Joint Education
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- October 5, 2026
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:00
Good morning. Welcome to the Senate and House Education Committee.
I'm calling this meeting to order. I'm glad to see everybody here on this beautiful day. We need to approve the minutes from the March 9th and 10th meetings. Do I hear a motion?
Motion? Do I hear a second? Second? Any discussion on the
motion? All in favor? Thank you. okay we have a full program today but first off off the bat we have a presentation from the
arkansas excellence in teaching fellowship program so if you ladies would please come and join us at the table and gentlemen do we need another chair have enough
okay and if you would push your little button there and identify yourself you'll be recognized sure so
Speaker 8
2:41
I'll I'll go ahead and kick us off Jacob Oliva Department of Education and I'm here with three
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
2:46
friends that are representing three different school districts I'm gonna see if I get this right off the top of my head cabot point in drew central and i'll let lindsey lisa and melanie each introduce themselves and then i'll tell you a little bit about why we're here and then let them speak a little bit about what's happening in their wonderful classroom so hi
Lindsey Lester
Unverified
3:08
my name is lindsey laster i teach third grade at poen elementary
Speaker 12
3:14
i'm melanie brotherton i teach third grade at
Drew Central Elementary in Monticello. Lissa Monroe,
Speaker 15
3:21
and I teach third grade at Ward Central Elementary in the Cabot School
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
3:27
District. So these three teachers, I was saying earlier, I think saying three of the best teachers in the state of Arkansas is an understatement. So I'm going to say these are three of the best teachers in the nation, and they're out in front of our students each and every single day. And what makes them great is that they just completed finishing a year-long kind of residency program or fellowship
called the Arkansas Excellence in Teaching Fellowship Program. Now, in order to be in this program, this is a new program that we worked on throughout the agency, and in order to be invited to participate in this program, there were some criteria that they had to meet, and they're going to explain a little bit about how they met that criteria. But one of the biggest indicators is they are recipients of teacher merit pay. If you remember with Arkansas Learns, as we elevated and celebrated excellent teaching and student learning
by raising starting salaries and investing into our classrooms, we developed a teacher merit pay system that recognizes teachers that are getting amazing gains out of their students. these three third grade teachers are recipients of merit pay and then they participate in a year-long fellowship program with some representatives from our agency to talk about the profession because one of the things that we definitely heard from the legislature is how do we get our best teachers to help mentor and teach other teachers about some of the wonderful work they're
Speaker 8
4:57
doing so we're following up on the commitment I'm going to turn it over to them and I'm sure Some members may have some
Speaker 19
5:15
questions, if that's okay. One of you has to jump forward. The fellowship has been a really cool experience. We meet a couple of times a year through Zoom, and there were about 20, I think it says 23 of us from all over the state.
And so it was really neat to get to learn from other teachers who are excellent educators and see the different things that they're doing
Speaker 21
5:39
in their classrooms. It's provided us with resources. I now have two third-grade teachers that I can
Speaker 22
5:44
reach out to across the state. It's helped me to strengthen myself. If I have ideas, somebody else's idea may be better. And we're all in
Speaker 21
5:55
this to learn, no matter how long that we've been in education.
And I've really enjoyed learning things from other teachers across the state. It's
Speaker 14
6:07
kind of like being on a cheerleader squad where everyone is completely encouraging one another. It's just been amazing. You don't realize the situations that you have in your own school district with your own students that those same things are mirrored in other counties and other parts of the state. So when we have something that is a difficult task, it's just a blessing to be able to confer with other educators who have some ideas that have worked.
And what works is when you see kids grow. We're here for one
Speaker 15
6:43
reason, one reason only, and to make sure students grow.
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
6:58
Representative Mayberry. Thank you. I just have to brag that Lindsay Laster taught my
daughter, Courtney, back when she was at East End Intermediate School, not at Poen, but was also there as my daughter was a special education intern through Henderson State at Poen this year and I think had some interaction with you as well.
So anyway, I wanted to say thank you. I know firsthand what a great teacher you are. But while I have the opportunity, we've got a group of third grade teachers and we're all here to kind of learn and help one another and all that. And there's been a lot of focus on third grade testing and just wanted to ask advice from other third grade teachers. There will likely be some teachers who will have students who are going to be retained for the first time this year because of their scores on the Atlas test.
What advice would you give to those teachers who will have these students potentially being held back? If you could share some great advice. I'll address that. I had a little girl come to me at the beginning of
Speaker 14
8:06
the year that was reading four words a minute in third grade. So my advice to any educator, number one is, when you get your students at the beginning of the year, you have to think, where do you want them to be in May? What do you want to achieve by May to allow them to continue on their education to fourth grade?
We have to intervene. We have to plan interventions once we get the data. And you have to do things above and beyond what is available. For example, I met Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday mornings at 730 with a group of kids that was really struggling that received a level one on their interim, and our whole goal was what can we do to make that better? but we have to do that at the very beginning of the year and my advice to any third grade teacher is you're in it for the long run and you have to know why your heart is in it if your heart is
in it to see kids grow you're going to do the things that allow them to grow and you're going to find things so you're going to either do interventions you're going to get pullouts you're going to go to rti meetings you're going to make sure those kids are taken care of and if you feel like you don't have enough resources we have a committee the principals are all willing to get things into the hands of teachers to allow them to get those kids to grow and that is our
Senator Jane English
Unverified
9:31
focus so thank you so let me ask this question is is it only is is this only third grade teachers or is
all teachers kindergarten through 12 the the retention law
Senator Jane English
Unverified
9:47
was i mean uh that are part of this god of this leadership
Speaker 19
9:51
the fellowship it's open for anyone who receives merit
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
9:55
pay i think for today's panel it just so happened that these three were available in
Senator Jane English
Unverified
10:00
the all-teach third grade and it's because we're the topic
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
10:03
is the reading is so important Yeah, but the fellowship included 23 educators, and they covered pretty much all subjects.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
10:10
All grades, okay, all right. So Representative Duke. Thank
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
10:16
you, Madam Chair. Thank you all for being here and for your years of service. My first question is, how many years have you all taught?
Speaker 21
10:24
I've taught 27 that I've been in education for 28. I started as a paraprofessional. That's great. i'm a little over 30. i
Speaker 19
10:35
am 13. i started in fourth grade for four years i moved to poen and did first grade for two years and then i was asked to move to third and i've been there for seven
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
10:44
that's fantastic so just again thank you guys for staying in the long haul as well too so we really appreciate it i'm glad to hear your where your years of wisdom are being passed around to these um that are part of this cohort i'm curious the information because you guys i guess are zooming together what are you doing with the information that you are gathering and then dispensing it through your district because obviously it's great for you but how are you making your districts better through what you're gaining
Speaker 21
11:14
through this cohort I meet with my team and discuss what was discussed on the zooms and pass on the information I also share it with my
principal and other lead teachers and other grade levels so that they everybody knows what we discussed okay the rest of you
Speaker 30
11:30
all do y'all have similar strategies um yes
Speaker 19
11:33
ma'am i we're i'm small we're small poem is very small so i whatever the information i got i would send out to my entire campus and then i would send it to my superintendent and the principals um and we would discuss things in our plcs the merit pay um slide show that we got that was something that was really i guess interested in and so people would come and ask lots of questions about that
Speaker 14
11:53
i was just going to say the same thing in our plc meetings um which is strictly by grade level but our principal and assistant principal passed that information on to the whole school and then when we got the slideshow i sent it out to the entire staff and then to liz massey who sends it out to all the elementary schools in cabot okay great
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
12:14
um i have a question for you i secretary leva so on on these teachers here maybe it says this on this
form and i didn't see it what do you know like what is I guess the teacher with the least amount of years of service and the ones with the
longest I'm just kind of curious where some of your gyms are that you have in this cohort that's
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
12:32
a great question I don't know that um information on time ahead but I'd be happy to to get it that would be great because I just
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
12:37
think that's kind of fascinating to see how long they've been there also if we have some that right off I guess is it three years or something before you can be a part of this so obviously they
couldn't have been um year one or two but maybe if you had year three or four it also might be an indicator of how our colleges are turning our teachers too if they hit the ground running you know year three or four and we have some of them um qualifying for
this but that's really super exciting I appreciate again what all y'all are
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
13:03
doing there yes I'm sorry I'll say I think also what would just really kind of special about this program is is one they're probably not going to tell you this but they probably don't like this kind of attention right like these these teachers are the ones that are starting meeting with kids before school after school nights and weekends they go around this is a calling this is their passion this is their heart and soul and you know when we've been doing this teacher merit and in looking at value
added measure scores and and making sure that people have that information every one of these teachers will tell you like i can't believe i'm getting recognized for this like this is just what we do and i think what you'll find when we get that information to you and that spectrum of teachers this is what makes our state special you know these these teachers have been working here 20 30 almost 20 30 years and they're seeing a lot of education reform happen right and I'm sure
every one of them probably says here we go again watching the educational pendulum swing but what we're doing with learns and getting coherence and alignment and then really investing in our classrooms is why we're going to see these monumental shifts and outcomes and I and I think like if if they were to talk about that experience that I think that's kind of where you're getting at is like these are there is so much knowledge and wisdom that not only just help the next generation of teachers but think about the these third graders that are now reading at grade level
how they're going to be successful in school and you know when when we look at how many teachers we recognized through teacher merit which was new new to the state of Arkansas how many teachers we recognized like our goal would would be like for everybody to qualify because it's there's a reason they're here and there's a reason that happened so yeah we'd be happy to do that but I I know sometimes they're they're they're not going to brag right but we need to brag on what what these folks are doing each and every single day and and for them to share their expertise and wisdom with
others it's it's contagious and and everybody wins because of it no i agree
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
15:12
with that and um i also one more question um do you also i know these are not you are third grade the other range of teachers do you have high how high up in in the high school do you
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
15:25
have i want to say they went to about biology geometry like the the end of course exam subjects areas so it's a pretty good spectrum that's
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
15:33
great and then i guess my final question it would be um so since you guys are all
third grade teachers and you're dealing with that are the conversations being had i'm going to assume especially since how you excel with your first and second grade and kindergarten teachers um could you maybe kind of expand a little bit on how you guys are communicating with them and preparing those kids so we're not hitting third grade with the four words in
a minute but getting that conversation lower I'm sure it's happening but since you're here could you
Speaker 21
16:04
share with us it's become more intense for k2 because those students have got to be you know we have to know
who they are they shouldn't be getting to third grade we should identify them before third grade so I believe that even more screening testing it's become more intense for them which is good for us because you know of the law that's you know that's a great thing that it is more intense because a child is probably going to do better if they're retained in first grade rather than third i was just going to uh share
Speaker 14
16:40
that one of the things we're doing this year which i'm so excited
about is each grade level so i just prepared over the weekend and beginning of third grade test. So things that we expect second graders to know by the time they come to third grade. They're giving those assessments this week on Wednesday and then we meet in the summer during our PLC to plan our whole year out and we'll have that data to drive our instruction even more fully and see who needs the intervention before they even get to school. So we're so excited like my
third graders will take one from the fourth grade teachers. So I think that's going to be very very developmentally helpful for all of us because it'll give us data that we can use to get that instruction even
Senator Jane English
Unverified
17:31
a lot more solid so are we
testing children in kindergarten and first grade to see where kind of where they are and see what issues that they might be having so we're not just waiting until the third grade but we have some testing going along and and some things in place
Speaker 31
17:49
to help them? Yes, ma'am. We start the year with the screeners that
Speaker 32
17:53
are given through Atlas and we take those results and use them throughout the year. The students are progress monitored throughout the year and we also have testlets through Atlas that we can give along with teacher-made assessments. So those kids are monitored all throughout the year and then we take Atlas at the end of the
Speaker 14
18:11
year. Let me identify this to the little girl that came reading four words per minute. they did not want her to move on from first the parents refused they did not want her to move on
to second and so that is out of our control if a parent says they want their child to move on so we did everything so this year our goal was what can we do to give her the very best education she possibly can regardless of the support she has at home the last
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
18:42
plug that i will say is when you guys get the surveys please extend to your fellow teachers those surveys that come from I don't know how it's labeled from our committee I'm just asking all the different things please just make sure everyone fills them out we have really good participation from the superintendents
but I for one would really like to have better participation from the teachers because as you guys are going to see or maybe you follow we're going to go through these and it really does matter to us what your all's opinions are so encourage them next year to make sure they fill them out it's not just one of those surveys no one looks at we actually do look at them and go through them very thoroughly
Senator Jane English
Unverified
19:17
so we can thank you all thank you madam chair thank you
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
19:21
okay let's see stephen meeks thank you madam chair so i'm over here by the column here so um first off thank you ladies for your for your service to the uh to the state as my colleagues know with my portable
planetarium program i literally see thousands of third grade students across the state every year. And so my question is kind of related to that. What do you see, because this is basically with this third grade group, they're basically kind of like the first post-COVID group, right, coming up. What do you see as the biggest challenges facing our third graders right now that might be hindering them from being where they need to be? Is it social media? Is it issues at
home. What are y'all seeing as those challenges? And then my next question, maybe for the secretary, I noticed there's only 23. Sounds like a great program. Is there a reason it's only 23? Why do we not have 50 or 75? So just kind of curious to those two. And then I'll have one more follow-up. I don't think it's anything new that students
Speaker 18
20:27
don't always come from a good home. Um, so I see a lot of that
Speaker 19
20:32
in the area that I live in where we're more of a
lower socioeconomic area. So we have a lot
Speaker 32
20:38
of students who live with grandparents and great grandparents and aunts and uncles and students who live in campers and different things like that. And I know that that affects them in the classroom. Um, so one of the biggest things that we do at the beginning of the year is build relationships with them because
Speaker 19
20:53
they're not going to do well on any assessment or any classwork if they don't have a relationship built with you. They don't trust you. I would
Speaker 77
21:05
have to follow up with what she said. The most important
Speaker 21
21:08
thing that I can do with students, regardless of where they came from or what their situation is, is building relationships. Because that's where you start and build that bond with them, where they trust you and they want to step out and ask questions. I deal with that a lot. And the most important thing I can do is find out who they are, where they are, their challenges, their strengths,
Speaker 80
21:33
and what kind of learner they are. Right. I
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
21:37
think school becomes the only stable thing in their lives a lot of times it sounds like.
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
21:43
So, Mr. Secretary, the – Yes, so I think it's a great question. So, you know, we've been looking back at this program. This is year one of the program. And we put out an invitation. And I want to say the initial response, because we were targeting, like, the very high end of teacher merit pay. Like, these are the teachers that are getting the $10,000 award, you know, the $7,500 award. So we sent out letters to all of them, and not everybody wants to participate. It's new. Nobody knows what they're signing for, because this is a commitment, right?
