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
- SliQ live captions
- Model
- SliQ live ASR
- Processing date
- October 2, 2026
Speaker 3
1:40
if everybody will make their way to their seats are about to get started
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:29
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 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 of years ago now so thank you all for being here today and we'll hear from a number of folks that are working hard and 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 appreciate everyone being here
today and hopefully we'll have some good questions so we're starting out this morning with our work with the folks in the department of education so if we could haveRoss White, Tina Moore, hugh Mcdonald, Cody Waits, Janet mann and Maryy Franknklin come to the table I guess uhjanet and Mary you can guys can hold off for a little bit and we'll start with the department of edd department shipy and workforce they've got a great presentation for us and we'll bring you 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 Missy we'll just say that funds will not be using effectively and efficiently for our Kansans that we really were seeing some waste across the state and I think if we can do a much better job of getting some training to our our ourkansas 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 gonna turn it over to all of you and let you start with your presentation if you'll first introduce yourselves and we'll give it to you guys. thank
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
4:20
you. Good morning. my name is Hughmcdonald, Secretary of commerce Cody Wa's executive directororkforce Connections department
Speaker 20
4:25
of commerce Ken Warden commissioner division of higher education Tina Moore, director of workforce development division of higherducation
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
4:41
of the division of career and
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
4:45
technical Education. awesome thank you all so much for being here this morning. let me first begin Hughmcdonald 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 taken on the last couple and a half years
and I guess the the theme eventually will we will get to workforce how it how it connects to the workforce system but 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 uhc 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 Servicesgan organization and into two areas reporting directly to the secretary's position in those two areas are reemployment 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 Doctorurri 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 with there were portions in AEDC there were portions in DWS the old the the office of Skillsvelopment reported directly to the secretary all
those now are within Mr. Waite's organization, the Arkansas Workforce Connection. Secretary Mcdonald you just a second colleagues if you
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
7:19
look in your binders you'll see this presentation forda under today's agenda right under today's agenda you'll see this presentation in your binder
so you can look at it and for some of it's a lot easier to look at that than trying to look at the screen. Sorry sir 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 follow you when we're looking at the pages in front of us so thank you sir and I I apologize for thank you
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
7:45
thank you so we're now in a pos position as Cody Waits will further describe that will detail a requesting the number of waivers from the department of laborbor, 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 wide single statewide strategy and
one board that still retains the flexibility at the local level all those changes have created lots of efficiencies within 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
from60% to25%. we're now we're now understanding what things cost within the old organization and not to mention we're trending we're also getting the right people in the right place and of about 17 different leadership positions and within the division of commerce 12 out of those 17 are new. so moving in the right direction and 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 quarter3 from 2 to quarter3 we've seen significant improvement already measurable skills gains have
gone from 18.47,18.4% to57% mp lo y ment rates of second quarter after exit has gone from 1% to37% again still not where we need to go employment rate fourth quarter after exit has gone from 10% to43% and finally credential attainment rate has gone from 10% to30%. 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 continued to
resolve agency issues as it relates to workforce development. as we've stated we've had a very fragmented and very uncoordinated workforce development programme 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 and geographical structures that also only drive up costs, create confusion for example we have5 regions for DSB11 regions for ARs how many regions for adult edd? Uh5. 5 regions for so there's there's two consistencies there so that's good so 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 I can get the next slides which just lays out the we owe a funding levels for Title I and TitleI. all the weoa Wagner and
and that's includes Wagner Piser as well so as you can see the last four years have been pretty consistent $2021 million every year after year. so let me turn it over to Mr Waits
Speaker 35
12:42
here that we'll get into the details of of starting with the waiver authority thank you Mr.
Speaker 39
12:48
Secretary good morning it's good to be with you couple of things just to point
Speaker 40
12:53
out you know we listed we we received a list of maybe 131415 different questions and
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 of of perhaps
Speaker 41
13:13
programs from the department of Education to the department of laborbor make impacts to us here at the state level the good news is 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 officefice of career and technical Education at the adult at at the federal level you know they've since transitioned that to Department of laborbor we already have adult education within the department of commerce Workforce nections 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 laborbor at the federal level or DHHS I think there's probably strong consensus that it may end up at laborbour 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 a combined we owe a Perkins state plan for the first time in
Speaker 40
14:25
Arkansas's history and so what that means is that you know we had this conversation the commission and I have it 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 weowa state plan which is about a600 ppage document we're doing our best to try to pare that down somewhat so that it's readable. but some of the ways
Speaker 41
14:45
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 forward to in
Speaker 40
14:53
two years is perhaps a more refined and condensed owa 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 laborbor
Speaker 41
15:12
you know there's been some questions around waiver authorities and a lot of questions around the flexibility with waivers and 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 laborbor at the federal level and so when you start to
Speaker 40
15:29
look at the the waiver request that we submitted we submitted 9 and then there's 1/10 1 that's to be
determined which is kind of a a pie in the sky wish list but something we want to
Speaker 41
15:40
put on the radar of the department of laborbor because we think and believe that it would only make us more efficient and more effective in the operation of we owe at a 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 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 would no longer exist if these waivers are approved by the federaleral Department of Labor the state board of of workforcevelopment 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 to3 to move forward with submitting the waiver package to the US Department of Labor but again it provides us great flexibilities in in our ways and and v and also allows us to expend funds of more towards training and supportive services for clients prioritizing client services
reducing administrative and operating expenses and sets itself up for success moving forward and so we'll get into some more of the details around that here shortly but state plan has a regional plan he's setting
Speaker 40
16:48
the state up as a as a kind of a regional area again allows us to have more flexibility with the movement of funds you know
Speaker 41
16:54
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 number4 where you bite 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 that process will remain the same we owe
Speaker 42
17:44
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 we owe 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 weoa funds whether that be workforcePell workforce Challenge whether that
Speaker 41
18:12
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 that individuals is eligible for those funds this would eliminate that requirement and allow us to really focus on serving the individual that walks in our doors obviously working with our partners at DHS 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 day network of affiliates sites in lieu of comprehensive centers right now you have 10
Speaker 42
18:42
comprehensive centers across the state each local workforce development area is required to have a comprehensive center along with that comes a lot of infrastructure funding agreements and
Speaker 41
18:52
a lot of burdensome reporting and tracking down of partners external from kind of state partners such as Joborp and some other functions such as that AAarp and some of these other you know 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 Crintech 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 all that we're renewing and then you may wonder on number7 right 14 youth programme
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 US 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 I block grant you know this was discussed kind of at the federal level when they were you know looking at reforming weowa reauthorizing weowa and thenv under the Make America
Skilledgain which we spoke about maybe a year or so ago to this not this committee buttLC you know and it's really taking the barriers right if you look at title one of Ooa 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 separate ly 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 administrated administrative entities. this would reduce that down to one administrative entity. currently we have 10 planning regions that would go to one planting region right now we have 11 sets of performancec 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 laborbor 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 increase year over year and so we have to negotiate those rates with the federal department of laborbor we then have to negotiate with each local area as it relating a
local board as it relates to their own independent performance and so all the0 local areas you know obviously have an impact on our performance at a 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 in local areas here in the coming weeks we would have had our meeting last week negotiate our performance structure and then we would 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 roughly 20 something members on the state workforce development board additionalitionly 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 oneop operators and we certainly have to have case managers and and and individuals on the front lines that are serving the clients but when you start talking about board directors
and onestop 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 the local workforce boards have so instead of having 10 board directors and 10 onestop operators you're gonna have one board director and perhaps one or two onestop operators instead of instead of 10 and keep in mind you know each one of those contracts for a one stop operator may range from50,000 dollars to75,000 dollars so you can start to see the cost savings that we're incurring there or 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 rung 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 one no wrong door approach the 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 warn no wrong door model enhanced 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
hours 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 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 s 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 in in the list of questions but you know right now again you have 10 boards with and similar I mean the the policies are similar in nature but the way in which they hire an on board is probably different but we would have a consistent on boarding 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 with uhRobert Mcggoo state datata 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 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.
