but also i'm a special needs parent as
Speaker 136
36:19
well so i'm michael taylor special education director for bryant
Speaker 126
36:25
public schools i'm sheila smith i'm with the arkansas behavior support specialist under the department of special education also a licensed behavior or licensed psychologist and a board certified behavior
Speaker 75
36:36
analyst i'm angela scott i work at the dentist developmental center with dr hill i'm a developmental pediatrician so we do mostly diagnostic
Speaker 74
36:48
work i'm also the proud mother of a 20 year old yesterday with autism. My name is
Ashley Beast
Unverified
36:58
Ashley Beast and I'm an educator with Cabot Public Schools but I am a parent of a 11 year old boy getting into
those hormones and it's making it a challenge so I'm very excited to be here.
Senator Jim Dotson
Unverified
37:15
I'm JD Shupp. I'm a father of a 20 year old daughter with autism. I work for walmart in northwest arkansas all my careers have been in television marketing and
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
37:37
advertising so i have another question um do we have any interest of um mental health when it comes to
are um children with autism and can somebody lead that up and and and lead it up and see who we need to come who need to come to the meetings to kind of present things on the um how that works because I worry about my son at 16 um having that that support that he needs um when he gets out of the house fortunately he is he does have somebody he talks to at his school but
also you know want to have that for him as he become an adult so if there's somebody in the committee that wants to hit that up that'd be greatly appreciated
Speaker 98
38:29
I'd like to nominate someone my fantastic colleague dr.
Speaker 75
38:33
Hill would be VERY QUALIFIED TO SPEAK ON THAT SUBJECT. ALL RIGHT,
Representative Tracy Steele
Unverified
38:46
MS. HILL. YES, YOU RECOGNIZE? THANK YOU, MADAM CHAIR. OUTSTANDING WORK THAT THIS COMMITTEE IS INDULGING IN. WE APPRECIATE
EVERYBODY'S SERVICE ON THIS. AND AS LONG AS WE GOT DOC HERE, I TELL YOU, HE'S GOING TO KEEP us going in the right direction that's for sure my question is uh will this committee dove and and look at the issues with the 504 program and kids that are kind of on the spectrum my concern that i just found out about a couple of years ago is that the 504 program and i served on the school board at north little rock so um the 504 program k through 12 is is pretty stringent
and it's doing a lot of good work. Kind of the issue is, is at the collegiate level, you know, some colleges respect it, adhere to it, and some do not. And I just didn't know if this committee is going
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
39:46
to look at that issue at the collegiate level. Well, Representative Steele, I did pass some legislation
this session dealing with that. The bills that I did pass is going to look at the data collection of individuals with special needs and how the higher education
institutions, how they are documenting the students that come through there so we can figure out if we can make that a better experience for the students that come through higher ed. Because we do know that it's challenging for some of our students to go to higher ed and actually finish. So we are looking into that. thank you madam chair
Senator Justin Boyd
Unverified
40:30
for giving me the microphone again so uh so what i'm going to
propose is that we we're working to get we have to have permission to meet the week of alc week i've asked the pro tem and the speaker and i've heard back that from the pro tem that he's okay with it so if something changes we'll we'll let you know but then going forward with madam chair's permission and agreement then we'll look we'll look at meeting in audit the week of audit which is usually the week before ALC week so but in September we're going to look at legislative
council week is is the next meeting we will try to see if we can get a little bit longer or bigger block of time because there's going to be a lot to discuss you know if as you know we want it to be worth your time to show up and and participate in and help us understand what's happening um so with your okay that's the way we're going to proceed forward so then i'm going to make a motion with your permission madam chair to authorize the co-chairs that would be the two
of us to approve a final report due on or before august 31st so again i don't anticipate we're going to have any legislative recommendations so we anticipate a report that would be we have no legislative recommendations currently and with your permission I'm making a motion to for y'all to authorize us to have
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
42:07
second? All in favor say aye. Aye. All in favor say I mean all in opposed say nay.
okay the eyes have it
motion adopted also can I add something to are we interested in technology and how technology can help the our kids with autism like as they get older and matriculate out of high school and because there's all kinds of new innovative ways of having technology help instead of having AIDS. So
it's my goal to have somebody in here to talk
about technology and the role and how and how they can help our children with autism. So is that something that we might
be interested in? Okay. All right do we have any other suggestions or any other comments concerns or questions?
