ALC - Hospital, Medicaid, - Developmental Disabilities Study Subcommittee
Video
Transcript
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 4, 2026
Speaker 3
1:30
If everybody make their way to their seats, you're about to get started.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:00
Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for, in the middle of your summer, coming to a great meeting. I appreciate everybody showing up this morning.
I'm very, very excited about this morning's topic and what we're going to be discussing. I think you all will see it's very, very important. We're just moving forward right along with our project that we have started a couple years ago now. So thank you all for being here today, and we'll hear from a number of folks that are working hard on what we're trying to do to bring a complete transformation of our workforce system in our state so that all of our Kansas can get to work because that's what we want them to do for their families to be thriving. And I really appreciate everyone being here today, and hopefully we'll have some good questions. So we're starting out this morning with the folks in the Department of Education.
So if we could have Ross White, Tina Moore, Hugh McDonald, Cody Waits, Janet Mann, and Mary Franklin come to the table. I guess Janet and Mary, you guys can hold off for a little bit, and we'll start with the Department of Ed and Workforce. They've got a great presentation for us, and we'll bring you folks up in a little bit. so I'm sure all of you have heard about the waivers that we're doing with the Department of Workforce and what they've got going so they have a good
presentation for us so I think it's really exciting as we saw with our audit there were a miss you will just say that funds will not be using effectively and efficient efficiently for our Kansas that we really were seeing some waste across the state and I think it can do a much better job of getting some training to our Kansas across the whole state and every county so thank you all for being here this morning. We're excited to hear what you guys are doing and moving forward on behalf of our state. So I'm going to turn it over to all of you and let you start with your presentation. If you'll first introduce yourselves
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
4:06
and we'll give it to you guys. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Hugh
Speaker 20
4:20
McDonald, Secretary of Commerce. Cody Waits, Executive Director, Workforce Connections, Department of Commerce. Ken Warden,
Speaker 23
4:28
Commissioner, Division of Higher Education. Tina Moore, Director of Workforce Development, Division of Higher Education.
Speaker 25
4:33
Ross Watt, Director of the Division of Career and Technical Education. Awesome.
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
4:36
Thank you all so much for being here this morning. Let me first begin. Hugh MacDonald here to -- wanted to start this presentation, at least from Cody Waits and myself, to kind of ground everyone on the Commerce Department's organization, where it stands today and describe kind of the realignment and reorganizing efforts that we've uh taken on the last couple and a half years and i guess the the theme eventually we will get to
um workforce how it how it connects to the workforce system um but uh um sort of like we we needed to clean our own house up first before we can ask others to clean their own house clean their house so starting out the largest effort really was focused in three major areas one was the implementation of shared services within commerce centralizing functions like accounting HR fiscal procurement and IT rather than
having those functions in all of the in all of the commerce divisions and doing it inconsistently. The second was we merged, if you might recall in the 2023 session, we merged banking and securities. And the third, which is most relevant for today, is the realignment and sort of breaking up, separating the old Department of Workforce Services organization and into two areas reporting directly to the Secretary's position. And those two areas are
re-employment, otherwise formerly known as unemployment insurance. And effective July 1 will also include the Bureau of Labor Statistics and labor market information, part of that organization upon the retirement of Dr. Sharice Childers. And the other area was the creation of Arkansas Workforce Connections led by Mr. Waits, that really the intent was to bring together all of the workforce development related functions that frankly were scattered
across multiple divisions within the Department of Commerce. There were portions in AEDC, there were portions in DWS, the Office of Skills Development reported directly to the Secretary. All those now are within Mr. Waite's organization, the Arkansas Workforce Connection. Secretary McDonald you know just a
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
7:14
second colleagues if you look in your binders you'll see this presentation
for today and under today's agenda right
under today's agenda you'll see this presentation in your binder so you can look at it I know for
some of us a lot easier to look at that than try and look at the screen sorry sorry I just want to make sure we're we're all on the same page you're doing a great job it's much easier for us to
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
7:39
follow you when we're looking at the pages in front of us so thank you sir I apologize no thank you Thank you. So we're now in a position, as Cody Waits will further describe, that will detail requesting the number of waivers from the Department of Labor,
the most significant of which is moving from 10 local workforce development boards with over 200 boards of directors, 10 different workforce strategies, 10 different sets of local workforce development policies to one single statewide strategy and one board that still retains the flexibility at the local level. All those changes have created lots of efficiencies within the Department of Commerce. We're not done yet, but we've got about 11% less headcount than where we were when we came in.
We've got about $20 million less in our normal operating costs. That's about a 12% reduction. Our indirect rates for our federal programs have gone from 60% to 25%. We're now understanding what things cost within the old organization. And not to mention, we're also getting the right people in the right place. And of about 17 different leadership positions within the Division of Commerce, 12 out of those 17 are new.
So moving in the right direction. And to make sure we're not just, I want to make sure you understand we're not just focusing on the cost, but we're also focusing on the services. And you might recall a few months I was up here talking about some challenges we had in the Division of Services for the Blind. We now have a new interim director. We also have a new board. And I can tell you from quarter two to quarter three, we've seen significant improvement already.
measurable skills gains have gone from 18.4% to 57%. Employment rates second quarter after exit has gone from 1% to 37%. Again, still not where we need to go. Employment rate fourth quarter after exit has gone from 10% to 43%. And finally, credential attainment rate has gone from 10% to 30% that's in one quarter now some of that is not all some of that is improving
processes business process some of it is reporting but I wanted you to understand that we are cleaning things up and mr. winter is making a great progress thus far so see the next slide here so I want you to have a backdrop of what we've been done and where we stand in our next major steps going forward
with change and resolving continue to resolve agency issues as it relates to to workforce development as we've stated we've had a very fragmented and very uncoordinated workforce development program in the state that really has never operated as a coordinated workforce development system and that's where we're going our single state area waiver begins to pull everything together across the state with our the coordination with other agencies
Internally, we've also been inconsistent in reporting in geographical structures that also only drive up costs, create confusion. For example, we have five regions for DSB, 11 regions for ARS. How many regions for adult ed? Five. Five regions. So there's two consistencies there, so that's good. again that's that's work to be done but we've also got multiple technology
systems that need performance upgrades and and merging as well and ultimately improving the service to our customers and our and our employees so those are the big challenges we're we're gonna work on this year the next 12 months if can get the next slides which just lays out the WIOA funding levels for Title 1 and Title 3 all the WIOA Wagner and and that includes Wagner Pizer as well
so as you can see the last four years have been pretty consistent 20 21 million dollars every year after year so let me turn it over to
Speaker 35
12:37
Mr. Waits here that we'll get into the details of starting with the waiver authority. Thank
Speaker 39
12:43
you, Mr. Secretary. Good morning. It's good to be with you. A couple
Speaker 40
12:48
of things just to point out. You know, we received a list of maybe 13, 14, 15 different questions, and this slide deck helps answer those,
but we're certainly going to speak to some of that. Going back real quick to this slide, there was a question around, you know, how does some of the changes at the federal level with the shift
Speaker 41
13:08
of perhaps programs from the Department of Education to the Department of Labor make impacts to us here at the state level? The good news is that we've already been structured this way for many years, as the Secretary alluded to, with our transition of some of the programs that were once independent, whether it's with respect to adult education, the Office of Career and Technical Education
at the adult at the federal level you know they've since transitioned that to department of labor we already have adult education within the department of commerce workforce connections vocational rehab services or rehabilitation services administrations currently within the department of education there's conversations about whether that will be transitioned to department of labor at the federal level or dhhs i think there's probably strong consensus that it may end up at labor so once again we're already structured in a way that aligns with the federal government so in a lot of ways we're already ahead of the game as it relates to some of these transitions I can't say the same for some of the other states around the country.
But we're very much structured in a way that sets us up for success, given the changes that are being made at the federal level. So for the first time in Arkansas's history, thanks to the partners here at the table and some of those that are obviously not at the table, we submitted a combined WIOA-Perkins state plan for the
Speaker 40
14:20
first time in Arkansas's history. And so what that means is that, you know, we had this conversation, the commissioner and I have, it wasn't that we weren't always aligned, but we weren't combined. And so we took some of those efforts and some of those initiatives, layered that into our WIOA state plan, which is about a 600-page document.
We're doing our best to try to pare that down somewhat so that it's readable. But some of
Speaker 41
14:40
the ways in which the questions are asked at the federal level, it requires us to answer and be redundant in some capacity. So something to look
Speaker 40
14:48
forward to in two years is perhaps a more refined and condensed WIOA state Perkins state plan. But again, credit to Commissioner Warden, Secretary Oliva, Secretary McDonald, and the team to my right over here as well, and those that are behind me as well, for getting this across the finish line in a time frame that met some of the requests that we had been receiving from the Federal Department of Labor.
Speaker 41
15:07
You know, there's been some questions around waiver authorities and a lot of questions around the flexibility with waivers. And this is just a quick kind of glimpse into the federal regulation that allows waiver authorities for states as approved by the Secretary of Department of Labor at the federal level. And so when you start to look at
Speaker 40
15:24
the waiver requests that we submitted, we submitted nine. And then there's a tenth one that's to be determined, which is kind of a pie in the sky wish list, but something we want to put on the radar of the Department of
Speaker 41
15:35
Labor because we think and believe that it would only make us more efficient
and more effective in the operation of WIOA at a statewide level. But of these waivers, you know, the one that received the most attention was obviously the one at the top of the list, which is the state board function as the local board. There were some questions throughout the list that we received around, you know, what role do the local workforce development boards play? Do they exist in the future, and how does all that work? And so, you know, to answer that just pretty directly, the answer would be no. The local workforce development boards as they exist today would no longer exist if these waivers are approved by the Federal Department of Labor. The State Board of Workforce Development, we had a meeting in April where we presented this waiver package.
We had a follow-up meeting in May where it was approved with a vote of 11 to 3 to move forward with submitting the waiver package to the U.S. Department of Labor. But again, it provides us great flexibilities in our ways and also allows us to expend funds more towards training and supportive services for clients prioritizing client services reducing administrative and operating expenses and sets ourselves up for success moving forward and so we'll get into some more of the details around that here shortly but state plan as a
Speaker 40
16:43
regional plan setting the state up as a kind of
a regional area again allows us to have more flexibility with the movement
Speaker 41
16:49
of funds you know right now we have 10 local workforce areas in the state that maintains the same but in the future you know we're talking about how do we have waiver flexibilities as it is in number four where you might perhaps move funds across resources where they're being underutilized or perhaps there's an economic condition whether it's a plant closure perhaps it's an economic development project that lands in the Pacific region of the state having the flexibility to move funds around to where those needs are most or where those workforce development needs are highest we would have the
flexibility to do so but there's some rules around how you can move money and when you can move money and and certainly we want to keep the funds in the regions in which they are obligated that's obviously the goal but as it is today there's a lot of times where certain areas of the state will have to we'll have to recapture funds from those areas because they're not being utilized and so
Speaker 42
17:39
that process will remain the same. We owe a training funds and supportive services last dollar flexibility. That's a pretty big one as well that has flown under the radar for you know for whatever reason but at the end of the day you know one of the things that's a barrier
around WIOA is the fact that it has to be a last dollar in so you know as a as a counselor or case manager working with clients you have to go out and try to find which funding source might be able to be leveraged first prior to WIOA funds whether that be Workforce Pell,
Speaker 41
18:07
Workforce Challenge, whether that be TANF, whether that be other sources of funding that might be available. Those funds have to have some sort of track record of having to identify if that individual is eligible for those funds. This would eliminate that requirement, allow us to really focus on serving the individual that walks in our doors, obviously working with our partners at DHS to
to try to co-enroll them in whatever programs make the most sense. But having that flexibility at a state level will allow us to be more impactful to the work that we do every single
Speaker 42
18:34
day. Network of affiliate sites in lieu of comprehensive centers. Right now you have 10 comprehensive centers across the state. Each local workforce development area is required to have a comprehensive center. Along with that
Speaker 41
18:47
comes a lot of infrastructure funding agreements and a lot of burdensome reporting and tracking down of partners external from kind of state partners, such as Job Corps and some other functions such as that, AARP and some of these other organizations that are out there.
And so this would, again, create some efficiencies for us. We would certainly have a comprehensive center in the state of Arkansas. We would certainly do our best to provide all of the different partners that exist under Workforce Connections, as well as Crew and Tech Ed and DHS in those workforce centers. But having the flexibility to not have them recognized as comprehensive as you go through what's called a center certification process creates great efficiencies for our staff, both on the financial side, on the program side, and across different agencies outside of Department of Commerce as well. So another great benefit for us there. There's a couple of waivers that we're renewing. And then you may
wonder on number seven, right, 14 youth program elements flexibility. This is probably the most common finding that we see every single time we have to write up a finding on a local workforce development board, not just specific to Arkansas, but across the U.S. And so we're seeking waiver flexibility there to reduce those elements or to not have all 14 of those elements required and then lastly just real quick on the title one block grant you know this was discussed kind of at the federal level when they were you know looking at reforming WIOA reauthorizing WIOA
and then under the make America skilled again which we spoke about maybe a year or so ago to this not this committee but to ALC you know and it's really taking the barriers right if you look at Title I of WIOA, right now there's adult, dislocated worker, and youth funds, and there's three buckets of funds. They're about the same amount of money, but you have to track those funds separately. You can only serve certain clients with those funds, and they have their own parameters around them. Being able to block grant that into one fund would allow us to use our funds more efficiently in a local office level. It would allow us not have to track as much from a cost allocation perspective, and would allow us to use the funds for the people
who are in the most need at that time in which we're serving them locally, regardless of whether they fit a youth bucket a dislocated worker bucket or an adult bucket so we kind of talked about waiver package benefits already a little bit but just to go into a little more detail and the secretary mentioned some of these as well right now we have 11 administrative administrative entities this would reduce that down to one administrative entity currently we have 10 planning regions it would go to one planning region right now we have 11 sets of
performance accountability, this would move us to a one accountability structure. So real world example of that in real time, just this last week, we had met with our federal department of labor counterparts and had to do what's called an annual performance negotiation. So basically what that means is we look at past performance plus what they're hoping to gain out of us in terms of improved or increased performance in terms of percentages increased year over year. And so we have to negotiate those rates with the federal department of labor. We then have to negotiate with each local area as it relates to their own independent performance and so all the 10 local
areas you know obviously have an impact on our performance at a federal level and obviously how we do it as a state so in the future model we would no longer have these 10 different sets of performance negotiations that our staff will have to enter into with the local workforce development boards and local areas here in the coming weeks we would have had our meeting last week negotiate our performance structure and then we would have been done with it currently as the secretary mentioned there's about 208 board members statewide this would be reduced down to one board probably 20 something members on the state workforce development board additionally when
you're talking about streamlined service delivery across workforce centers this obviously creates efficiency in terms of the reduction of the administration right now you know when you're looking at the makeup of a lot of the local workforce development boards you have case managers you have executive staff you have board directors you have one-stop operators and we certainly have to have case managers and individuals on the front lines that are serving the clients but when you start talking about board directors and one-stop operators those numbers can be drastically reduced which is a which is a pretty big expense in some of the operating and administrative costs
that some of local workforce boards have so instead of having 10 board directors and 10 one-stop operators you're going to have one board director and perhaps one or two one-stop operators instead of instead of 10 and keep in mind you know each one of those contracts for a one-stop operator may range from $50,000 to $75,000. So you can start to see the cost savings that we're incurring there or saving there just in terms of the the structure that we've put in place. You know there's been a lot of talk around no wrong door and so you know when you start to think about what we're trying to implement with our partners from DHS this really creates a path
for us to a no wrong door approach. The referral process and we'll talk about that here in a little bit as well. You know, we're trying to refer individuals, perhaps from DHS to 10 different entities who have maybe some different policies and rules that create some inefficiencies. And so by having one organization in DHS working with one organization at Commerce, you can see how you can create a more consistent and cohesive referral process in terms of serving members, which allows us to move closer to that no wrong door model. Enhance mobile and virtual service delivery
approaches. You know, one of the things we've been talking about a lot lately is, you know, why are we not providing services after hours we certainly have mobile services that occur today our mobile units were out at some job fairs and some hiring events just this last week but what about the individuals who might need some service services provided after hours how can we accommodate that leveraging technology and virtual after-hour service deliveries and so this is something that with the cost savings that we would that we foresee in moving to this one state board model that we could provide some additional resources and service
delivery opportunities for individuals across the state maybe that's a barrier to getting to a local office or perhaps um there's certain circumstances they're working during the day but they would still love to receive some services and they can't find time to make it to a local office having those after hours delivery service delivery options would be great improved customer service you know again it's more like a franchise model i think there was a question around a franchise model uh in in the list of questions but um you know right now again you have 10 boards with and And similar, I mean, the policies are similar in nature, but the way in which they hire and
onboard is probably different. But we would have a consistent onboarding, training, service delivery kind of provider piece to it. And so no matter what workforce center you walked into across the state, you would be receiving the same type of service, similar to a franchise model that you might see in other parts of the country and in other industries. And then start streamlining and automating the eligibility application process. That's something we're working on with Robert Magoo, state data team, AR data, Transformation Shared Services and that team is to figure out how can we automate that process to determine eligibility much faster without somebody having to come to a local office for those services and to have that done.