Speaker 46
25:55
upon approval of the waivers from the US Department of yes ma'am on just
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
25:59
a minute we're I'm gonna hold it just I've got a long list of legislators ready to ask you a question so hold off on implementing since we're going to the next page we're gonna hold off right there and get some questions asked if that's OK and I just want to quickly say you know this committee did had an audit done and we found that you know out of the $20 million that we're getting for to you guys there was only like 1.8 spent on training and 1200 individuals trained so I can't tell you how excited I am to see you guys moving using those funds more efficiently and effect
ive ly for our cans and so that being said, since it's representative Rick Beck's birthday we're gonna let him ask
Speaker 49
26:33
the first question. thank you madam chairir 29 yeah 29. I don't know that if that's I usually
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
26:39
like to be the last person so I guess I I get put on the spot because it's my birthday the the question I had it and this is just some concerns and I I'm if 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 we start combining boards and things you you get that not everybody feels like they're being represented that could be a regional thing or that could be across agencies you know different agencies you you you we mentioned that workforce yeah I think the term was it was really scattered across multiple agencies and things like that so just to address what what 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 in the same box there and and move things for I I what you're doing I think is spot on and I I just wanna make sure that we've addressed those
Speaker 40
27:36
issues yeah and here later on in the presentation we'll talk about some regional business councils 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 the 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
28:01
morning a lot of those are at your two year colleges and fourear universities number of them are within your chambers of commerce a number of them are within industry associations and so we've been
Speaker 40
28:11
having conversations with those two year colleges and fourear 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 to the customer to make sure that we keep that local input but internally right when you're
starting to talk about all the services that are provided locally most of those services are provided
Speaker 54
28:33
from within Workforce connections and commerce but obviously with
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
28:38
and through partnerships with DHS and others just
a quick follow up another aspect that I'd written down was as far as local ac access excuse me to these systems you know you know sometimes you get this 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 into a local office or or to go talk to someone at the local board or anything like that so is there any way you could address
Speaker 40
29:09
that issue? yeah we're we're not closing any local offices you know and and when we start talking about the implementation plan a little bit you know the the 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 the
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
29:38
plan youir happy birthday right Senator Sullivan thank you madam chairir and I'm excited about what you're doing and reorganization I think is really good and I wanna have some conversations later on with you so it when you talked about the funds which is the most important thing the legislature does distribute the funds so we're gonna distribute those funds to you then you're going to reallocate those regionally correct well not necessarily so
Speaker 42
30:00
these funds are federal funds this division employment and training withinorkforce connections does not receive any general revenue 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 that they set at the at the national
Speaker 41
30:15
level that firmly looks at things like labor force participation rate and unemployment rates a number of different factors and
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
30:20
so they don't don't want to get take too long but there's a formula you're gonna distribute the funds regionally Did I understand you correctly that
the funds cannot be moved out of that region to another region or did I misunderstand? They can be so and they can't whose approval the approval would exist at
Speaker 41
30:39
the department of commerce. right so Department of Commerce can move
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
30:42
money from one region to another based on based on various factors right and and think about
Speaker 41
30:49
how 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
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
31:05
can put in a statewide workforce development priorities don't want to take too long this is a new area we're getting into we're have some good things going on excited about that I'm really I'm concerned about how that happens so that's not a conversation for now that's a conversation for later on that's prop 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
Representative Kenneth B. Ferguson
Unverified
31:35
thank you madam chairir. just a couple of quick questions. I think you've answered one of my questions in terms of the services but just for clarification this waiver would will have no more local boards correct that's correct we have just one if approved and we'll just have one statewide board was a local boards normally would have representation in input from some of our local mayors and
some of our county judges I guess I'm concerned aboutr 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? correct right
Speaker 41
32:19
and and actually if you there's another waiver that we have as it relates to the state board composition flexibility and as part of
Speaker 42
32:25
that state board composition flexibility waiver we hope to ensure that through that process we could make sure that we have kind of regions of the state that are captured on the workforce development boardard at a statewide level plus leveraging the regional business councils in the air to
Speaker 41
32:38
provide that voice to the customer from the employer's side
Representative Kenneth B. Ferguson
Unverified
32:41
one final question by eliminating those state boards locally how many of those how many positions are you gonna save or how many positions will be eliminated across the state locally we have a proposed number I don't know if Eddie or Angela want to speak
Speaker 40
32:53
to that or we can send it to you after this if you'd like I mean you could please send it through staff and I think you said
Representative Kenneth B. Ferguson
Unverified
33:02
that some of those positions and some of those individuals would get an opportunity for reemployment
centralized level that's what you said yeah we
Speaker 42
33:12
would hope that you know because we're going to maintain those local offices and that local presence we we we plan and and hope that we will be able to hire some of those individuals that are doing the work today currently they they're doing that work as an employee of an economic development district or as a local board and we would hope
Representative Kenneth B. Ferguson
Unverified
33:28
to bring them on our team so based on this waiver there'll be a minimum amount of positions lost across the state locally minimal
Speaker 90
33:37
all right thank you madam chair thank you Representative
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
33:40
Ferguson uhpresentative Bott thank you madam chairir. I'm
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
33:44
over here 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 in 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 that the paper mill or at the chicken plant or at warrehauser they work really close with those people they have good working relationships when we move this to littlettleRock 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 umpresentative Rrie is that they're probably more aligned with northwest Arkansas and 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 thank you umpresentative Vaughtug yeah we
Speaker 41
35:22
have those same working relationships as well whether it's through Industry nect which is we'll we'll discuss
Speaker 40
35:27
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 and they'll be a part of
Speaker 41
35:37
those regional business councils you know it it somebody mentioned it earlier maybe it
waspresentative entley around the fact that you know when you look at the total dollar 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 and supportive services you know our goal is really work with those with those businesses ident ify 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 ofkillsvelopment where we provide funds and direction and connection to the various programs within the agency and I have
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
36:22
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 selected it would go
Speaker 39
36:33
through the same process as it does today through boards and commissions
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
36:38
ok 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 gonna 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 chairir. Mr. Wa, why don't you finish your presentation and they might answer some questions
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
37:37
that kind of stopped you early so I think if you s talk about the implementation might help some of the some of the qualms of
people because I think we're not getting the final picture of where how we're going to do the regionals and I think now the and also to Representativeottt's question right now we are sending money to those boards correctly and they're not being spent on training a lot of it has been spent on bricks and mortar or whatever at administrative costs so we actually have more money to spend on training individuals so if you'll finish that up and I I will I'll get everybody's questions asked but I think with you finish ing your presentation we'll help answer some of the questions and
Speaker 40
38:11
we'll we'll finish up. thank you thank you so implementation plan we
submitted our state plan last month and so the
Speaker 41
38:17
US 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 close out if the waiver's approved in august that will take some time so it's not gonna happen overnight but we'll have some targeted scope monitoring reviews that are done. I will be initiated which look at case files and and and expenditure sample reviews and things of that nature as we would do in a
normal marin Turing 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 of understanding infrastructure agreements executed and then obviously you know before we would take ownership of a of a local board per se or a local area all those findings will be resolved similar to how uhpresentative Vauugt's question was around kind of the relationship with local employers and there's a question around our alignment with economic development
umarkansas Industry Connect was a division that used to exist within an 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 healthcare 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 highlevel 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 supportsclin O'Neal and the executive or the economic development commission on workforce or on economic development projects and so we're very closer 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 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 gonna 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 we're really proud of the the work that we're doing with Secretary mann and her team trying to move
Speaker 40
41:01
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. Mcgo and and others
Speaker 41
41:11
but launch for job seekers is live launched 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 of2026 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 employerdriven 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 1000 of that is going
to train CDL truck drivers and and not to say that we don't need to be training truck drive r s 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 gonna take funds away from transportation just means that we're gonna prioritize funds for other industries as well once you get past transportation and healthcare 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 training people for jobs in the manufacturing sector at a statewide level for tech jobs we
trained we spent about $10,000 and so our efforts really believe that we're going to increase the amount of funds available to close to6 to7 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 theuture fit initiative and the governor's reducing recidivism initiative and so we have that that pretty streamlined turn the page
Speaker 40
43:13
so just to recap on the the state plan and just the presentation in general is really to deliver consistent highqual services statewide
Speaker 41
43:23