I mean, these people, we are giving up their personal time above and beyond to participate in this program. So, yeah, maybe next year we'll get to 50, you know, maybe as work gets out. And you also got to try to find that magic number where it's still small enough that they have time to learn from each other to benefit. So I think we're going to learn from them, too, about how to make that better. But, yeah, we want to invite as many folks that are eligible, and hopefully participation percentage goes higher. Okay. All right.
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
22:46
And then my final question is for the ladies. Obviously, you're sitting here in front of the General Assembly. I know you all have talked probably amongst yourselves and your colleagues and said, I wish they would do this or they need to do this differently. So here's your opportunity. What would you have us know that, yes, I know I may be open a can of worms here, but yes. Yeah, remember, this is live streamed. Yeah, so just be careful. But what do you wish that we would do different or what do we need to do as a General Assembly,
as a state of Arkansas, that maybe we're not doing, that we need to do to help you in what you do, right? If you've ever, you know, I wish I, you know, if I were the governor, this is what I would do differently, right? So how would you answer that question to, how would you have us help
Speaker 14
23:39
you do your job? Okay, I think the number one thing is we've got to do a better job promoting positivity in public education.
And I think the way that you do that is you focus in on the success stories of both students and teachers. And go to different districts. Go to the ones that, you know, have a lower socioeconomic. Go to the ones, you know, up in Bentonville. Go where they are growing and find out what's happening and let them be the person who speaks. I think the more we cover people that are doing a good job because they love it, not because of merit pay.
You know, I had a first-year teacher ask me about merit pay, and I said, if you are concerned about merit pay, then you need to go back and ask yourself, why are you teaching? Why did you choose this profession? And I believe if your why is heartfelt and genuine, you don't even worry about merit pay. And I can attribute to the other women next to me, the first year I received it, I mean, I cried so hard my husband thought I was in an accident because I thought I was going
to get maybe $200. I had no idea. And it's because that was not my focus. My focus is how can we make these kids better? How can they grow? What can we do to make them a success? And I think focusing in on those teachers and those students and putting it on the news, that's going to promote positivity in public education. Any of you? Other
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
25:19
two ladies have any ideas on that? I can't
Speaker 19
25:23
think of anything off the top of my head specifically,
and I'm sure that you guys do this, but just reaching out to teachers in different school districts, in different grade levels, and maybe throwing them an idea and seeing what they think and kind of including teachers. I know that there have been some times where my principal or superintendent have come and said, okay, now we have to do this. And I thought, oh, man, I wish they would have asked my opinion. And like I said, I can't think of one off the top of my head. But just including teacher input I think would be great. All right,
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
25:51
thank you. Again, thank you ladies for being here. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
25:57
Thank you very much. Let's see, Representative Barnes. All right.
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
26:10
Thank you, Chair. Thank you, ladies, so much for coming today, and I commend you for your outstanding work, first of all. I've always thought teachers ought to be highest paid. You are shaping Moldauer at least, and they go make $50 million,
and you're making $50,000. But thank you so much for what you're doing. I do have a question on number one. Are you curriculum-guided in your teaching, or are you test-guided? I'm hearing a lot of teachers say they're trying to teach the test, and how do you do that? I have never
Speaker 14
26:51
taught to the test. Never. I take the state standards, and like I said, we think about where we want them in May.
So we take the data that we receive on them in the summer or August and how do we align that to better get them to the position that we want to get them to in the end of May. So if you focus on what the child's needs are and addressing those needs, you don't have to
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
27:21
teach to the test. One last question. Have you found any incentives that seem to work best with that age group when you're trying to motivate them to learn what incentives you may be using
Speaker 22
27:33
for that age group? I use a card punch. They get a question correctly, I will punch a card. They get 10 across that card. They get to tell me what they want
Speaker 101
27:48
as their reward. They love that. I've used that
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
27:54
all year long. Okay. Do you have any support from the community in helping get those incentives uh extra money from some outside entity um non-faith base or
uh some investor into the school will help you buy those our local churches in ward because
Speaker 43
28:10
we're kind of the stepchild of cabot i don't mean that in a bad way i
Speaker 14
28:15
mean that in a good way we're just our own little city and um our churches donate and like i'm missing right now they are doing an atlas incentive and the local fire department and they have a foam machine so they're out getting sprayed right now and i get to stay dry but yes we have out we have
Speaker 15
28:31
community outsourcing thank you so much i buy things
Speaker 22
28:37
like that myself um when they come into my classroom they become
part of my family so i mean i feel like i'm buying it for my own children my children used to be jealous of my classroom kids
Speaker 33
28:54
so thank you chair thank you very much representative
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
29:00
all of you for being here today and for the work that you do I had a question for miss Monroe you told us I mean I really appreciate the extra effort the initiative you took to work
with these children that needed a little extra and I didn't recall I don't recall you saying how how how well they improved did you were you able to see I'm sure you were improvement and can you tell us some of your success stories I had seven children
Speaker 14
29:32
and only one could come just one day a week so I really had six because you don't like to get more than six in a small group but all six of them grew at least 10 to 15 points on all areas of their atlas scores so we saw great
improvement and one of them who was a level one in the fall a level two at interim in the winter um it became a level three reader and grew 33 points wonderful thank you very much thank you
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
30:02
fantastic representative ladyman i'm over here thank you madam chair and
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
30:10
i'm not a member of the committee i appreciate you let me ask a question um well thank you all for being here and
giving us your time because i know it's valuable um and i also have to put in a plug
for uh haley harris up in valley view where i coached for some time and my kids went to school there doesn't surprise me that valley view is doing this and one of the teachers there uh one more thing for us question uh miss monroe i agree with you a hundred percent about the positivity uh you know it it if you have one negative thing it takes 10 positives to offset that and we don't get near that many positives especially in news coverage and i'm saying this
for the news because y'all need more coverage on programs like this where the kids grow and The Atlas Test, I'm very familiar with that. I fished with my two grandsons in the boat this weekend. I heard all about the Atlas Test and what grades they made and what they didn't do very good at. Just a real quick question. This program, going through this, what's the most important thing that you learned from talking to other people and participating in meetings?
What would you say is the most important thing that you've gained from that collaboration. This might help other teachers that
Speaker 21
31:36
are listening. How other people use data, how they use it in the classroom, how they interact with the students on the data, things that they may do for assessments that we don't do. We even talked about the use of AI and how other people are using things that I haven't heard of before.
So then when I heard it, I'm introducing it to everyone in my school to get that word out that there's other ways that we can do things. I don't depend on AI
Speaker 77
32:12
a whole lot, but I'll grow to that. I'm kind of old school. You know, that's
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
32:19
amazing you mentioned that, and they'll probably get it quicker than I would. Do y'all have anything
Speaker 116
32:27
else? I think that we learned collaboratively that there's no magic program.
Speaker 19
32:31
Even though we're all using HQIM that is on the list from the state, it's about consistency, and it's about the data. And I know sometimes teachers feel drugged down by all the data, and it's data this and data that. But if you use it correctly, you know your
Speaker 14
32:52
students, and you're going to see growth. it's connecting data
Speaker 118
32:57
to a relationship with a child can I make a
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
33:03
along this conversation because we have three third
grade teachers here we get asked all the questions about third grade promotion what does that look like how is it different what are the numbers going to be but what's different I think going in this school year and what we've built as a state through Arkansas Learns and I like to say some of the biggest things I think that Arkansas Learns did for teachers was provide clarity and alignment. We made everything that we expected them to do so confusing and hard to understand and then didn't give them any information specific back to those students and their performance for
months. And what we did when we made this commitment to building a unified coordinated progress monitoring system, kindergarten through high school, where every student's working off the same criteria, clear and easy standards to understand. We talked about teaching to the standards, not to an assessment, but we made the assessments clear. We doubled down on the science of reading we added additional resources like coaches and high impact tutoring and and all of
those those right investments but we're also able to now get that snapshot in time which is that summative assessment and through that progress monitoring teachers can get that data and make instructional decisions so that when it gets to that summative assessment it's not a surprise It's not a surprise if a student's ready to pass that assessment
Speaker 53
34:33
or not. Retention is not new in the state of Arkansas. Students have been getting retained for decades. What's new is that we actually do something about it. We actually say, let's get this child, let's get them in an intervention plan,
let's make sure they have resources, and if they have to move on and they're not where we expect them to be, let's make sure that that plan continues. That's what we're doing here. Before, we would just retain kids, retain kids. Now we have a purpose, and it's a laser-like purpose. We're going to retain less students because we're getting better at it. But what's different this year, which I think is magical, and the teachers alluded to it, is students are getting their test results within 24 hours. That's never happened. Think about that. Talk about celebrating.
So now they can meet with students and families and say, this is how your child's doing, and this is how they did, and this is what we're going to work on. So this system that we've built, it's taken a few years to build, and we're still figuring out some of the stuff, especially in the K-2 spaces, because that's in its second year of alignment. But what we have done as a state is
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
35:39
we've added clarity and alignment, and we're going to see outstanding performance and growth for decades, because these teachers have been here for decades. The teachers know what they were doing.
We just threw them in a bad system. Bad systems beat good people every time. We have an aligned
Speaker 53
35:54
system for the first time, and so your grandkids are getting test results. When have students ever been able to talk to their grandparents or parents about test results? Never. You know why? Because we never
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
36:07
told them how they did. Now they know, and so we're owning teaching and learning. That's why I think this is exciting when we talk about that, and I'm not asking questions of the committee,
but that's what's magical also happening this year, and correct me if I'm wrong, But I think some of these teachers here have received merit pay every year that we've had it, right? Like these folks have always existed. We've got them aligned in a system where we're going to see even more students excel.
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
36:34
Well, congratulations on the merit pay. I know that's not why you said that, why you didn't do it. But I believe we should reward hard work, and I think that's what that system does. Just one more quick question. I'll give up the mic here. But, Secretary Leva, I don't think this question has been asked, but maybe you need to answer it.
But what is the smallest school that we have a representative from and the largest? I mean, do we have people in these small schools that are going for this merit program? Yeah,
Speaker 34
37:03
I mean, you're probably the smallest employees. Yeah, yes. I'm from
Speaker 124
37:07
Poen, and we're very small. We have two classes per grade level. And there
Speaker 19
37:11
were four or five in our elementary, I know, that received merit pay. So, I feel like we're doing pretty well. So, what about the large schools?
Speaker 14
37:24
It was a little secretive who got it the first year. But in my particular elementary school, we had five teachers I know of that received it. So, I don't know how many outside of my particular elementary school received it, but quite a few. But five from our school was a lot. That's good. Well, thank you. Thank you. Senator Davis. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
37:55
I love this fellowship program. I mean, I think you alluded to it a little bit. The first year, I know, it's hard to see. The first year, I had friends who were teachers, and they would come up to me and say, I got merit pay. You know, but they didn't want anybody else to know just the culture around that. And I love this fellowship program that it is really bringing celebration and excitement to the fabulous work that teachers are doing across the state. I think it's worth celebrating, and I think it's worth rewarding.
And so I love that this has come together, and we have teachers across the state that are able to collaborate and finally sort of come out of the shadows, so to speak, over the last few years on merit pay and be able to say, like, I am doing a fantastic job in my classroom. And I'm getting, you know, rewarded for that. I think it's amazing. I was kind of curious if there are any strategies or approaches specifically. And you guys have sort of maybe answered this question throughout the line of questioning.
But anything that you're doing specifically in your classroom or that you're finding your strategies and approaches are really what you're seeing other teachers doing across the state that are also receiving merit pay. If there's any sort of like common denominator there. As far as teaching, I know building relationships with kids and having them trust you, but are there actual like teaching things that you're doing that you find are being done across the state or that really work for
Speaker 14
39:25
you in your classroom? Several years ago, Cabot brought in Ruby Payne, and we used a lot of her strategies back,
that was probably eight years ago, probably the best professional development I've ever attended. And so they kind of got away from those, and what I did was I introduced those to my fellow co-teachers and said, this works. You know, you try to get a third grader to capitalize the beginning word of every sentence, and they've got a little formula that you can use. And so that's been very helpful as far as strategies. And I think any other strategies, it goes back to when we talk about relationships.
Every child is different, so they learn different. You know, boys learn differently from girls. I have four boys. I know that for a fact. And you have to really take to heart, you know, some of the kids that have really deep struggles. It comes from something behind the scenes, not something in the classroom. When we discover what that is and are able to develop how we are a safe place and we really want to see them excel that's when the growth happens and I can give you an example
of a little boy real quick that came to me angry he was in the office every day and I sat down with him at lunch I had him eat lunch with me found out that he came from a split home he was living with dad he didn't get to see mom and he was angry about it and he couldn't speak he had very difficult speech problems and you know the parent said constantly you can't read because you can't speak so we started on that level and I got the speech teacher to work with me on things that we were
working in the classroom and just that little bit that kid grew from a kindergarten level to reading about 48 words on a third grade level at the end of the school year simply because we erased the anger and replaced it with relationships and he really genuinely knew that we cared about him so I think that strategy of knowing the needs of the child which I'm sure these two teachers do every day makes a huge difference I use a lot of one-on-one at first
Speaker 21
41:43
in my classroom I do the one-on-one and then it gets less because I start putting them into small groups. I like to, I mean, I'll start with teacher led, but I go to student centered so that they are taking ownership of their learning and their teaching, which is a higher depth of knowledge level when they have to teach each other. And it also forms those relationships with each other to where they're critiquing in a positive way
Speaker 22
42:11
and supporting, which is what I want them to do is
support each other and rally behind their successes and meeting the small goals that I make for them at the beginning. We sit down and we talk and we decide on a goal. You know, first it might be, will I want to learn how to read fast? But then it gets more specific as you go on. I mean, I'll take those. I'll take that.