Lastly, you know, again, regional flexibility, ability to move funds across areas and future requests to move funds with programs to a block grant, which I alluded to. There was a question around implementation plan. And so thank you, sir. Upon approval of the waivers from the U.S.
Speaker 46
25:48
Department of... Yes, ma'am. Hold on just a minute. I'm going to hold it. I've
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
25:54
got a long list of legislators ready to ask you questions. So hold off and implement it. Since we're going to the next page, we're going to hold off right there and get some questions asked if that's okay. And I just want to quickly say, you know, this committee had an audit done,
and we found that, you know, out of the $20 million that we were getting to you guys, there was only like 1.8 spent on training and 1,200 individuals trained. So I can't tell you how excited I am to see you guys using those funds more efficiently and effectively for our cans and so that being said since it's represented rickbeck's birthday we're going to let him ask the
Speaker 49
26:28
first question oh thank you madam chair 29 yeah 29 i don't know that if that's a
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
26:34
i usually like to be the last person so i guess i get put on the spot because it's my birthday um the question i had and this
is just some concerns and i i'm sure if you guys can maybe make things a little bit better for us feel a little bit better you know a lot of times when we start combining boards and things you get that not everybody feels like they're being represented equally and that could be a regional thing or that could be across agencies you know different agencies you you we mentioned that workforce uh yeah i think the term was it was really scattered across multiple agencies and things like that so just to address with what you guys are doing how are you how are you trying to
address that issue to make sure that you know all the agencies you know work well together in the same sandbox there and and move things forward i what you're doing i think is spot on and i just want to make sure that we've addressed those issues sure yeah
Speaker 40
27:31
um and here later on in the presentation we'll talk about some regional business councils um that we're working on and and our team has been pulling together kind of the local voice of the employer aspect you know there's been some discussion around this in terms of losing a local voice as it relates to kind of consolidation of the boards themselves but we know that we have regional business councils that are
scattered throughout the state we have a long list of them i just had emailed to me this
Speaker 41
27:56
morning a lot of those are at your two-year colleges and four-year universities number of them are within your chambers of commerce a number of them are within industry associations and so we've
Speaker 40
28:06
been having conversations with those two-year colleges and four-year universities with the chambers of commerce with organizations like an nwa council as a as an example to really talk about like leveraging those existing workforce and regional business advisory councils to help us provide some of that voice of the customer to make sure that we keep that local input um but internally right
when you're starting to talk about all the services that are provided locally most of those
Speaker 54
28:28
services are provided from within workforce connections and commerce but
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
28:33
obviously with and through partnerships with dhs
and others just a quick follow-up another aspect that i'd written down was as far as local access to these systems, you know, sometimes you get this local, you know, the local, the people, sometimes it's a digital barrier for some people to be able to go to the state level as opposed to walking to a local office
or go talk to someone at a local board or anything like that. So is there any way you could address that
Speaker 40
29:04
issue? Yeah, we're not closing any local offices, you know, and when we start talking about the implementation plan a little bit, you know, the individuals that are providing those services today, we hope to hire some of those individuals as we go through our phase-out plan that we'll talk about shortly. But services will still be provided locally within those local workforce offices as they are today once this waiver package gets approved and as we start to implement the plan.
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
29:27
Thank you. Sorry. Happy birthday. All right. Senator Sullivan. Thank you, Madam Chair. and i'm excited about what you're doing and reorganization i think is really good and i want to have some conversations uh later on with you so it when you talk about the funds which is the most important thing the legislature does distribute the funds so we're going to distribute those funds to you then you're going to reallocate those regionally correct
Speaker 42
29:55
well not necessarily so these funds are federal funds this division employment and training within workforce connections does
receive any general revenue um so this this funding that you're seeing on that chart that's all federal revenue and so the way it works is there's a federal formula um that they set at
Speaker 41
30:10
the at the national level that firmly looks at things like labor force participation rate unemployment rates a number
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
30:15
of different factors okay i don't i don't want to get take too long but sure there's a formula you're going to distribute the funds regionally correct i understand you correctly that the funds cannot be moved out of that region to another region, or did I misunderstand?
They can be. Okay, so with whose approval? The approval would exist at the Department
Speaker 41
30:34
of Commerce. All right, so the Department of Commerce can move
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
30:37
money from one region to another based on? Based on various factors, right, and think about how
Speaker 41
30:44
it is today. And so this happens routinely now where, you know, funds may not be expended within a certain region, And so those funds, after a period of time, get recaptured. And so we can then deploy those funds either to a local area or we can put into statewide workforce development priorities.
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
31:01
Again, I don't want to take too long. This is a new area we're getting into. We have some good things going on. I'm excited about that. I'm really concerned about how that happens. So that's not a conversation for now. That's a conversation for later on. That's for me. That's the most important thing that we do is how we're going to distribute that money. Thank you, madam chair. Thank you senator. Happy to have that conversation. Thank you senator representative Ferguson Thank you madam chair
Representative Kenneth B. Ferguson
Unverified
31:32
Just a couple of quick questions. I think you've answered one of my questions in terms of the services but just a clarification this waiver would Will have no more local board correct. That's correct. We'll have just if approved if approved and we'll just have one statewide board correct now those local boards normally would have uh representation and input from some of our local mayors and some of our county judges uh i guess i'm concerned about rural
part of the state and some of my house district is rural so i think you said that you're not closing any of the centers correct
Speaker 41
32:14
correct right and and actually if you'll there's another waiver that we have as it relates to the state board composition flexibility uh
Speaker 42
32:20
and as part of that state board composition flexibility waiver we hope to ensure that through that process we can make sure that we have kind of regions of the state that are captured on the workforce development board at a statewide level plus leveraging the regional business councils in the air
Representative Kenneth B. Ferguson
Unverified
32:36
employer side one final question by eliminating those state boys
locally how many of those how many positions are you going to save or how many positions will be eliminated across the state locally we have a proposed number um i don't know
Speaker 40
32:48
if eddie or angela want to speak to that or we can send it to you after this if you'd like if you could please send it through
Representative Kenneth B. Ferguson
Unverified
32:57
staff and i think you said that some of those positions and some of those individuals would get an opportunity for re-employment yeah centralized level that's what you said yeah we would
Speaker 42
33:07
hope that you know because we're going to maintain those local offices and
that local presence. We plan and hope that we will be able to hire some of those individuals that are doing the work today. Currently, they're doing that work as an employee of an economic development district or as a local board, and we would hope to bring
Representative Kenneth B. Ferguson
Unverified
33:23
them on our team. So based on this waiver, there'll be a minimum amount of positions lost across the state locally, minimal? Correct.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
33:35
Representative Ferguson. Representative Vought. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm over here.
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
33:43
I've got several questions and some heartburn with this, I believe, unless you can really put that at ease. So I live in rural Arkansas, and rural Arkansas in southwest Arkansas is not the same as rural Arkansas in the Delta. And my board works very closely with their employers that employ, you know, what I'm saying, they work real close with the guys at the paper mill or at the chicken plant or at Weyerhaeuser.
They work really close with those people. They have good working relationships. When we move this to Little Rock, we will no longer have those same working relationships. And I don't know that you'll even be able to help us fill the jobs that we need to be filled due to the fact that Central Arkansas is not like, or Northwest Arkansas is nothing like the rest of Arkansas. I guess you could go up to Northeast Arkansas where Representative Fry is at. They're probably more aligned with Northwest Arkansas than the Southwest or Southeast corner of the state.
When those boards are gone, are we not going to lose our voice at the table to try to get monies to come there? Because we know population is leaving those areas. We know it's hard to get people to come to those areas and create new jobs for those areas. So can you tell me what we're going to do that's going to be beneficial for those areas to help us grow economically in those areas? Yeah, thank you, Representative Vaught.
Speaker 41
35:18
Yeah, we have those same working relationships as well, whether it's through
Speaker 40
35:22
Industry Connect, which we'll discuss later in the presentation as well. But, again, we're not losing that local presence. We're maintaining those local offices in those local areas. We engage with those businesses regularly, and they'll be
Speaker 41
35:32
a part of those regional business councils. You know, somebody mentioned it earlier. Maybe it was Representative Bentley around the fact that, you know, when you look at the total dollars spent at our local workforce boards as it relates to, they receive about $14 million scattered around the state. And right now we're only getting about $1.9 million of that spent on training and supportive services.
You know, our goal is really work with those businesses, identify what those needs are at a much more deeper level, and provide more employees and more individuals that are trained to align with that. And I think that through this model we're going to be able to accomplish that without losing any sort of relationship with those local employers that we already have today across Arkansas Industry Connect, employment and training, Office of Skills Development, where we provide funds and direction and connection to the various programs within
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
36:17
the agency. And I have a – can I ask another one, ma'am? Thank you. You're talking about the 20 board member – 20 members on a board.
Can you tell me how those people will be
Speaker 39
36:28
selected? It would go through the same process as it does today
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
36:33
through boards and commissions. Okay. That, again, gives me a lot of heartburn, making me think that no one from rural Arkansas, especially the southwest corner of the state, will be represented on a board in which they deserve to be on. so we can fight for things to come to our area it's real easy to say oh they're going to be we're going to still have these same relationships we're still going to do all of this the same when in reality I know that that's going to be nearly impossible for you to actually have those
same working relationships that the local guys already have in my area and it's real easy to say we're going to spend some money down there but I can't remember the last time money was spent from the state to bring a company to southwest Arkansas and help grow that area but it's easy because northwest Arkansas is growing so quickly I feel like a lot more money would go to northwest Arkansas than what would come to southwest Arkansas especially if we didn't have a voice on a board and that's my concerns thank you madam chair mr. wait why don't you
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
37:32
finish your presentation they might answer some questions I kind of stopped
you early so I think if you talk about the implementation might help some of the some of qualms of people because i think we're not getting the final picture of how we're going to the regionals and um i think now the and also to represent avat's question right now we are sending money to those boards correctly and they're not being spent on training a lot of us has been spent on bricks and mortar or whatever an administrative cost so we actually have more money to spend on training individuals so if you'll finish that up and i'll get everybody's questions asked but i think with you finishing your presentation will
Speaker 40
38:06
help answer some of the questions and we'll finish up Thank you. Thank you. So implementation plan, we submitted our state plan last month. And so
Speaker 41
38:13
the U.S. Department of Labor has 90 days to respond to that. So we're anticipating some sort of response and perhaps some back and forth between now and the end of August as it relates to the state plan. But as we go through that process, we will begin kind of the subaward closeout if the waiver is approved in August. That will take some time, so it's not going to happen overnight. But we'll have some targeted scope monitoring reviews that are done and will be initiated which look at case files and and expenditure sample reviews and things of that nature as we would do in a normal morning touring review we will be posting opportunities for those
staff in order to be able to hire those individuals they would be trained on our updated policies and procedures and workflows memorandums understanding infrastructure agreements executed and then obviously you know before we would take ownership of a local board per se or a local area all those findings will be resolved. Similar to how Representative Vought's question was around kind of the relationship with local employers, and there was a question around our alignment with economic development. Arkansas Industry Connect was a division that used to exist within economic development. Now that's within Workforce Connections as our business engagement arm of our
team. We have regional folks scattered throughout the state that are working, doing nothing but calling on businesses every single day from manufacturing, health care, construction, being involved in workforce boards and workforce councils. And so that really is our team that's boots on the ground, really having the high-level conversations with the company and making the connections and the referrals back to the individual programs within Workforce Connections. Additionally, they're the team that really strongly supports Clint O'Neill and the Executive or the Economic Development Commission on Workforce or on Economic Development Projects.
And so we're very closely aligned from an economic development perspective as well as engaging with businesses at a statewide level. There were some questions around DHS, referrals, case management systems, and so, you know, throughout the work that's been done through the 1033 initiative, obviously DHS and us collaborate very effectively with Restore Hope as it relates to Hope Hub and some of the case management that's done in that system. But independently of that, you know, we have some work to do as it relates to the referral process. You know, as I was mentioning earlier around the state board moving to the function as the local board, you know, when you have one organization that can refer clients to one organization versus 10 or 11 different organizations, there's going to be some efficiency there.
And so, you know, while we have some work to do as it relates to the data systems talking to each other, right, because we use different case management systems, we know that the goal is to try to make those systems talk to one another and figure out a way in order to which we can make those referrals more seamlessly. right now that's somewhat manual, but they do happen. And so we're really proud of the work that we're doing with Secretary Mann and
Speaker 40
40:56
her team. Trying to move on to the next slide. Arkansas Launch. There were some questions around Arkansas Launch. So while I'm not the expert to
speak on this, I would defer to Mr.
Speaker 41
41:06
Magoo and others, but Launch for Job Seekers is live. Launch for Employers is live, but still has some additional work to be done for the user experience. We're actually meeting next week to discuss that and launch for students is expanding statewide with upcoming implementation you have launch providers that's projected october of 2026 and then there's obviously some planned enhancements that are being done to the launch system regional business councils we've kind of touched on this already but again it's to provide the employer-driven recommendations of their needs you know and just for awareness and information
when you look at you know this 1.9 million that we've talked about in terms of how it's being spent you know roughly 800 and something thousand of that is going to train CDL truck drivers and and not to say that we don't need to be training truck drivers because I think we do and I think Shannon Newton the trucking association and all our transportation partners across the state would agree but if we make the pie larger it doesn't mean that we're going to take funds away from transportation just means that we're going to prioritize funds for other industries as well once you get past transportation and health care there's a vast drop-off in terms of the next level of funding for example in the manufacturing industry just last year we spent about 20,000
dollars training people for jobs in the manufacturing sector at a statewide level for tech jobs we trained we spent about ten thousand dollars and so our efforts really believe that we're going to increase the amount of funds available to close to six to seven million dollars annually for workforce training up from 1.9 today and that's just the start we think we can go further but that will allow us to provide more individuals and more training opportunities for the companies that are out there needing those employees they'll provide real-time insight and deploy your needs industry trends and skills gaps Obviously, they'll help design the training for us alongside our higher education partners.