reducing our administrative and operational expenses of which are hovering around70+% right now we have to get that down strengthen employer partnerships I can't tell you how many times I've I've gone to employers and asked them around their engagement with local boards and it's and it's not what you would expect it to be expanding ases through virtual and mobile services integra ting Perkins and and strengtheningcT and youth career pathways leveraging AI and and data to drive smarter decisions and building a talent pipeline that meets the
needs of today's and tomorrow's employers. thank
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
43:59
you sir answering questions we'll go back to questions but think there were some things in there
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
44:07
that might help answer colleagues' questions. right Representative Crawford thank you madam chair good morning I guess it's still morning morning a couple of questions and you mentioned restore hope so did restore hope lose tann of
funds and now they go through you guys to get their funding how
Speaker 112
44:29
does that work? I would have to defer to DHS for that I think they'll be up
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
44:33
here later maybe that you can ask the my question right my other is and it may be somewhere but I'm very interested in where the waiver request talking about the youth can you ex po und 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 it
Speaker 41
44:52
well I'll get Angelaooker 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 is 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's certain services that have to be provided for youth and so
providing requesting this waiver will allow us to have flexibility around all 14 of those youth elements
Speaker 54
45:31
but we'd be happy to you know get you information as it relates to the 14 youth elements
Senator Jane English
Unverified
45:45
OK Senatorli 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 we owe and
Perkins so how do these 14 elements fit in with whatever is in the Perkins plan How how does that all align well again I can't really speak to the exact that something
Speaker 39
46:07
ss can talk about? Well, the14 youth elements are
Senator Jane English
Unverified
46:16
to speak to the broader that one of the things that that find and I'm sure you do too 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 how a a system works how would it be possible for those 14 elements whatever they are to interact with the whatever Perkins's got or department of Education has in that plan or is that a is that a question you can answer? Senator Englishinwarden commissioner division of higher education. the 14 elements
Speaker 122
46:59
are part of the weoa waiver request what I will say that excites me most about this alignment is that we've we've always or since I've been here before I would say that we have done work to align the two but there's a difference between being aligned
Speaker 124
47:14
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 edd
includingcTE to make sure that we are tracking and doing things together and writing funding not duplicating funding what excites me most about this whole process and I think what is the the the the game changer for this group is 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 weowa 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 I we literally have campuses that say the bureaucracy are so great and there's so many so few students getting trained that we're not gonna do the work cause I can't hire someone to afford to attractive bureaucracies as we reduced those and those money
goes to trained 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 and wherever their facility is whether that's in a paper mill in the southwest or in a you know in a steel mill in northeast or you know it it whatever the case may be so that's what excites me most we are we are I could not be more a bigger fan of this. I just know and see what we're already doing and how much money this is going to put in student's
pockets and reducing bureaucracy so that we can train more folks to your 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 in high schools in K1el it's a required component if you're going to ask for Perkins funds in this state you must and you're an education industry you must point to your higher ed partner if you're hire or K12 group if you're a K12 group you point to your hire partner vice versa and now we're
going to do the same with we owe and how that aligns with the equipment we're spending and where the need is Cody mentioned 3000 $0 combined spent in manufacturing and what was the other healthcare but tech excuse me tech and tech tech and manufacturing30,000 dollars out of how many millions?1.9 million spent training people that is absolutely ridiculous and what other industry sector with this 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 gonna see moving forward but this is a huge step in getting these waivers done and and the commitment that I see from our colleagues in commerce and and on both sides of the aisle just I'm I'm really proud of it. I don't know if
Speaker 21
50:21
I answered your question directly but there's a good thing you have and guess
Senator Jane English
Unverified
50:26
that's my 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 that5 we owe a programs our 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 got to talk about is how do we put add
everything together because there's some really good stuff going on and we can't let it be off by itself so thank you thank
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
51:23
you senator Secretary Mcdonald do you have something that you want
Speaker 17
51:26
to add to that just just wanted to elaborate maybe on Commissioner Warden's comment, I used to be an employer and
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
51:37
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 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 Cody's earlier comment they they struggle
to 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 were actually trying to better engage employers to be involved to have the flexibility to make sure that their priorities are actually part of the state plan
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
52:33
correct one thing before we take another question. really we've received $15 million to all
these local wards and only 1 point8 or 1.9 if that was spent on training individuals and of the 1.9 million only30 $1000 was spent on on or say 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 federal it 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. OK, Senator Irwin thank you
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
53:13
so you may have just said this but the 1el million roughly the fi5 million the rest of that was spent on administrative costs is that correctut outside of the one point something for training yes technically I think it's 14 million and then it's
Speaker 41
53:26
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 within the supported services yeah within that 1.9 million right you have actual training costs that might be prayed to an institution of higher ed or a private career training provider then you also have things like
gas cards child care assistants things of that nature that's kind of the supportive services pieces sometimes it may be rental assistance was
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
53:51
there any audit of the effectiveness of sending it to the higher ed do we know what we got for if if they it was sent to higher edd. If they
come you mean if they like completed their program of study and things of that nature they completed
Speaker 54
54:03
the training program mean we we tracked that data and we have to report on it and that's kind
Speaker 41
54:09
of what comes out of our federal performance requirements too is like the second quarter employment rates fourth quarter
Speaker 54
54:16
employment rates median earnings we track all that
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
54:19
data OK I mean the reason why I ask is that higher ed sometimes really isn't geared towards what industry needs as employers. and
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
54:32
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 wait4 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 I just want
to make sure that when you're doing all of this reorganization that we're highly focused on the needed areas for our companies as far as it's regards training wise I mean there's nothing against training all kinds of different workforce issues but at one point and I'm gonna make me 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 cybertech technology and AI I mean so I need to know ok 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 and I have more questions if you don't mind I will just say briefly that
Speaker 122
56:38
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 we reported the median and we could demonstrate effectively the amount of money
spent but the 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 maybe less than4 years if if the if the employer will entertain the hiring of that and we work on that daily and and and every year to try to enhance
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
57:23
those efforts I mean I appreciate that.gain, 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 the other questions the elle administrative entities do we have names of those? Yeah they're essentially they're the 10 local workforce development
Speaker 40
57:40
boards plus the state OK and those are the economic development
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
57:44
some of them are 8 of the10 local boards are
Speaker 40
57:47
the economic development districts with the economic development
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
57:55
folks in e of them and then when you say there was 11 sets of performance accountability and 11 sets of board policies where those performance accountabilities and board policies approved at the state level? Yeah well they have to be approved at a local level and then I think
Speaker 41
58:07
they have to abide by the state kind of parameters that we set as a statewide level and some of those things are federally required as well for them to have but the oferce was basically
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
58:16
the one that said yes you can do it yes you can do it so OK. that's interesting to me. OK and
then when it comes to the makeup of the
one board are y'all going to have to create that legislatively the the state workforce development boardard is in place
Speaker 41
58:35
today depending upon the waiver if it's approved by the department of laborbor we would have to look at maybe how we restructure that and then yes that would go through a legislative
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
58:44
process OK so at that point that's when those folks of us
from rural Arkansas have the ability to say, OK, 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 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 we have an appropriation for the
Speaker 42
59:16
amount of money we receive from the feds but outside
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
59:20
of that no there's no detailed approval process for the money today OK thank you
Representative Dwight Tosh
Unverified
59:28
thank you 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's31 of them in the state 28 of them are located in our high schools service and all the high schools in those regions and I applaud
you guys Mr Secretary and Cody I appreciate y'all working with us in a formula that you came up with to be able to the 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 there any way anything what this discussion today are those uh31 facilities in any way affected by what's going on here at the federal level they're they they could
Speaker 85
1:00:46
be they're not directly impacted by the way they're themselves however I would
Speaker 42
1:00:51
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 weowa
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 we owea 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 of7 million dollars 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 uhRoss 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 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
1:02:48
that's what makes best use of taxpayers' fund whether it's it's federal or state so we work to do that and we do have opportunities where that happens up but there's muchro for improvement thank you
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
1:03:03
thank you Thank you, ir. Representative meeks thank you thank you for for your time this morning. so I've got two quick questions Senator Irvin already asked one of mine so that beat us along here. first off I just want to applaud you for what you're doing when I ran
the legislation create the data chief data officer in 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,2 years,3 years. what are we thinking there? Yeah probably no longer than a year I think
Speaker 41
1:03:43
some of that just depends on the close out process so it's going to be somewhat fluid but
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
1:03:49