Speaker 21
42:36
But then it goes a little bit more specific and more centered to what they really need i
Speaker 32
42:44
always say that my success is not mine alone um the k-2 teachers
build the foundation for the students that i get in the third grade um i think that we have we we are very i don't know how to say it i guess we're we have the benefit of a small school in my hallway there are two second grade classes and two third grade classes and we're on the same plc team so we meet at the beginning of the year with all of our test scores and we put every kid on a note card and we're moving them around and putting them into groups sometimes i'm able to send my third graders to second grade teachers to work on things and then they're able to send some of their higher level readers to me to work on comprehension so i feel like that has really
helped us grow in our school district i think that just having high expectations is a really big deal because students are not going to rise to low expectations every the past three years my co-teacher and i have had pretty good test scores um and so i feel like we're we're in the right we're going in the right direction we're doing the right things and we've had teachers from other school districts call and come and visit us and they want to know what are you doing why are your test scores so high and it's because we work together and we use the data and we figure out
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
43:53
what the students need i love that thank you are there times in the day that i know there's like planning um prep periods but to really look at data like consistently are there times in the day that your schools have carved out for you to be able to do that like on a consistent basis like weekly even or we meet once a week on wednesdays
Speaker 31
44:15
um after school for 30 minutes most of the time we go over but we're we're required to be there for 30 minutes thank you we also meet once a week
Speaker 21
44:25
we have a we call it a cluster meeting where we meet with our master teacher and then
Speaker 22
44:29
we have a meeting where I meet with my grade level team ditto we meet during the
Speaker 14
44:37
week for our PLC meeting and we usually meet 45 minutes but sometimes because they have three consecutive activities in a row sometimes it goes all the way till we pick them up at recess representative gonzalez
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
44:55
thank you um first congratulations um and i am an educator still um still practicing and so it excites me always whenever i'm around teachers and especially teachers that have gone the extra mile and now you're recognized and and continuing to learn um i think that's one of the big things is you know being that critical thinker but also critical on your practice so that you can move forward and learning from other teachers and that that you mentioned
that throughout when you were just talking just now I was curious as to the pathway you you are paraprofessional you mentioned you're from paraprofessional to teacher and I have a I work with the grow your own program um in my university and so i was just very curious because one of the things that that i've learned just through the years is that when you're a paraprofessional and you have this interest of becoming a teacher wow that's just awesome because you're in that
classroom and you know exactly why you're in that classroom because you've had all those years experience uh prior to and so what i wanted to know from you is what your pathway was from para to teacher just how you were able to move from para to teacher and then my second question might be more for the secretary and that is I know that for teachers who apply to this program one of the one of the number four on the well this is for the eligibility and I didn't know if this was when it comes to critical shortage area what do we mean exactly by critical shortage
area okay so those are my
Speaker 114
46:42
two questions i was actually certified as a teacher when i was
Speaker 21
46:47
hired as a para um i actually volunteered and i started at the school because i had two daughters and i wanted to help them so what came you know involvement became a purpose and so i wanted to work at this particular school because I graduated from there and it was like coming home when I was
there you know when you have those teachers that pour into you you want to do that same thing for for others so I was actually certified when I was a para I actually had uh groups that would come to me uh either the high or the low it didn't matter I had
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
47:32
my own classroom okay thank you First part, I agree just on the comment about para pros and investing in different pathways to help them become a licensed teacher if that's the pathway they choose.
In my experience, I think we found that a lot of your best teachers might have started as a para pro and maybe didn't know that they have this natural gift to want to become a teacher. So, like, those grow-your-own programs and investing in those opportunities to credential the parapros that are there is such a great investment. So, definitely concur in that journey and being a part of that. What identifies as a critical shortage area, we actually run a report every year.
And in that report, it looks at the number of licensed folks needed in those different teaching categories and then how many we have, and then that report gets published. So, like, all the different criteria in Maripay, and we'd be happy to send you some information because we have a pretty good website that has all that information. But I think it's important for folks to remember, it's not just tested subject areas that are eligible for Maripay. There are critical shortage areas, like, where we know,
and a lot of times you'll see it in maybe, like, secondary science, Like, it's hard to find a physics teacher or a chemistry teacher. Like, those are the kind of subject areas. But it's also geographically hard to staff locations. So even you have critical subject areas, but then even geographically, there's hard to staff areas just because of the region or part of the communities they serve. But every teacher is eligible. We have kindergarten teachers that got merit pay here this year. Everybody keeps saying that they're not eligible. I think we have about 35 kindergarten teachers receive merit pay
because they can fall in a different bucket. It doesn't matter if you're a band teacher. It doesn't matter if you're a PE teacher. There are things you can do. You have to be licensed. You have to be deemed highly effective on your evaluation. But one of the big programs is part of our master teacher designation program or mentoring other teachers and teaching in critical shortage areas, geographically hard to locate. So when we look at kind of who receives this, teachers receive merit pay from our largest districts in the state of Arkansas all the way down to our smallest so but to answer your question there's an annual report that we
have to produce that that looks at the
Speaker 148
49:58
the numbers so just to make sure i'm understanding so you also mentioned the um
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
50:04
maybe areas of support like academic support in a in a school or a school district that they're are you referring to for example paraprofessionals just as an example um would that be if you're needing special
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
50:19
this would be for licensed teachers just for teachers so for academic for academic I was just curious because I know they act the supports that that come
along oftentimes it's coupled with an instructional
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
50:32
assistant or it's you know well and I think it's even just you know talking with superintendents sometimes it's bigger than that like I like to say our entire educational family right so like bus drivers food service workers I mean everybody pays a part until these students being successful on these classrooms and um you know there's some harsh realities like like probably one of the hardest staffing areas I hear consistently is bus drivers right like who wants to get up at five o'clock in the morning drive a bus and you know like just how do we find better incentives because
they're making a difference and I always like to say sometimes those are the first the bus driver is the first face a lot of students see in the morning and the last one they see and the bus driver knows a lot about what's going on in a student's life and when they're partnering with teachers and everybody's coming together that's when we start seeing these success stories thank you representative richardson
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
51:35
thank you thank you madam chair uh good morning to you guys and i had to step away for a minute but i did want to say thank you for
the work that you're doing and what you're doing for our children it's very much appreciated my question is for dr oliva i'm sorry mr oliva secretary oliva olivia
Speaker 159
51:53
okay listen i've been called worse you can call me whatever
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
51:57
you want i'm curious to know and i don't know if the question had been asked or not but in terms of not necessarily people that are receiving the merit increase or merit pay but
do you know if there's a breakdown in time and position like are we seeing merit pay for teachers that are two years or less, or are we mainly seeing it from more seasoned teachers that have been there five or ten, twenty years? Yeah, that's a good
Speaker 154
52:21
question. I don't know if we have the exact number of years for everybody that does merit pay, but part of the eligibility requirements, you have to be in the classroom for at least three years. So you're
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
52:32
seeing, like, we've got teachers here with 30 years of experience, 16 and 20-something, so it spreads all over the spectrum, but at least they've been in the classroom for three years.
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
52:41
Okay, but you are able then to pull that data to show teachers that have been there at least the three years. Yeah, to be eligible. What percentage of those have been eligible as opposed to those that have been there longer?
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
52:59
Yes. Okay, thank you. Representative Garner. Thank you, Madam Chair, over here. I just have a quick question, and I'll save the others for the update for education. but you talked earlier about Ruby Payne. Is it the same Ruby Payne that talks about poverty in the classroom?
Okay, so that brings up a whole set of issues, obviously, when we're talking about poverty in the classroom, and I love that you're dealing with her and some of her programs. Do you all have a social worker in your school districts? Because every district in Arkansas does not have a social worker yet, do they? I didn't think so. Do y'all have a social worker? Do you have access to social workers in your community?
Some of these folks obviously want to help their child, but they're working three jobs or whatever. And so I don't think it's quite fair to say that the parents aren't interested in their children. I don't think sometimes that may be the case. But most of the time, I think it's something else. but I'm just wondering if you found that program or her suggestions helpful in the classroom, if you're pulling in some of her expert advisors out in the community.
Speaker 14
54:19
We have a lot of counselors, and one of them is deemed as a social worker for the district, but we have counselors in the school all the time, and they come and meet with us individually. to see how that student is doing what are you using so for example the ruby pain strategies if they're struggling in reading comprehension or in writing i you know i give those to that counselor and when they meet with that that student they can go over that with them
so they're kind of double dipping and so that's been very very beneficial but as far as social workers coming into our building um we have more counselors than we do a
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
55:02
social worker And I think that most people would agree that school counselors have very different job description than social workers. So you're using a school counselor, it sounds like, exactly like you should be using a school counselor, and they should be helping with those academic issues. But when you're talking about some of the other things that poverty, is poverty related to the families,
then you probably do really need a social worker or somebody in the mental health and behavioral
Speaker 43
55:31
health. Out of our four outside counselors, two of them are
Speaker 53
55:37
actual social workers. Great. Can I also add to that? Because, you
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
55:42
know, there's a lot that's put on schools, and schools only have so many resources, right? And I think what you're talking about is kind of organizing communities to have some ownership. I mean, we heard about firefighters and faith-based organizations
and looking at the entire family, And I think that's a lot of kind of that vision behind the governor's 10, I think it's the 1013 initiative. Sometimes I get the wrong verse in that, but it's like, what is that hope hub? Like, what is that central? And I know, like recently I visited a program at Batesville where like if a family comes in to register for the school district, they have a lot of like community partners offices in the school district. So it's like, hey, if you need help with this, this and this, it's a one-stop shop.
And I think that's kind of that conversation that, you know, there's so much that the school can do and that they do do that is above and beyond. But how do we get our other agencies? How do we get our other partners together? Because typically if you see a child in need of services, there's a family in need of services, right? Like it's usually not just a one-off. And I think that's what we've heard a lot today about those relationships. It's like they have to unpack, like, why is school not fun to an eight-year-old, right? Like, something's going on.
School should be fun. And we should want to go to school, and life shouldn't be that complicated. So if we can remove some of those obstacles and barriers. So I think that's why we, as a state, you know, the legislature invested in the 1013 initiative and that we're trying to put some resources around being more
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
57:18
laser-like focused and organized. Great. And, you know, I think the school is a great place to do that because every child and every family have input there and are there every day.
I'm just thankful that the education department is working with some of the other initiatives to make sure that that's happening. We should not be mandating without giving resources for anything, I don't think. But we shouldn't be mandating without resources. But it makes sense that the school is the one place where families and children are going every day that we should be working together to make sure that that's happening. So I just appreciate that. Thank you. I was just going
Speaker 67
57:59
to add, we have a backpack program every Friday,
and we have the local people
Speaker 14
58:05
come in, and they fill the backpacks with food for the family. At Christmastime, the teachers and the local churches adopt families that need Christmas presents. And then we also partner, even though we're out in Ward, with the Every Arkansan, which is in downtown Little Rock, And we have provided when there's been a fire, when they've lost a home. We've provided furniture for the entire family, utensils, you know, in case they lost everything.
So we have a lot of resources that we utilize for the benefit of those students and those families that are in
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
58:42
need. Thank you. And I just want to clarify, it's the 1033 initiative. I think I said the wrong one, and I don't want Morgan to be upset
Speaker 38
58:51
with me. So, Morgan, I apologize. 1033, I
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
58:58
will not forget. um representative shepherd thank thank you madam chair um and i'm i'm thankful that representative garner asked that question um beforehand because it's along the lines of the question that i was
going to ask so i think two parts now mr secretary one is aces um do you know what work and if you don't know if you can get the information to the committee i'd appreciate that in regards to aces which is adverse childhood experiences and of course children in Arkansas face more trauma than any other child in the nation so do you know what work is currently happening throughout
Speaker 178
59:35
the state related to addressing ACEs in our schools yeah I don't
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
59:40
know if I know the answer specifically
around ACEs I know like when you look at the percentage of schools and districts and sometimes it's even through a co-op that have those mental health supports you know so when you look at that adverse childhood experiences that means there's several different conditions that are could be predictors that students may need some extra intervention and support i i probably need to do a little research and specifically how they use those instruments and tools i don't know if i know that because it may look different depending on the school or the co-op or the region but that
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
1:00:17
that's a good question okay thank you I'd appreciate that and the follow-up um you mentioned the the 1033 initiative 1033 is based on Luke and the Good Samaritan um I was actually a part of that launch in Pulaski County with Morgan in the governor's office at my church so with that
Speaker 181
1:00:37
being said the question is are our schools partnering with 1033 initiative in a
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:00:43
way so there's there's also this kind of hope hub um initiative that many of our districts are learning more and more
about where they can help partner and that could feed into some of the 1033 support or other support and whether it's through other state agencies whether it's faith-based communities it's about just kind of being um data driven like when you look at the centralized dashboards that the hope hub kind of facilities um partnership provides it it helps you get just more organized and that's why I kind of like highlighted like the Batesville model other districts I
Speaker 154
1:01:14
think are looking at doing something similar to that as well would you mind giving us
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
1:01:21
the schools that are working with sure initiative thank you thank you madam chair
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:01:30
thank you all for being here today senator flowers thank you madam chair and congratulations to you teachers on your achievement I'd like to know first off are any
of the students that you see student growth in under IEPs and can you
tell us what the percentage and how are those children and students distinguish from your other third third graders that are not under an
Speaker 14
1:02:04
IEP I can address that But we co-teach, so we have four third grades, and two of us, one I teach literacy, and my co-teacher teaches math and science, and then we have the other two third grades. So out of our two third grades this year, out of 50 students, we had 27 that had IEPs, dyslexia intervention, or a 504.
The other two third grades had 12. So we started out the year 33% below BASIC, and we ended the year 13% below BASIC. So that's how much that they grew.
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:02:42
Would those children that finish below BASIC then have a waiver or an exception? Yes, ma'am. They all, every one
Speaker 14
1:02:50
of them have an exception because we have our, in fact, The inclusion teacher that comes into my classroom actually just got hired by the state of Arkansas Education Department.
She's so good, and she came in and co-taught with me. When she was in math, she would go in there, and then literacy, she would come in there. And those IEP students, a lot of them grew. Every one of them grew. The 13 that are still below basic, all of them have exceptions. They either have an IEP, they have a 504, they've had extra intervention. They've had the state-supported tutoring, after-school tutoring, that they had to be certified by the state to tutor because they got the grants.
So all of those people have been literally
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:03:44
taken care of throughout the year. And you specifically mentioned the student that had the
anger issue and eventually started getting speech therapy and improved. Was that an IEP? That was an IEP at the
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:04:03
ma'am. Okay, and then I'd like to know, are any of you in a critical shortage area?
No. And Secretary Oliva, then I would like for you, if you can, to address whether we have teachers that have received the merit pay in
these critical shortage areas. Yes, we have. And like we
Speaker 154
1:04:32
have critical shortage areas, maybe like in certification, like
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:04:37
for certain type of positions, but then also geographic locations. Well, some of you may have gotten the geographic component.
I'm not sure, but we can get a breakdown of where and the type of person that received teacher merit pay. I want to say it's close to 10,000 people received some sort of merit pay last year,
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:05:06
so it covers the whole spectrum. Well, I'm looking at the map on Exhibit C, and it seems like the far eastern part of Arkansas from north to south, the Delta area, has no teacher that qualified or received teacher merit pay.
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:05:26
Yeah, so that map is just showing, is highlighting the 23 teachers where they came from that were in this fellowship program. The recipients and merit pay, it looks
Speaker 154
1:05:36
very different. So that's not this map. So I would have to give you another
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:05:41
map. Well, I'd like to get that and send it to our
staff to send out. Send it to the staff. The other thing is I noticed, I saw something, I
read something about a virtual program that you all participate in or that merit pay recipients participate in.