We do this today. This happens all over the state where we're working with our team, institutions of higher ed, local employers to stand-up training programs. It happens in correctional facilities across the state with the Future Fit Initiative and the Governor's Reducing Recidivism Initiative. And so we have that pretty streamlined. Well, if I can turn
Speaker 40
43:08
the page. So just to recap on the state plan and just the presentation in general is really to deliver consistent, high-quality services statewide,
Speaker 41
43:17
reducing our administrative and operational expenses of which are hovering around 70-plus percent right now. We have to get that down. Strengthen employer partnerships. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to employers and asked them around their engagement with local boards, and it's not what you would expect it to be. expanding access through virtual and mobile services, integrating Perkins, and strengthening CT and youth career pathways, leveraging AI and data to drive smarter decisions, and building a talent pipeline that meets the needs of today's and tomorrow's employers.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
43:52
Thank you, sir. I'm happy to continue answering questions. We'll go back to questions, but I think
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
44:02
there were some things in there that might help answer colleagues' questions. All right, Representative Crawford. Thank you, Madam Chair. Good morning. I guess it's still morning. Good morning. A couple of questions. And you mentioned Restore Hope. So did Restore Hope lose TANF funds and now they go through you guys to get their funding? How does that work?
Speaker 112
44:23
I would have to defer to DHS for that. I think they'll be up here later.
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
44:28
Maybe you can ask them that question. All right. My other is, and it may be somewhere, but I'm very interested in the waiver request, talking about the youth. Can you expand on that, or can you give me direction to where I can look that up? I'll do my best, and if I don't answer
Speaker 41
44:47
it well, I'll get Angela Cook or Eddie Thomas up here to answer it. I don't know all of the different elements that are required as it relates to those 14 elements.
What I can tell you and kind of what I mentioned previously is that when we do our monitoring reviews on an annual basis, this is one of the things that comes up in almost all the monitorings, and it gets written up as a finding, is the fact that a local area, a local board did not have the requirements for all 14 youth elements to be tracked or there wasn't a partnership in place to provide a youth element because there are certain services that have to be provided for youth. And so requesting this waiver will allow us to have flexibility around all 14 of those youth elements. But
Speaker 54
45:26
we'd be happy to, you know, get you information as it relates to the 14 youth
Senator Jane English
Unverified
45:31
elements. Okay, Senator English. Thank you. So I guess one of my questions is, good morning. One of my questions is, as we look at this, and you have now this combined plan, WIOA, and Perkins, so how do these 14 elements fit in with whatever is in the Perkins plan? How does that all align?
Senator Jane English
Unverified
46:11
Well, the 14 youth elements are a WIOA thing, but Ross may be able to speak to the broader... I guess that one of the things that I find, and I'm sure you do too, is so disconcerting is how really inane some of these federal requirements are, and they don't talk to each other, and they don't align with each other. So I'm wondering if we're thinking about how a system works, how would it be possible for those 14 elements, whatever they are,
to interact with whatever Perkins has got or the Department of Education has in that plan? Or is that a question you can answer? Senator English, Ken Warden, Commissioner of the Division of
Speaker 122
46:51
Higher Education. The 14 elements are part of the WIOA waiver request. What I will say that excites me most about this alignment is that we've always, or since I've been here before, I would say that we have done work to align the two.
Speaker 124
47:07
But there's a difference between being aligned and being combined. And so as we get the waivers, I don't know that we fully appreciate all the ways that we're going to be able to align. I do know that over the last year and beyond, we have met regularly with the Department of Commerce and Division of Higher Ed, including CTE, to make sure that we are tracking and doing things together and braiding funding, not duplicating funding. What excites me most about this whole process, and I think what is the game changer for this group,
is to realize the kind of intentionality there has been and will continue to be to do better. Literally tens of millions of dollars are going to be put to use training students and job seekers that have been spent on bureaucracies. I've been involved with WIOA since 2006 as a member of a local board in a rural community and all facets of it since then. And I saw what happens, and we literally have campuses that say the bureaucracies are so great
and there are so few students getting trained that we're not going to do the work because I can't hire someone to afford to track the bureaucracies. As we reduce those and those money goes to train students, those local employers are going to be happier because there are going to be more there's more money available to have people trained to go to work in wherever their facility is whether that's in a paper mill in southwest or in a you know in a steel mill in northeast or you know it whatever the case may be so that's what excites me most we are we are i i could not be more a bigger fan
of this um i just know and see what we're already doing and how much money this is going to put in students' pockets and reduce some bureaucracy so that we can train more folks. To your question about how are they exactly aligned, how do we complement the equipment we're buying through Perkins and Startup Grants in high schools, which we are now better aligned at high schools than K-12, it's a required component. If you're going to ask for Perkins funds in this state, you must, and you're an education entity, you must point to
your higher ed partner, if you're a K-12 group, If you're a K-12 group, you point to your higher ed partner, vice versa. And now we're going to do the same with WIOA and how that aligns with the equipment we're spending and where the need is. Cody mentioned $30,000 combined spent in manufacturing and what was the other, health care, tech and manufacturing, $30,000 out of how many millions? 1.9. 1.9 million spent training people.
That is absolutely ridiculous. And what other industry sector would we suffer this? None, ever. So I don't think that we fully appreciate all the things and all the fruits of this that we're going to see moving forward, but this is a huge step in getting these waivers done. And the commitment that I see from our colleagues in Commerce and on both sides of the aisle, I'm really proud of it. I don't know if I answered your
Speaker 21
50:16
question directly, but there's good things. You have, and I guess
Senator Jane English
Unverified
50:21
that's my, we have so many federal programs, we all know that,
we have so many federal programs, they all have their own rules, their own regulations, and their own whatever, and so sometimes it's really hard to try and build a system. You can't say that five WIOA programs are a system. That's not a public workforce system. It actually is, and I'd be interested in how we even go further and think about how do we use all of the resources that we've got at the state level and introducing people, making sure that they have that access,
not just our federal programs. Because we've got a lot of things going on here in the state that I don't really think that so many of our people have access to. But it's not just the federal programs we've got to talk about. How do
we add everything together? Because there's some really good stuff going on and we can't let it be off by
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
51:18
itself so thank you thank you senator secretary mcdonald do
Speaker 17
51:21
you have something that you want to add to that yeah i just i just wanted to elaborate maybe
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
51:27
on commissioner warden's comment i used to be an employer and i remember one time checking into
the local workforce board and if you really get down to and i'm and i'm speaking generally there There are some workforce boards that are better than others, of course. But the vast majority of employers do not use them. Most of them probably don't even know that they exist. And if you, to Cody's earlier comment, they struggle to find active, real employers to go on those boards
because of the bureaucracy and that's really what we're trying to fix we're trying to with these regional business councils we're actually trying to better engage employers to be involved to have the flexibility to make sure that their priorities are actually part of
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
52:28
just want to correct one thing before we take another the question really we've received $15 million to all these local boards and only 1.8 or 1.9 of that was spent on training individuals and of the 1.9
million only 30,000 was spent on 20,000 are manufacturing and 10,000 on technology so really it's pitiful the amount of money that was spent of total that was sent to our state federally was 15 million and just only 1.9 was spent on training of arkansans to get a job so just want to clarify that before we move on
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
53:06
okay senator erwin thank you um so you may have just said this but the 12 million roughly the 15 million
the rest of that was spent on administrative cost is that correct outside of the one point something for training yes technically i think it's 14 million
Speaker 41
53:21
and then it's 1.9 million last year that we had spent on training and supportive services right so i think that's kind of a nuance that has to be stated is what is supported services yeah within that 1.9 million right you have actual training costs that might be paid to an institution of higher ed or a private career training provider but then you also have things like gas cards child care assistance things of that nature oh those are the supported that's kind of the supportive services pieces sometimes
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
53:46
it may be rental assistance okay was there any audit of the effectiveness of sending it to the higher ed do we know what we got for if if it was
sent to higher ed if they come you mean if they like completed their program of study and things
Speaker 54
53:58
of that nature they completed the training program yeah i mean yeah we track that data and we have
Speaker 41
54:04
to report on it and that's kind of what comes out of our federal performance requirements too is like the
Speaker 54
54:08
second quarter employment rates fourth quarter employment rates median earnings we track all that data okay i mean the reason why i ask is
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
54:16
that higher ed sometimes really isn't geared towards what industry needs as employers and so i just
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
54:27
well you may disagree but i mean i attended one of the probably the best conferences i've ever attended with ncsl was google and apple and ibm and the incredible technology companies who basically said they're not able we can't wait four years we have to have
people right now because we cannot fill these tech positions and higher ed is not getting it done I am I am quoting straight from these CEOs of these major tech companies and so I just want to know like we these are high paying jobs in the technology sector and so I just want to I just want to make sure that when you're doing all this reorganization that we're highly focused on
the needed areas for our companies as far as its regards training wise I mean there's nothing against training all kinds of different workforce issues. But at one point, and I'm going to make people mad when I say this, but it's just absolutely the truth. We were training a lot of cosmetologists and a lot of barbers. And that's great. But that's not great for our employers that
need people in data security and cyber technology and AI. I mean, so I need to know, okay, we're going to give you all this money. Great. But training has got to be really, really focused, in my opinion, on the needs of industry and the needs of employers in the state of Arkansas. But also, let's try to educate, train people at every different level of spectrum of salary position.
Does that make sense? So you can respond, and I have more questions if you don't mind.
Speaker 122
56:33
I will just say briefly that we presented to the legislative body recently in the past year on the return on investment on every degree in Arkansas. We didn't report every student. reported the median and we could demonstrate effectively the amount of money spent with their individual return on investment was and how long it took the individual to pay for that degree and I'm very satisfied with that information and happy to go in depth in other areas on that but
to your point we do need to have more information technology jobs and more offerings in other areas that are maybe less than four years if the employer will entertain the hiring of that. And we work on that daily and every year to try to enhance those efforts. Okay. I mean, I appreciate that. Again,
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
57:19
I just think there's pathways for everybody. One of my best friends just retired from Oracle and doesn't have a college degree.
So other questions. The 11 administrative entities, do we have names of those? Yeah, essentially they're the 10 local workforce
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
57:39
economic development? Some of them are. Eight of the
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
57:44
districts. Are they combined with the economic development folks? Yes, in eight of them. Okay. And then when you say there was 11 sets of performance accountability and 11 sets of board policies, were those performance accountabilities and board policies approved at the state level?
Speaker 41
58:02
Yeah, well, they have to be approved at a local level, And then I think they have to abide by the state kind of parameters that we set as statewide level. And some of those things are
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
58:11
federally required as well for them to have. But the Department of Commerce was basically the one that said, yes, you can do
it. Yes, you can do it. So, okay. That's interesting to me. Okay. And then when it comes to the makeup of
the one board, are y'all going to have to create that legislatively? The State Workforce Development Board is in place today.
Speaker 41
58:32
Depending upon the waiver, if it's approved by the Department of Labor, we would have to look at maybe how we
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
58:39
restructure that. And then, yes, that would go through a
legislative process. Okay. So at that point, that's when those folks of us from rural Arkansas have the ability to say, okay, we just want to make sure that the composition of the board reflects all the areas of the state of Arkansas so that will have to happen legislatively. Correct. And then the last question I have is that when you do currently have money that goes, I know it's federal. Do we as
legislative council or the legislature approve those fundings through peer today or?
Speaker 42
59:11
No, I mean, we have an appropriation for the amount of money
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
59:15
we receive from the feds, but outside of that, no. There's no detailed approval process for the money today. Correct. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
Representative Dwight Tosh
Unverified
59:28
Representative Tosh. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I appreciate you allowing me to ask a question. I just want to make sure I understand that, you know, during the last session, a priority for me and Senator English was to make sure there was appropriate funding for our workforce training facilities.
I believe there's 31 of them in the state. 28 of them are located in our high schools, servicing all the high schools in those regions. And I applaud you guys, Mr. Secretary and Cody. I appreciate y'all working with us and the formula that you came up with to be able to redirect some of those funds from the unemployment insurance over to the workforce training facilities. I guess my question is, this restructuring that you're talking about today, does that in any way affect these workforce training facilities that, you know, we ran legislation during the last session to make sure they had the appropriate funding?
And is that formula that we were able to put into law, is it sufficient enough to make sure that they have adequate funding? And is any way anything, what this discussion day, are those 31 facilities in any way affected by what's going on here at the federal level? They
Speaker 85
1:00:41
could be. They're not directly impacted by the way they're themselves. However, I
Speaker 42
1:00:46
would say that we have a greater opportunity to work with our secondary career and technical education centers to find youth that could be eligible for WIOA-type services.
So there's an opportunity for us there to work closely with our secondary career tech centers to identify students who might be eligible for WIOA youth benefits. So there's kind of an indirect impact to them. As it relates to the unemployment insurance administrative assessment bill that we ran last year, it has generated, I think at this point in time, just north of $7 million available to us for workforce training. Obviously, a portion of that will, in some form or fashion, we're actually having conversations right now with Ross White, Ken Warden, and Tina around the Career and Technical Education Centers and funding and the tiered structure for next year.
Whether or not it's, I forget how you phrased it, enough perhaps, for lack of a better word, I think that's to be determined. I think we have some plans for maybe how we want to spend the funds now, But, you know, this is an annual type, you know, revenue stream for us now at this point. And so we'll look at the debits and the credit.
Speaker 124
1:02:38
that's what makes best use of taxpayers fund whether it's federal or state so we work to do that and we do have opportunities where that happens out but there is much room for improvement
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
1:02:58
thank you thank you thank you sir representative meeks thank you uh everyone for for your time this morning uh so i've got two quick questions senator ervin already asked one of mine so let speed us along here. First off, I just want to applaud you for what you're doing. When I ran the
legislation to create the data, chief data officer and the data panel was to try to get silos broken down amongst state government to try to create these opportunities. And so I really applaud that you all are up here making that happen for the benefit of our citizens. Two questions. You may have already covered the first one. What's the time frame to implement this if and when the waiver gets approved what we're looking at a year two years three years what are we thinking there yeah probably no longer
Speaker 41
1:03:38
than a year I think some of that just depends on the closeout process so it's
going to be somewhat fluid but probably
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
1:03:45
by this time next year next year excellent
and then my other question I think Secretary McDonald might be the best one to answer this kind of piggybacking off of what Senator Irvin had said about you know we've got these large tech companies that are that are needing employees they can't find employees I'm seeing this as an excellent opportunity for us to get the employees ready to try to encourage out-of-state investment. So not only are we growing our own, but trying to attract those high-paying jobs from out-of-state, especially
given what, I'm trying to be politically correct here, some of our other states are doing to reduce their business climate or
we're trying to improve our business climate. So can you talk to us about how
Speaker 17
1:04:33
this opportunity could help us bring new investment, new business to the state? Yeah, absolutely.