probably 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 we're 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 this opportunity could help us bring new
Speaker 17
1:04:38
investment and new business to the state. Yeah, absolutely. I think when when I'm sitting across the table from
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
1:04:44
from businesses workforce is always the number 1, #2
Speaker 17
1:04:52
concern of theirs and and I would I would
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
1:04:59
say that our entire workforce 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 through 1el but
we want to make sure that we're meeting the needs of cust of of the employers they're ultimately hiring the products that come out of higher ed so and Ken and I have talked about this a lot about working together what Ken described earlier as the ROI of of of degrees higher ed degrees that came out of this process so we're we're making the right steps as a state in fact, there was recent
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 tiot talent pipeline index so we're listening to listening to the employer's higher ed as what is listening to the employers and we're designing not just to your associate's degrees but short term noncredit courses as well to
Speaker 35
1:06:30
meet their needs and then a last question you brought
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
1:06:32
another one to mind and can you may be the better one to answer this one of the barriers to our citizens being able to take advantage of these degrees and just the cost of getting the degree because the cost of higher ed as we all know is extremely expensive. and we've not in 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 gonna help fix the affordability issue for students
to be able to take advantage of what you're trying to do here
Speaker 154
1:07:06
and that's my final question. So I will say that it it boils down to the $14 million only
Speaker 122
1:07:11
1.9 million being spent on training 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 is or frivolous but are things that were not directly benefiting a student and an employee to 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 quick thing and you
Speaker 40
1:07:52
know I like real world examples you know just this last week we were having a conversation with the academies of central
Speaker 41
1:07:58
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 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
Speaker 23
1:08:33
wrapparound services the wheel of funds in addition to paying for the training, being able to pay for the wrapround 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 to3,000 dollars from being $800 prior and IT specifically is one of the highman areas so we have so many shortterm trainings whether it's on the professional skills
training also known as noncredit 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 cybersecurity, 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 weoa funds being applied to those students being able to get to school to be able to pay for childcare those type of things that will open up a lot of opportunity as well.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:09:37
Colleagues we have another presentation I really want us to get to to this and talk about workforce e and all those things so I'm gonna 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 or two year colleges and workforcepa and those things and DhS as well so if you guys can limit it to
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
1:09:59
one question, I'd appreciate it and with that uhpresentative beatty. thank you madam chair. my my question is is really going back to reiterate what whatpresentative Vault and
uhent Irvin mentioned and that's that board composition I mean I applaud what you guys are are doing going from 208 board members down to 20 my concerns are maybe if you can you can provide us with a more detailed plan of the first part of your presentation on the organization administration and how you're going to select and and and 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 or how you're going to do that but I think that would reassure us on that side because that I'm not certain we're gonna lose a whole lot of voice in South Arkansas so along those lines I I think that would that would make some of us have a a a better comfort level so I I would like to see just a presentation dealing with the organization and administration and and in 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, will make everything better so thank you Did you guys want to respond to
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:11:35
that before we go to our next question or
Speaker 39
1:11:37
yeah yeah thank you number one you know there's a board
composition structure today that exists we can share that
Speaker 41
1:11:45
and then you know when and if the waiver gets approved I think that's winterly wind we'll probably take a deeper dive into kind of what that composition could look like and happy to come back
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:11:57
and present on it thank you sir and we will
also have regional boards as well for folks
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
1:12:04
to have input on uhpresentative Ennett thank you madam chair. I'd like to s 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 their resources like customize employment and job coaches feels operational gap it's a great question you know vocational rehab services is
Speaker 40
1:12:32
title o of Woa so they're a core partner in the workforce development system they are office sometimes in the same locations as we are
Speaker 42
1:12:45
with title one 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 nect, formerly known as existing businessinessource 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 jobbin Arkansas jobbin 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 so yeah thank you uhpresentative warren thank you madam chair
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
1:13:46
all right so my comments are over here right my comment's gonna 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 twoyear college has come
together the the whole community we've had work fairres 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 in my I've got a two part question but I've heard30 million being spent and I've heard 14 million being spent but the same number of 1.9 million is all that was going
Speaker 182
1:15:08
for training how much which which is the correct number I'm not familiar with the30
million dollars number so it's 14 million
Speaker 40
1:15:20
yeah we we received 16 we passed down 14 million of that 1.9 last year was spent on training
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
1:15:26
and support services so how do you and I'm ok 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 it 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 we have put every single graduate from that welding program to work we just got a6 million dollars 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's absent the workforce development programs in our communities how are you gonna work with them thank you very familiar with the grant, very familiar with
Speaker 40
1:16:33
the welding facility chamber coal the entire team there worked closely with National Park College too the same way in which we do
Speaker 42
1:16:40
today those services are still gonna be offered those programs are gonna be offered we're still gonna have staff in hot spprings at the local office there the
staff's just gonna be a state employee versus instead of a a west central planning andlopment district employee and so those programs will not go away the funds are not gonna 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 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 hott Springs to help highlight what others should be doing around the state well I've just never seen the
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
1:17:20
emphasis on that and I will also say that 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 and I think that's part of this
Speaker 41
1:17:40
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 by67 million dollars annually and so by us
being able to have more funds available we're able to help serve more people
Speaker 42
1:17:54
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 so we haven ' t really talked a lot about is the fact that under the you know make Americakilled good model 10% of all we owa funds are supposed to be used on apprenticeships and we're we're one of the leaders of 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 are to be
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
1:18:22
generated by this cost saving measure thank you because that's we've been trying
Speaker 124
1:18:28
to figure out how to fund that locally I think that changes and increases in workforce challenge was gonna help the short term training also with learns and access you know 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 scholarships that they will stay in school and go through a technical center go to the welding program at Nationalark 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 but because it lowered their GPA. they've been discouraged from going to the national park and finishing out some taking class 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 of the labor and I think Representative meeks, Senator Irvin both mentioned we have all these degrees at all different
levels and 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 there're more short term direct to work and so I think the systemic changes and not just the one but with the changes are learned the changes in the waiver all these other things this change of workforce challenge we're creating an entire roaming the entire system not just one piece and that's I
think what this conversation with the two agencies how that benefits us most. thank you very much ahead Secretary Mcdonald and
Hugh Mcdonald
Unverified
1:20:04
springs region has got such a strong workforce development connection and focus right now that's that is the 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 having creating a
separate workforce development boardard 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 I will plug the workforce challenge
Speaker 191
1:20:37
again. I just pulled it up and looked national Park College, the welding
Speaker 23
1:20:41
program is on workforce challenge and approved for up to $3000 for that training. thank you allgate Representativewooldergen again I just need to limit y'all all to
Representative Jeremy Wooldridge
Unverified
1:20:54
one question thank you 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 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 gonna keep all the centers open you're gonna keep all the employees how do you free up
enough to add6 million or $8 million back into the actual training sector of that like what what are you freeing up? well we're not we're
Speaker 41
1:21:31
not keeping all the employees right so there's gonna be some some headcount reduction there in terms of the case managers and and and kind of that level but then when you start looking at the oneop 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 is you know
Speaker 42
1:21:51
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
1:21:59
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 you madam chair if you would be
Representative Jeremy Wooldridge
Unverified
1:22:19
ok with it, I would love for them to share that with staff and send that to the members of the committee
specifically break down on each of these positions what that cumulative savings would be and where you're coming up with that6 to8 million that you're going to reinvest thank you for the question. and again I will that's how I'm happy to
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:22:36
do that but also well there's 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 sol for your input and for being here. Ourpresentative Barnes thank you madam over here since you all already have your
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:22:56
paradigm of how you're trying to form
your new model and those people that are gonna lose jobs. I'm wondering what criteria are you gonna use to to decide who goes and who stays
Speaker 200
1:23:09
Anything else that oh sorry thank you I think there
Speaker 73
1:23:12
will be a similar process that we would
Speaker 42
1:23:15
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
Speaker 89
1:23:27
gonna post those jobs and we're gonna interview this team that that'll be you know applying for that and we'll
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:23:33
select the candidates that best fit the needs of the job. my question is who goes you're gonna be letting people go I want what criteria are
Speaker 42
1:23:40
you gonna use we we are not letting the the the the staff at the local boards as we close these organizations out as we close those subwords 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 100% of them but a percentage of them.
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:23:58
so those local boards would that be a criteria that they will use to release whoot decide who was being released.