Do you all three participate in some virtual program that goes across the state to other school districts? Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 202
1:06:15
The teacher fellowship that we're in, the Arkansas Teacher Fellowship, we meet via Zoom with
Speaker 31
1:06:21
the other teachers who applied, the other 23 teachers. And we meet once every couple of months. Once every couple of months we meet with Brendan from Each Day Communications.
And I remember specifically in one of the meetings he had a couple of us to do a breakout room and to speak specifically about something that we use in our classrooms. So we were able to do that and learn
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:06:49
from other teachers and the things that they've used in their classrooms. So that's a program or a viewing just
Speaker 69
1:06:57
among the merit pay scholars? Yes, ma'am, the ones
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:07:00
who received merit pay and applied for it. Well, Secretary Oliva, then why would not that kind of virtual learning be offered to all teachers,
particularly those in schools where you see test
scores lower for third graders? Yeah, I mean, I don't
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:07:23
think that's not possible. I think that's something we can do. This specific program, the fellowship program, was to find out from our highest level teacher merit pay recipients, meaning they got at least $7,500 or higher. We reached out to them and say, there's a reason you're getting this level of recognition, up to $10,000.
Specifically, we want to talk to those folks and find out what they're doing and how we can get them connected so that they can take that knowledge back to their districts and other fellows and other merit. So the program we're highlighting today is a very, very, very small subset of a much larger picture when
Speaker 196
1:08:14
you look at the number of teachers that receive the
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:08:18
merit pay. Yeah, but I think my point was just that it seems
like the qualifications and the fact that you all received this merit pay based on the eligibility criteria would make sense to communicate to teachers in districts that are not having a growth impact.
Would you agree with that, teachers? i
Speaker 21
1:08:48
think that's an excellent idea that's wonderful i think that that might help yes okay because
Speaker 137
1:08:56
we're all in it to to bring up student growth right it
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:09:01
doesn't matter i mean arkansas we want them all to be up there seems to me like that would be a professional development activity, event that teachers in these other districts that don't have teachers that see
impact growth would benefit from. I want to, the last question I think would be about students in your
schools that might be subject to court orders or families that are subject to court
orders. I heard where, I'm not sure where you're from in the middle, but you mentioned there
were students that were
living in homes that are not their parents, either their aunt, their grandparent, that kind of thing. Is that a result of maybe foster care or either court-ordered custody placements, if you know? And do you all, if you have such students, do you all get information from social work or DHS about these children
and the reason for their placement other than in their parents'
Speaker 31
1:10:27
home? I think a lot of it is parents who have been incarcerated or they've had issues with drugs and alcohol abuse. I don't personally get that information. I'm not sure if the school district does. We just get whatever the parent or
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:10:47
grandparent tells us at open house or with communication from phone calls and e-mails. Well, when I practiced in juvenile court and with children and families, many times a judge would order the DHS worker,
caseworker to go out to the school and either check see if the child was attending or even to take a get a urine test so I mean have you all not experienced any of that I have not experienced any
Speaker 126
1:11:24
of that I know we have one family that was dealing with a custody battle she was getting custody of her grandchildren I'm
Speaker 31
1:11:31
not sure the case but I know that she was very careful she made sure that they were always there she wanted all of their records she came to every
parent teacher conference because she knew she had certain guidelines to
Speaker 88
1:11:43
follow but i'm not aware of what those were
Speaker 14
1:11:50
we've had several cases like you're talking about and we had uh two two little boys they were cousins and when they came to our school february the it was right before valentine's day They had not been in school since October, and they went from California to Oklahoma to Texas, then to Arkansas.
So we had someone come in and explain to us that we've got to really watch them, make sure, because one little boy didn't have his parents. He was with his aunt and his grandmother, and we didn't get any school records. And so we had to work with this caseworker on going back to where they finished before they came to us because they actually have missed so much school. So we finally got the records from the California school.
And then we did not get any records on the student in my room who we don't know where his parents are, if they're incarcerated or if they were actually running from the parents. They told us that there was a high alert, like there was only certain people that could check them out, and if anybody came to the office. So we were made known of those situations when they first came to our school.
and it's it's been a very intertwining case but we're working with the grandmother and the aunt very very closely to make sure that they get
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:13:27
caught up well are you all aware of any involvement with your school district even your your class of kids
and DHS department of human services case workers are yes
Speaker 14
1:13:42
ma'am we've had several dhs situations in
our school district and so they're on a case-by-case basis and they're very private we get called into the principal's office and say this person you know their family was called dhs was called into the home and now they're here so they they make us aware as teachers but i don't know that they can tell us everything but we've been made aware of whatever we are allowed to know would you like to
Speaker 216
1:14:13
it would be helpful in the classroom with the
child you know because sometimes i wonder if the child you say
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:14:20
you you the way you describe the child with the anger issue seemed like you had to pull that out of him by going to that one-on-one first to see what was actually going on in his his home and in his life do any of the other two teachers have any comment on our absentees we take that and it goes into
Speaker 22
1:14:47
the office and it's it's an automatic system that if they have five days letters are sent and you know eventually i'm sure that if it's a problem they have to file fines but i i don't know that unless they tell me I am to alert the office if someone's potentially being checked out or, you know, they're missing a lot in certain times of the day. But as far as, like, specific information, I find it out from my parents and usually my students.
Speaker 21
1:15:19
If I'm alerted by things, I'm to go straight, you know, to my counselor to let them deal with those things. My situation,
Speaker 31
1:15:28
excuse me, is mostly like Lissa's. We've called in before to DHS, and they've come to speak to the students, but they're pulled into the office, and we don't get a whole lot of information. Representative Rye. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
1:15:51
Secretary Lever, we've hit on a lot of this, but i'd like to ask you a question because i think it would actually would clear this thing up as far as the things that's required from us to be able to take that child and make sure that we detect right about the child having trouble reading and what is the proper protocol dr leva well i think um
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:16:20
you know if you really get a lot of the conversations we have
here is it starts probably before students um even come to kindergarten if if um if we're doing a good job with our early learning environments and voluntary pre-kindergarten sometimes you can find children and there's a program of a child find that may need additional support intervention if there's anything that we know is the sooner we can identify and provide intervention um the outcomes of improvement go into place a lot quicker but when we look at the
system we built especially in kindergarten first and second grade in the law requirements around dyslexia screening especially around literacy the system that we've created now is able to identify potentially students that may have some gaps or need some more intervention at an earlier age and we take that snapshot in time three times a year when students start with us in kindergarten, but I always go back to, um, you know, working with parents and families, you know,
and the investment that state's made by getting books in the children's homes and, and, um, creating a culture on literacy starts well before kindergarten. And, um, I, when we look at kind of the system we built with Arkansas learns is to be more methodical in identifying students that need support and then like at third grade if if a student's still not where they need to be we know that's such a critical juncture because in order for you to succeed you got to be able to read
right and school if you're in sixth grade or seventh grade and you're struggling with foundational literary skills you're not having fun and when school becomes fun you become disengaged so the state of Arkansas has been has made a commitment into being a science of reading state so when you look at kind of these reading wars we've taken a strong stance which is the right stance we're continuing to build out professional development support schools with the implementation of the science of reading but then that snapshot in time which is which is great about the policy and
learns is it requires us to do something everybody wants to look at like oh you know we're we're just trying to retain students that's not the spirit that's not the goal the goal is not to add more student parking at middle schools because everybody's retained in third grade it's to say we have to hit a red flag we have to hit a caution button this this student is not meeting at a basic level and when you start getting away from systemic systematic explicit instruction and phonics and get more into content we need to make sure that there's a plan in place for that student
Speaker 154
1:19:04
moving forward that their access to get those holes filled so that that's what we've done and that's
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:19:18
what we've committed to as a state. Thank you sir and thank you madam chairman. Representative
McGruder. Thank you madam chair. I really want to say thank you to all of you educators for being here today. Being an educator myself I really appreciate you all and all that you do as representative Barnes stated. We have people like Jacob Oliva. We have our governor and people like
myself, who all started with an educator from the beginning. So our job is never done. I do have a few questions for you ladies. I want to know how many veteran teachers that you all have within your districts. Can I ask you to clarify, how do you define a
Speaker 118
1:19:57
veteran teacher? Great question. Just to make sense, but I saw their wheels turning, so I just
Speaker 226
1:20:03
wanted to see if you could give them a little follow-up.
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:20:07
I would say a veteran teacher is someone with
Speaker 14
1:20:15
about 10 years of experience. We have a very large school district, and I do not know the answer to the number of veteran teachers. I can tell you, in our own school, we have probably 45 teachers. And out of that 45 teachers, I mentored one brand-new teacher this year. That's all we had was one brand-new teacher. But we have a huge turnover for the next year because within our little school,
we have the highest number of promotions to administrative positions than any other elementary school in the district. And you're in Pointe? I'm in Cabot, Ward Central and Ward. But we have more coming out of Ward Central into administrative. We've had several go to the Department of Education. So it's kind of exciting that we've seen them move on. But we've got probably, like I said, we just had one brand-new teacher this year,
and I was her mentor because we only had one. But next year we're
Speaker 21
1:21:22
going to have several. We have about eight from K-4. You know, the rest of the other building, I'm not sure of how many they still have. That's 10 and up, but we have about eight from K-4.
Speaker 124
1:21:34
We're a K-6 building. There's two teachers in each grade level, and I want to say about 10 of them have 10
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:21:43
or more years of experience. My next question is in regards to academic coaches, because I know that matters tremendously
to helping us teachers improve our craft. Do all of you have literacy coaches in your buildings? No. No, we don't. Yes,
Speaker 234
1:22:01
we do. Cabot does, and the other two districts are?
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:22:15
Central. I was listening to you on my drive-in. I honestly think Secretary Oliva scheduled a lot of the road work today to hinder me from arriving on time.
But setting standards, I heard one of you say that on my drive-in, which is very important to make sure that our students can achieve. I think that's an area that we have lacked in where we don't set standards. Also, cross-core curriculum, POCs. I heard someone say they meet after school, and so do you all have time? So do each of you have time during the day to help? Do you do cross-curriculum PLCs, and is that during the day or is it after school?
I heard somebody say after school earlier, and I want to
Speaker 126
1:23:07
know which district that was. So I'm at Poen, and we're a four-day school
Speaker 19
1:23:12
week, so our contracted time is 745 to 430. So after school, I mean by the kids have left. were
Speaker 21
1:23:21
still contracted at that time. We meet during our planning time that we have at least once a week. I teach everything, so.
Speaker 43
1:23:30
So you are the cross-curriculum POC. Yes, I teach everything.
We also meet once a week during school hours. Okay. And
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:23:41
my next questions are for Secretary Oliva. again thank you ladies uh I know uh we're ending the year and uh teachers are marking the days off the calendar uh test scores have we got any
in are we seeing any gains or improvements yet
Speaker 118
1:23:58
yeah so I like to say um don't count down the days make
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:24:04
every day count right um but yeah so uh
school schools are are uh coming to I actually think this is probably the most exciting time of the year especially when I was a high school principal is that end of the school year and you're having the graduations problems all that good stuff we we are still in the testing window right so we get asked a lot of questions around when are we going to get test results and and I'm not sure if you were here yet but we stated that students in schools are getting their three through ten atlas scores with pretty much within 24 hours some some some are a little bit lagging because
they do a lot of verifying it's still a new system and in cross-checking but definitely within a week so a student takes the test the parents are able to log in a portal and see how they did on achievement levels within let's say 72 hours mostly pretty much there so they have their student data every every teacher I think has access to their student data school has exit data we don't have the aggregate yet at the state level because the windows not closed right like so the state window closes this friday and um we'll get those student files
in probably the second or third week of june because there's a lot of calibration that has to happen then it takes a couple weeks to load that in the student information system so we'll be able to generate reports definitely by july because i think the questions are going to be like how did the districts do how do the schools do we don't have that ability yet because um we we have to get the files and convert it and there's all these this process happens and then they'll be calculating learning gains which we'll be able to release but schools have access to their achievement data now and what i'm hearing from schools is is they're seeing pretty good results
as expected as we're building on our current year and reference system so i don't have specific dates and answers but i think in the next like if we did an update in june or july the next time We
Speaker 154
1:26:02
have meetings, we should be able to share hard information
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:26:05
then. I know in my district, we made some strides in the right direction. So you're saying that's just the ATLAS exam that
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:26:16
we're looking at now? Yeah, for 3 through 10. And that's the criteria that goes into the school and district grades.
And the tested subject areas are English, language arts, math, and science. But then you get into course exams in
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:26:31
algebraic geometry and biology. I love what we're doing with this program. I was very frustrated by nobody being from my area. So my question is, how can someone like myself help recruit people for this program, especially those people who are in the delta where we're located?
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:26:52
Well, awareness is, I think, the first part.