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
1:04:39
I think when I'm sitting across the table from businesses, workforce is always the number one, number two concern of theirs.
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
1:04:54
development strategy has really flipped on its head what historically has been doing where the customer is the employer you know heretofore I think we had too much focus on where academia designed the program whether it was higher ed or k-12 but we want to make sure that we're meeting the needs of custom of the employers
They're ultimately hiring the products that come out of higher ed. So Ken and I have talked about this a lot, about working together. What Ken described earlier is the ROI of degrees, higher ed degrees. That came out of this process. So we're making the right steps as a state. In fact, there was recent ranking from a site development organization and Lightcast that said that Arkansas was the fourth ranked state in the country in terms of fourth best of our manufacturing talent pipeline index.
So we're listening to the employers, higher ed is listening to the employers, and we're designing not just two-year associate's degrees, but short-term non-credit courses as well to meet their needs. And then a last question. You brought another one
Speaker 35
1:06:22
to mind, and Ken, you may be the better one to answer this.
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
1:06:27
one of the barriers to our citizens being able to take advantage of these degrees is just the cost of getting the degree because the cost of higher ed as we all know is extremely expensive
and we've not and by your own admission we've not spent the vast majority of this money on the actual students it's mostly been towards overhead how is this going to help fix the affordability issue for students to be able to take advantage of what you're trying to do here And that's my final question. So I will
Speaker 154
1:07:01
say that it boils down to the $14 million, only $1.9 million being spent on training
Speaker 122
1:07:06
and then, you know, not being maybe targeted where we needed it. This is more money in students' pockets to help offset the cost.
The fact of the matter is we had regions that had need, students in need, that they couldn't serve because they were out of money, while we had another region across the state that had more money than they could spend. So they were, because of a bad system, spending money on things that I'm not saying are frivolous but are things that were not directly benefiting a student and an employee and they're in turn benefiting an employer. So I would say that's the biggest way is more money directly in the pockets of students to support their training
their training needs is the biggest way. One more
Speaker 40
1:07:47
quick thing and you know I like real world examples you know just this last week we were having a conversation with
Speaker 41
1:07:53
the Academies of Central Arkansas and they were talking about some of the growth they've had in their welding programs and they brought up a couple of students who could not accept the employment opportunities because they did not have transportation to the port where they were getting employment opportunities at. That's the perfect kind of person. That's not necessarily education focused but it's employment focused. Why are we not making that connection with these funds and how do we not
support them to make sure that they have an employment opportunity. They've been through a training program. Why are we not making that
Speaker 23
1:08:25
connection and that's the problem we're trying to fix as well. And if I could add to that and echo what Cody's saying about wraparound services, the WIOA funds, in addition to paying for the training, being able to pay for the wraparound services is so important because we have other sources. I know that everyone mentions higher ed being expensive, but there are so many scholarship and grant opportunities available, especially for short-term training. You all approved for Workforce Challenge to increase up to $3,000 from being
800 prior and IT specifically is one of the high demand areas so we have so many short-term trainings whether it's on the professional skills training also known as non-credit side that can be as short as 80 hours 80 clock hours or up to an associate's degree so everything in between across our state we have stackable credentials in IT for cyber security data science and the like so even if you use state funds for some of that or OSD sponsors a lot of that training, having the WIOA funds being applied to those students, being able to get
to school, to be able to pay for child care, those type things, that will open up a lot of opportunity as well. Colleagues, we
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:09:32
have another presentation I really want us to get to, it's going to talk about workforce Pell and all those things, so I'm going to ask you to please limit it to one question. I'm so happy to have everybody here and have your input, but please limit it to one question so we can get to the next presentation on our two-year colleges and workforce Pell and those things, and DHS as well. So, if you guys can limit it to one question, I'd appreciate it, and with that, Representative Beatty. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
1:09:56
My question is really going back to reiterate what Representative Vaught
and Senator Irvin mentioned, and that's that board composition. I mean, I applaud what you guys are doing, going from 208 board members down to 20. My concerns are maybe if you can provide us with a more detailed plan of the first part of your presentation on the organization and administration and how you're going to select and pick those board members to make certain that all of us have an equal voice on that board.
I don't know if it's by congressional district or how you're going to do that. But I think that would reassure us on that side because I'm not certain we're going to lose a whole lot of voice in South Arkansas. So along those lines, I think that would make some of us have a better comfort level. So I would like to see just a presentation dealing with the organization and administration in great detail of what you guys are looking at on that.
And I think that would be very, very helpful because I think those of us that live in these regions of the state are going to be very vocal and probably a lot more vocal through some of these changes. So that comfort early on will make everything better. So thank you. Did you guys want
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:11:30
to respond to that before we go to our
Speaker 39
1:11:32
next question? Sure, yeah. Thank you, number one.
Um, you know, there's a board composition structure today that exists. We can share
Speaker 41
1:11:40
that. And then, you know, when and if the waiver gets approved, um, I think that's really when we'll probably take a deeper dive into kind of what that composition could look like and
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:11:52
happy to come back and present on it. Thank
you, sir. And we will also have
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
1:11:59
regional boards as well for folks to have input on, uh, representative in it. Thank you, ma'am chair. I'd like to, um, shift the conversation to people with disabilities. How are we ensuring that standard Arkansas workforce centers are fully equipped to co-enroll job seekers with disabilities?
And what is our strategy for partnering with local employers to show them that resources like customized employment and job coaches fills an operational gap? That's a great question. You know, Vocational Rehab Services
Speaker 40
1:12:27
is Title IV of WIOA, so they're a core partner in the workforce development system. They are officed sometimes in the same locations as we
Speaker 42
1:12:36
are with Title I of WIOA. But I think at the end of the day, you know, our referral process needs to be strengthened across those divisions.
They're internal to Workforce Connections. And so, you know, one of the things that we did this last year was kind of change our business engagement team within ARS to really job placement team. That's really what they were doing. With the reorganization that Secretary McDonald discussed and bringing over Arkansas Industry Connect, formerly known as Existing Business Resource Division, We're making the connections with employers across the strait and providing those opportunities. Our counselors and case managers and our job placement team for ARS never had access to our state job board, AJL, America's Job Link, Arkansas Job Link. Well, now they do, and so they're able to see real-time job openings,
job postings across the entire state versus having a team of people manually trying to call employers and place individuals with disabilities into employment. We're now able to do that in a much more efficient and effective way, and we've seen that. Thank you.
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
1:13:37
Representative Warren. Thank you, Madam Chair. All right, so my comments are over here. All right, my comment is going to be directed to Cody and Ken. So you guys have been to Hot Springs,
so I can't begin to tell you what kind of focus has been put on workforce training. I've never seen, this has probably been the biggest effort I've seen in Hot Springs. Our chamber has come together. Our two-year college has come together. The whole community, we've had work fairs. We had over 64 businesses come together at one high school.
we had every high school in our county and High schools from surrounding counties come the emphasis has been placed on kids getting a job and Us keeping the kids in our communities so and and my I've got Two-part question, but I've heard $30 million being spent,
and I've heard $14 million being spent, but the same number of
Speaker 182
1:15:03
$1.9 million is all that was going for training. How much, which is the correct number? I'm
Speaker 40
1:15:15
received $16 million. We passed down $14 million of that $1.9 million last year was spent on
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
1:15:21
training and support services. So how do you, and I'm okay with the four-year universities because there are a lot of degrees that we're not even touching at the two-year colleges that we have a need for here locally.
So how are you going to work with the chambers who are implementing programs for workforce services and the two-year colleges so that we get the money to implement? I mean, just one example is our welding program, which I know y'all are familiar with. We have put every single graduate from that welding program to work. we just got a six million dollar grant and we're building a huge facility we
will employ every graduate of that welding program that's just one facet so how are we going to work with the communities absent the workforce development programs in our communities how are you gonna work with them thank Thank you. Very familiar with the grant,
Speaker 40
1:16:28
very familiar with the welding facility, chamber, coal, the entire team there. Work closely with National Park College, too.
Speaker 42
1:16:35
The same way in which we do today.
Those services are still going to be offered. Those programs are going to be offered. We're still going to have staff in Hot Springs at the local office there. The staff is just going to be a state employee versus instead of a West Central Planning and Development District employee. And so those programs will not go away. The funds are not going to go away. We're going to continue to support that as we have today and maybe even strengthen it in some levels, right? I mean, we know in Hot Springs they have a strong business engagement front through the chamber, and so we want to figure out ways in which we can continue to support that and expand on that and perhaps bring others into that or leverage what you're doing in Hot Springs to help highlight what others should be doing around the state.
Speaker 186
1:17:11
Well, I've just never seen the emphasis on that, and I will also say that
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
1:17:17
with funding at the two-year college, it's not strong when it comes to workforce training, And I'm not picking on you, but we don't have a lot of funding to help with the workforce training at the college. Well, and I think that's part of
Speaker 41
1:17:35
this model, right? I mean, again, we're spending maybe $1.92 million a year on training and supportive services.
Under our model, we think we're going to increase that by $6 million, $7 million annually. And so by us being able to have more funds available, we're able to help serve
Speaker 42
1:17:49
more people, whether they're youth, adults. There's more people that can go and enroll at a two-year college or a four-year institution. There's individuals that could go into a private training provider program. They could be going into apprenticeships. You know, part of this conversation around apprenticeships that we haven't really talked a lot about is the fact that under the, you know, Make America Skill Again model, 10% of all we owe funds are supposed to be used on apprenticeships. And we're one of the leaders in the nation around apprenticeships here in this state. And so there's another different ways we should be supporting our higher ed partners
and the individuals in the communities through the funds that would be generated
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
1:18:19
by this cost-saving measure. Thank you, because that's – we've been trying to
Speaker 124
1:18:23
figure out how to fund that locally. I think that changes and increases in workforce challenge was going to help the short-term training. Also, with learns and access, we had less than half our students, seniors in high school, that had a full schedule. They didn't go to school all day. Now, through learns and access, access to acceleration of scholarships, that they will stay in school and go through a technical center, go to the welding program at National Park that you're referring to, and finish up those credentials.
That's going to help them for scholarship opportunities down the road. We're recognizing the technical fields. Our most talented students have been discouraged from taking and engaging in technical activities because it lowered their GPA. They've been discouraged from going to the National Park and finishing out some taking classes in high school because it lowered their GPA. We fixed that. We're just now just on the edge of seeing the fruits of the labor. And I think Representative Meeks, Senator Irvin, both mentioned we have all these degrees at all different levels, that we do have to showcase these degrees,
and we're creating systems so that our most talented students and everybody in between can seek out and embrace these opportunities that are maybe not a bachelor's degree and beyond. Maybe they're more short-term direct-to-work. And so I think the systemic changes, and not just the one, but with the changes in the waiver, all these other things, the changes in the workforce challenge, We're creating an entire system, not just one piece. And that's, I think, what this conversation with the two agencies, how that benefits us most.
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
1:19:59
McDonnell. Yeah, and I guess I would also say because Hot Springs region has got such a strong workforce development connection and focus right now, that would effectively become most likely, I don't want to get ahead of Cody, but a regional business council, as we've talked about, as opposed to creating a separate workforce development board that is duplicative, doesn't have... I mean, the businesses are already engaged
in what's happening right now, and so what we're talking about is plugging into that, not recreating the wheel. And
Speaker 191
1:20:32
I will plug the Workforce Challenge again. I just pulled it
Speaker 23
1:20:36
up and looked. National Park College, the welding program, is on Workforce Challenge and approved for up to $3,000 for that training. thank you okay representative
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:20:45
woldergen again i just need to limit you all to one question thank you
Representative Jeremy Wooldridge
Unverified
1:20:50
thank you madam chair to your right cody so i appreciate you guys being here and having this conversation i think the thing i'm confused on we talk about 14 million dollars so you guys
are keeping 2 million we're sending 14 out to these different workforce development districts and cumulatively 1.9 million is being spent on training so that means the rest is being spent on overhead you're going to keep all the centers open you're going to keep all the employees how do you free up enough to add six million or eight million dollars back into the actual training sector of that like what what are you freeing up well we're not we're not keeping all the
Speaker 41
1:21:26
employees right so there is going to be some some head count reduction there in terms of the
case managers and and kind of that level but then when you start looking at the one-stop operator contracts and the board director positions and all of those pieces you start to see that that cost savings generate right you start to see that revenue kind of come back up the other piece is
Speaker 42
1:21:46
is you know as we sub award dollars out right sometimes they have different administrative expenses than we do we have a shared services as secretary
Speaker 41
1:21:54
mcdonald talked about a lot of these boards have to have financial staff they have to have other pieces we have a shared services administrative financial team that takes a percentage of our grant funds right but we we
cover that and so when you start to add in all these various components as part of this restructuring you get to that number and we've we've done some analysis on that we're happy to share that with
Representative Jeremy Wooldridge
Unverified
1:22:14
you okay it madam chair if you would be okay with it i would love for them to share that with staff and send that to the members of the committee specifically break down uh on each of these positions what that cumulative savings would be and where you're coming up with that six to eight million that you're going to reinvest thank you for the question and again i
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:22:31
will that's i'm happy to do that but also there's a lot more pieces to the puzzle this is a very small fraction of the
funding that's going out there for for education and workforce training in our state so thank you so for your input and for being here
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:22:47
our representative barnes thank you madam over here since you all already have your paradigm of how
you're trying to form your new model and those people that are going to lose jobs i'm wondering what criteria are you going to use to uh
Speaker 42
1:23:10
would be a similar process that we would do with any position that we post here at the state you know so we would have you know position qualifications and you know the the requirements of the job details and duties we're going to post those jobs and we're going to interview this
Speaker 89
1:23:23
team that that'll be you know applying for that and we'll select the candidates that best fit the needs
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:23:28
of the job now my question is who goes you're going to be letting people go I want what criteria you're going to use we're
Speaker 42
1:23:35
we are not letting any the the the staff at the local boards as we close these organizations out as we close those sub awards out would be released from their employment at that
at that entity we would then be hiring posting positions to potentially hire those individuals back to our agency not a hundred percent of them but
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:23:53
a percentage of them okay so those local boards Would that be a criteria that they will use to release who decide who
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:24:08
be a question for them. I'm not certain. Thank you, sir. Representative Brown. Thank you, Madam Chair. And this question is in regards to comments that Mr. Waits and Ms. Cook made about education, child care.
And this may not pertain, this is just an awkward question to ask, but we have lost funds from our SRA funds, and I don't believe anything was added to our ABC funds for early childhood education, daycare, that sort of thing. And I understand that I heard both of you comment about child care. This child care that you all provide with the funds that you administer, it would be strictly for students to be able to attend school or how does that work to help our workforce stay?
I've got an email this morning from a mother who's spending $260 a week. She's single and got two little ones, and it's taken almost all her money to pay for child care. Now, I know that's a separate issue from what y'all are talking about, but do they tie together? I think they do.
Speaker 40
1:25:12
I'm not familiar with these funds, SRA, ABC. I'm not familiar with that, but
Speaker 41
1:25:15
she sounds like a perfect candidate that should be visiting with our team to understand what services we could
Speaker 42
1:25:20
provide her If she's eligible underneath the rules of WIOA, WIOA, she could have that child care cost subsidized by our agency.