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:24:13
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. Whites and Miss Cook made about education child or childcare and
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 understand that I heard both of you comment about childcare this childcare that you all provide with the funds that you administer is it 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 our money to pay for childcare. Now I know that's a separate issue from what y'all are talking about but do they tie together? I think they do I'm not familiar
Speaker 40
1:25:17
with these funds SRA ABC I'm not I'm not familiar with that but she sounds
Speaker 41
1:25:20
like a perfect candidate that should be visiting with our team to understand what services we could provide her
Speaker 42
1:25:25
if she's eligible underneath the the rules of WIOa we oa she could have that childcare cost
Speaker 40
1:25:32
subsidized by our agency so we'd be happy to connect with her actually and try to figure
Speaker 191
1:25:38
out a solution to that and Tinaore Miss Cook works with Cody as well. so also in
Speaker 23
1:25:44
addition to that we have the careerathways initiative that might be something that you look into cause career pathways initiative funds wrapparound services as well. So there are there are multiple opportunities for students to access these wrapround services.'d be happy to share that information as well. Who may I have her reach out to? I
Speaker 210
1:26:03
would say let's I'll catch up with you after this and then I'll get
Speaker 42
1:26:07
you a point of contact and I think that's what 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
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:26:37
and get the information so this woman is working in healthcare so perhaps she could gain additional training so that she could get a better paying job and then would not need to have her childcare subsidized if she could be elig ible for any of
Speaker 41
1:26:48
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 childcare all those things are on the table depending on her level of eligibility. thank you very much thank you thank you again this
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:27:04
really highlights exactly what we're trying to do because there's so much available and people have no idea
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:27:10
that it's theirs Senator English yeah I think at 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 as are possible we need to figure out a way to help our our citizens be able to access these programs because we've got some great stuff and and opportunities for people we just need to figure out one door so that they only have to be to be touched one dime thank you and I would just say how do we and representative
Speaker 42
1:27:57
meeks probably like this how how do we leverage the data systems that we have in place to help navigate that client to the appropriate source awesome thank
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
1:28:05
you all very much Representative Rye Yesir good to see y'all this morning 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
panto. Now what you got in Mar rey you got AU markkre and then you got the the workforce up in in in Blaville 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 Marree Taranza and other schools that they 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 coll get to training up at in Bloville and for for Barl and Osceola Representativeright thank you. I think this is
Speaker 217
1:29:13
probably a situation I'd love to just catch up with
Speaker 42
1:29:18
you and get some of my team members together and kind of talk through and understand better but certainly there's possibly an opportunity but we need to move more details so let's let me follow up with you after this that'll work. OK thank you thank you sir.r for
Speaker 219
1:29:29
letting me in you're welcome thank you that's what it's all about Senator Irwin Irvin sorry.
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:29:37
thank you just a quick question. so the training money that you were talking about so would you then be able to also fund the Arkansas rural Preceptorshipgrame. which is a training for medical students to try to get them to practice medicine and 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
Speaker 42
1:30:11
don't know that Wioa would be the best source of funding for that but I think that's certainly a conversation we should we should be having
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:30:19
and happy to do that with you well mean your your answer is we're 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 communityy starting the practice which then provides more jobs your return on your investment actually is probably incredibly more greater. I mean probably greater if you did something
like fund a program like that which is legislature passed in actct727. I don't disagree with you what I'm saying is is this
Speaker 42
1:31:17
fund the the individuals in that probably wouldn't be eligible for this kind of weoa funding because of the eligibility requirements that are established at a federal level which is why I'm just saying is I think
Speaker 41
1:31:26
there's an opportunity for us to work with you on that this was probably isn't the best avenue for it Representative Bott thank you madam chairir. I'll be quick. I
Representative DeAnn Vaught
Unverified
1:31:38
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 $2 million 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 gonna receive at the state level for the fees and services and so forth and so on Well I mean the the funds have to
Speaker 39
1:32:06
go to those local areas by law so the way that the areas are structured and the way the
Speaker 54
1:32:12
federal government kind of does the formula those same funds will be maintained in those local areas so our our contribution would maintain
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:32:21
the same at statewide. thank you all right, I appreciate the discussion that's the end of questions and we do have a presentation from
Speaker 23
1:32:31
Tina on workforcee correct? well it's my understanding to to just come prepared to answer your questions about that we did send some electronic documents for your review. so we do not have a formal
Speaker 148
1:32:39
presentation. I'm happy to speak to it but do not
have slides on it. um, whichever you prefer you could speak to
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:32:46
I think everybody if you look you got a handout here for a lot of
I got to go to NCl workforce conference not too long ago and talked about workforce ell and this I think if you could just give us a a few minutes for the rest of my colleagues to kind of hear on that withRoss and them on that what's going to be helpful and workforce challenge as well those two so I'll I'll just speak to those a little bit if you guys were
looking you've got a handout on your desk on both those topics thank you. OK sure
Speaker 23
1:33:14
so the handout that we've provided is from a webinar that we had for our higher ed institutions to provide an overview of workforce ell. SoorkforcePell is in something that has been called for for decades for the Pell grant so the traditional Pell grant that we're all familiar with that's needsbas has been extended to short term programs including noncredit programs. they do have to meet certain criteria the guardrails are are very stringent. They must be in the
clock hour side 150 clock hours but no more than599 clock hours oncece you hit600, you get into the territory of regular Pell grants they must be at least 8 weeks but less than 15 weeks of instruction. so it's very narrow parameters of what qualify for workforce pill it also can be on the credit side the equiviv equivalent of that so short term training they still have to be 8 weeks because of this in Arkansas and
nationally we've been to multiple meetings in DC about this we're part of a cohort with the national governor's 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 well that's come up today. CDl fits within the number of hours but it doesn't fit with the the
number of instructional weeks it doesn't take 8 weeks to go through a Cdl program. So, Cdl does not qualify. We look a lot of folks thought that maybe certified nursing assistants would be a good opportunity. c andA programs on the noncredit side for clock hours typically are around 90'clock hours. well that's not gonna 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 eightweek program which many of our institutions are doing that anyway taking semester programs and putting it in 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 workforcePell there's also just like Doctor Warden mentioned that we're looking at return on investment of Arkansas training across our colleges and universities from short term training through degrees will workforcePell has built in different mechanisms for that. first of all there's the seysey rule70% of students must complete the program within 150150% completion time. time to completion. So if a program was 8 weeks they have to
complete that program within 1el weeks to be counted. also students must meet a70% threshold for employment70% 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 as a student must be able to show3 3 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 workforcePell 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 that it is led by the governor's office or their designee. the division of higher edd 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 o 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 pill 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 for a student up to close to4,000 dollars because Pell grant's being determined on student need a student may qualify for, you know,100% of a Pell grant or they may qualify for as low as 10% 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 over7,000 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 isorkforcePell. any questions on that before we talk about workforce challenge. I think
Speaker 229
1:38:40
Doctor Warden may want to add something I'll just say to bullet down you
Speaker 124
1:38:45
know we've been asking for workforce ell and and waiting on it to come for probably 15 years or more
Speaker 122
1:38:51
that I can remember at least 15 years ago thinking how
workforceell's 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 or two,5 years from now as they massage and tweak workforce pel it's going to become a better product the fact of the matter is it's what if you're an institution and you're a student
and it's better for the student and better for the institution if you just go through the standarde process than to do all the hoops and the things to to be eligible for workforcee so don't wanna 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 you know it'll help us
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:39:49
as constituents reach out for know a little bit more what's going on with Pell so hopefully we'll see some improvements in the
short so you want to go over CTE
Speaker 190
1:40:00
as well a little bit I'm sureRoss does let me highlight workforce
Speaker 23
1:40:04
challenge a little bit because we are actually even more excited about workforce challenge and the opportunities that students will have with workforce challengeen thanks to legislation and access where the amount was increased from 800 to up to3000 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
highdeman areas of IT construction trades advanced manufacturing, healthcare 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 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 1200 programs around 1250 total programs were approved 150 of those were from our two year colleges and universities that are public.9 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. of those out of those programs we had75 total providers represented36 were our public two and four year institutions two were private colleges and universities and37 were the private career education training providers or eligible trainee 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 noncredit training they may have a certificate of proficiency or technical certificate or even 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 it's
really quite cumbersome to get on the workforce pill list. so I'll pass it to rosselestin
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:42:43
one has questions one of the things that we need to rec say is that there is no income guidelines to these workforce challenge unlike the workforce e anybody can apply for these scholarships for these programs which is a a wonderful thing absolutely
Speaker 23
1:42:58
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 workforcePell one really excellent thing about workforceell is bachelor holder bachelor degree holders are eligible for workforcePell where a regular ell if you have a bachelor's you're not eligible for regular pill 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 for for pell and get that short
Speaker 232
1:43:42
term workforce training. thank you madam Chair's 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 postsecondary institutions that are Perkins eligible. those federal dollars when we moved to this combined plan. so right now we have two separate state plans we have a Wiowa plan and
