Joint Education: Sept. 22, 2025

Representative Keith Brooks Joint Education will come to order. Members, if you would, please take your seats and we will get started on our agenda for today. Thank you everybody for being here. Hopefully everybody had a good Labor Day holiday and glad you’re back here in town. 

If you would, I’d like to go ahead and start off just with a moment of silence and then a prayer in recognition of Senator Gary Stubblefield and his passing. Obviously, it’s a very difficult thing for his family, for his constituents in the state of Arkansas. So we want to make sure that we recognize him and the amazing service that he did. If you would please stand with me. We’ll have a moment of silence and a prayer. 

Gracious Father, we thank you for your love, your mercy, your forgiveness. We’re thankful for the promise of Jesus Christ, the hope of eternity. God, we pray today for Senator Stubblefield, his wife, his children, his grandchildren in his passing and the loss that they feel. God, may you bring peace to their family, peace to know that the hope of Christ is the most amazing hope that any of us could ever have. I pray that you provide that to their family in the days, weeks and years to come. Lord, into your blessing, we thank you for the service that he gave to his constituents, to the state of Arkansas, and ultimately to his family and you. Lord, we love you. Thank you for forgiving all of us. It’s in Christ we pray, amen. 

Members, we will go to Item B on your agenda, consideration of motion to approve the meeting from June 16th. I need a motion to approve. Motion. And a second on the Senate side. Have a second. All in favor say aye. All opposed. That has been approved. We’ll move on to C. 

We have several interim study proposals. Members, if you’d like to present it, let me know. I don’t believe that any of the ones who are on the agenda today have indicated they want to present it. So without objection, we will batch all three of these. I do not see any objections, so I need a motion to batch all three and approve. I have a motion and a second. Is there any discussion on the motion? All in favor, say aye. All opposed? All right. 

And now, Item D on the agenda, we have an overview of ATLAS testing, school scorecards and career readiness. I’ll recognize Secretary Jacob Oliva, as well as Ross White. If you would please introduce yourself and then you’re recognized. 

Jacob Oliva Good afternoon, Jacob Oliva, Secretary of Education, Department of Education. 

Ross White Ross White, Director for the Division of Career and Technical Education at the department. 

ATLAS Testing Overview

Jacob Oliva So first, I want to thank you all for an opportunity to come provide an update and overview on kind of the state of the state on where we are in education across the state of Arkansas, review some ATLAS results that we have administered from last spring that we’re able to release back to the school districts of our own achievement levels. 

This week and last week, we’ve been presenting learning gains. Give you an update on where we are with redesigning our accountability formula and talk about how all of this work is not only just aligned with Arkansas LEARNS, but now with Arkansas ACCESS as we build a system of excellence for all of our students across the state. So if that’s okay with you, Chair, I’d like to just go ahead and share some information. 

Representative Keith Brooks You’re recognized. 

Jacob Oliva So just a historical perspective, if everybody remembers, we’ve done a redesign on our statewide assessment system. We’ve updated our current standards in the last 2 1/2 years and went back to a criterion reference assessment. That means that those test items were written specifically on the criteria that we’re looking to measure on our academic standards. The primary tested subjects that we are going to review today is English Language Arts, Math, and Science. This was an update from our previous assessment system that we had in the state of Arkansas, which was the ACT Aspire. And this is something that we’re really proud of because it was created by Arkansas educators and experts all across the state for our Arkansas students. 

So I always like to look at how are we making sure that everything’s aligned. And if you kind of look at our three-legged stool, what we want to really make sure we have is high quality standards that clearly outline what we want students to know and learn in each test’s subject area and grade, what kind of high quality instruction materials are we giving teachers and the type of professional development we’re giving them to support the teaching of those standards, and then how are we going to measure whether or not students are learning what we expect them to know when we do our standardized assessments. 

Student proficiency levels

That’s the key to making sure that the system is aligned. And we spent the last 2 1/2 years building out that framework. When we talk about the different performance levels, similar to ACT Aspire, there’s four levels: levels 1, 2, 3, and 4. And just to give you kind of a little bit of an overview is our minimum expectation that we want to see when we define proficiency is a student that’s demonstrating a level 3 or greater. That means they have a good understanding of what’s being asked of them in the classroom, and they’re able to apply what they’re learning into the work in other corresponding subjects.