Speaker 40
1:25:28
So we'd be happy to connect with her, actually, and try to figure out
Speaker 191
1:25:33
a solution to that. And Tina Moore, Ms. Cook, works with Cody as well. So also in addition
Speaker 23
1:25:39
to that, we have the Career Pathways Initiative. That might be something that you look into because Career Pathways Initiative funds wraparound services as well. So there are multiple opportunities for students to access these wraparound services. I'd be happy to share that information as well. Who may I have her reach out to? I would say I'll catch up with
Speaker 210
1:25:58
you after this, and then I'll get you a point of contact.
Speaker 42
1:26:02
And I think this is kind of the issue that is interesting, right? Like this is what we're trying to resolve is one point of contact, one single point of contact for people to know who to go talk with versus various organizations that do similar work that gets confusing to the consumer, to the Arkansan. And so we want to very much make that clear as to how should people go about understanding what services are out there, how do we communicate that, and then effectively service this individual. And there's hundreds if not thousands of people that are in the same boat that we need to be serving. So happy to connect with you after this and get the information. So this woman is working in health care,
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:26:34
so perhaps she could gain additional training so that she could get a better paying job and then would not need to have her child care subsidized. If she could be eligible for any of
Speaker 41
1:26:43
the various programs that we have, We could probably pay for her for upskilling into another career path. We could help subsidize cost of transportation, child care. All those things are on the table depending on her level of eligibility. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Again,
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:26:58
this really highlights exactly what we're trying to do because there's so much available and people have no idea that it's there. Senator English.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:27:05
Yeah, I think this points out exactly what we're trying to do with the one door is because we have all of these programs for people to be able to access. They just don't know about them, and so we have them all operating in different agencies. Our goal is to figure out how we get one point of contact for all of these folks so that they can access many of the programs that are out there that really don't have as many people using them as are possible. We need to figure out a way to help our citizens be able to access these programs
because we've got some great stuff and opportunities for people. We just need to figure out one door so that they only have to be touched one time. Thank you. And I would just say, how do we, and
Speaker 42
1:27:52
Representative Meeks would probably like this, how do we leverage the data systems that we have in place to help navigate that client to the appropriate source?
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:28:00
Awesome. Thank you all very much. Representative Rye.
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
1:28:07
Yes, sir. Good to see you all this morning. I've got a question for you as far as outreach is concerned.
I've got a situation in Mississippi County, which is where our steel and our, well, that's the biggest thing is our steel mills. What we're having, ladies and gentlemen, is we're having folks that are able to catch a bus all the way down to Lepanto. Now, what you've got in Mark 3, you've got ASU Mark 3, and then you've got the workforce up in Blymouth. What what we need to do and I hope we have the money to do this is there's a lot of children
Students that are graduating from March 3 to Ronza and other schools that they can't catch a bus So is there something we can do with this new funding? That would make it easier for those students to be able to to get to call get to training up at uh in bobble and for bobble and osceola representative rod thank you i think
Speaker 42
1:29:13
to just catch up with you and get some of my team members together
and kind of talk through and understand better uh but certainly there's possibly an opportunity but we need to move more details so let's let me follow
Speaker 219
1:29:24
up with you after this okay that'll work okay thank you thank you sir
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:29:28
thank you mr chair for letting me in oh you're welcome thank you that's
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:29:33
what it's all about senator erwin ervin sorry thank you just a quick question so the training money that you were talking about so um would you then be able to also fund the arkansas rural preceptorship program which is a training for medical students to try to get them to
practice medicine in rural arkansas if you're if you're talking to if you're talking about you're wanting to help with the training for people at all ends of the spectrum then would this be available i don't know that weowa would be the best
Speaker 42
1:30:05
source of funding for that but i think that's certainly a conversation we should we should be having and happy to do
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:30:14
that with you well i mean your your answer is we're i'm for money for people in all aspects but again it goes
back to my question about need and and we do we want to support people that are in the welding program but we also should be supporting medical students through the rural preceptorship because if you put a little bit of money towards a rural preceptorship introducing medical students into rural Arkansas which is a great place to raise a family and and to practice family and have family practice increasing access to health care for all of our citizens for the bang for your buck and it's somebody who's there contributing to that community by starting to practice which
then provides more jobs your return on your investment actually is probably incredibly more greater i mean incredibly greater if you did something like fund a program like that which just legislature passed yeah act 727 i don't disagree with you i what i'm saying is is this fund the individuals in that probably wouldn't be
Speaker 42
1:31:12
eligible for this kind of we owe a funding because of the eligibility requirements that are established at a federal level which is what i'm just saying is i think there's an
Speaker 41
1:31:21
opportunity for us to work with you on that this was probably isn't the best avenue for it representative bot thank you madam chair i'll be
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
1:31:33
quick i know we're trying to move on thanks for being here i think it's been a great discussion i still have more questions that i can ask offline that's fine but something did catch my ear so y'all get two million dollars of the money right now and i assume money goes to each one of our areas so how much when we shut down those areas how much more money are you going to receive at the state level for the fees and services and so forth and so on well I mean the
Speaker 39
1:32:01
the funds have to go to those local areas uh by law so the way that the areas are structured in the way the federal
Speaker 54
1:32:08
government kind of does the formula those same funds will be maintained in those local areas so our our contribution would
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:32:16
maintain the same at statewide thank you all all right I appreciate the discussion that's end of questions and we do have a
Speaker 23
1:32:26
presentation from Tina on workforce correct well it's my understanding to just come prepared to answer your questions about that we did send some electronic documents for your review um so we do not
Speaker 148
1:32:34
have a formal presentation i'm happy to speak to it but do not have slides on it um whichever you could speak to i think
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:32:42
everybody if you look you got a handout here for a lot
of i got to go to ncsl uh workforce conference not too long ago and talked about workforce Pell and this I think if you could just give us a few minutes for all the rest of colleagues kind of here on that with Ross and them on that what's going to be helpful and workforce challenge as well those two sure so I'll just speak to those a
little bit if you guys will look you've got a handout on your desk on
Speaker 23
1:33:08
both those topics thank you okay sure so the handout that we provided is from a webinar that
we had for our higher ed institutions to provide an overview of Workforce Pell. So Workforce Pell is something that has been called for for decades for the Pell Grant. So the traditional Pell Grant that we're all familiar with, it's needs-based, has been extended to short-term programs, including non-credit programs. They do have to meet certain criteria. The guardrails are very stringent. They must be, in the clock hour side, 150 clock hours, but no more than 599 clock hours.
Once you hit 600, you get into the territory of regular Pell Grants. They must be at least eight weeks, but less than 15 weeks of instruction. So it's very narrow parameters of what qualify for Workforce Pell. It also can be on the credit side, the equivalent of that, so short-term trainings. They still have to be eight weeks. Because of this, in Arkansas and nationally, we've been to multiple meetings in D.C. about this.
We're part of a cohort with the National Governors Association on workforce pill implementation. And around the country, we're seeing that most workforce programs do not fit within these parameters. So we were really excited to have this funding opportunity. But majority of programs are either too many, like CDL. That's come up today. CDL fits within the number of hours, but it doesn't fit within the number of instructional weeks. It doesn't take eight weeks to go through a CDL program.
So CDL does not qualify. A lot of folks thought that maybe certified nursing assistants would be a good opportunity. CNA programs on the non-credit side for clock hours typically are around 90 clock hours. Well, that's not going to meet your 150-hour threshold. So at this point, our colleges and universities are looking at existing programs they have, how they might be tweaked to meet that criteria. We certainly don't want to inflate training just to meet that threshold when there are other sources of funding.
That wouldn't make sense. But potentially, especially on the credit side, you may have a program that is a full semester right now, which would be too many instructional weeks, that could be shortened into an eight-week program, which many of our institutions are doing that anyway, taking semester programs and putting them into basically half of a semester. So we look forward to increasing the amount of programs that may be eligible. So a little bit more about Workforce Pell. There's also, just like Dr. Ward mentioned, that we're looking at return on investment
of Arkansas training across our colleges and universities from short-term training through degrees. Well, Workforce Pell has built in different mechanisms for that. First of all, there's the 70-70 rule. 70% of students must complete the program within 150% completion time, time to completion. So if a program was eight weeks, they have to complete that program within 12 weeks to be counted. Also, students must meet a 70% threshold for employment.
70% of students must be employed within 180 days after completing the program. Additionally, there's a value-added earnings metric. It's a formula that I won't get into the details that are in the slides if you want to look more, that a student must be able to show three years after completion. They look at the median earnings of students, compare it to the poverty level, look at the prosperity index for Arkansas, and tuition and fees cannot exceed those earnings. So what we're really trying to do is make sure that students aren't putting their money
or putting federal tax dollars into a program that's not going to result in a job with a livable wage. so that's a little bit about workforce Pell it is a program that is a federal program yet the state had a lot of authority in how it would be implemented and we were asked to make up our own policies and procedures to implement all those requirements and it goes through the governor's office it is led by the governor's office or their designee the division of higher ed has been appointed as that designee by the governor and that's why we've been leading that work since
the majority of training providers will be our higher ed institutions there are other title for eligible providers in the state but the overwhelming majority would be our public colleges and universities or our private colleges and universities so that's a little bit about workforce Pell one thing I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it is prorated and you will see one of the slides in that presentation shows that it can range from as little as 123 dollars for a student up to close to four thousand dollars because Pell Grants being determined on student
need a student may qualify for you know a hundred percent of a Pell Grant or they may qualify for as low as 10 percent of a Pell Grant based upon their need well then you prorate that for the number of hours that they're taking and a student who is this current academic year who's going to college full-time and has the greatest need would be eligible for over seven thousand dollars for Pell grant. Well, when you whittle that down into just a short-term program, that would be a lot less
because it's based on percentage. So that is workforce Pell. Any questions on that before
Speaker 229
1:38:35
we talk about workforce challenge? I think Dr. Warden may want to add something. I'll
Speaker 124
1:38:40
just say to boil it down, you know, we've been asking for workforce Pell and waiting on it to
Speaker 122
1:38:46
come for probably 15 years or more. I can remember at least 15 years ago thinking how workforce Pell is going to solve a lot of our problems. But the fact of the matter is, with the restrictions that are attached to it currently, and the amount of funding that's attached to it, I don't think it's going to change
many programs or many colleges or universities or even privates that are eligible the way they do business. Now, I think a year, two, five years from now, as they massage and tweak Workforce Pell, it's going to become a better product. The fact of the matter is, if you're an institution and you're a student it's better for the student better for the institution if you just go through the standard Pell process than to do all the hoops and the things to be eligible for workforce Pell so don't look a gift horse in the mouth we're glad it's here but I think it's going to be a few years
before it it's really actual actualized actualizes into a product that helps students great thank you so much I know
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:39:44
you know it'll help us as constituents reach out if I know a little bit more what's going
on with Pell so hopefully we'll see some improvements in the short so you want
Speaker 23
1:39:59
me highlight workforce challenge a little bit because we are actually even more excited about workforce challenge and the opportunities that students will have with workforce challenge thanks to legislation and
access where the amount was increased from 800 to up to 3,000 academic year for students and programs, and I wanted to share some numbers for Workforce Challenge. So I think y'all are already familiar with Workforce Challenge, that it's for high demand areas of IT, construction trades, advanced manufacturing, health care, and then logistics and distribution. And we had the window open for institutions to apply this year, and also because of the constitutional amendment to make
lottery proceeds be to make private career training providers and vocational technical schools eligible to receive lottery funds we did have that open for the workforce challenge so we added more training providers and I want to give you a breakdown of the numbers of programs that were approved and how many were our colleges and universities versus our private career training providers. So we had over 1,200 programs around 1,250 total programs were
approved. 1,150 of those were from our two-year colleges and universities that are public. Nine of those were from our private colleges and universities and 110 were from private career education providers or those on the eligible training provider list. Out of those programs we had 75 total providers represented 36 were our public two and four-year institutions two were private colleges or universities and 37 were the private career education training providers or eligible training
provider list folks so we see a lot of this ranging like I said IT we have so many different programs and you'll see many of our training providers they'll have multiple programs they may have a welding program that is on the professional skills training side which is a short-term non-credit training they may have a certificate of proficiency or technical certificate or even an associate's degree in welding so students have the opportunity to stack and grow their academics over time instead of just being lumped into one program so the difference was
for this it's just a lot easier a lot less burden on institutions to get on this list It's really quite cumbersome to get on the workforce Pell list. So I'll pass it to Ross unless anyone
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:42:38
has questions. I think one of the things that we need to say is that there is no income guidelines to the workforce challenge. Unlike the workforce Pell, anybody can apply for these scholarships for these programs, which is a wonderful thing.
Speaker 23
1:42:53
Absolutely. And especially with the changes in our society due to AI and technology, we have many students who have bachelor's degree or graduate degrees deciding they need to upskill or, or change direction. And with workforce Pell, one really excellent thing about workforce Pell is bachelor holder, bachelor degree holders are eligible for workforce Pell, where regular Pell, if you have a bachelor's, you're not eligible for regular Pell for those very reasons that I just mentioned about people need to upskill.
But for Workforce Challenge, it doesn't matter if you have no degree, if you have a bachelor's degree, a graduate degree, you can still come back to Workforce Pell and get that short-term workforce training. Thank you, Madam
Speaker 232
1:43:37
Chair. Ross Watt, Division of Career and Technical Education. And really, I just have one piece to add to a lot of the conversation we've had this morning. And I think as we look at Perkins, within the Career and Technical Education umbrella that's serving our K-12 schools, but also our post-secondary institutions that are Perkins
eligible. Those federal dollars, when we move to this combined plan, so right now we have two separate state plans. We have a WIOA plan and we have a Perkins plan. And Perkins is 100% around building workforce talent within K-12 and post-secondary. And then a WIOA plan is how do we connect people to workforce. You know, there has been an option now for multiple years to have a combined plan as a state we have chosen not to take that route with this combined plan it gives us the ability to connect these two pieces when we start to look at outcomes but also how we're
using those federal dollars so earlier when representative warren was talking about some of the pieces happening there in hot springs and some of the events in the schools that were participating in those being heavily k-12 students there are federal dollars that are perkins that are helping some of those events happen but then when we look at the employer side and we start to talk about then they have these we owe a dollars that are at those local workforce boards it's able for us to better connect how we're using those and have that connection because what we see right now is some disconnect where locally those districts and a lot of them are consortium model through our
education co-ops they're engaging with employers about their needs and at the same time there's a local workforce board engaging so they're getting constant communication people knocking on their door asking for them to engage in that process where if we're able to combine those efforts into a combined plan we're able to use the regional business councils that Secretary McDonnell and Cody mentioned and be a much more coordinated effort from both of those federal plans that do serve different pieces. I have a piece here on my notes that says Perkins helps build talents with
students where WIOA connects the talent to the jobs and they're serving two different purposes but what we often see is they're serving the same people at just different stages of life And so how are we really coordinating those efforts in really meaningful ways that benefit the Arkansas workforce ecosystem? And I'm not sure who said it earlier, but then retaining talent in our community. That is the conversation I have on a regular basis with our K-12 and then especially our post-secondary is how are you using these dollars to retain talent in your community that stay there and build the workforce there rather than that's great.