we have a Perkins plan and Perkins is 100% around building workforce talent within K-12 and postsecondary and then a we have a 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 and the schools that were participating in those being heavily K-1el 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 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 American consortia 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 the 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 Mcdonald and Cody mentioned I'm gonna 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 we we owe 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 and really meaningful ways that benefit the Arkansas workforce ecosystem and I'm not sure who said it earlier but then retaining talents in our community that is the conversation I have on a regular basis with our K12 and then especially our postsecondaryries 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 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 postsecondary and that deeper connection of pathway. when we see those opportunities as
especially we graduate the class of 20 28 I mean that's the 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've been able to achieve more workforce readiness and ready for that enlistment and enrollment employment 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 when a
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:47:06
businesses as far as community colleges and that what you're doing so how are we
connecting with industry at this point if
Speaker 124
1:47:14
you could so will say that that local voice that has been mentioned I think Representative Voug mentioned that and some others is is important not just in Wiowa but in to our community
Speaker 122
1:47:24
colleges and everything else and I will say that having served on a weiO board I think there's more and better opportunities for local voice than just the than just the local weoa 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 others but in the best case the colleges I led we 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 were going and
Speaker 124
1:48:00
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 LittleRock but how do we create
a system where we value that we build that so that the 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
Speaker 122
1:48:27
industry partners once they get someone that's fundamentally sound then creates different schemes but if there's different local locavore 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 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 the university or the collegeleve board of advisors and other things that go on the other thing is part and parcel of what we're doing with this our
Speaker 124
1:49:00
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 and vice versa and I'll
Speaker 23
1:49:19
add one thing to that you may recall from the governor's workforce strategy mentioning talent pipeline management through the US chamber it's just a 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 Doctor Warden 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 the employer so not only have we done that through talent popline management and several cohorts in our state have gone through that with a lot of support from Arkansas Community collegeleges and Kala Waters. In addition, our state has had 8 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 microcredentials 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 microcredentials 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 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 and launch employers can see exactly what it means when it says that the student completed this microcredential or this technical certificate or this degree at a certain institution. One last thing is we've
Speaker 124
1:50:58
also started some work with the last two weeks we received notice that we were successful in a grant application for CTO connecting talentsportun and through this we're working with the folks at AR Data and launched to do
Speaker 122
1:51:10
what we call skills parsing so we're going into some general education courses and a pilot projects or
your for your a lot of people say well why do I need to take comp one? What am I going to learn there to help me do my job. but 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's learning and then also better informed students better informed sto employers better informed 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 as
part of your program but the skills that are gonna make it more relevant to you so it's not this you have to make this abstract you know 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. that's great thank
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:52:06
you a quick question I'll get to Senator Irvin how many referrals
for education or training or do community colleges receive from DHS programs a workforce solution programs or others do you guys get any
Speaker 124
1:52:20
I will say there are opportunities where we have relationships between the local DHF's offices and community college but I would say more times than not it's the 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 DHfHFHS 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 edd and community
colleges or community colleges back to DHS or vice versa when we get rid of some of this bureaucracies and get down to some of the intensive case management that we need
Speaker 122
1:53:00
I think those local relationships are very important and we're trying to create that system that encourages the local collaboration
Speaker 188
1:53:05
without all the weeds of the bureaucracies that's unnecessary and costly. thank you sir Senator
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:53:12
Irvin thank you and I I appreciate that and applaud
that. I want you to understand I I think
that's really critically important and and one question is
were those administrative entities, did they go through legislative audits did did legislative audit ever audit any of those administrative entities that you're eliminating you mean on the
Speaker 188
1:53:39
weoa side? the workforce that's not the
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:53:43
whichever one I mean the the elle administrative entities under your waiver package so
Speaker 240
1:53:51
that that would be under that would be under Secretary Mcdonaldc Cody so that
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:53:56
that would be better directed that was just a question forgot to ask and then on the eligibility I think side I just had a follow up of of what that eligibility criteria is cause whether you're a student at a two year college a four year college or a medical school or pharmacy school you're still 00 income based. So I don't know if that's referred to as incomebased at the when the when the answer was eligibility so I
Speaker 124
1:54:21
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 weowa training program. I was a dislocated worker in a millennia, a different millennia but and was retrained as an automotive technician and that's how I got into higher ed and so this this pro this this process when it works is a very good process and it's a hand up and it was for me and for a lot of people I
Speaker 122
1:54:48
can attest to that personally. I 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 get a student into
Speaker 23
1:55:06
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 weO programs but we can talk with Cody and and his team and you can get back to make about sure
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:55:19
because I didn't want there to be some assumption that a medical student was
Speaker 23
1:55:25
wealthy because they're not so they think that zero income they probably more
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:55:33
program related than student eligibility related but we'll get with them and get back 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
Speaker 23
1:55:47
give you just one example of of 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 hospitalspital because Children's hospitalspital wants to be able to send their workers through workforce training to upskill and you know progress up that career ladder and they have a 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
challengellenge 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 around the state you're probably familiar with the officefice 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 officefice of Skills
Development and they can pay up to75% 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 to75% directly to the employer for the cost of that customized training so we're working with employers to really just find sources of funding to upskill and that and that includes all hospitals
Speaker 22
1:57:27
I don't know that all hospitals I mean I'm not
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:57:31
personally working with all hospitals but you could do that to employers right you say you reach out to employers. My question is are when you say employer does that also include healthcare businesses entities, hospitals you said children's hospital I don't know if they reach out to you or vice versa but my question I my hope is that you're reaching out and viewing and seeing healthcare as a huge
sector of our economy 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 of that hospitals require employer employees from every different aspect. so a lot
of times I feel like we're 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 irronworks 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 I hope that you're talking to hospitals as employers as well that's thank you thank you and our workforce challenge
Speaker 23
1:59:28
and I don't have the percentage I'd have to
go back and and calculate it and see but so many of our programs that were submitted were for healthcare and not just nursing but other forms of healthcare as well because I mean you have a an entire, I mean ecosystem just within healthcare itself so thank you thank you all so much for being here today and I wish we had more time because I have really
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:59:51
have 8 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 mann come to the table and Miss Lourri whoever she wants to bring with her to discuss some things on Snap and all those things as well so
right thank you all for being here today so we would just love you to give us an update on the Kimm 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 there.
Speaker 251
2:00:57
Thank you. good morning. I think our or good afternoon uhjanet mann DHS secretary.
Speaker 253
2:01:06
Good morning. I'm Mary Franklin, director of the division of county operations for DHS. thank you y'all. welcome to
Speaker 257
2:01:18
proce Good morning. Representative Bentley. I think the first thing that you mentioned was could you possibly move your
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:01:22
fight a little bit forward. thank you for thank you Mary is that better much better you wanted to talk about
Speaker 257
2:01:28
snap accuracy and what we are doing to help improve the accuracy rate. all right I will be glad to do that. We
we are say three quarter 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 at7.85% snap payment error rate that's above6. we need to get below6 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% 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% I believe. we finished federal fiscal 25 and we are waiting for Eines to send out their final
determination of all the state's accuracy rates that usually comes in June so it could be any day now but what we reported is our final error rate to FNS for federal fiscal 25 was 8.32%. now that could change a little bit based on federal reviews and their determination but at least this week we were at7.85 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 startsoctober 1 and September30th and 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 September30th to do things that will impact the error rate and help improve it so improvement is always from today forward so we have we do secondpar reviews just to talk about the things we do to help improve the error rate. We do secondparty 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 midApril formed a team that we are calling the quality assurance teamam and this was a group of caseworkers,10 caseworkers that we pulled out of regular everyday casework 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 pro not to repeat the same errors we we are doing refresher training some months is shorter some months you know some months is longer and we try to focus on things that we've we know from the quality control reviews are from the secondparty 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 to16,000 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 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 secondparty 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 secondparty 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 can work to make sure we develop things
Speaker 257
2:09:00
leave anything out? Yes we are also working with a department of inspector general in coordinating with them they are we we are doing a series of meetings with them providing information to them so they're gonna be also taking a look atsnap and seeing how we can collaborate together also with new ideas for improving the error rate.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:09:23
and we have a couple of questions so you
Speaker 251
2:09:28
want to say something Secretary Maria? yes ma'am if 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 or 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
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:10:02
error rate. Great Representative beatty Thank you madam chairir. I I guess my questions one the work that you're currently doing I'd ask for that a while back so it's good to see that that
there are different programs that are going you mentioned that you had removed staff from case management to the quality assurance team how many members make up that team? It's only 10 right now small number
did that affect the the case management staff that are that are doing the the work on the front
Speaker 257
2:10:30
end so that means that t 10 staff that did casework are now doing case reviews so you know it it 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 it you know it's all important being able