 A student that is at a level 4, they demonstrate an advanced understanding. They’re typically able to apply the concepts being learned in the classroom to other concepts that may not have already been taught. They’re ready for a more rigorous path and expectation. A level 2 student is somebody that has a basic understanding. We get a lot of asked questions about the difference between 2 and 3. 

Level 3 means a student primarily can work on those tasks independently, need very few prompts or reminders from the teacher, and they’re able to demonstrate, at a proficient level, the content we expect them to know. A student with a basic understanding means that they understand what’s happening. They may understand some of the main concepts, but they may need some additional cueing. They may need additional reminders. They may need additional support in order to get those correct answers. 

And then a student scored at level 1 has a very limited understanding and they need intensive supports. They may need high impact tutoring. They may need before school, after school, summer school programs. So the biggest question that we want to know is, now that we’ve done two years of the same assessment, the same assessment items, that we were able to get two years of data on our students. How did we perform in year two versus year one? 

Now, if you remember, we had to go through a very rigorous process called the standard setting process when we determine what those levels are for level 1, 2, 3, and 4. Those standards were set. And based on the same standards, we’re able to define how well our students did. So here you can see in green students where they performed at level 3 and above if you aggregate all the subject areas in ELA for 2024. And then in blue is how the students performed in 2025. 

Statewide percentage improvement

So you can see in ELA, we saw about a 0.8% increase in the number of students meeting what we would call that proficient level. So that’s a positive trend line and we’re pretty excited to see students are moving towards that progression. If you look at the middle column, that’s math. You can see in the green from ’24 to ’25, there’s about a 2.7 increase. When we look at how were our students performing before the impact of COVID, we’re still below where we were when we were defining that proficient level, but you can see that we’re progressing towards more students hitting that proficient benchmark. 

Science was about a 2.4 increase. So if you look at that all aggregated and break it down by grade level, what you want to see is more students in the dark green and the dark blue. That means they have a proficient or a deep understanding of the grade level expectations. And when we did that standard setting process, the state did it right. Your support got it right. We set very rigorous expectations when we want to say what a level 3 is, which was very aligned to similar what we’ve seen on the NAEP assessment, which is the National Assessment of Education Progress. 

There are other states around the nation that actually went back and lowered proficiency rates for their students so that they can come out and say that they’re back to the level of where they were before COVID. Well, I think we believe that we should not lie to students, we should not lie to parents, and we should be transparent on student performance. Sometimes it’s not as good as we want to see, but that’s a big deal for this state to say we’re going to have high expectations. And you can see over time, students are starting to meet that. 

This chart shows you that it’s a pretty even distribution across grade levels 3 through 10 on the percentage of students scoring level 1, 2, 3 or 4. You see a similar distribution in math until you get past 8th grade. And you can see that when we went back to end of course exams in algebra and geometry, we’re still nowhere near the proficient levels that we want to see as a state. And part of that is because we’re making a transition back to end of course exams where we’re actually teaching algebra and we’re actual teaching geometry. 

When we gave the ACT Aspire Assessment to high school students, they were taking a grade level assessment, not a subject area assessment. And I think as we’re supporting teachers and making that transition back to the content we expect them to know and learn, we’re going to see greater improvements overall. You can see science is actually a pretty even distribution. 

Going into the end-of-course exam for biology, when you look at 3 3 performance and how do students make that transition back to biology. So this is a big deal. This is a lot of work for the state to make sure we had an assessment system that measured what we want students to know and learn at each of the test subject areas, and back to end-of-course exams. 

One of my favorite charts is this chart, because I like to look at everything by cohorts and say, overall, instead of trying to compare students from year to year, how is each of the cohort doing based on previous years’ cohorts? And you can see, overall, this was a pretty positive year for the students across the state of Arkansas. 

The foundation has been laid. The support is starting to happen in our classrooms. Our teachers and administrators, our local folks, are doing an excellent job. We have a unified coordinated progress monitoring system that’s giving real-time information back to our educators to help them make sure the students are learning the standards that we want them to learn. 