let's ship you off to XYZ because that's going to be a better opportunity rather than how do we retain it there. So there's a lot of power within the combination of plans that we think will change the further we see within career and technical education. I think Commissioner Warden mentioned it earlier. We've already seen a transition and hopefully in the next year or two we'll be able to see a lot of fruits of our labor from learns and access and how that has changed priorities within especially the K-12 but then how it leads to post-secondary and that deeper connection of pathway when we see those opportunities as especially we graduate the class of
2028 I mean that's the year that I know that there'll be so many things we can report we can already talk about the current class that's graduated and students who have been able to achieve more workforce readiness and ready for that enlistment enrollment appointment but the transition that existing the transition and accountability to ensuring that we're meeting the workforce needs are going to be tremendous and we know a combined plan will help us move forward with that as well so how are we connecting now
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:47:01
with businesses as far as community colleges and that what you're doing so how are we connecting with industry
at this point if you could so i will
Speaker 124
1:47:09
say that that local voice that has been mentioned i think representative vod mentioned that some others is is important not just in wioa but in to our community colleges
Speaker 122
1:47:19
and everything else and i will say that having served on a wioa board i think there's more and better opportunities for local voice than just the than just the local WIOA board. I know that all of our programs by design are required to have industry presence in all of their in their advisory boards. Now some of those are more active and some of those work better than other but in the best case the colleges I led we
had a meeting every semester with industry partners to do several things. Look at our equipment, look at our facilities look at our curriculum look at our books look at our credentials look at the graduate rates and where they
Speaker 124
1:47:55
were going and what we needed to change to stay on track with those and when you're at a local level I think those decisions are best made locally not from Little Rock but how do we create a system where we value that we build that so that they input they need at the local level to build the program that typically is a very fundamental program in higher ed even at
the bachelor's degree level we teach fundamentals our industry partners once they get someone
Speaker 122
1:48:22
that's fundamentally sound then creates different schemes but if there's different local locovore to the degree that matters whether it's the type of equipment you're trained on or the nuanced context of whatever the subject matter is relying on those local boards so I've you know we all of our programs across the state and all of our schools have local advisory boards and I think that's a one way that we ensure that we get local voice in into the program not to mention the the university or the college level board of advisors and other things that go on the other
thing is part and parcel what we're doing with this our
Speaker 124
1:48:55
colleagues that we're here from the department of commerce let's not do it twice let's not make our industry ceo or hr manager go to three meetings that month let's get ourselves together as a state to say what are you saying how do we hear you from the department of education and make sure that informs commerce processes
Speaker 23
1:49:14
and vice versa. And I'll add one thing to that. You may recall from the governor's workforce strategy mentioning talent pipeline management through the U.S. chamber. It's just an organized framework and
process for training providers such as our higher ed institutions to partner with local employers to really ensure that the curriculum that's being designed is doing all the things that Dr. Ward just mentioned, that they're employer-driven pathways. It's not academia making a program and then telling employers hey this is what we have it's starting with employer so not only have we done that through talent pipeline management and several cohorts in our state have gone through that with a lot of support from arkansas community colleges and kala waters in addition our state has
had eight community colleges go through what's called the community college growth engine that follows a similar as talent pipeline management of framework that is very similar to make micro credentials and micro pathways and we have several institutions launching those pathways right now across the state northwest arkansas community colleges was one of the first they started a few months ahead of our others but our other programs are implementing and starting this fall with and launching their new micro credentials so we're really excited that you know we we say that it
happens but everyone always questions us well what's evidence of that we we have that evidence right now that we can show the skills and taxonomies that were verified by local employers and we're tying that into launch so the learning and employment records that will show up in launch employers can see exactly what it means when it says that this student completed this micro credential or this technical certificate or this degree at a certain institution. One last thing is we've
Speaker 124
1:50:53
also started some work with the last two weeks we received notice that
we were successful in a grant application for CTO, Connecting Talents Opportunity. And through this, we're working with the folks at AR Data and Launch to do
Speaker 122
1:51:05
what we call skills parsing. So we're going into some general education courses and some pilot projects. A lot of people say, well, why do I need to take Comp 1? What am I going to learn there to help me do my job? Well, what we're doing is we're digging into these courses and doing what we call skills parsing. So we pick out the skills within the class so that we can inform employers on the skills that that individual is learning, and then also better inform students,
better inform employers, better inform our practices in higher ed so that we are leaned in heavily to not just saying a syllabi and you need to take this class as part of your program, but the skills that are going to make it more relevant to you. So it's not this, you have to make this abstract concept and leap to how it's applied, but more really intuitive to what matters in that course and all of these courses to make you better at who you want to be.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:52:01
That's great. Thank you. A quick question, then I'll get
to Senator Irvin. How many referrals for education or training do community colleges receive from DHS programs or workforce solution programs
Speaker 124
1:52:15
or others? Do you guys get any? I will say there are opportunities where we have relationships between the local DHS offices and community college, but I would say more times than not, It's the individual that self-selects and then some coordination between the local financial aid offices at the institution. If there's, you know, if there's a case manager at the DHS office locally.
But I think this combined plan is going to help us build out more of that and do better, whether it's with adult ed and community colleges or community colleges, back to DHS or vice versa. When we get rid of some of these bureaucracies and get down to some of the intensive case management that we
Speaker 122
1:52:55
need, I think those local relationships are very important, and we're trying to create that system that encourages the local
Speaker 188
1:53:00
collaboration without all the weeds of the bureaucracies that's unnecessary and costly. Thank you, sir.
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:53:08
Senator Irvin? Thank you. And I
appreciate that and applaud that. I want you to understand. I think that's really critically
important. And one question is, were those administrative entities, did they go through legislative audits? Did legislative audit ever audit any of those administrative entities that you're eliminating?
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:53:38
the workforce? Yeah, whichever one.
I mean, the 11 administrative entities under your waiver package. So that would be under Secretary McDonald
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:53:51
was just a question I forgot to ask. And then on the eligibility, I think, side, I just had a follow-up of what that eligibility criteria is, because whether you're a student at a two-year college, a four-year college, or a medical school or pharmacy school, you're still zero income based. so i don't know if that's referred to as income based at the
when when the answer was eligibility
Speaker 124
1:54:15
so i i think there are some eligibility requirements and i will say i don't talk about this a lot but i'm actually the product of a we owe a training program okay i was a dislocated worker in a millennia a different millennia but uh and was retrained as an automotive technician and that's how i got into higher ed and so this this product this this process when it works is a very good process and it's a hand up and it was for me and for
Speaker 122
1:54:43
a lot of people i can attest to that personally so i think the eligibility depends on which facet it's in so i think dislocated
workers are there or maybe it's low income like i don't know i don't know what the percentage is but let's just say 250 of poverty level i think there's different criteria that can
Speaker 23
1:55:01
get a student into the door in addition it's not just eligibility of students but eligibility of programs not all programs are going to qualify. And that's about my level of expertise of talking about the wheel of programs, but, um, we can talk with Cody and his
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:55:14
team. I just want to make sure because I didn't want there to be some assumption that a medical student was wealthy because they're not zero
Speaker 23
1:55:22
income. They probably more program related than student eligibility related, but we'll
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:55:28
get with them. And then, and then healthcare industry, are y'all on your program? Are you meeting with healthcare industry hospitals as employers are we able are you engaging in that sector so I'll give you just one example of
Speaker 23
1:55:42
course our institutions meet with them to design programs but you know that's not in our office we're not the ones that boots on the ground doing that
but we are just like right now about to meet with children's hospital because children's hospital wants to be able to send their workers through workforce training to upskill and you know progress up that career ladder and they have certain amount of funds designated for their employees but that goes very fast when you have just this limited amount of funding so for workforce challenge they're wanting to understand more about workforce challenge because they want to be able to send their employees through training programs that workforce challenge will pay for and then they can complement that through through their own funds that go to employees so that's one way that
we work with employers are helping employers identify funding opportunities so they can send students through programs additionally we work with employers because around the state you're probably familiar with the office of skills development funds that go directly to employers so if it's not something that we're going to fund a student directly through a scholarship or a grant we can fund employers through the office of skills development and they can pay up to 75 percent of that customized training so an employer may want to send just a group one a one person or maybe a
customized training cohort of 10 people, whatever it may be. And then the office of skills development will pay up to 75% directly to the employer for the cost of that customized training. So we're working with employers to really just, um, find sources of funding to upskill. Okay. And that, and
Speaker 22
1:57:22
that includes all hospitals. I don't know that all hospitals, I
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:57:26
mean, I'm not personally working with all hospitals, but I mean, you reach out to employers, right? You say you reach out to My question is, when you say employers, does that also include health care, businesses, entities, hospitals?
You said children's hospital. I don't know if they reach out to you or vice versa. But my hope is that you're reaching out and viewing and seeing health care as a huge sector of our economy. Absolutely. And as huge employers that also need your services and our help with exactly what you're talking about. For example, we need more people that are trained in being able to perform ultrasounds, radiology technicians.
I mean, there's a whole wide variety of skill sets that hospitals require employees from every different aspect. So, a lot of times I feel like we're super focused on manufacturing and things like that, and we're not really focusing on healthcare as that employer and that huge sector of our economy that does also need exactly what you're talking about. So that would be my request and ask is that there be a focus on that because, for example, we had somebody who was a welder at Stone County Ironworks who did participate in the program just like what you're talking about, who is now one of our head nurses at the nursing home, which is great because he's this big, tall, muscular man who we really need to help with on a lot of our patients there at that nursing home.
so it really he was a dislocated worker that really then went back to school and into a new career path so i hope that you're talking to hospitals as employers yes that's thank you yes thank you and our workforce
Speaker 23
1:59:23
challenge and i don't have the percentage i'd have to go back and calculate it and see but so many of our programs that were submitted were for health care and not just nursing but um other forms of health care as well because i mean you have a an entire i mean
ecosystem just within health care itself so thank you thank you all so much for being here
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:59:46
today and i wish we had more time because i have i really have eight more questions but i'm going to hold them for now and we will bring you back so just let you know we'll have you back to another subcommittee meeting thank you so much for being with us today and with that we'll let secretary man come to the table and miss lori whoever else she wants to bring with her to discuss some things on snap and all those things as well so all right
thank you all for being here today so we would just love you to give us an update uh the committee update on the work plan that dhs is implementing to address arkansas snap improper payment rate your expanded snap work requirements implement of the new medicaid work requirements so if you guys could give us an update on that tell us who you are and we'll we'll go forward from
Speaker 251
2:00:52
there thank you good morning i think our good afternoon Janet Mann DHS secretary good morning I'm Mary Franklin director of the
Speaker 257
2:01:13
welcome to proceed good morning representative Bentley I think the first thing that you mentioned was
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:01:17
could you possibly move your fight a little bit forward thank you for thank you mary is that
Speaker 257
2:01:23
better okay much better uh you wanted to talk about snap accuracy and what we are doing to help
Speaker 256
2:01:30
improve the accuracy rate all right i will be glad to do that we
Speaker 257
2:01:36
um we are say three quarters of the way through a federal fiscal year in which we are measuring
snap accuracy according to federal rules for how we do that i can tell you the report that i got last week had us at 7.85 percent SNAP payment error rate. That's above six. We need to get below six in order for Arkansas not to have to contribute to cost share of the cost of the SNAP benefits, which at this time are 100 percent federally funded. We have done several things and will continue to do several things to help address our error rate. I can tell you the last
published rate was for federal fiscal year 24 and in that time we were at 9.56 percent i believe we finished federal fiscal 25 and we are waiting for fns to send out their final determination of all the state's accuracy rates that usually comes in june so could be any day now but what we reported as our final error rate to fns for federal fiscal 25 was 8.32 percent
now that could change a little bit based on federal reviews and their determination but at least this week we were at 7.85 and i just want to tell you that it changes every week based on the cases that we complete the review process on the review year starts october 1 in september 30th and um we don't pull the cases we don't sample the cases for a month until that month is complete and then once we get the sample the quality control team has 90 days to complete
those reviews for that month so we're always getting this information behind even though today is june 15th they're still working on february and january reviews so there's always a lag but we only have between now and september 30th to do things that will impact the error rate and help improve it so improvement is always from today forward um so we have we do second party
reviews just to talk about the things we do to help improve the error rate we do second party reviews which means someone who is not the caseworker reviews cases usually those are supervisors and so we have that process going on in addition to the quality control process that just happens according to fns guidelines we have recently in mid-april formed a team that we are calling the quality assurance team and this was a group of case workers 10 case workers that
we pulled out of regular everyday case work and their job is to review cases all day every day unlike the supervisors who have all the supervisory duties and and you can imagine the daily things that come up that supervisors deal with they still review cases but this team is completely dedicated to cases and so that's a new thing that we've added just to help review the cases the point of that is to see where the mistakes are find them before they end up in a
quality control sample and determine his error and of course just to get the benefits correct and make sure we're doing things right to do follow-up if we need to make adjustments to training if we need to do some training with an individual the whole goal of that is to find errors fix them learn from the mistakes and help not to prove not to repeat the same errors we um we are doing refresher training um some months is shorter some month you know some months is longer
and we try to focus on things that we've we know from the quality control reviews or from the second party reviews are problem areas for us so we're doing refresher training every month and we are also doing something we called it prevention in a snap but basically it takes the error summaries from the quality control team and simplifies them in plain language and says these are things that caused errors here's what you know here's what the root cause was here's
what you can do to make sure that this doesn't happen again and in that process we also allow feedback even anonymous feedback if somebody has an idea or thinks there's something that we might need to change or update in our policy we are also doing some changes in our eligibility system where we are employing ai technology to help us with some tasks that are repetitive but they take a lot of time in particular with our national directory of new hire tasks
that's 15 to 16 000 tasks every quarter they're simple we're basically you know seeing if we have that information in the case and documenting so that we can make sure if there is income that it's addressed in the case and we're also implementing help with returned mail tasks which return mail following up on that is important to make sure that the people still live in arkansas and to make sure that we can communicate with them and that we have their
correct address so we're we're doing that and we're also that that's going to help us with work for say create efficiency give more time for workers to do harder things but there is something else that we're working on and it is to help us with case accuracy we call it case iq but it is to help systematically point out things that we need to go back and look at before the case is approved you know we're working to implement that as an error prevention because the more we can
prevent on the front end the better you know it's good to find things find mistakes that already happened in the second party review process but we also want to use tools to help us find it before we ever approve the case and so we're implementing that and there are other ai things that we would like to pursue and implement we have a list and we are going to work on it in phases and our policy team and our training team and our field operations team are working very closely
through this whole process we have a meeting every month where we go over how many second party reviews were done what are what are the results that that we're finding with that we are looking at the latest qc errors what are we seeing what are the top three reasons and we're all collaborating in that meeting together and so that we can identify things that we can try or and making sure that each part of the team knows what's going on so that they
Speaker 256
2:08:44
can work to help make sure we develop things that help address accuracy did i leave anything out
Speaker 257
2:08:49
yes we are also working with a department of inspector general um and coordinating with them they are we we are doing a series of meetings with them providing information to them So they're going to be also taking a look at SNAP and seeing how we can collaborate together also with new ideas for improving the error rate. Great. And we have a couple of questions.
Speaker 251
2:09:20
Do you want to say something, Secretary? May I? Yes, ma'am. If I could just add one last thing is we have done a peer-to-peer state analysis, and three states that have stood out repetitively are Idaho, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, and we have reached out to two of the three, we're hoping to get to the third one, to look at how they are working and how they are keeping their error rate low. So we are looking outside, internally, and in the state with other partners to try to work on the error rate.