Speaker 263
2:10:47
to get the work done as as well as helping to prevent errors well that's I
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:10:55
guess that's my my next line of questioning is reporting on on what this team has found do you have reports of what errors they've found and and can you provide some of that data to the committee. I I think it would be a a good meeting just to go over and focus strictly on on these areas as well as some written documentation of what you verbally gave to the committee just just briefly ago so I'd like to see you know some
I guess data on what's what's been discovered and and if that's leading to improve work on the front end, or if it's still repetitive errors that are coming out of of out of the the case management staff it's bad when you write things down and you can't read your own handwriting over here umm I'm going to work on that let's see I 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 has noted in their reviews. yes sir we have we have some reports that we can provide and I
Speaker 257
2:12:08
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 are7 cases that were found to have errors 2/3 of those are client cause errors information not reported one third of those is agency misapplying policy so that that's the top reason.umber 2 is something called timelimited participation which means we did we had people in the program too long that 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 number3 is shelter deductions that's5 cases and agency cause48.18% of that those payment errors in client cause51.82 but it's the same two root causes under that failed to follow up on information or failed to ve I mean for the
agency side failed to verify information we should have and on the client side information not reported so t 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 may move out of the top three but I wanted to provide you those today. Well it looks you know based on that it
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:13:52
sounds like it's improving somewhat on the agency side from I I think the last number you gave us
somewhere around64 to68% on the agency so it appears that that's that's improving so we'll hope that that that continues to to to be the trend thank you for
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:14:10
the information you Senator English. so could you give me an idea of what a caseworker does? what is a
caseworker does or case manager do you call them all the same and how many do you have? So we have
Speaker 257
2:14:31
We have more than 800 caseworker positions. I don't have
Speaker 256
2:14:37
the number that we have filled today but we they do one of two things so they
Speaker 257
2:14:46
do integrated eligibility determinations meaning medicaidsnap andt they're taking applications approvingroving 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 programme and they do case management with those tea 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 and help the client take the steps through that employment plan with the goal of them being able to leave the tea program with with a job possibly to move on to the work pace program which is also funded byANF which is only for individuals who were
in ta whoseteK is 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 of
Speaker 256
2:16:19
public assistance in a in a way from dependence so do
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:16:23
they work with the department of workforce Services and employers how do they work with employers find jobs or whatever or training programs so they they work with workforce services
Speaker 257
2:16:37
they also part of part of the employment plan and it's an individualized thing so everybody's plan isn't gonna look exactly alike but they you know depending on what's in the plan if there's work experience in the plan then there have 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 doing 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 just depends on what's in the individual plan. so are these people
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:17:27
all over the state or they at the county operations office or where are they they
Speaker 257
2:17:32
are 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 our our team clients so
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:17:45
they don't do eligibility they just
Speaker 257
2:17:47
only incidental to the case management they may update addresses and do eligibility changes for their their clients but but they 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 that's their main focus so
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:18:05
they're doing snap and medicaid and TAF
Speaker 256
2:18:09
and the majority of what they do is case management like I said there may be some maintain you know if
Speaker 257
2:18:15
something changes for that client 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
Speaker 256
2:18:26
the main goal of their job thank you welcome. OK Representativeladyman thank you
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
2:18:33
madam chairir. I'm over here. thank y'all for being here. when you look at your quality your your misses or
mistakes whatever you want to call those are you able to tell if there's certain counties or certain offices that are you know having more mistakes than others where you can zero in on resolutions are you able to tell the to see
Speaker 256
2:18:57
that yes sir we look at we look at that down to the
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
2:19:02
individual worker level. 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 a applicant mistake are you 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 you know adequately telling them what they need to do you understand my question are you zeroing in on those areas to try to provide training to correct those errors yes and we may even
Speaker 272
2:19:41
do more reviews if we see a problem in a particular area we may do more
Speaker 257
2:19:46
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 coll ab or ation 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 that 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 talked to some of the county operations
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
2:20:30
they say well it's the clients that are making the mistakes but you know maybe we can make it easier for them to to be accurate to be more accurate that and and part of what we are you know
Speaker 257
2:20:43
even refresher training is about interviewing you know when we insnap 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 that we agree are part of the process and that
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
2:21:15
we are working on OK when you talk about the percentage7% whatever it is we need to get down to6% what's the formula there is it just the number of contacts you know divided by the number of mistakes or is
Speaker 253
2:21:29
that a big formula or what it's it's a payment error rate so of the universe of
Speaker 256
2:21:35
cases 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 an error so
Speaker 257
2:21:47
that's essentially the formula it's a payment error rate not case error rate thank you thank you Representative Beck
Speaker 49
2:21:59
thank you madam chair the well it looks like I'm no I
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:22:04
think for a second the I saying I went from first to last on my birthday so it's ok right no worry now the the question
the the question I had was when you you were talking about refresher
training and and ok that's ok so it's I understand what refresher training is but are we doing refreshing training or refresher training because someone might have moved in a in a particular location you know in job location or there's there's a new person there you know cause quite honestly if I've trained you on something or maybe it's it's
that the systems have changed right you know there's new requirements or whatever like that so you've got is is is that the nature of your refresher training or
Speaker 256
2:22:57
so not exactly we the refresher training is for everybody. every caseworker and supervisor
Speaker 257
2:23:02
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 on 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 what how 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 ref re sh er training is is for
everybody and it's what we do something monthly to help 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 just to see how they're doing from a looking at case reviews but this refresh er training is is for everybody and it is all about just keeping
Speaker 256
2:24:23
our skills honed and fresh and trying to trying to do everything we can do
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:24:28
to prevent errors so if you if you think about the
the rural areas where you guys are probably the 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 or is there anything that you guys are doing are 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 in a more urban type area or is it so
Speaker 257
2:25:00
our case we train all the caseworkers it doesn't matter where they live where they physically sit and they work cases from all over the state so you but but do you
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:25:10
see is there any data that that shows that there's more cons there's and I'm not I'm not saying there is but let's say there's the payment I think was one of the things that you you mentioned that there's that's more of a
problem in rural areas versus you know in urban areas are are does it change I guess what I'm saying when you're looking at these things is as opportunities and know you you you guys have said y'all looking at the opportunities do you see any differences between rural areas and urban areas is my point
Speaker 256
2:25:41
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 but I I can't tell you today where I see more I I didn't bring that with me but we track it and like I said at the individual level we do even additional reviews if we need to just to help make sure that we've reinforced and there has
Speaker 257
2:26:16
been learning well you you you you definitely got my interest earlier on when
Speaker 292
2:26:21
and I was very happy to hear you use the term
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:26:27
the root cause of out then root causes analysis and that's truly where you solve the problem to to get rid of all the the others but anyway so I 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 I'm somewhat concerned with some of the new work requirements and that were 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 are gonna need to be doing to make sure that we 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 and I I was actually sitting there thinking that you do have a challenge coming up with with these new requirements it's gonna leave it open for more errors and so hats off to you for
all that you've done and I I wish you all the luck in the in the world going forward Senator Urvin
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
2:27:31
thank you echo the sentiments I think it is critically important that we all that we understand I textedlourri but ummcdonald we are held accountable for the client error errors as well as the agency errors and I'm as I'm guessing that you know that's a whole another level of accountability that we probably didn't have before is that we're accountable for those client errors as well as our 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 guess I'm 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 caseworkers, is there a pass off? iss there are
you trained to say, OK, to make sure that this client is not, um, 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 am I making a correct assumption is that 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
2:29:07
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 monitored
Speaker 256
2:29:18
by FinS reported to Fins and it has always included agency and client errors. The big difference is the cost share with the benefits that that was not there was a
Speaker 257
2:29:26
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 if the error rate is above6% but on the investigative side investigative interviewing is something that we talk about and and do refresher on and yes our our staff can utilize that field investigations unit on any case that they have concerns about we there's an electronic mechanism for referral to that unit and we have field investigators scattered throughout the state in addition to clients are are in
addition to referrals from casework ers they take calls from our tollfree fraud line and may investigate those they 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 be Try and make sure we use the resources we
Speaker 293
2:30:34
have to the to the to the best ability to identify
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
2:30:40
cases that may have problems and the fraud hotline is advertised on ok. I 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 I want to say to them you 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 you can use this fraud hotline you you you know step up but I think it's good information. thank you. for the work you're doing Representative Beck just one
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:31:37
more quick question. I came have you guys seen any
opportunities and like the refresher training I mean the refresher means that I've already had training in this topic at least and now you're you're refreshing have are you excuse me are you guys going back and looking at the original training and maybe updating those original training modules so they they represent the refresher part that you're having to do later on yes
Speaker 257
2:32:05