Speaker 61
43:15
Yes, ma'am. Just going back to diagnosis, I know it was difficult for my daughter
Speaker 152
43:20
to get a diagnosis. It took a very long time. And so going forward, telling parents, you know, Dentist Developmental, I know the waiting list is like six months. And so I've heard from other private companies like Kidsource, just an example off the top of my head, that they do private testing. And so if we could have kind of a list of places that parents could go and the type of coverage they could have to have their child screened for autism, it would be helpful because
right now I only have two places to tell other parents to take their children and it takes a long time. Did
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
44:02
you have something to say, Representative Johnson? Oh, did I have that look on my face? Maybe, yeah. I was just thinking about, I was thinking back to our conversation about how we connect with families and individuals who need information around the autism waiver, the
CES waiver, and the passes. You know, my thought has always been DHS, right? That's where we go. But I'm looking around the room at educators and thinking about, you know, we've moved pre-K services out of DHS over to the Department of Education.
You know, DESE has its own Medicaid. I mean, there's some very splintered approaches within Medicaid because we have this Medicaid within DESE that's totally adjacent to the Medicaid that's in DHS. Maybe having someone from the Department of Education come to visit with us or be here. You know, I see DHS represented here at the table. I see educators represented at the table. Maybe having someone from DESE, you know, someone within special ed or someone within the Medicaid Department at DESE.
there's several names i could give you that would probably be good i'm just as we're having these conversations i'm thinking man i wish fill in the
blank was here so i could say hey how
Speaker 126
45:09
about this you know i believe that dr jeff adams who serves on here from the arkansas department of education would be able to answer oh i see
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
45:16
that i see that now sorry yeah that's okay i did not mean to slide uh jeff unfortunately
Speaker 126
45:20
he was not able to be here today but he
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
45:23
so let's just make sure he can be here he'd be great that's one of the people i was thinking of
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
45:29
so i'm seeing that name now. Yeah, perfect. And I have a question for the educator and the counselor. Dealing with
my son and all that wonderful stuff that you have to go through and, you know, while, you know, K to 12, which he's still in, he's 16. So is there something easier to make your life easier as a counselor like when you're dealing with the parents is there something that you can suggest
and something that maybe we can work on and make it more streamlined for parents? I think the
Speaker 152
46:00
biggest thing is I'm in a little bit different situation everybody gets passed to me because I'm a parent
of a child with special needs so like you know what to do because you've done it personally so I think from for my fellow counselors they have zero training as far as this is how we go through and talk to a parent with special needs this is how we these are the resources we could provide that's why I set a list because there's many times I'm going off personal experience I'm not
Speaker 154
46:32
going off of an exhaustive list and then I think also we are in charge of doing sped referrals
counselors are we're not very educated on doing that as a state and that may be different for different districts but I think it's just a they most of the counselors I work with are more than willing to help they just don't know how and they're in the counselor role so they're not in a classroom role with kids with autism every day so um more education would be great I think so I have a question
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
47:06
for you so for I know for um the department of ed they have the
what do they call like the announcements where things where educators can see
what's happening do y'all have anything for counselors like a website or something we have um arska
Speaker 154
47:23
and asco so we have the national and the state committee you know our um i'm losing my words right now but we we meet you know several times a year but that is just something i think we we get some of the really watered down version but then the actual giving support or being able
to guide people to the right place I think that's the biggest thing is just if we could give parents more resources we get a lot of education on if mental health suicide things like that we have lots of things to give parents but we don't
Speaker 158
48:02
have a lot to give them in the terms of if their child has an autism diagnosis. Thank you. I
Speaker 136
48:16
just want to say a couple of things from an educator's perspective in leadership in a school setting. So there have been a lot of positive changes that
our meds and the Department of Ed have implemented over the last couple of years to help us in the schools. Notably that we can begin building ABA services. That has been a game changer for the public school system. Something that I hope is a part of this discussion here, we want all of our kids in our schools every single day, and I love every one of our 1,800 kids at Brighton who have special education needs, and many of them are children with autism. Our challenge is for the students who have the most profound levels of disability, and I'm talking about autism
specifically. We want those kids in our school every single day and we spend, I don't want to say the number, but it's a huge number that we spend on ABA services on those kids. They have an ABA with them. They have multiple adults assigned to them every day. They're in very individualized spaces that cost a lot for construction and keep and keeping those spaces safe from week to week. We don't see the needle move oftentimes with some of those children, and we know that
we're doing everything that we can to keep the adults safe and to keep the kids safe and to help that kid make progress. That is our dilemma. I see the state making efforts to help us be able to recoup dollars so that we can take care of those children, but after we get to a point to where we don't see that needle moving and we're not making much progress with those kids, and I'm talking about that very unique small population of kids who are in our schools. We want those kids to be in our schools. Let me say that loud and clear. We just don't know always where to go next.