And that's something that I think we're always looking to do better as an agency, school districts, schools, teachers, one of the teachers mentioned earlier when asked, like, what can we do as a legislature is we got to say the positive things that are happening in our public schools, right? We have incredible opportunities for our students and families. So I think the biggest thing that you could help us with and help with is awareness, right? Because there's still just a lot of confusion. I get emails all the time, like, you know, how come
kindergarten teachers aren't eligible for teacher merit pay when we're critical to setting up the foundation and i'm always having to share more information they kindergarten teachers are eligible there's different pathways so there's a lot of confusion around it um this program specifically looked at top tier teacher merit pay candidates which i want to say there's about 50 if I'm just using ballpark math so we invited anybody to want to participate in this program so if somebody from your area may have qualified but chose not to
participate it was their first year I'm hoping you all would say this was a worthwhile experience otherwise you wouldn't be here because we are intending to do cohort two these are official graduates of cohort one congratulations graduation season but we intend to do a cohort two so I think word of mouth um if you get invited to be part of this fellowship program we we would want to encourage folks to participate because not everybody that was eligible chose to participate and that's okay that's okay um hopefully um we can we can do that and it may be when we get that
list as i'm thinking um and i don't know when that list will be calculated probably around august or so by the time we calculate the learning gains and the van scores and who who is eligible um it it may be worth um when we identify the folks that are eligible letting all of the representatives and legislators know like hey these folks are eligible if you want to encourage them to participate um that that that's probably would probably be the best way to help because i think if if a teacher heard from their rep like i knew that you should do this it's it's a little bit
Speaker 240
1:29:06
different than getting a letter from me true and my last question
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:29:12
and thank you uh senator english for the leeway. I hear that we're working towards getting literacy coaches and academic coaches in all the school districts, which is a process. I know we're getting ready for adequacy study. I don't know if this question is for the chair or secretary Oliva. How can we identify the districts in need and how can we assist in making sure that everybody has those coaches so we can
make sure those students are in the low socioeconomic
areas and those teachers can achieve
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:29:47
better i can respond unless you want to respond so that's a good question and what we did with arkansas learns is made a commitment the legislator made a commitment to at least having about 120 literacy coaches statewide to support our dnf schools so we we started with dns schools which i don't think any of you are at a dnf school or
you were but now you but you've improved congratulations um so every dnf school gets assigned a kind of a state literacy coach every single education cooperative has literacy coaches because i think part of the question that i would always say back to is like what data shows that some of these schools need coaches how do we there's only so many resources so we got to make make sure we prioritize those schools. So DNS schools should have a state literacy coach assigned to them. One of the challenges that we have, and I think this is a great challenge, is that
we'll have a state sign up. I'll pick on Drew Central here as an example. Maybe they were a D school and they had a state literacy coach. Then they approved to a C school, right? And now they don't qualify for one. And they're like, wait a minute, you know, this person helped us. You can't take this resource away from us but then they don't qualify then they then they the district may try to hire this person like there's almost like a deeper conversation is like yeah we made that commitment we established these dns schools hopefully we don't have any more dns schools like
i keep saying we have to eliminate failure but we also can't see improvement and then take away those resources so everybody that improved that had a literacy coach doesn't want to give one up So now we're trying to find more literacy coaches, and it's an ongoing process, but D&F schools have assigned a literacy coach for sure. Thank you. Representative Mayberry. Thank you. I'm sorry. I really didn't want
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:31:45
to have to ask another question because I know we have a lot still on the agenda,
but you said something in answering some questions a moment ago that really perked my interest, and I just wanted to just be a little bit more direct in asking because you were stressing, and we've had so many conversations about early childhood education. We've had so many meetings, and you were stressing that learning starts before kindergarten, and I cannot agree with you more on this. And you said some fantastic words just a moment ago. So I want to ask, you know, very directly, does this mean that maybe in the future that we're going to see the administration come forward with some support for more resources, for more financial means to be able to take some children off of a waiting list?
We have a 3,000-child waiting list for early childhood education to help some of our struggling early child care centers, our ABC centers, with some more funding so they can stay open. I mean, I think what your comments were very much noted the importance of that in starting kindergarten off right. so so can we potentially hope those of us who are hoping that we could see some support from
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:33:08
the administration for that yeah well I think the administration has made a commitment to supporting our learning and it is start with learns with kind of just recalibrating and how do we define quality how do we look at investing in our classrooms have we arrived absolutely not do we need to keep this conversation going whether it's more resources whether it's more training whether it's more funding this is when we need to be having these conversations and I think I've been pretty consistent when saying like our investment as a state if we're going to invest
in state programs because it's kind of hard to invest in federal programs that you don't know what they're going to be each and every single year our investment in our state programs and I I'm getting all the years wrong but I don't think it's has had an increase or a re-evaluation since around 2019 so it's i think
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:34:01
it's worth having that conversation i think it's long overdue so would you uh you know would you support more funding from the educational adequacy fund to be able to support
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:34:11
some some of that so i that's that's such a general statement if is there
data that says we need more funding i would support looking at the data and looking at the return on investment and looking at the impact and looking at the process to make that question. I'm never going to throw more money at a problem. That doesn't work. Just throwing money at
Speaker 53
1:34:32
things. We did that as a nation with COVID funding. We flooded people with federal dollars that we did not need and now we're still paying for it. What was our income from all these federal dollars that we threw at schools and in classrooms to impact COVID learning? Our kids are still well below
pre-COVID levels. It wasn't funding. We threw tons of money at the problem. You know what we did is we bought more stuff. We brought in initiatives. We hired administrators. We made fake jobs. I'm not going to throw more money at it. I'm going to look at a plan and say, if this is the right plan, if this is the right strategy to improve quality and access, will it need more funding? Probably, but I think we need a strategy first. Throwing money made things worse, and we did that thanks to our federal government by just writing blank checks.
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:35:23
program does have that data to support it, and that's what I'm talking about, that we have the highest level of criteria for that ABC program, and that's the program that I'm referring to. And your own numbers from your own department indicate that the students who have gone through that program do better in kindergarten and all of that. So that's where my question comes from.
I agree with you. I just, I hope that in 2027 that we can see some widespread support also among legislators. I just had to take advantage of that opportunity to, you know, keep this on the topic of our radar screen here because I think it's so very important. Thank you. And I agree. And I just, just so you know, I
Speaker 53
1:36:11
agree. But that's why I think we need to look at and have the right strategy and then
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:36:17
make sure that it's appropriately resourced. Representative Garner.
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
1:36:31
Thank you, Madam Chair. Now I'm on. Thank you. Thank you. And I will
say, and I certainly appreciate Representative Mayberry's passion, and you know I'm right there with you. I do appreciate you guys coming once a month. And for the legislators that don't know, we are meeting once a month for early childhood education to talk about some of these things during ALC week and also with the commission. So thank you. Thank you for that. And I agree. We've got to do something because we can't wait for a long-term strategy.
We've got to have a short-term one. So thank you for that. You also brought up some information that I was going to hold, but started talking about the Atlas scores and when we get them and how we get them and those kinds of things. What are we doing about retention? So how early do we know how many kids need to be retained in third grade? Do we have a list of those districts, not the kids themselves, but the districts and those kinds of things? Do we have that information?
How many kids are being retained, where they are in the district, and how early do the families know? Well, yeah, hopefully right
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
1:37:39
away. So, you know, we started this school year, we were asked, like, how many students are at risk? So we basically took the rising cohort of second graders and said, if you're a level one, you're at risk before the school year started, which we knew was around 10,000 students. So schools, and I would love for the teachers to talk about it, immediately didn't wait.
Like, they started working with families. They started intervention. They started tutoring. In fact, I remember talking to a principal not too long ago that says, you know, before school started, we had every family of our third graders that were at risk, and we invited them in, and we worked on a strategy of what they can do at home when they're going to do school. And they're like, these meetings went so well that we actually just did the whole school. And I was like, wow, like, you know, like, this is great. Like, it's more involvement. So the teachers have been working with these students that are at risk throughout the school year.
Well, when the students take the assessments, they're getting their results. So the teachers already know if the student met, you know, the level two criteria to move on or not. We won't know, like, how many kids were retained until probably after the school year starts because they're happening at the school and district level. we can we can get a snapshot of like the number of level ones you know by school and by district we'll should have that probably about the first or second week of july once the system is loaded
but schools know right so schools um like if a student's taking assessment they're already doing interventions some are planning some are learning programs some are doing high impact tutoring now um we we actually even did something it's new this year and um and i think it's it was pretty good idea from the team that's been working on this so like our official testing window closes friday like for all the subjects and in the tests well the following monday we're opening up third
grade again so if a student took the test and wasn't successful and has been doing intervention they have an opportunity to retest before school's even out and we'll we'll know what that data is when when that's done but um parents and students if they test this some some schools haven't tested yet right they're still testing but if they tested they know their scores i i don't know if it's fair if you want to hear from
Speaker 21
1:40:01
them or not i have five students that uh was on the retention possible
retention list at christmas i don't have any that will be retained so great
Speaker 14
1:40:14
news thank you We notified our parents at the beginning of third grade if they were considered at risk. And then we took the fall interim, well, the fall atlas, and let the parents know how they did after that. And so they have been very aware all year long if their child was at risk. So we started out between the two classes that I teach.
There's 50 because we're split. And we had 11 at risk. And as of today, we only have one possibility, and that is the student I spoke of that hasn't been in school since October. However, we just got his scores Friday. We still have a couple trickling in, and he actually was a level two. So right now, if that be the case, we have zero between just our 50. with the other two classes um i think there's three at risk um and then one of them is just
the student that was the cousin of the little boy that was not in school since october so that's just down to one
Speaker 126
1:41:24
we did the same thing in the beginning of the year we let all the parents know about the law
Speaker 19
1:41:30
the things that the department sent we sent home um and throughout the year when we did our testing we have forgive me if you know this but we have the individualized reading plans which we call IRPs and every time we do any kind of progress monitoring we add that to their IRPs and parents have full access to that through the portal all year long so not only were we sending
messages through our communication portals but they were able to log into Atlas as well and then when we took the summative assessment like Secretary Oliva said that's a mouthful he said that they were coming immediately and they were we finished testing at before 10 o'clock i think and by lunch we were getting scores coming in immediately um now we did have some that i guess were pulled for the recalibration yes recalibration um and those came the next week but that was that was amazing as a teacher to be able to get those
results immediately and see how the students did um
Speaker 255
1:42:24
when did you get your results before August, September,
Speaker 126
1:42:27
October last year for K2 so just all of the things I guess are coming together and they're helping us thank you very much Representative
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:42:43
Gonzalez this is our last question we obviously have had a really great discussion here almost two hours
so this has been very very good but we have one last question and then we'll have to move on to our resource allocations, our adequacy stuff.
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
1:43:01
Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mine is more of a just kind of a cautious comment, if that's okay. And it addresses the Ruby Payne work that you were mentioning. And so I would just say, I mean, I've been through that training, and the thing that kind of stands out when I was doing the training is that it operates kind of like
from the cultural deficit model you know where their comparison of kids who are low-income kids versus those who are middle class and what these are and how you can get them here and relationships and survival for example that's what low-income kids focus on versus middle-class values of achievement and future planning it's like this or that you know and I and I would just caution you know because I know after coming out of that training and I was thinking to myself
you know wow then there were teachers leaving the training and then they're talking about their poverty kids and so that that really is bothersome and and maybe that's I'm sure that's probably not going on in your your classroom but just kind of thinking about that because there there were There's stereotyping, et cetera, and I just wanted to, you know, blaming the culture or behaviors, values versus what assets do the students have
and how can we bring forth those and build upon that. It's just a different mindset, but I understand where you're coming from. Like I said, I've gone through the training, too. We all want what's best for our students, and we want to see them all as assets in our classroom, you know, preparing that next generation of leaders. And our future career, our careers is based on our students now.
Speaker 173
1:44:53
I will say my students had no idea who she was.
Speaker 14
1:44:57
And that was just one of several strategies that we used.
So they don't know the why behind her teaching at all. They don't know that it's for
Speaker 43
1:45:06
poverty students. Thank you very much. This
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:45:15
has been a very informative couple of hours. We've really enjoyed it. I thought it would be about 15 minutes, but it's been very enlightening. I think we all had an opportunity to ask questions from the people who are in the field doing it, and that's really critically important for all of us,
and I appreciate very much you all being here today. Thank you so very much, and
thank you. And now we'll move on to our adequacy resource allocation study from our Bureau folks.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:46:41
Okay, thank you ladies, if you will identify yourselves, we'll get moving. Elizabeth Bynum, Bureau of Legislative
Speaker 261
1:46:58
Research. Adrienne Beck, also with the Bureau. Leah
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:47:06
Hadley, Bureau of Legislative Research. We will make sure you pull your microphones way up close to you, please.
Speaker 266
1:47:15
Okay. Okay, so this is part two, continuing our resource allocation presentations. In part one, we went over the
Speaker 267
1:47:28
per-student cost across all districts, as well as the adequate resources determined by the matrix and non-matrix spending. Part two, we'll look at expenditures from fund sources beyond foundation aid, reviewing best practices and educator feedback where available. So going back to our adequacy statute, number six on your tracking sheet, tab 1B of your binders, as a reminder.
This report is presented in partial fulfillment of this section that's requiring a continuous review and evaluation to take into account the certain factors relevant to providing an adequate education for all students, including an expenditure review of specific required funding. As a reminder from the reports we presented in March, foundation funds make up more than half of state funding in total. The rest is coming from other funds. In those funding streams, the federal here is referring to the miscellaneous funds
that are received locally by districts. More detailed definitions for these fund sources can be found on page 29 or Appendix A of your reports, which is Exhibit E2 of today's meeting. The first allocation report showed that public school districts and charters spent over $7 billion in the 25 school year. That total expenditure has been split at about 49% from foundation, 51% from other funds for the last three school years. Within those other funds are several funds that we've identified as
categorical, supplemental, as well as some additional fund sources. Multiple fund sources make up these categories, and when looking at overall spending, the additional category includes federal dollars, such as Perkins grants for CTE. However, under these categorical and supplemental labels, there are several funds created to either address many of the factors listed in that or described in that adequacy section or listed explicitly as part of the requirements to accomplish the required review.
So today we're going to focus on the funding sources that the state provides, some established to provide specific educational supports to students, the categorical funds, and some required by statute that Elizabeth introduced back in February, such as the National Student Lunch Funding, now known as Enhanced Student Achievement, and others addressing teacher salaries, which have been enacted as recently as 2023. We'll be looking at how these districts have spent these state funds, including the review of the specific funds cited in Section H1 of the Adequacy Statute, and a few more additional unrestricted and restricted state funds that are available to districts.
So first we have categorical funds. There are four of these at the moment. We've got three of the four funds. There are three created to address the needs of specific students' populations. That would be Alternative Learning Environment, ALE, English Learners, EL, and Enhanced Student Achievement, or ESA. PD is instead provided to ensure that personnel is equipped to support all students. Spending from all four of these funds is limited to their designated purpose and has requirements that are outlined either in rules or statute.
Additionally, the funding is based on student populations, with ESA having the most allowable uses and PD having the largest population of students. When we talk about program spending in this presentation today, this is when we're referring to district and charter spending that's been dedicated to the identified purposes in each of these funds. So for EL, it'll be spending on English learners and providing those associated services and programs, and the same for the other three categorical funds. The per-student funding amounts are set in statute.
They're also in your binders for the next biennium in the back of the matrix and funding summary, where you'll see that only ALE has increased in the last three years, but the increases for the other four categoricals are present for the next biennium. While these funds are restricted, statute does allow for the transfer of funds between categoricals. They're still restricted to each of the funds' allowable uses, but for instance, a district may transfer part of their ESA allocation to spend on English learners instead.