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:09:53
Great. Representative Beatty? Thank you, Madam Chair. I guess my questions, one, the work that you're currently doing, I'd asked for that a while back, so it's good to
see that there are different programs that are going. You mentioned that you had moved staff from case management to the quality assurance team. How many members make up that team? It's only 10 right now. 10 right now. How did that affect the case management staff that are doing the work on the front end?
Speaker 257
2:10:25
So that means that 10 staff that did case work are now doing case reviews. So, you know, it has the impact of having 10 fewer staff working on cases to help us be timely and, of course, do accurate work. We're just going to – we're monitoring that because,
Speaker 263
2:10:42
you know, it's all important, being able to get the work done as well as
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:10:49
helping to prevent errors. Well, that's – I guess that's my next line of question is reporting on what this team has found.
Do you have reports of what errors they've found, and can you provide some of that data to the committee? I think it would be a good meeting just to go over and focus strictly on these areas as well as some written documentation of what you verbally gave to the committee just briefly ago. So I'd like to see, you know, some, I guess, data on what's been discovered and if that's leading to improved work on the front end
or if it's still repetitive errors that are coming out of the case management staff. It's bad when you write things down and you can't read your own handwriting over here. I'm going to work on that. Let's see. I think those are the main things. Just some written of what you just verbally gave us as well as some data from what the quality assurance team has noted in their reviews.
Speaker 257
2:12:03
Yes, sir. We have some reports that we can provide. And I do have detailed today if you would like to know for the quality control year that we're in what our top three errors are. Oh, sure. Go ahead and share that with us. Or the top three. Wages and salaries is number one. I can tell you every year. It's wages and salaries is the number one. Right now, where we're at in this federal fiscal year review period, there are seven cases that were found to have errors. Two-thirds of those are client-caused errors, information not reported.
One-third of those is agency misapplying policy. So that's the top reason. Number two is something called time-limited participation, which means we had people in the program too long. There are three cases in that bucket, and they are all agency errors because we failed to follow up on information provided or failed to verify information we should have. That's what caused those three. And then number three is shelter deductions.
That's five cases, and agency caused 48.18% of those payment errors, and client caused 51.82, But it's the same two root causes under that, failed to follow up on information or failed to verify, I mean, for the agency side, failed to verify information we should have, and on the client side, information not reported. So those are our top three in the federal QC sampling that we have to date.
And that could change, of course, as more cases are reviewed. Something else may rise to the top. One of these may move out of the top three. but
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:13:47
I wanted to provide you those today. Well, based on that, it sounds like it's improving somewhat on the agency side from I think the last number you gave was somewhere around 64% to 68% on the agency. So it appears that that's improving. So we'll hope that that continues to be the trend.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:14:05
Thank you for the information. Thank you. Senator English. So could you give me an idea of what a caseworker does?
What does a caseworker does? case manager do you call them all the same and
Speaker 257
2:14:21
how many do you have so we have we have more than 800 caseworker positions I
Speaker 256
2:14:32
don't have the number that we have filled today but we they do one of two things so they do
Speaker 257
2:14:41
integrated eligibility determinations meaning medicaid snap and t they're taking applications approving proving denying applications as
appropriate processing renewals in those programs processing change change reports reacting to data report and data matches those things that that's what i will call everyday casework and then we have a small group of individuals we would call case managers they all have the same job title but they work specifically in the transitional employment assistance program and they do case management with those t clients full-time and and in that
sense they may do eligibility as well as part of maintaining those cases but they do assessments with the clients they help them identify barriers help them to identify solutions to those barriers develop those employment plans, do referrals and follow up with any other agencies that are part of that employment plan and help the client take the steps through that employment plan with the goal of them being able to leave the T program with a job, possibly to move
on to the work pays program, which is also funded by TANF, which is only for individuals who were in T, whose TKs closed due to earnings, and that then does additional case management with the goal of helping them to increase their hours of employment or increase their rate of pay and just continue to take those steps off
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:16:18
they work with the Department of Workforce Services and employers? How do they work with employers?
Find jobs or whatever, or training programs? So
Speaker 253
2:16:27
they work with Workforce Services. They also, part of the employment plan, and it's an
Speaker 257
2:16:33
individualized thing. So everybody's plan isn't going to look exactly alike. But they, you know, depending on what's in the plan, if there's work experience in the plan, then they have made connections and have set up those work sites so that the individual can go. And essentially, it's guided volunteering. They're getting work experience that will hopefully lead to a good job reference
and something to help build their resume and their skills so that they can find a job. Some of the employment plans, they may be in school or assigned a certain job training in which they'll make that connection there. If they're going to college as part of that plan, then there would be connection to education. It just depends on what's in the individual plan. So are these people all
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:17:22
over the state? Are they at the county operations office, or where are they? They are.
Speaker 257
2:17:28
It's about 23 members on that team, and they are spread throughout the state strategically to try and be close to where the clients live that are our team clients.
Speaker 257
2:17:42
incidental to the case management. They may update addresses and do eligibility changes for their clients, But they don't do, you know, they don't focus as much on volume as they do on their individual clients who need case management.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:17:59
That's their main focus. So they're doing SNAP and Medicaid and TANF? The majority
Speaker 256
2:18:05
of what they do is case management. Like I said, there may be some, you know, if something changes for that client,
Speaker 257
2:18:10
case managers use the first one that knows if something has changed. So they may be facilitating updating the case with that. but that's not their job. I mean, that's not the main goal of their
Speaker 256
2:18:21
job. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Okay, Representative Blademan. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
2:18:29
I'm over here. Thank you all for being here. When you look at your
quality, your misses or mistakes, whatever you want to call those, are you able to tell if there are certain counties or certain offices that are having more mistakes than others where you can zero in on resolutions, Are you able to
Speaker 256
2:18:52
see that? Yes, sir. We look at that down to the individual worker
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
2:18:57
level. Okay. So when you see that, and maybe your corrective actions, if you're doing those already,
do you do more training in those individual offices? And if it's a, whether it's an agency or an applicant mistake, are you zeroing in on some type of training? Even if it's your caseworker and they're having problems with people getting the paper to them, maybe they're not adequately telling them what they need to do. Do you understand my question? Are you throwing in on those areas to try to provide training to correct those errors?
Speaker 272
2:19:35
Yes, and we may even do more reviews if we see a problem in a particular area. We
Speaker 257
2:19:41
may do more reviews in that area. And, of course, training and things like that. And, you know, when I was talking to you about the things that we do to prevent the errors and how we are collaborating across our team, I failed to mention our special investigations unit. They are part of that collaboration as well as our fraud unit in DHS. And so they are actually helping us to focus on the client side of these errors as well. You know, look at cases that may be more prone to have errors, zero income but expenses are claimed
or expenses outweigh the income that's been claimed and verified. And so it's a collaboration across our teams to identify things we can do in all the ways to help reduce our errors. I know when I talk
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
2:20:25
to some of the county operations, they say, well, it's the clients that are making the mistakes. But, you know, maybe we can make it easier for them to be accurate, to be more accurate. Right.
Speaker 256
2:20:35
And part of what we are, you know, even refresher training is about interviewing.
Speaker 257
2:20:41
You know, when we, in SNAP, we talk with our clients. The interview is part of the eligibility process, and it's about making sure we explain everything. What the client's rights and responsibilities are. What does quality control mean? What does a field investigation mean? What does it mean that you, you know, need to verify information and making sure they understand the ways that they can return information? Yes, sir, those are all things that we agree are part of the process and that we are working on. Okay, when
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
2:21:11
you talk about the percentage, 7%, whatever it is we need to get down to 6%, what's the formula there?
Is it just the number of contacts, you know, divided by the number of mistakes? Is that a big
Speaker 253
2:21:24
formula or what? It's a payment error rate. So of the universe of cases
Speaker 256
2:21:30
selected for review, what is the dollar amount of benefits that we determined and issued in that sample universe versus the dollars we found to be in error? So
Speaker 257
2:21:42
that's essentially the formula. It's a payment error rate, not case error rate.
Speaker 49
2:21:48
All right. Thank you. Thank you. Representative Beck. Thank you, Madam
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:21:59
Chair. The, well, it looks like I'm last. No, I think I'm not. I was saying I went from first to last
on my birthday, so that's okay. All right, no worries. Now, the question I had was
when you were talking about refresher training, and, okay, that's okay.
So I understand what refresher training is, But are we doing refresher training because someone might have moved in a particular location, you know, job location, or there's a new person there? You know, because quite honestly, if I've trained you on something, or maybe it's that the systems have changed, right? You know, there's new requirements or whatever like that. So you've got – is that the nature of your refresher training?
Speaker 256
2:22:52
So not exactly. The refresher training is for everybody, every caseworker
Speaker 257
2:22:57
and supervisor involved in the eligibility process, and we target things that we see problems with or that are error-prone. Like we have done a refresher training on shelter deductions because that's one of our problem areas. We have done refresher training on income and how to calculate income, and we do training on policy changes. For example, when we went from voluntary to mandatory SNAP employment and training,
we did some training for our staff on what that means. How has that changed your eligibility determination? How does that change how you handle a case? What are the things you need to do to make sure you're complying with that policy and explaining it to the client? So the refresher training is for everybody. and we do something monthly to help everybody just keep their skills fresh because everybody gets trained initially. You know, as a new caseworker, there is a training that everyone goes through.
They are monitored, under 100% review for a while until we determine they're proficient, and then we do periodic reviews on everybody just to see how they're doing from looking at case reviews. But this refresher training is for everybody, and it is all about just keeping our skills
Speaker 256
2:24:17
honed and fresh and trying to do everything we can do to prevent errors. So if you think about
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:24:23
the rural areas where you guys are probably the,
I won't say the best, but in some cases you're the only one that can be providing some of these services, do you see any training or is there anything that you guys are doing? is there any training necessary you see more refresher type training necessary for those type positions versus someone that
might be working in in a more urban type area or is it so our
Speaker 257
2:24:55
case we train all the caseworkers it doesn't matter where they live where they physically sit and they work
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:25:01
cases from all over the state so you but but do you see is there any data that that shows that there's more and I'm not saying there is but let's say there's the payment I think was one of the things that you mentioned that's more of a problem in rural areas versus you know in urban areas or does it change I guess what I'm saying when you're looking at these things as opportunities I know you guys have said you are looking at the opportunities do you see any differences
between rural areas and urban areas is my point.
Speaker 256
2:25:36
So we we well we do if we select a case out of the sample and it turns out to be an error we document where the worker who made the error where where are they where is their work unit what county is it in and we do track that at the state level at our area level and then even down to the county level so um but i i can't tell you today where i see more i didn't bring that with me but we track
And like I said, at the individual level, we do even additional reviews if we need to just to
Speaker 257
2:26:11
help make sure that we've reinforced and there has been learning.
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:26:19
was very happy to hear you use the term, the root cause analysis, and that's truly where you solve the problem to get rid of all the others. But anyway, so I do appreciate everything that you guys are doing. I do see you as maybe the only lifeline in town in some of the rural areas,
and I just want to make sure that I'm somewhat concerned with some of the new work requirements that are related to some of these services that there might be, I guess that might be more of the refresher training type thing that you guys are going to need to be doing to make sure that we check all those boxes, or not just check the boxes, to make sure everyone is doing what needs to be done to make sure that services don't. And I was actually sitting here thinking that you do have a challenge coming up with these new requirements. It's going to leave it open for more errors.
And so hats off to you for all that you've done, and I wish
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
2:27:25
you all the luck in the world going forward. Thank you, Representative. Senator Urban. Thank you. I echo the sentiments. And I think it is critically important that we understand, I texted Lori, but McDonald, we are held accountable for the client errors as well as the agency errors. And I'm guessing that, you know, that's a whole other level of accountability that we probably didn't have before is that we're accountable for those client errors as well as any agency errors.
And so, that would require really basically new training, I would guess, based on this new federal policy since we're financially held accountable for that. But I'm assuming that's also just making sure that there's a higher level of review so that there's not a lot of fraud going on, basically. Is that, do you think, is there, is there, within your refreshing training in your investigative unit with your case workers,
is there a pass-off, is there, are you trained to say, okay, to make sure that this client is not creating these errors, there's got to be a trigger or a pass-off to the investigative squad, so to speak, so that we can prevent that. Am I making a correct assumption as to, you know, I guess the federal government's reason for really putting that in place and holding states accountable for client errors as well as agency errors?
Speaker 257
2:29:01
FNS measured us on payment accuracy. They have, I think, back to the beginning of time. I mean, we've always had payment accuracy rates
Speaker 256
2:29:13
monitored by FNS, reported to FNS, and it has always included agency and client errors. The big difference is the cost share with the benefits. That was not, there
Speaker 257
2:29:21
was a way you could be penalized as a state if your error rate was below the national average for more than two years. But in addition to that now is the cost share that comes into play
if the error rate is above 6%. But on the investigative side, Investigative interviewing is something that we talk about and do refresher on. And, yes, our staff can utilize that field investigations unit on any case that they have concerns about. There is an electronic mechanism for referral to that unit. We have field investigators scattered throughout the state. In addition to referrals from caseworkers, they take calls from our toll-free fraud line and may investigate those.
They use out-of-state transactions on our EBT report. They also use other reports for things like households with zero income, households where expenses exceed income, things like that, to just try and make sure we
Speaker 293
2:30:29
use the resources we have to the best ability to identify cases that may have problems. Okay. And
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
2:30:37
the fraud hotline is advertised? Okay. I think it's important for people to understand, too, like they are participants in our government, too, whether they may not work.
But there's a disability fraud unit in the state of Arkansas, as well as a fraud, you know, unit and hotline for any abuses of these programs. And I think we need to be reminded of that and that citizens need to be reminded of that. You know, sometimes we get complaints from people, and I want to say to them, you can do something about that. You know, if you're complaining about somebody who's taking advantage of a program that they're not necessarily, you don't think they're eligible for,
You can use this fraud hotline. You, you know, step up. But I think it's good information. Thank you for the work
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:31:32
you're doing. Representative Beck. Just one more quick
question. I came, have you guys seen any opportunities in, like, the refresher training? I mean, the nature of the refresher means that I've already had training in this topic at least, and now you're refreshing. Are you guys going back and looking at the original training
and maybe updating those original training modules so that they represent the refresher part that you're having to do later on? Yes,
Speaker 257
2:32:00
that's part of the whole collaborative process so that our policy team, our training team, our field investigators, our field operations team, so that we all have that in mind and we can do those things. If we're having errors in a particular area, yes, we want to do refresher training on it, But do we need to go back and look at the original training and update everything throughout?
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:32:23
Yes, that's part of our process. All right, thank you. One more thing. We'll move on real quickly. I know we had talked about doing a landlord verification form or something like that because household number of people live in a household and all that. I know other states are doing a landlord verification form to help you make sure that those are the number of people living in that house and not duplicating addresses for different accounts. So I know that we had talked about that before. just wanted to bring that
Speaker 251
2:32:51
refresher out so yes ma'am thank you um we are actually looking at
several different ways to upgrade and enhance the income verification and that would include helping with the landlord but also helping with client reporting and agency reporting that is the number one era that you see across the country not just in arkansas and so we are looking at different ways to do that um with technology and how do we implement that and how do how do we use it effectively efficiently and can afford it so yes it's high on the list thank
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:33:27
you okay um so i want us to go
over the snap and this report that you guys have prepared for us real quickly and
Speaker 257
2:33:39
then we'll do um assisted living so all right i am going to just high level there's a lot of data here and this snapshot for snap was from february and at that time we had 120 000 snap households the average household size was two which included 227 825 enrollees
i did look and in may i was going to say i just looked for may since this was done in february For May, we had 118,938 households and 223,490 individuals. So it hasn't changed much. And in February, there were 107,590 able-bodied adults without dependents and 120,235 individuals were not able-bodied adults without dependents.