Cohort tracking

But I like to track certain cohorts. And a cohort of a lot of interest to me is 5th grade in this slide. And you can see overall in 5th grade, the ELA scores are pretty stagnant. There’s a little bit of a decline in math, and science was a little of an increase. This is a big deal to me because these are the kids that we sent home prematurely and took away the opportunity to learn during the COVID pandemic and had probably some of the greatest impact on making sure they had access to high quality learning. 

And then if you look at the 4th grade, the cohort of students behind them, those are students that when we did bring them back to school, we over quarantined them and masked them in their primary early literacy grades. And we know that was going to have an impact on their learning. And you can see that those students are resilient. The investment in high impact tutoring, the double down on the science of reading that we put in those primary grades, are having an impact because we want to make sure that we’re growing generations of students to mitigate the access to high quality learning that we created throughout that pandemic. 

Another key initiative that we’ve been really pushing districts is making sure our systems are designed around acceleration, which was some of the foundation and backbone around ACCESS. A lot of our students are ready for more rigorous content, meaning they’re ready to earn high school credit while they’re in middle school. And a lot of times we don’t have systems that support that. But we’ve been pushing districts for the past two and a half years to make sure that we’re creating opportunities for students that are ready to be on a more accelerated pathway to be in those classes to get it. 

Accelerated learning & expectations

So I get asked all the time, well, what if the kids aren’t ready? So here’s a snapshot of the students that did take more rigorous coursework, when they did. And I think it’s a very interesting anecdote. So when you look at the percentage on the chart to my left, the 2025 algebra performance levels by grade, you can see that in 7th grade– it’s little bit blurry– but it was about 81% of 7th graders that took the algebra end-of-course exam passed at a proficient level. 

So this mindset that kids aren’t ready for more rigorous coursework is not necessarily showing up in the data. When we raise our expectations for students, they will meet it. And this is part of what the ACCESS and the accountability system’s going to be built around. And you can see even students in 8th grade– my number’s a little blurry– but it’s about, I’m going to say, close to 70% of the students that took the algebra end-of-course in 8th grade met at a proficient level, where you can see if they took algebra in 9th grade, you’re getting down to about 20% of the students. 

And then in 10th grade, about 17% of students are passing the algebra exam. Now, there’s a lot of theories, a lot of differences in thoughts, beliefs, and practices about why that happens, and those are the conversations that we have with districts. But you can also see geometry. When you look at the percentage of students taking geometry in 8th grade, it’s almost 90%. And even geometry in 9th grade, you’re getting to about close to 55, 60 percent. And then the students that take geometry in 10th grade, you’re under 20 percent. 

Our system is being designed to push kids. We created a system in this state where we tended to focus on the bottom kids and held everybody back. And I’ve often said a lot of times, when you focus on that kind of system, you neglect your top performing students. And now we’re flipping the narrative. Not only are we doubled down with our focus on the lowest performing students, making sure they have access to the supports they need, we’re opening up rigorous pathways to our students that are the best and brightest. 

And if you remember, I presented the NAEP scores back to this committee when they came out over the summer. And when you look at those quintiles– and this is why these math paths are really important. And I’ve been sharing this data with district leaders all throughout the summer, and this is the foundation for some of the bones that Arkansas ACCESS was built around. 

When you look at our 90th percentile kid in 8th grade math– and I’m talking, that’s our best and brightest kids in 8th grade, our 90 percentile kids. Our 90th percentile kid is 11 points behind the nation’s average 90th percentile kid. So I know we like to be proud of some of the work we’re doing, and we are proud. This is a lot to celebrate. 

But if we create the conditions to help incentivize the schools and support them better to push and accelerate our students, we’re going to see more students taking more advantage and more rigorous pathways and opportunities, and we’re going to close that gap for all of our students– not just the bottom students, but our highest performing students. 

School district grading

So how do we incentivize, and how do we ensure, and how do we measure whether or not districts are doing that? This is where we’ve come to look at, how do we grade schools? What does an A mean? What does a C mean? What does an F mean? 

And if there’s one thing that I definitely heard when I first got here and we were working on Arkansas LEARNS implementation and went out around to every district, every single educational cooperative, met with every superintendent, and if there is one question that I got at every single educational cooperative when I’m at those meetings, guaranteed I got one question: When are we going to get rid of A through F? 