Lastly, to put these funds in perspective in expenditures of total spending, the categorical funds made up about 4%, less than $300 million of total spending for the 25 school year. Last year, we had asked all superintendents to rate the extent that categorical funds had met their needs for the last school year. You can see here that the needs vary a lot by districts. For instance, PD was the only categorical where no superintendents responded NA,
but where ALE shows the highest NA response at about 10% among those districts receiving the funding, it was the least reported that it met needs and the most reported that it did not meet their needs. Both ALE and ESA showed less than a half percent that the funding had exceeded their needs. And like the responses on matrix need from part one, you can find these answers in page four of your superintendent survey, which is tab 3C1 of your binders. So the first categorical is ALE, and according to DESI's 2025 Guide to Alternative Education, they make a distinction between alternative education,
Which is the specialized programming and alternative learning environments even though those terms are used interchangeably Which emphasizes the location of instruction for our purposes today? We're talking about a ALE spending including what districts are spending to provide the education as well as support the students in those environments According to DESI rules governing special needs funding Categorical funds for ALE are used to provide alternative and specialized programming that eliminates traditional barriers to learning
for students. These students must spend a certain amount of time in this programming before being counted for funding purposes. And I want to emphasize that the districts are based or funded are based on the number of students placed and how long that student is in the program during the previous school year. And so overall that becomes a per-student FTE funding basis. To be a student for to be an eligible student, DESI rules governing special needs funding outline the 12 characteristics and situations defining criteria for placement. The full list is in your report
on page 3 of Exhibit E2. Of those 12 barriers, students must be experiencing or exhibiting at least two. DESE rules also provide for a hybrid programming type for ALE, which is defined by time spent in non-traditional ALEs. Those students are funded at 1/2. In statute, A traditional ALE student must be in the program for at least 20 consecutive days to be counted for funding purposes.
For those who participate in partial days, there's a calculation outlined in rules that determines how to fund those students. The chart that you see in front of you is the last three school years total FTE funding count for students. According to DESE's legislative reports on ALEs that they submit each year to this committee, There have been over 11,000 students that participate in ALE program in each of the last school years, decreasing slightly in 2025.
But the chart here is showing you the total funded students in FTEs, which is based on the prior year. And so that 5,400 number is based on the FTEs they identified in the 24 program year. The actual funding amount for 2025 was 5,417.35 students, reflecting those partial days that students have spent in ALE. And because funding is based on instructional time, this decrease in FTEs reflects students spending less time in the program and being returned to the classroom more frequently.
So in part one, you saw several three-year trend charts divided by foundation and other spending. Today, you're going to see charts showing the categorical fund amount provided by the state for the intended purpose, the spending from those funds, and then spending from all sources, which can include foundation dollars. So first in our green columns at the bottom is the per student funding amount for the last three school years. Next is the green line showing the per student spending on ALE or program spending from the
ALE categorical fund. And the top line is spending from all available sources, all available fund sources spent on program spending or anything spent on by districts to provide ALEs. As you can see, though there are fewer FTE students, districts are still spending increasingly more per student to provide ALEs, and especially increasing from all funds available.
Similar to our per student chart, we have our green bar of total ALE funding allocated from the state and provided to districts in the last three years. As there have been fewer FTE students identified, the state has been providing less in funding despite the increase in the per student amount. Similarly this green line is showing the expenditures on ALEs from the ALE fund which which is also decreased, but you can see the districts are still spending more than their
current year funded amount. The difference in these charts is that this new yellow line is showing the total amount spent from the ALE categorical fund overall regardless of its purpose. This would include transfers to other categorical funds and spent on those needs. Comparing the two green and yellow lines, though the chart is adding some visual distance, you can see that most of the total spending FROM THE ALE FUND HAS BEEN SPENT ON ALE FOR THE LAST THREE YEARS. AND FINALLY THAT TOP LINE AGAIN IS TOTAL PROGRAM SPENDING ON ALE FROM ALL AVAILABLE
FUND SOURCES SHOWING THAT DISTRICTS ARE NOT ONLY SPENDING MORE THAN TWICE THEIR FUNDED AMOUNT BUT INCREASINGLY MORE EACH YEAR. SO MOVING ON TO SOME RELATED LEGISLATION, SINCE THE PASSAGE OF ACT 911 OF 2025 DISTRICTS are not required to provide alternative learning environments in statute the legislation made no changes in the way that districts can choose to provide an ale so according to statute they still have the flexibility in how these students are served which by district can include the
possibility of a school or a school embedded program operating as an ale most districts do not use the education service co-op option or pay another district but for some insight into the 58 districts that reported using those options you can refer to page 7 of your superintendent survey report just tab 1c again so hold just
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:58:42
one second I think we have a question on the last hold on representative Duke thank you madam
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:58:52
chair thank you all again for your work a quick question on I guess slide 11 on on page six on the
per-student funding. - Yes. - So they've got their categorical fundings, the ones that's just specific. Okay, this is your ALE funding. They can move between the other categorical funding. So obviously they're spending more. Is all that additional funding coming from those other categoricals or are they coming from their local dollars? Where's the additional money?
Do you know from each, from these
Speaker 267
1:59:26
districts? - So typically what we found is that the reason, or the way that districts are spending more than they're funded each year is from fund balances of previous allocations. I believe the transfers are typically found in the expenditures from the fund, but on other programs. And so that would have been the yellow line in the next chart of the total spending. And so in this yellow line here, that 45 million would be including transfers
other um transfers from other categorical funds so it's all coming
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:59:59
from other categorical it's not coming from other correct yes yes
Speaker 267
2:00:03
it's it's either a fund balance from a categorical previous allocation or another categorical fund yes okay so i'm gonna i'm
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:00:09
sorry i'm gonna have to use simple words on this because i i this i find a little challenging
as far as school funding sometimes to understand exactly what's going on so we're talking on this categorical funding back here to some of these other charts when you're talking about the ESA and the English
language learners and so forth and I guess PD they can't move from is that correct they're not taking money from that it's either going to be money leftover from previous year's
balances or they're going to shift from ESA to in to some of these others right yes so
Speaker 267
2:00:44
they'd shift from ESA PD English learners to pay for ale okay so the reason why
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:00:50
i'm asking this question is so if they've got leftover money in these places and they're
shifting into ale then i guess what i'm trying
to determine is are we funding these different things correctly if we are if they have enough money left over and this is not a question that i'm asking you to answer right i understand that but that i'm trying to i guess explain my question to see if i'm processing it correctly i guess is what I'm trying to understand so if they are taking money from ESA or they have fund balances from previous years we've got the formula off a little bit because we're shifting but ALE doesn't have enough so the schools are spending more on ALE we're not giving them enough money there but
they're finding it in other places they're just moving it is that a fair assessment am I understanding what's happening correctly with them yes I think so and
Speaker 267
2:01:38
as far as the per student amounts especially that would be your green line is yes that's the move between categorical funds and again that top blue line is from all funds and so that includes foundation funding it includes any other unrestricted funds that they've been able to find to support ALE and so that's where you
Speaker 270
2:01:52
have that 12,000 per student okay so that I
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:01:56
guess that that is what I was wondering so it's not just categorical money they're pouring into it they're also pouring from other places they're
pouring it into ALE because in these specific districts they are finding a need more there than they are finding other places and they're figuring out ways to move it okay so that i am
correct in that analysis yes okay thank you appreciate it thank you madam chair representative gonzalez
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:02:22
that was that was similar that that addressed that addressed my question i was just wondering since i spent more how we what can we do or how could we find out what that was
what that was and i was looking at the slide right after that 69.8 million that's a lot over what they received for that specific category. So I would be interested, yes, to know what they spent it on. Yes, thank you. As I mentioned earlier, you'll see these
Speaker 270
2:02:53
charts per student for EL and PD. ESA is funded a bit differently, but the total funding charts you'll see for the other categoricals as well.
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
2:03:09
Representative Garner. Thank you, Madam Chair. My question is also on that same slide, so now I'm confused. I got everything up to date, up to what we've talked about now, except that do we know where they're using the all funds? So this $12.8 million, the blue line, do we know where schools are pulling those funds from? Yes, we can track the expenditure sources.
Okay, so where mostly are the schools pulling those funds from? I don't have it in front of me, but it's a very quick pull, yes. Okay, but we can figure out. Yes, absolutely. That would be great. I would love to know where they're getting those funds because that is not from a fund balance necessarily. Right, yes, there are additional sources, right? I'd like to know how they're paying for it.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:04:03
Okay. Thank you. Okay, moving right along. We're at English learners.
Speaker 287
2:04:11
That's correct. So Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires districts to provide an equal educational opportunity to language minority students. Federal law provides that no state shall deny equal educational opportunity to an individual on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin. So Arkansas provides categorical funds to assist districts and charters in meeting these requirements for English learners or EL for short, as Leah noted earlier.
So as a reminder, categorical funding for EL students was $366 in the 25 school year. And these students are those identified as not proficient in the English language based on statewide entrance and exit procedures criteria, including an approved English proficiency assessment instrument, the ELPA 21, which we covered in a previous report that you can also find in your binder, the accountability and achievement. But these funds are to be used for salaries, for EL skilled instructional services, relevant training for teachers, program development, instructional materials, and assessment-related activities.
In 2025, 94% of EL categorical expenditures were spent on salaries and benefits. And so moving on to that chart that we all saw previously for ELE, we'll see a similar version here. So this chart is going to show total funding from all EL categorical funds in that bottom green column, and that's compared to total EL spending from all funds in that top blue bar. So in short, this is showing us that total spending on EL services has been around 43%
higher on average than EL categorical funds. In 2025, total EL funding came up to almost $16 million, while total spending for EL services from strictly those EL categorical funds totaled almost $18 million, again indicating use of fund balances and transfers. So total EL funding increased by 7% over the past three school years, as did spending from EL categorical funds for strictly on EL-related program services.
so we'll look at how these students are across the state this shows distribution of these students shown as a percentage of total district enrollment for the 25 school year charters are not included here since they do not have geographic boundaries but you'll see amongst districts that that percent range from 0.7 percent of all students up to 35 percent with all districts having at least one el student. And then of the 25 charters in the 25 school year, 19 had EL students ranging from 1.4
percent of total student population in KIP Delta up to 70 percent at the Exalt Academy in Southwest Little Rock. And then in the previous three school years, that statewide percentage has increased seven percentage points and you'll see that reflected here and this chart shows el per student funded amounts for the last three school years as compared to the per student el program expenditures from el categorical funds in that green line and then again from all fund sources
in that blue line so you'll see the per student funding amount has remained flat for these three school years but the per student spending from both categorical funds and all fund sources has exceeded per student funding for all of these years for categorical spending this indicates a use again of fund balances and transfers between other categoricals while per student spending between 24 and 25 decline the number of english learners increased by seven percentage points during that time as noted in the previous slide and I will move into
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:08:17
enhanced student achievement excuse me just what we have a couple of questions here um representative
Speaker 293
2:08:30
house um um okay oh i'm sorry that's okay um okay thank you i've never been called that that's
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:08:42
okay go ahead okay sorry yeah no that's fine um the chart that you have on the percentage of English learners by district that that chart okay
this one so we have if we if you just glance at this um this this is by school district and there are more that are in the zero to three percent versus those who are a little higher number and of course the darker so my my question is I just wondered about when you look at the categorical fund needs when you started off like the superintendent survey
it said that English learners only 27% reported that it doesn't meet the need and I got to thinking about that in that overall there are most of the school districts across Arkansas they're in that 0-3% so they're not more than likely not going to uh say that that's that's a need that's not being met you know and so but there are fewer that have those big dark you know that would be one superintendent so reporting right um
and so i just wondered about that i'm not sure that would that's accurately reflected when you have i mean it's all the school districts but the majority of the school districts that have large numbers of English learners you're only talking about one superintendent that's going to answer that and there may be a need in that particular district but it's not going to show up overall because of the small number does that make sense yes that
Speaker 287
2:10:26
makes sense and I I think we could easily pull our survey results and revisit that question and maybe break those out by concentration of
those students to see how that varies if there's any differentiation between districts that have a lower percentage and those that have a higher percentage of
Speaker 175
2:10:43
these students thank you you're welcome thank you um representative hope duke thank you madam chair um
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:10:53
similar question to the last one and i'll probably have that on the upcoming ones as well i haven't um re-glanced over them since yesterday but um can you just give us i'm sure you don't have it now but where that spending where they're making
up the difference is like we had asked on the um a le one whenever they're the districts are having to make up that money where are they pulling from to make it up i know they're categorical that they can move between but they're clearly when they
Speaker 298
2:11:24
can't i apologize for i have to put the microphone
Speaker 292
2:11:27
on i don't have the exact breakout with me um actually i think i i do um so it looks like a lot of that is federal funds that they're pulling in from though they are using um a good chunk of foundation funds uh to cover those expenses
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:11:42
can you get us a little bit of that that can you get
us that information a little absolutely i can break that down further i'm particularly i mean anytime you bring up federal dollars
it always makes me go and of course i know we've got a lot of federal money pulling in but i like to be as independent from them as i can because we never know when they're going to cut things and so um that is just having that information is good to know so we know what we need to where we need
Speaker 292
2:12:07
to fill in blanks if necessary right and it looks like there is a specific title three fund from the federal funds I think that makes up the largest proportion of those federal funds
Speaker 287
2:12:15
it's related to English language acquisition so I think which is targeted towards English learners so I think up a big portion but I could absolutely give a more detailed breakdown of those
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:12:25
funds. So they can't shift that funding, but they
could potentially, right, if it's coming down from the feds, it's saying it's targeted for this, then I assume we don't have the flexibility with it. So then if that you have that funding coming in from this pipeline, but you can shift your EL funding, correct, right? So then you could, you get the money coming here and you can shift the
money here and potentially doesn't mean they're doing it. Correct. But you would know, right, if
a district has had the federal money coming in and they're shifting the EL money somewhere else to fill in a gap somewhere else?
Speaker 287
2:13:00
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And we can even disaggregate to see if there's any particular, back to that question about the concentration of students, we can even go further and dig in to see which districts are maybe doing that predominantly more. Are they ones with higher proportions of districts? We can definitely do some breakouts to follow that money a little bit more closely to see how that's working out. I
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:13:18
think that would be at least a good story to know
where they're kind of shifting shells around a little bit because they've got federal dollars coming in in a particular area versus another area where they would not be receiving that so thank
Speaker 305
2:13:36
you thank you thank you absolutely okay moving right along excuse me our next categorical is enhanced student achievement enhanced student achievement is formerly known as national school of lunch funding because it is based on the number of students in a district eligible for free and reduced price lunch It is awarded on a per-student basis, a per-student amount based on the percentage of students eligible in the district, and so you can see those percentages and the amounts on the screen.
ESA funding also includes growth and transitional funding. Growth is additional funding on top of these amounts provided to districts that have experienced at least 1% growth in the past three years. And transitional funding is funding awarded to districts that are moving between those funding amounts. So for a district that is moving from receiving $1,076 to $538, it's funding intended to give the district time to adjust to that new, to the loss in funding.
You can see on the other side of your screen the eligible uses for ESA funding. A caveat to the first one, these are from the Public School Funding Act. The Public School Funding Act does require that schools cannot use ESA funds to meet, supplant, or satisfy the standards of accreditation or the minimum teacher salary requirements. So districts are required to meet all of those requirements before they begin using ESA funds on salaries.