There aren't a lot of community resources for us to tap in to help us achieve what we can't achieve already with all of the resources that are costly that we're pouring into those kids. Does
Speaker 137
50:11
that make sense? That's the only thing that I wanted to add to the conversation. and I
Ashley Beast
Unverified
50:30
kind of want to piggy off on what both of you guys were saying working in the school
district and having a son in the district that I work at it does seem like in the beginning like around diagnosis if you're getting diagnosed young you have your speech therapist your OTs your PTs, that are really pushing a lot of resources and helping you, you know, get farmed out where you need to go. But as a mama of 11-year-olds, it does seem that after kind of an age, those resources just drop off. And you're just kind of left in the private sector just having to figure it out on your own. And I think that would be incredibly helpful, even to help on the school
end, if we had a clear path of resources, especially for those middle ages and coming into the secondary education level, before we become an adult, what kind of resources can we continue? I think would be immensely helpful. Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
51:27
know when to be quiet and when to keep talking. I mean, there's a lot of overlap in problems and issues that you're trying to keep it specific to autism, but, you know, we need an overhaul of how we fund special education in Arkansas.
You know, we're one of the only states that have just sort of a flat rate, right? We don't have any recognition as a school district level of what percentage of your kids are SPED and not SPED. You know, the average school district in Arkansas has about 13.5% SPED kids, but there are school districts that have 20%, and there are school districts that have 2%, and they're all funded the same. Based on your average daily census, there's no recognition of your SPED concentration in funding. And then within that, as you know, to your point, not every SPED kid is created the same, right? I mean, some SPED kids require intensive dollars, and some don't.
And we make no acknowledgment of that at a state level by trying to create criteria or categories as how to fund special education. There's a lot of interest in changing how we fund special education. Some of this comes back to data. We don't do a great job collecting the data points that DESE would like us to have to really create a new funding system. But to your point, I think, you know, that unique subset of kids, whether they have autism or something else, and they have intensive services and you're really tapping out on what you can do for them,
we need to do a better job as the state of supporting our school districts with funding proportionate to that and acknowledge that some of these kids cost more than others. And, you know, all the conversations you can have around that, this has been something I've been championing for a couple of years, you know, help move the needle. And, you know, in fairness to everyone involved, everybody agrees we need to change. It's just change is hard, change is slow. You want to be, you know, thoughtful in how you make changes, but I
can't help listen to that and just think we could do better
in our school districts around special education.
Speaker 71
53:29
I think one of the things that that makes me wonder about as well is um whether it's a student that you have who has just really severe autism and or those students that you're struggling with who have such severe behavioral challenges um i we're seeing we're operating a pilot project for dhs to try to do some prevention things with that population and i think there's a connection we're missing between school and home and if we could do some things in
the homes to help support families so we could get some consistency across those environments, I can't help but think we'd have, we'd see that needle move some. And I also think that the, that, that's another push for us to really invest in early intervention because if we got, some of those kids didn't get any early intervention and the ones that we see, if we get them in there really young and early before some of those behaviors develop because they're so frustrated because they can't communicate, then we can, we can head off some of that but I think we're really missing a big piece between school and home in that
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
54:33
connection. All right we are wrapping up one more
Senator Jim Dotson
Unverified
54:39
comment. I love what you're saying there by the way because maybe there's a connection for homeschool families in that sense too so for those who don't send theirs to public education something around that could be really really
Thomas Smith
Unverified
54:54
helpful for support. All right. Well, I'd like to thank this committee for this robust conversation that we are having,
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
55:00
and we can also continue this conversation via email. If you have any questions
or have anything that you want to add, please feel free to email us, and I guess our staff have everybody's email addresses, so we can always continue the discussion via email or phone call. I want to thank everybody again for coming. I want to thank my co-chair, Senator Boyd. And I want to thank you for your patience. This is my first time sharing a committee. So, again, I do thank everybody for being here. And I think we are adjourned.
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Election of Co-Chairs
C. Adoption of Task Force Rules and Procedures
D. Consideration of a Motion to Authorize Chairs to Approve Special Expenses Incurred by the Task Force
E. Adoption of Minutes from December 15, 2022
F. Discussion of Annual Reporting Requirement and Identifying Legislative Priorities
G. Discussion of Future Agenda Items
H. Other Business
I. Adjournment
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — TASK FORCE ON AUTISM, Jun 17, 2025 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit C -- Task Force Rules of Procedure | Exhibit | 2 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit E -- DRAFT Minutes Autisim Task Force 12-15-2022 | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
Senator Justin Boyd
Unverified
Speaker 19
Speaker 23
Speaker 30
Speaker 31
Speaker 33
Speaker 37
Speaker 45
Speaker 54
Senator Jim Dotson
Unverified
Speaker 16
Speaker 61
Speaker 63
Speaker 68
Thomas Smith
Unverified
Speaker 71
Speaker 75
Speaker 24
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
Allison Guthrie
Unverified
Speaker 101
Speaker 108
Speaker 122
Speaker 125
Speaker 126
Speaker 129
Speaker 133
Speaker 136
Speaker 74
Ashley Beast
Unverified
Speaker 98
Representative Tracy Steele
Unverified
Speaker 146
Speaker 152
Speaker 154
Speaker 158
Speaker 137