Now, I’m going to tell you, I am a big believer in A through F. I’m a big believer in accountability. I think parents have a right to know how well their schools are performing. I think students have a right to know what kind of school they go to. The community has a right to know what kind of schools are represented in their neighborhood. But if there’s no confidence that the A through F system reflects the learning that’s happening in the school, then we need to fix that. And what I have found is most of the superintendents, they’re OK with being held accountable. Our educational cooperators, they want to be held accountable. 

But they want to know that the grade that we put on top of that school is reflective of the learning that’s happening in that school. So we put together work groups just like we did around standards, test items, accountability, all these frameworks, brought people together to make some recommendations. And as we rolled out last year, if you remember, we rolled out– because it was the first year of an assessment, we issued tentative grades that weren’t officially kind of given because it was a transition and we had to do equitable percentile linkings from one assessment to another assessment. 

So those grades were given provisionally, but most schools accepted or wanted to accept them because they felt that that school grade actually reflected the learning that’s happened in their school. So one of the first things that we wanted to do is simplify the accountability formula. We had a formula that measured school grades in this state that directly mirrored what the feds required us to report to them. 

So the first question I would have with superintendents and leaders across the state is, one, should we create an accountability system based on what Arkansas feels is important? Or should we build an accountability system based on what we think the federal government thinks we should think is important? And without hesitation, it was decided we needed to bifurcate the two. Sure, we have to meet some federal reporting requirements, but that doesn’t mean that that needs to be the definitions that reflect the school grade. 

And one of the things that we did when we built around federal reporting requirements is we made it confusing. We have to add clarity. If I go to a principal– and let’s say Ross is a principal at a high school. I say, Hey, Ross, I saw your high school was a C as a school grade, what are you going to work on next year to try to improve it? Could you tell me what you needed to fix in order to get a better grade? No, because it measured everything and anything, and none of it was measured on outputs of students’ performance. We tried to micromanage and handcuff districts for making strong educational decisions by controlling the inputs. 

That’s not how you’re going to improve learning and outcomes. We need to hold people accountable for outputs and not micromanage inputs. So we wanted to unhandcuff that. And we built this system that’s based on growth in achievement. Very simple. Then if you’re at a high school, are kids graduating? And are they graduating on time? 

So when you look at how we define now the buckets– I like to say there’s buckets. There’s about nine buckets that go into a school grade. We want to measure our student scoring at achievement level of proficiency in English language arts, math and science. And then are all the students learning? Regardless of their achievement level, can students in your school demonstrate a year’s worth of growth? And then also we put an extra focus on your lowest quartile. Are they showing you a year’s worth of growth? 

So this formula doubles down, not just measuring achievement levels, because that’s what we got criticized, saying that your school grade reflects your poverty level of your school based on achievement levels. But this is based on, Are your kids learning? They may come to us as a level 1, they may stay a level 1, but they can still hit their learning targets as they’re progressing to level 2, and then progressing to a level 3. Because every student has a unique learning target that’s built around their own unique identifiers. 

So if we focus on those three fundamentals: achievement, growth, and then graduating ready to be successful in life, then we have a school grade accountability that reflects what we expect students to be able to know, learn, and demonstrate. And that grade is reflective on the performance of that overall school. We issued provisional grades last year. It was a hold harmless year, based on this formula. 

Ask your superintendents. I think you’ll find that it was very well overall received. Some schools, they’re going to say they’re not proud of the grade they got, but they understood it. And some schools are really proud of their grade they’ve got because they feel like they’re going above and beyond and meeting that mark. 

Success-ready graduates

But there’s one metric in there that we’re really looking at that’s going to focus on acceleration, and that’s how we define a success-ready graduate. And what we’ve done is we’ve recognized that students will graduate from our system and fall into maybe one of three buckets. There’s some students that are going to go to school and do the bare minimum requirements and they’re going to graduate and they are going to move on. That’s great. You have now earned a standard diploma. 

In fact, when we used to post graduation rates on our last accountability system, we also factored in a five-year graduation rate. That’s not good enough. We should expect kids to graduate in four years, especially when we only require 22 graduation requirements, which I think is really low. But I’m not going to tell people you’re doing a great job if you can get kids across the finish line in five years. 