So the requirements you just saw are from the Public School Funding Act. DESE also has requirements in the rules for how ESA funding is spent. They are meant to be targeted to the needs of students based on the district's needs assessments. It is for programs and purposes intended to increase academic achievement and reduce gaps in achievement among students subgrades. Now looking at Act 807 from 2025 and some changes to reporting requirements on ESA funding.
Previously, statute required districts to submit a three-year plan to the department outlining how they were going to use their ESA funds. Act 807 removed that requirement, and instead, districts are now required to include information on prioritization and intended use of funding in the district's strategic plan. However, the public school funding statute still requires that the state board will promulgate rules for submitting that ESA plan,
and the rules related to ESA funding still require the three-year plan and those rules are current as of March of this year now looking at total funding and spending and I'm going to start from the bottom of this and work up you can see at the bottom those green bars are representing total ESA funding the green bars that you see at the bottom are representing spending from ESA
categorical funding on ESA programs the yellow line here is showing total expenditures from ESA categoricals on any program and this is where you see transfers to the other three categoricals and you can see that it's about 4.5 million that's been the districts are spending in 2025 above that green bar and that 4.5 million is all transfers to other categoricals and then that blue bar is showing all spending
from all sources on any ESA programs looking next at eligible students ESA funding is awarded based on prior year eligibility and so this chart is showing the number of students that districts received funding for in each year you can see that the number is going up about a thousand students from 23 to 24 and then declining almost 8,000 students between 24 and 25.
The map here is showing you each district's ESA rate for the 25 school year. Of course, the map is only showing you the traditional school districts. The charters are not included since they do not have geographic boundaries. You can see that there are six rates. this is including the transitional funding for districts that are receiving that transitional funding you can see that most of the districts receiving the highest amount are in the south and the eastern parts of the state looking at charter districts nine charters are receiving that lowest
538 amount four are receiving the 1076 amount and five districts five charter districts in the state did not receive any ESA funding in 2025. And then finally, looking at the top expenditure categories for ESA funding, academic supports and intervention makes up more than $92 million, almost half of all ESA expenditures, and more than twice any of those other categories.
And I'll be happy to take questions on this section or we can go
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:19:26
ahead and move on Second we've got representative Duke
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:19:32
Thank You madam chair just a quick question different question than from the previous ones My question is, on your free and reduced lunch,
the drop, do we know why, and do we know where that's occurring?
Speaker 305
2:19:45
I don't know exactly why, but I can tell you where. Yes, I can pull that for you.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:19:50
Okay, so you're going to have to pull that
Speaker 305
2:19:53
and get that to us? Yes, I can pull that. I can pull that by district. We did look and compare this to the ADM across the state, And this is more of a decline than just the decline in enrollment across the state. When we looked at this decline, we said, well, is this just reflecting a general drop in enrollment? And this is a steeper decline than the drop in enrollment, but I don't know why.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:20:17
Do you have any idea if that's being seen in any other maybe neighboring states, if this is a trend or if this is just exclusive to – because I'm going to guess that's not been the trend if we were to go back further. That's not been the trend in Arkansas. I mean, obviously, I don't know, but I'm
Speaker 305
2:20:34
guessing. I don't believe so. I haven't looked at other states, but I'd be happy to pull ahead
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:20:38
and look into that for you. Okay. I mean, that's just pretty noticeable, especially when you say it doesn't go with the drop in enrollment. It doesn't correlate. I mean, it's steeper than our drop in enrollment.
So that does, yeah, I would appreciate that
Speaker 146
2:20:58
information, and I'm sure the other members would as
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:21:01
well. Thank you. Absolutely. Representative Gonzalez. Yes, thank you. My question is on slide 26, the top five ESA categorical expenditure categories. I would be very interested in knowing what that consists of for the academic supports and interventions and also additional teachers. Like what is that, exactly what do we mean by that,
or how is that being spent in
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
2:21:24
those categories? I can pull additional information
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:21:28
on that for you. Okay, thank you. My question on that just, and unless I'm not, this is the first time I'm in session with fiscal session and learning about adequacy, so I have a lot of questions. So the sentence that you had mentioned, ESA funding cannot be used to meet, satisfy, or supplant the state standards for accreditation or minimum teacher salary requirements.
So I just wondered if we have more money being spent because there's a bigger need and there seems to be a big need in particular areas from year to year, would that eventually be moved over to like a consistent line item that we would include that maybe in the matrix or something that's solid if it continues to be an area that
there's a lot of need and we're having to figure out where the money is going to
Speaker 305
2:22:32
come from to meet that need. Representative Gonzales-Worthin, that's a policy question and the legislature could do that, but that's a policy question and that would be a
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:22:46
decision for you, the committees. Okay, thank you. Representative Beatty. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm over here. My question is kind of going back to the ALE and the categorical fund transfers. Is there any correlation between the transfers and the districts that choose to do that
and the actual student outcome? Have we looked at that to see if those transfers have actually improved the
Speaker 283
2:23:13
outcomes? Sorry, just so I'm understanding your question, regarding the ALE students, so the districts that are choosing to
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:23:20
provide ALEs? Those that are choosing to provide ALEs and also to transfer the categorical funds over to the ALEs, are we tracking? Is that actually improving the outcomes for those students?
Or is it kind of like what the Secretary said earlier, is it just throwing money in an area that we're not seeing the benefit? all right so desi's previously presented to this
Speaker 266
2:23:43
committee i think it was in 22 possibly um that they they have a program like they have
Speaker 267
2:23:49
a legislative report and that includes some student outcomes that tracks some items such as i think the graduation rates of students like how many students have been returned uh but i believe that that's the only mechanism that they have to like identify and classify student outcomes uh we can pull which districts are transferring those
Speaker 144
2:24:09
funds absolutely but I don't think we could provide any comparisons I think that would be a Desi question all right
Speaker 286
2:24:24
thank you absolutely okay moving right along great so we're going to move into our final categorical and that
Speaker 287
2:24:35
is for professional development so Arkansas disburses pd funds in three different ways as discussed previously in the funding report but as
a reminder um these go out in three different ways and we're going to focus on the portions distributed to districts through desi as the grants and then the portion that goes to districts as a per student amount and as a reminder 41 is allocated for professional development but districts receive 37 50 of that in 2025 a portion of that so as i said districts receive 37 50 per student for purposes of pd and statute defines the purpose
of pd as that to improve teaching and learning to facilitate individual school-wide and system-wide improvements so that all students demonstrate proficiency on state academic standards and these specific requirements related to professional development and were outlined in DESI's rules governing professional development. So categorical funding provided for PD is to be used for PD related activities and materials that do the following. So it needs to improve the knowledge
and skills of teachers, administrators, and paraprofessionals. It needs to improve student academic achievement and then provide training for school bus drivers and in 2025 more than 60 percent went towards salaries and benefits for certified teachers for purposes of pd so our similar chart here we're going to look at funding as related to spending for professional development so again you'll see in the bottom green column this is the total categorical funding
generated from that 3750 amount and the green line above that this you'll see it's just above that indicating it spending is close to actual funding and in that yellow line and these are showing again total expenditures from pd categorical funds so this remains roughly two to three million dollars above total funding again indicating use of fund transfers and um fund fund balances, excuse me. Both of these spending amounts increased slightly in 2024 before
decreasing by approximately $2 million in 2025. Then you'll see that top line in blue here, and this shows total spending on PD-related expenses using all fund sources, almost $145 million in 2025, approximately 88% higher than total funding. The largest portion of that spending comes from federal fund sources and you'll see total spending steadily decreased from all across all three three school years as well. So we'll look at that in per student
form. So beginning with the funded per student amount and then showing what they spent from those funds. So they spent $37 per student from categorical funds for purposes of PD, a decrease of almost $4 per student from the previous school year and then finally total per student PD related spending from all fund sources came to $306 in 2025 a decrease of $15 per student from 2023 and more than $260 more than per student funding. So this next chart we're going to look
or this next chart using this next slide we're going to look at funds how funds from the professional learning grant program were spent so this grant provided 16.2 million dollars in funds 200 245 districts based on a per student calculation and this was um as of using and this was available for all districts to receive of the total 259 districts 10 did not apply and one was not approved
So the grant program is designed to enhance student learning outcomes by fostering continuous job-embedded professional development for educators. And then Act 795 of 2025 changed how additional PD categorical funds were to be used. So this law removed the $16.5 million appropriation for additional PD. Instead, that funding provided above the per-student PD amount She'll be used by DESI for implementation of the LEARNS Act to improve student academic outcomes.
So in their most recent 2019 evidence-based model, Auden and Pykus, often referred to as OMP, and these are education consultants the committees have used in the past, they estimated the cost for effective PD as $125 per student for the cost of trainers. So this includes paying for central office PD staff, outside consultants, as well as reimbursements for teacher conference registrations or tuition for teachers who enroll in appropriate coursework at approved colleges and universities.
Costs may also include miscellaneous administrative materials, supplies, and travel expenses. OMP also recommend that teachers have 10 days of their work year dedicated to PD. And the full evidence-based model can be found in Appendix D of your report. So looking at some survey results regarding PD, we asked teachers about their professional development they received in the 25 school year.
Results show collaboration with other educators and staff as received by the most of teachers, followed by district-provided PD not using Arkansas Ideas, which is the online professional development program through AETM. And then when asked which forms of PD were most useful, collaboration with other educators and staff was rated highest, followed by conferences and workshops. So that's going to conclude our categorical fund section.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:30:45
I'm happy to take questions before I move on.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:30:54
Let me see. representative Duke thank you madam chair same what this is the same question as before on page 16 I guess slide 32 if I'm understanding correctly there they have thirty one thirty seven dollars they're spending three hundred and six is that correct okay
that's correct where is that additional funding coming from so
Speaker 292
2:31:12
federal funds are making up the largest portion let me pull this
information earlier um to get a little bit more detail so let me see if i have that broken out um if i remember i can get that more detail for you but
Speaker 287
2:31:29
i do remember looking at that that esser fund some of the covet funds did make up some of that but of course that is um falling away so that may change but there are some multiple other funds federal fund sources and other state and local funds that are being used that i'm happy to disaggregate for you thank you and that would
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:31:47
be great and also on that federal funding when you're looking at it and you find those different streams
that are coming in if they are restricted in how
they use them or to what maybe vendor or whoever they use them have to use them for i would like to know that too if they have flexibility with it or if it is said you're going to go spend
it here with this if you accept this money absolutely I can pull that for you
Speaker 298
2:32:11
and include that context for you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Representative Beatty.
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:32:19
Thank you, Madam Chair. Go back to the last slide where you were showing, you know, on the PD, I guess what they found most useful with the 50 and the 21%. I guess my question is, did they also provide information on what they found the least helpful? and did they provide that information do you have that that you could share because i get a lot of complaints from my educators on pd and that that some of it's a waste their time they don't see
the benefit that they feel like they're just going through the motion to get those those days in so did did you have some honest educators that provided that information that you can
Speaker 287
2:33:03
share uh yes so in the survey report so in the in the binder if you have that um if not we can provide that for you but there are the full results from our survey which includes the all of the responses provided and then we have additional comments they may have provided regarding some of that pd so we can absolutely get more information to you on that
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:33:22
was there anything that really stood out to
to you guys when you looked over that information is something that they they universally saw statewide as being um maybe not helpful
Speaker 287
2:33:35
at the top of my head i don't remember anything standing out to that degree but i'll certainly go back and see
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:33:42
if if that's still the case i was just you know seeing it 21 on conferences and workshops uh that only 21 of those surveyed thought those were helpful or essential
Speaker 287
2:33:53
i think we have the specifically essential uh we have i think four
break i had to double check myself but we have a few different breakouts but those are the that's highest rating
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:34:03
available all right and probably the most expensive uh as far as the cost of a pd conferences and workshops would you agree i don't know off anecdotally you might be right
Speaker 287
2:34:13
i don't have the data in front of me to show exactly how districts were spending related to conferences i can't get to that level of detail but um anecdotally you might be correct on that all right thank you i'll
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:34:25
be quiet now thank you madam chair for allowing me to ask questions that's fine thank
Speaker 287
2:34:30
you. Let's move ahead. Great. So we're going to move into our supplemental funds and these refer to an assortment of additional funding streams that have been added over the years to assist districts and charters with various needs. So we have multiple of these beginning with isolated funding, declining enrollment, student growth, ESA grants or enhanced student achievement grants, special education high cost occurrences enhanced transportation teacher salary equalization and
then learns minimum teacher salaries each of these funds address specific needs that districts may have to provide an adequate education they are each distributed differently to district different using districts and charters and overall account for five percent of total district and charter spending. So our first one that we'll review is for isolated and special needs isolated funds. So broadly, isolated funding refers to districts with, it's provided to districts with low
enrollment or geographic challenges. And that term isolated funding typically encompasses four distinct forms of isolated funding that each have their own eligibility and distribution criteria isolate so these are isolated special needs isolated I'll say SNI for short going forward and then small district and then isolate or using SNI for transportation specifically so this table is going to show us funding amounts for each of these funds for the 25 school year
as compared to spending for each of those funds so you'll see that almost 11 million dollars was funded in total to these four funds with special needs isolated or sni receiving the largest portion almost four million dollars and you'll see that spending for the first two isolated and special needs isolated and sni is combined and this is because of the app scan coding structure and app scan refers to the arkansas public school computer network and this is the system that districts use to input all of their expenditure data and because of the way these are coded we are not able to
disaggregate spending for each of these funds so they are combined there for that total 6.3 amount on your right but you'll see that total isolated and sni spending was almost half a million more than total funding meaning districts use some remaining fund balances and that applies for the other sni funds there as well so this next chart is going to show how spending from each of these funds has varied for the last three school years beginning with the combined isolated
and special needs isolated followed by the small school fund in the light blue and then total spending at the top while total spending in 25 is higher than it was in 23 it's an overall decrease from the 24 school year spending from isolated and sni funds increased by 1 million dollars between 24 and 25 while spending from the small school fund decreased by more than two million dollars in that time so this next chart is going to take that total spending and compare it to total funding
for the last three school years you'll see that funding has remained flat at 10.9 million while spending has fluctuated between 11.1 and 11.9 million dollars as mentioned each of these isolated funds have different eligibility criteria and distribution methods as well as different spending restrictions excluding the small school fund which has no spending restrictions so for all of these restrictions these are strictly for the
specific isolated school area for which they are receiving those isolated funds and for some districts these make up the majority if not all of the district so these are the corresponding top uses of these each of these funds and again you'll see the top expenditures combined for isolated and sni funds again due to that coding structure despite each of those having separate spending restrictions overall you'll see regular instruction related expenses were the largest use of isolated sni funds excluding transportation
where transportation was the largest use of those funds. So going back to the research from Onan and Paikas, they recommend adjustments for school districts that have smaller enrollment numbers, and they also state that districts below 975 students require additional support staff for an adequate program. For districts with 975 students or fewer, they recommend staffing one assistant principal and then one full-time teacher for every seven students.