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 do we need to go back and look at the original training and update everything throughout yes that's part of our process right thank you one
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:32:32
more thing we'll move on but 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 that do in 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
Speaker 251
2:32:56
bring that refresher out so yes ma'am thank you 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 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 you. OK so I want us to
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:33:32
go over the snap and this report that you guys have prepared
for us real quickly and then we'll do assisted living so right I am going to just highle
Speaker 257
2:33:49
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 2 which included227,825 enrollees did look and in I was gonna say I just looked for May since this was done in February for May we had
118,938 households and 223,490 individuals just 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 dependence and the issuance was38.64 million and the average household issuance was319 dollars40 cents per month
this this slide gives you residents county organized by our management areas so you can see area one is northwest area 2 northeast area three is central and area four is southwest area5 is southeast and area six is pulaski County and it just breaks down the percentage of snap and rollies but our snap households by area the following slide breaks down
all the way to the residents county level for households the next slide breaks down all the way to the residents county for enrollees for individuals and then more about income47% 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
in this slide is a breakdown of 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 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 145,107 of the snap and rollies for the month of February received snap and magi Medicaid uh67,00 little over67,0an0 receivesnap and nonagile Medicaid 1el, to16 or 218 received just snap and then you can see smaller numbers receiving snap
tea and met magie Medicaid orsnap nonaggile Medicaid andt and 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 11,000 had been in the snap program less than a year about 52000 had been on the program 1 to2 years over 24,000 2 to 3
years31, 3 to 4 years and4 to5 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 for the enrollees with income how long they had 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 dependences under age 14 in the income whether they have income or no income broken down by age and then enrollees with no dependences 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 enrolling disability breakdown here to enrollees disabled or not disabled the non disabled number was 157,000. is this disabled number68,000 and then a breakdown of the disability types
this is a 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 eligible this was also February data total cases
um587,512 cases magi324,099 non magi 257,721 and then broke the bottom chart shows by individual there were a total of 867,132 individuals in those cases6 45541 magja 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 our kids A 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 residences county by area and then residents county by
case residents county by individual and then similar information on income breakdown for enrollees with income303,425 of our medicaid enrollees at this point in time had income and also the earned income types and disability types this is the enrollees withoutcome also broken down by age, the majority of those without income of
course are aged0 to17 but total enrollees without income is563,707 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 in rollees with no dependence under 14 years old and their whether or not they have income by age enrollies with no dependence under 14 and their disability status again by age groups enrollees with dependents under 14 year old years broken down by income or no income and by age
this is disability status on this slide by age in the disability breakdown by age race and ethnicity age and gender and that's all that
Speaker 293
2:42:28
was a very informative thank you I've got
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:42:34
a couple of questions but I will letpresentative meeks start Representative meeks thank you so just
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
2:42:40
two quick questions. what is magi? magie it's an acronym modified
Speaker 253
2:42:48
adjusted grosscome and it's it is the income methodology that we
Speaker 256
2:42:51
have to use to determine eligibility and it impacts the our home group our kids A our kids B everything
Speaker 293
2:42:57
basically but long term care and SsI and TEFA. OK. and then my my second question is is
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
2:43:06
can you give me some examples of some nonisabled that would be receiving these benefits Non disabled that might be receiving benefits
Speaker 256
2:43:13
who would that be children adults I mean
Speaker 270
2:43:18
who who make the income limit I guess I'm obviously
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
2:43:21
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 encourage them to maybe get with some of these workforce training that we've done to 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 do to help promote that. so there are several categories
Speaker 256
2:43:46
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 homero 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 if the program was
already in 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 it like care caregiving if they're
Speaker 257
2:44:38
not exempt they will be required to do 80 hours a month in either employment or volunteering structured volunteering at an you know like a nonprofit government entity something like that
Speaker 256
2:44:55
in job training or in school or in their earnings their gross earnings would have to be580 dollars a month to be you know considered meeting that requirement or working at least 80 hours a month but inclu when we implement that those who are not meeting that requirement we will have to look at application and we will also have
Speaker 257
2:45:17
to look at renewal time and by the way renewals are going from 1el months to6 months at the same
time in January so as people come up for renewal throughout2027 when we recertify them it'll be for six months not 12 months
Speaker 270
2:45:32
as is typical now well and and I would
Speaker 311
2:45:37
just like to clarify for the our homeme or the expansion group are sometimes calledro 8, they will have the
Speaker 251
2:45:43
renewals every6 months and the work requirement. Children are still at an annual renewal in the
Speaker 312
2:45:48
other categories are annual renewal. I just didn't want to confuse anyone
Speaker 256
2:45:56
you this is already confusing enough right thank you so the community so part we're gonna 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 a30 day compliance letter giving them30 days to provide information explaining what 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 will be 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 to meet these requirements
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:47:03
OK so just a 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 everybody working age adults that we're gonna that are gonna fall into this work
Speaker 256
2:47:14
requirement do you guys have any numbers that you're looking at right now so the work requirement will apply to the entire our home group which 215 or 17,000 but many of them are going to be exempt right and then some of them are already compliant we we have estimated
Speaker 257
2:47:33
probably around 20% per month may be the group that's at risk OK so what do you
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:47:38
think can be 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 able to 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 with workforce to get these people really a good job
Speaker 257
2:48:05
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 onorkforce 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 mailed the male interactions we will
you know 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 inperson interaction. so we 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
2:49:05
And I would just add that we've we've had lots of conversations withRobert Mcue 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 in working with others throughout the state that is part of our work plan. I don't have we don't have a clear picture because we're trying to meet the requirements for January
one but we consider that a very important piece of that box of what do we do and since we are going to be doing reti redeterminations every six months for this 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's on the it is definitely on the list
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:50:07
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 per future date my understanding is it's like about600,000 dollars program. how do you think that we're going to be able to use refer people to employment and
training what do you what do you see is that pathway for for those people I mean if 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 what do you is there a 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 to refer people to some of these programs that we've heard about today
Speaker 256
2:51:09
so we were able to make the change from voluntary snapmployment and training to mandatory
Speaker 257
2:51:15
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 dependence which now includes parents with children age under age 14 and any of our snap recipients subject to the
general work requirement which could you know anyone with a school age 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 snapmployment 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 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 that one adult is removed from the case but the case may continue so that that is happening and it's it's not a voluntary thing it's a mandatory thing
Speaker 260
2:52:33
now for people who are meeting that general work requirement to be referred so you
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:52:38
basically have two contracts with one with adult education and one with Northeast
Speaker 267
2:52:45
College that's my understanding and we have shorter college as well as career are people
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:52:49
limited to those who the the places that they can go is or be referred to as adult of those who the only places that they can be referred to that is true at this point in time that's not good OK thank you Representative Yeah just a quick question
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:53:19
so first the work requirement so we're going along and and we're gonna be notifying people that you're not meeting you're not we're gonna you're gonna tell them that this is the requirement that you're you're missing or whatever and then they're going to be looking to go out and and do that hopefully get that requirement so are is there any kind of grace period there? so we
Speaker 256
2:53:44
we've already started those notifications we've been doing
town halls in different parts of the state
Speaker 257
2:53:52
still have one more planned using social media and and again in in July we'll start notifying people this requirement is coming and beginning
Speaker 256
2:54:03
in January if you're not meeting this requirement or exempt from this requirement you could lose your healthcare coverage so we're we're starting now and I mean to try and get stakeholders and beneficiaries alike
Speaker 257
2:54:15
educated to understand what they need to do to meet the
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:54:22
requirements so good for you guys doing that but are
are we seeing where there's gonna be a rush of people knowing human nature you know there's gonna be a rush of people come the end of december wanting to meet some of
Speaker 251
2:54:41
these requirements and so every month it was 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 get 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 to6 months to get through everyone. right thank you OK I have a
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:55:19
lot more questions we're going to save them for another time and because we have
Speaker 324
2:55:24
some other people that want to use this
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:55:30
room believe it or not so let's go over our the
Speaker 251
2:55:32
review of our assisted living so we can get that off the off the docket for next time thank you umpresentative Bentley. there are two letters in your packet this month to represent the mayy and the June updates and that 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 more smooth smoother it it's been easier because we have not had to chase down the cost reports the 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 dayy process before we bring their comments in and respond to those and work through the and finish out the process. thank you very
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:56:36
much and there's not very many people in the room but Laurri Mcdonald is here. I'm not sure when
I'm gonna see Laura Mcdonald again so I just want to personally thank you for the excessive hours and the absolute awesome care you've 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 soloriri thank you so much for how much you've taken care of my constituents. and with that we're dismissed
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 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
Speaker 23
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
Speaker 182
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