And the issuance was $38.64 million, and the average household issuance was $319.40 per month. This slide gives you residence county organized by our management areas. so you can see area one is northwest area two northeast area three is central and area four is southwest area five is southeast and area six is pulaski county and it just breaks down the
percentage of snap enrollees but our snap households by area the following slide breaks down all the way to the residence county level for households the next slide breaks down all the way to the residence county for enrollees for individuals and then more about income 47 percent of the snap households have at least one person who's working of the 227,825 enrollees 107,329
have some type of income 120,496 had no income and this slide is a breakdown by age and disability and the disability type and any unearned income and that is broken down by age showing you disabled non-disabled and then this is the same information on on the how on the individuals without income showing you
by age breakdown whether they're disabled or not disabled according to information that we have the next slide is a look at the benefit composition of people who receive SNAP of our SNAP enrollees you can see a hundred and forty five thousand one hundred seven of the SNAP enrollees for the month of february received snap and magi medicaid uh 67 000 a little over 67 000 received snap and non-magi medicaid 12 000 216 or 218 received just snap and then you can see smaller numbers receiving snap t
and met magi medicaid or snap non-magi medicaid and t in the so that is what is on that slide This slide is about length of enrollment. For those who were in the program in February, 101,000 had been in the SNAP program less than a year. About 52,000 had been on the program one to two years, over 24,000 two to three years, 31,000 three to four years, and four to five years was over 17,000.
and the next slide is an enrollment by age the bar the bars are colored based on age breakdown and then it just tells you and it shows you length of um for the enrollees with income how long they have been in the snap program the following slide is the same information but for those who were not have no income, and are disabled. Same type of information on the next slide.
Length of enrollment, but no income and not disabled. And then the next slide looks at enrollees who have no dependents under age 14 in the income, whether they have income or no income, broken down by age. and then enrollees with no dependents under 14 broken down by age and disability status enrollees with dependents under 14 by age and with with income with or without income
enrollees with dependents under 14 years old disability status by age and then just a general enrollee disability breakdown here um total enrollees disabled or not disabled the non-disabled number is 157 000 is this disabled number 68 000 and then a breakdown of the disability types this is a deal of disability breakdown by age group
this is a breakdown of the enrollment individual enrollment with by race and ethnicity this is a breakdown of individual enrollment by age and gender and that gets us to the medicaid portion which you will see similar information um eligible this was also february data total cases 587,512 cases, MAGI, 324,099, non-MAGI, 257,721.
And then the bottom chart shows by individual. There were a total of 867,132 individuals in those cases, 645,541 MAGI, 225,433 non-MAGI. And then this slide, I recognize it's hard to see, but this breaks those individuals down into their actual Medicaid category. And one line gives you the total individuals, the lighter color and the darker blue gives you total cases.
You can see Arkansas was our biggest category with the most enrollees and so on down to the smallest number of people enrolled by category. This is the same information we shared with you on the SNAP enrollment. This is by residence county by area, and then residence county by case, residence county by individual, and then similar information on income breakdown for enrollees with income.
303,425 of our Medicaid enrollees at this point in time had income, and also the earned income types and disability types. This is the enrollees without income, also broken down by age. The majority of those without income, of course, are age 0 to 17, but total enrollees without income is $563,707. And again, without income, also a breakdown of disability by age.
Length of enrollment, again, the different colors on the lines, break the individuals into age, and then number of years enrolled in Medicaid. And this is a look at that same information for enrollees with no income but are disabled. Length of enrollment, no income but are not disabled. And enrollees with no dependents under 14 years old and whether or not they have income by age.
Enrollees with no dependents under 14 and their disability status, again, by age groups. Enrollees with dependents under 14 years broken down by income or no income and by age. This is disability status on this slide by age. and the disability breakdown by age, race and ethnicity, age
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:42:28
That was very informative. Thank you. I've got a couple questions, but I will
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
2:42:35
let Representative Meeks start. Representative Meeks. Thank you. So
Speaker 253
2:42:39
just two quick questions. What is MAGI? MAGI, it's an acronym, Modified Adjusted Gross Income, and it is the
Speaker 256
2:42:46
income methodology that we have to use to determine eligibility, and it impacts the R-Home group,
Speaker 293
2:42:52
R-Kids A, R-Kids B, everything basically but long-term care and SSI and TEFRA.
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
2:42:58
Okay. And then my second question is, can you give me some examples of a non-disabled that would be receiving these
Speaker 270
2:43:12
Right. Who would that be? children adults i mean who make the income
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
2:43:16
limit well i know i guess i'm obviously the children i get that but i guess i'm more specifically interested in the adults that are not disabled that are receiving these benefits and are we doing anything to um encourage them to maybe get with
some of these workforce training that we've done to try to get them off if they're you know if they're not disabled and they're able-bodied what are we trying to
Speaker 256
2:43:41
do to help promote that So there are several categories of Medicaid for adults that don't require disability as an eligibility factor. So you don't have to be disabled to receive that coverage if you meet the income and other requirements. Our home being one of those, parent caretaker relative. But there is a Medicaid work requirement, community engagement and work requirement coming to the Our Home group.
It's going to be implemented in January, but we are actually implementing next month as a soft launch. to start notifying people what their status would be if the program was already and the penalties were already in effect. There will be, it will require 80, for those who are not exempt for a disability or for medically frail or certain, like caregiving, if they're not exempt,
Speaker 257
2:44:35
They will be required to do 80 hours a month in either employment or volunteering, structured volunteering at, you know, like a nonprofit government entity, something like that, in
Speaker 256
2:44:49
job training or in school or in their earnings. Their gross earnings would have to be $580 a month to be considered meeting that requirement or working at least 80 hours a month.
But when we implement that, those who are not meeting that requirement, we will have to look at application,
Speaker 257
2:45:12
and we will also have to look at renewal time. And by the way, renewals are going from 12 months to 6 months at the same time in January. So as people come up for renewal throughout 2027, when we recertify them, it'll be for six months, not
Speaker 311
2:45:32
I would just like to clarify, for the R-Home or the expansion group, or sometimes called Group 8,
Speaker 251
2:45:38
they will have the renewals every six months and the work requirement. Children are still at an
Speaker 312
2:45:43
annual renewal, and the other categories are annual renewal. I just didn't want to confuse anyone. Good point. Thank you. Yeah, this is
Speaker 256
2:45:52
already confusing enough. All right, thank you. So we're going to be first checking data to see what we can determine ex parte without asking the client to provide anything. And for those clients that we are not able to determine from looking at data that they are meeting the requirement or would be exempt from the requirement,
we will send them a 30-day compliance letter, giving them 30 days to provide information, explaining what it means to be compliant, what would count, or what it would mean to be exempt, and what we would need. And then those we are not able, in addition to sending the notice, which satisfies the federal requirement, we are launching an outbound verification center through a customer service center contract, and they will be working to engage with those
who we could not determine their status. And during that 30 days where they are under notice to try and reach them, text, email, and then help connect them if they need help getting connected in order to meet these requirements. Okay, so just a
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:46:57
couple of quick questions before we move on. What is the number that you're looking at right now? You think of people that are able-bodied, working-age adults that are going to fall into this work requirement? Do you guys have any numbers
Speaker 256
2:47:09
that you're looking at right now? So the work requirement will apply to the entire Our Home group, which is 215,000 or 17,000.
But many of them are going to be exempt, right? And then some of them are already compliant. We have estimated probably around 20% per month
Speaker 257
2:47:27
may be the group that's at risk. Okay. So what do you think can be
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:47:33
done to connect your clients to all the programs that we have in the state that provide education? So I know in some of our counties there's just not a lot available. So what do you think we might be helpful to get these people connected to something beyond just clicking the box?
Well, now we've satisfied eligibility, but what can we do to maybe connect with some? I know that we're
trying to connect more, but what do you guys think we can do to connect
Speaker 257
2:48:01
with the workforce to get these people really a good job and not just checking the box? I think the Outbound Verification Center is going to help with that for those who are not meeting the requirement or exempt. We have always done a referral in our notices to our home on Workforce Connections, how they can access Workforce Connections. We'll continue to do things like that and use social media.
And when we do have interactions where we, other than the mail interactions, we can talk to clients who call us about how do I comply, what do I need to do, where can you send me. We'll share that information. Medicaid is very different from the SNAP program, and Medicaid does not include an in-person interaction. So we have to use the tools that we can other than in-person required interaction and take advantage when we do have, you know, conversations with them and correspondence with them to help make those connections.
Speaker 251
2:49:00
And I would just add that we've had lots of conversations with Robert Magoo on different ways to connect and different ways to use the ex parte process, as Mary referred to, or administrative process, to determine if they're eligible before we send notices. But in addition to the follow-up, so you now have to comply with the work requirement. How do we get them connected and working with others throughout the state? That is part of our work plan. We don't have a clear picture because we're trying to meet the requirements for January 1,
but we consider that a very important piece of that box of what do we do. And since we are going to be doing redeterminations every six months for this group, we are going to see them twice a year at a minimum with are you meeting the work requirement. If you're not meeting the work requirement and you don't have services, where have you been? How can you get tied in to get the next level so that you can either have services or a different job? So it is definitely on the list.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:50:03
Thank you. Senator English. One of the
things I think that I've seen is that with SNAP, the employment and training right now is voluntary. It's not going to be voluntary at some future date. My understanding is it's like about a $600,000 program. How do you think that we're going to be able to refer people to employment and training?
What do you see as that pathway for those people? I mean, if we're saying now that it's not voluntary anymore and you had 100,000 people who wanted to apply or went through there, do you think there's something at the federal level to increase the expansion of the amount of dollars that you have? Or how would we find a way to refer people to some of
these programs that we've heard about today?
Speaker 256
2:51:04
So we were able to make the change from voluntary SNAP employment and training
Speaker 257
2:51:10
to mandatory, to a mandatory program. We made that change in April. So we are early in that process, but we are doing mandatory employment and training. And specifically for those individuals in the SNAP program that are able-bodied, well, able-bodied adults without dependents, which now includes parents with children under age 14. And any of our SNAP recipients subject to the general work requirement, which could, you know, anyone with a school-aged child is included in that group.
So if they are not already employed, working enough hours, or if they are not exempt from that general work requirement, they are now required to participate in the mandatory SNAP employment and training program. And if they choose not to, then they are sanctioned out of that SNAP case. If the SNAP case included just that one individual, then the SNAP case closes altogether. But if it's one adult and there are other adults who remain eligible or other children,
other household members who would remain eligible, then that one adult is removed from the case, but the case may continue. So that is happening, and it's not a voluntary thing. It's a mandatory
Speaker 260
2:52:28
thing now for people who are meeting that general work requirement to be
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:52:33
referred. So you basically have two contracts, one with adult education and one with Northeast College, is my understanding. And
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:52:44
so are people limited to those who are the places that they can go or be referred to as adults?
Are those the only places that they can be referred
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:53:09
to? That is true. at this point in time. That's not good. Okay, thank you. Representative Beck. Yeah, just a quick question. So first, the work requirement. So we're going along and we're going to be notifying people that you're not meeting, I guess.
You're going to tell them that this is the requirement that you're missing or whatever, and then they're going to be looking to go out and do that, hopefully get that requirement. So is there any
Speaker 256
2:53:39
kind of grace period there? So we've already started those notifications. We've been doing town halls in different parts
Speaker 257
2:53:47
of the state, still have one more planned, using social media, and again, in July, we'll start notifying people this requirement is coming.
Speaker 256
2:53:59
Beginning in January, if you're not meeting this requirement or exempt from this requirement, you could lose your health care coverage. So we're starting now to try and get stakeholders
Speaker 257
2:54:10
and beneficiaries alike educated to understand what they need to do to meet the requirements.
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:54:17
good for you guys doing that, but are we seeing where
there's going to be a rush of people, knowing human nature, you know, there's going to be a rush of people come into December
wanting to meet some of these requirements? So
Speaker 251
2:54:36
every month as we go through the cycle, redeterminations are done throughout the entire year. so we start approximately 90 days in advance of their renewal date and that is sending the notice out to them if they have not met the administrative process so we are trying to build in a time period to where they get timely notice and can work on some things before it
becomes renewal but it will not be everyone on january 1 it will it will cycle it will take us an entire year to six months to get through everyone all right thank you okay
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:55:14
I have a lot more questions we're going to save them for another time and because we have some other people that want
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:55:25
so let's go over our the review of our assisted
Speaker 251
2:55:27
living so we can get that off the off the docket for next time thank you and representative Bentley there are two letters in your packet this month to represent the May and the June updates and just
to jump to the finish line we have been in the process of working on the cost report we are hoping for a draft report mid to late June that will go out for public comment this year has run incredibly um more smooth smoother it's been easier because we have not had to um chase down the cost reports the um providers were timely on on submitting those reports so we are working
through that there have been weekly calls with the providers and the contractor that is working on this and then we will put it out on our website and send it to the ALF providers for public comment that will be a 30-day process before we bring their comments in and respond to those and work through the and finish out the process. Thank you very much and there's not very
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:56:31
many people in the room but Lori McDonald is here I'm not sure when I'm going to
see a little McDonald again so I just want to personally thank you for the excessive hours and the absolute awesome care you're given
to my constituents on more times than I can count. So you will be greatly missed, and we're praying for a replacement that can be half as good as you are. So Lori, thank you so much for how much you've taken care of my constituents. And with that, we're dismissed. All right. Thank you for the devoted fuse.
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Discussion of Workforce Implementation and Agency Integration to Assist Arkansans with Job Training and Placement
C. Presentation on Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Waiver Requests and WIOA Combined State Plan [Exhibit C]
D. Overview of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid [Exhibit D]
E. Update of Reimbursement Rates Under the Living Choices Assisted Living Waiver Pursuant to Act 213 of 2022, Section 15 [Exhibits E1-E2]
F. Discussion of Recommendations by Subcommittee
G. Other Business
H. Adjournment
Documents
No documents posted.
Speakers
Speaker 3
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
Speaker 20
Speaker 23
Speaker 25
Speaker 35
Speaker 39
Speaker 40
Speaker 41
Speaker 42
Speaker 46
Speaker 49
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
Speaker 54
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
Representative Kenneth B. Ferguson
Unverified
Speaker 90
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
Speaker 112
Senator Jane English
Unverified
Speaker 122
Speaker 124
Speaker 21
Speaker 17
Speaker 130
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
Speaker 145
Representative Dwight Tosh
Unverified
Speaker 85
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
Speaker 154
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
Speaker 182
Speaker 116
Speaker 186
Speaker 30
Speaker 191
Representative Jeremy Wooldridge
Unverified
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
Speaker 200
Speaker 73
Speaker 89
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
Speaker 210
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
Speaker 217
Speaker 219
Speaker 148
Speaker 229
Speaker 190
Speaker 232
Speaker 188
Speaker 240
Speaker 22
Speaker 251
Speaker 253
Speaker 257
Speaker 256
Speaker 263
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
Speaker 272
Speaker 292
Speaker 293
Speaker 270
Speaker 311
Speaker 312
Speaker 260
Speaker 267
Speaker 324