to provide staffing in a way that a district can deploy at their own need. And in 2025, 142 districts have fewer than 975 students or 55% of all school districts. Our next
Speaker 305
2:39:40
supplemental fund is declining enrollment funding. Declining enrollment funding is unrestricted funding. It's awarded based on a formula. the formula awards about half the foundation funding amount for each student the district is
losing the formula full formula and an example calculation are in appendix b of your report and your report is exhibit two in your materials because of reporting requirements related to declining enrollment districts cannot transfer funds out of declining enrollment and so you can see looking at the funding and spending that for all three years districts are spending more money than they are actually being funded looking at the top
expenditure categories for declining enrollment certified staff vehicles and classified staff then looking at the number of districts receiving declining enrollment that number is increasing about 16 percent between 23 and 24 and 33 percent from 24 to 25 and then you can see the five districts that received the highest amounts of declining enrollment funding in 2025 and that top amount was about two million dollars
looking at best practices there are a number of ways that states address declining enrollment funding arkansas utilizes that first option to fund based on a formula but states do sometimes provide minimum amounts of funding or look at averages over a different period of years our next supplemental is student growth funding student growth funding is also unrestricted funding that formula is also in your report in appendix c it provides about the full foundation
amount for each district each student that a district is gaining because of a difference in the formula declining enrollment is based on yearly average daily membership and student growth is based on quarterly average daily membership it is possible for a district to be eligible for both but they receive whichever funding amount is greater they do not receive both like declining enrollment funding student growth funding cannot be transferred out of the student growth fund and so you see in 24 and 25 that districts are spending more
than they were funded those years looking at the top expenditure categories for student growth I do want to provide the definition from the financial handbook for that first one management service consulting is professional services provided in order to assist management in board policy or the operation of the districts and then looking at the districts and charters receiving funding that number is going down 13 from 23 to 24 18 between 24 and 25 and then you can see the five
districts receiving the highest amounts of funding in 2025 i do want to note that arkansas virtual academy and arkansas connections academy together are receiving more than 15 million and the two of those account for almost 40% of total student growth funding in 2025. Lastly, on student growth, best practices, one method is simply to fund based on current year enrollment. In Arkansas, we fund based on prior year enrollment. States do also adjust
mid-year. There are states that require a minimum percentage, so growth over a certain percentage to receive student growth funding and there are a number of states that are adjusting funding mid-year based on growth. Our next supplemental are ESA grants. This is despite the similar name this is completely separate from the enhanced student achievement categorical funding. This is a different stream of funding. This is a reimbursement system. Schools spend the money in one year and
then receive reimbursement from DESI reimbursement for one of the three programs that you see in 25 127 districts received funding and here you can see how much we'll go to the next slide you can see how much districts spent on each of those three purposes in 2025.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:44:22
Let's stop. Just one second here. Representative Duke. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:44:27
My question is going to go back to I think it's slide 53, page 27 on the student growth expenditures. A little intrigued on the managing service and
consulting i wrote down professional service i think your definition board policy or operational can you expand a little bit more on what that all that entails i can i can look further
Speaker 305
2:44:52
that probably be that may be a better question for the department
i do know there are a number of charter districts as we saw the two charter districts are receiving the top two amounts of money um and so and they of course don't have um a school board as in the same way that a traditional district would so most of that is
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:45:11
going to those charter districts to managing service and consulting i would have to look and check and i can get you
Speaker 307
2:45:18
those numbers that would that would be great and then we
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:45:21
can i can follow up with the department i guess a bit more on what that is but that
that is a very broad category i think that's all i had on that
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
2:45:32
one thank you representative garner thank you madam chair i've got a quick question on slide 49 page 25 when we're talking about declining enrollment um 15 and 23 and then 33 percent or 23 24 24 25 33 um do we know why i mean i'm assuming that it's charter i mean that it's uh if efa accounts
but since the since the list is looks like our largest cities that probably have more private schools but do you know that or do we know why or do you have to go back to the district and
Speaker 305
2:46:21
find out we do not have a way we we don't we don't know where the students are going as they're leaving the overall enrollment um for the state over those two years is not declining by that much it's declining less than one percent between 23 to 24 and 24 to 25 so it appears that it's a lot
movement within districts charter districts and traditional districts one note in 2023 the legislature removed previously there had been a cap on school choice and districts were only school choice was capped at 3% of students transferring out that was removed in 2023 and so some of that may be contributing to that that district that students are moving from one district to another okay so it could be from one district
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
2:47:13
to another it could be right it can be from a
Speaker 305
2:47:18
traditional district to another traditional district it can be from a district to a charter and it can be someone leaving the public
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
2:47:26
school system altogether okay great but we we
Speaker 148
2:47:31
don't have any way of knowing that not that i'm aware of okay
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:47:39
great thank you representative gonzalez yes Thank you, Madam Chair. Slide 57. I would like to know how the breakdown of that 7.9 million, what that was spent on.
I know you have the three categories here, preschool, early childhood. Would that be mainly like preschool settings and then just the overall 7.9 being spent and how they're able to spend those dollars and for what purpose? I can pull that for you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, moving right down.
Speaker 287
2:48:22
That's going to bring us to our special education high cost occurrences fund and this is provided to districts when an individual student's special education and related services that's required in their individualized education plan or IEP are unduly expensive, extraordinary or beyond the routine and normal costs associated with special education related services. These are distributed via a reimbursement system in which districts submit claims to desi and they're then reimbursed based on claim amounts and available funding so under this system
districts are responsible for the first fifteen thousand dollars per eligible student after adjusted for offsets after that a hundred percent of claims between fifteen and sixty five thousand dollars can be reimbursed and eighty percent of claims between 65 and a hundred thousand dollars per eligible student and then that final amount is then prorated based on available funds as we'll see in the next slides. So this next chart is going to show total funding alongside total
spending for the last three school years. In '25, $17.5 million was distributed to this fund which is an increase of $3.5 million from '23. Comparatively, spending increased by more than $5 million. Other than restrictions on the types of claims that are eligible to be reimbursed there are no restrictions on how these funds can be spent and in 25 districts spent 17 million of their of these funds with 71 of that going towards teacher salaries and benefits
primarily for classified positions the next table provides more details on the claims submitted by districts and charters for the last three school years so in 25 181 districts and charters made eligible claims for almost 2,200 students which is an increase of 24 additional districts and charters submitting these claims and then since 2023 and then 575 additional students generating these claims. Conversely the percentage of reimbursable funds received by districts decreased
from 66 percent in 23 to 58 percent in 25. So in dollar amounts there were 48 million dollars worth OF ELIGIBLE CLAIMS MADE BY DISTRICTS THAT WEREN'T FUNDED. THIS NEXT CHARTER IS GOING TO SHOW SOME MORE DOLLAR AMOUNTS FOR THESE CLAIMS. SO TOTAL HIGH COST FUNDING IN THAT BOTTOM GREEN COLUMN WITH A TOTAL AMOUNT OF ELIGIBLE CLAIMS IN THE TOP BLUE LINE AND THEN THE MAX REIMBURSIBLE AMOUNT BELOW THAT IN THE YELLOW LINE.
SO IN OTHER WORDS, DISTRICTS AND CHARTERS SUBMITTED ALMOST $66 MILLION IN ELIGIBLE CLAIMS IN '25. that distribution formula then is applied and that results in 30 million dollars being the maximum reimbursable amount that districts can receive and then um then that available funding was 17.5 million dollars and so that's uh what they actually receive and that's where we get that 48 million dollars in unfunded amount from the previous slide and then that's going to bring us an enhanced
transportation but I'm happy to take questions if they're already. So our next supplemental fund is for enhanced transportation and this is funding that's provided to districts and charters with high transportation cost. Districts and charters receive eight million dollars in 25 and spent nine million in that year indicating district use of fund balances. Expenditures from this fund exceeded funding by 13 percent and funding for enhanced transportation increased by around
using by around 11 percent over this three-year span while district spending increased by 31 percent so as noted this is provided to districts with high transportation cost this is in addition to the amount districts and charters receive through foundation funding for transportation purposes as well as that SNI transportation fund that some districts receive. In 25, 148 districts and one charter received this funding ranging from $1 up to $198,000.
This is not restricted funding, and therefore it can be used on items other than transportation. Of that $9 million spent from enhanced transportation funds in 25, 75% went towards student transportation-related expenses, primarily vehicle operation, servicing, and maintenance. So the loss of a supplemental group
Speaker 266
2:53:11
are two funds created to raise teacher salaries, both enacted in the last five years.
Speaker 270
2:53:17
So first in 2021 is teacher salary equalization funding. So in addition to its restricted use for teacher salaries and benefits, teacher salary equalization funds must be transferred to and spent from the teacher salary fund. Both regular school districts and open enrollment public charters can be eligible for this funding. Since it was first provided in 2022, the statewide target annual salary has been $51,822. In that same time period, DESI has not identified an average teacher salary that was lower than this target in 24 districts.
So they've never been eligible for this funding and have not received it. For the districts that have received this funding, DESI calculates eligibility using the average teacher salary for the previous two school years. So the allocation for 2025 was based on the salaries for the 2023 school year. Districts will continue to receive this amount once eligible, receive the amount provided by the formula, which is $185 times their prior ADM.
The funding amount can only increase with an increase of number of students and per statute and as measured by the district's ADM, the funding will not ever decrease below the amount they received in their initial school year. And so in their first year of funding, for districts that have received it, they'll continue to either increase if the student population increases, or they'll continue to receive the same funding amount that they received in that first school year.
And so there were 54 districts in the first year, and that has increased to a total of 210 districts and all 25 charters. That total was provided in $54 million for teacher salary equalization. However, pursuant to Act 909 of the regular session, this amount will start to decrease beginning in the 28 school year to $100 from 185 and then down to 50 in the following school year.
Another change made in this law was that the salary is no longer going to be set as part of the adequacy study review process. And to address the committee question earlier from the presentations in March, the districts that have been identified will continue
Speaker 267
2:55:43
to use that. However, the districts that report or have been identified with the target salary or an annual salary that's above that $51,000, they will continue to use those funds and have been using those funds from the teacher salary fund for the last three school years.
As this report was written and prepared, the districts will stop receiving that funding, and that will be addressed in the teacher salaries report in June. And our last supplemental category is the LEARN's minimum teacher salary and raises fund, or yes, fund. So according
Speaker 270
2:56:19
to the 2023 legislation, each school district in the state shall pay classroom teachers upon a minimum base salary of $50,000. and so these funds are directed to the minimum teacher salary and raises fund
and are provided to both districts and charters like the last fund and this is the second year that this funding has been provided and it was the state provided a total of $181.5 million to all traditional districts and 18
Speaker 287
2:56:51
charters. That wraps up our supplemental section so we're going to move into our final section which is just a review of additional fund spending and this table here provides total expenditures for the 25 school year from districts using fund sources that are categorized as
additional this came up to just over three billion dollars or 42 percent of total district spending district charter spending excuse me additional funding for this year includes numerous other funds received by districts and charters that are described in more detail in this annual Statistical Report, ASR, which includes federal as well as restricted and unrestricted state and local fund sources. So we'll wrap this all up with some key findings as we have in the past,
in the part one report. These are listed in your report as well on page 27, and your report again is exhibit two in your meeting materials. So for the categorical funds, first, the population of students that require funding increased for English learner students, but declined within Enhanced Student Achievement, or ESA. Per-student funding remained flat for all three years, with the exception of ALE funding. Excluding ESA spending, program spending, and total spending both exceeded funding for all
three school years. As Elizabeth noted, there's a regulatory conflict on the ESA funding requirements. Additionally, PD funding is uniquely based on total students instead of specific student populations in the other three categorical funds. Additionally, they do not receive all of, they receive only a portion of the total allotted per student categorical amount. And then finally, PD spending from all fund sources is significantly higher than funding, about 88% higher in the 25
school year. For supplemental funds, declining enrollment had the largest increase of funding in 25 with the exception of teacher salary allocations. Supplemental spending increased on average for all three school years. Additionally spending increase for every supplemental fund with the exception of special education high-cost occurrences and the teacher salaries fund. Also for the high cost occurrences eligible unfunded claims increased by 46 percentage points between 23 and
25 and finally enhanced transportation spending exceeded funding in 25 the first time in those three school years and then a few more overall additional findings as elizabeth explained as of at march using as of march 26 2025 excuse me 26 act 807 repealed the mandate requiring districts to submit a three-year ESA plan, which should the requirement to integrate ESA prioritization and use within overall strategic plans.
Existing DESE rules contradict Act 807 by continuing to require the submission of those plans, and they, with regards to data limitations or data analysis limitations, expenditures from isolated and special needs isolated funding, they cannot be analyzed separately because that they share the same fund code within the app scan data system and with that we conclude this report happy take any more questions you may have oh my goodness that's
Senator Jane English
Unverified
3:00:23
a lot of information thank you very much do I see any
questions here thank you ladies I appreciate your efforts and this is a lot of good information lots of us for us to think about and so without any further ado this meeting is adjourned
Agenda
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Documents
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Speakers
Senator Jane English
Unverified
Speaker 8
Lindsey Laster
Unverified
Lindsey Lester
Unverified
Speaker 12
Speaker 15
Speaker 19
Speaker 21
Speaker 22
Speaker 14
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
Speaker 31
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
Speaker 30
Speaker 32
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
Speaker 18
Speaker 77
Speaker 80
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
Speaker 101
Speaker 43
Speaker 33
Speaker 106
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
Speaker 116
Speaker 118
Speaker 53
Speaker 34
Speaker 124
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
Speaker 114
Speaker 148
Speaker 52
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
Speaker 159
Speaker 154
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
Speaker 67
Speaker 38
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
Speaker 178
Speaker 181
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
Speaker 202
Speaker 69
Speaker 196
Speaker 137
Speaker 126
Speaker 88
Speaker 200
Speaker 216
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
Speaker 226
Speaker 234
Speaker 227
Speaker 240
Speaker 252
Speaker 255
Speaker 173
Speaker 261
Speaker 266
Speaker 267
Speaker 270
Speaker 287
Speaker 293
Speaker 175
Speaker 298
Speaker 292
Speaker 305
Speaker 146
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
Speaker 283
Speaker 144
Speaker 286
Speaker 307