Diplomas of Merit and Distinction

You should be able to graduate on time with your cohort of peers when you enter 9th grade in four years. If students are able to do that, meet the minimum graduation requirements, we’re really happy for them. But we have some students that may do a little bit more. They may earn a seal of bi-literacy. They may take some concurrent credits. They may earn an industry recognized credential. They may pass some IB or AP exams. 

So how do we recognize those students and reflect that they are going above and beyond the minimum expectations? Well, we created a diploma of merit. And then how do recognize the students that are earning an associate’s degree while they’re in high school? They are an AP scholar. They are completing that workforce credential with an apprenticeship and define that diploma of distinction. 

At the end of the day, all three of these designations make sure that every student that graduates from an Arkansas high school is ready to be enrolled, enlisted, and employed. And one of the things that we had to do with Arkansas LEARNS is really look at our workforce pathways. And I know Ross is going to talk a lot about it because we had about 65 different career pathways that are reflected in high schools all across the state. 

Pathways and credentials

Well, Arkansas LEARNS tasked us with defining credentials of value that led to a high-skill, high-wage, high-demand area. And we identified– was it 16 or 18– 18 pathways. And Arkansas LEARNS required that every school offer three pathways, and one of them had to be on that list. And that had to go into effect for this past school year. And 100% of our schools met that requirement. 

So there’s a lot of good work happening. There’s a lot to be celebrated. But these are the pathways that I’ve identified. This isn’t a kind of list that you just make once and then you’re done, right? We’ve got to work with workforce partners, listen to industry, listen to key stakeholders, because what’s a credential of value today may not be a credential of value three years from now, five years from, 10 years from now. And so this is a fluid document that we have people that are going through and making sure that we’re updated and reflective of the times. 

But here’s the very different, more technical categories of what it meant to earn a diploma of merit and what it meant to be a diploma of distinction. Because not only are we calculating graduation rates for students towards their high school credit, but we’re also measuring the number of students that are meeting these credentials. And if you remember in Arkansas ACCESS, we tied the results, let’s say, of a student that earns a diploma of distinction with some of the different scholarships so that we can recognize these as a state to say, this is the product and quality of student that we’re proud of that graduates from our school system. 

And we know that if they are a recipient of a standard diploma, a diploma of merit, or a diploma of distinction, they are ready to be enrolled, enlisted or employed. So I know I covered a lot, Chair. But I wanted to just kind of give a state of the state of an update and then I’m sure there may be some questions. And then Ross White from our technical program area can go a little bit deeper around the pathways and what does this work really mean. 

Representative Keith Brooks Thank you, Secretary Oliva. And prior to Mr. White doing his presentation, we’ll open it up for questions for the secretary. Are there questions? Representative Meeks, you’re recognized for a question. 

Rise of AI and changes to programs

Representative Stephen Meeks Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a question on those pathways that you had listed there. This past month, I was at probably the largest AI conference in North America. It was an industry conference. 

And listening to a lot of the thought leaders in the discussion going on there, the impression that I came away with was that computer programming is beginning to wane because AI is really starting to take over kind of in that area. But AI, as you know, is becoming more and more important. And so I’ll just throw it out for what it’s worth, that AI prompt engineering is going to become more important than computer science programming. 

So as you look at that going into the future, I would hope it’s already on your radar. But if not, for what its worth, I’ll throw that out for you. 

Jacob Oliva We’d love to follow up with you a little bit about some of the topics. Because when we talk about AI, and I like to look at everything from education, but then also from a workforce perspective, it’s not new. These aren’t new tools or new topics. I think it’s becoming more sophisticated in the future of where we’re going to head. There’s a little bit of unknown, especially with generative AI. 

But I agree. I want to say I read an article recently about Salesforce and some of these national computing program companies are laying off thousands of programmers and it’s all being replaced by AI, which is creating a different skill and a different type of worker they need. And that’s why I said these are fluid lists that are always going to grow and be updated. 

But I don’t know if we know the extent of how AI is going to impact the technical side of the world and business industry. But I know we’re having a lot of folks looking at the impact, not only as schools, but for teachers, for classrooms, for tutors, for support. We’re even looking at it as an agency. How can the work that we do be more efficient and better supportive of the stakeholders we serve? So, excellent point. 

Representative Stephen Meeks Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Representative Keith Brooks  Representative Duke, you’re recognized for your question. 

Representative Hope Duke Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you for the presentation. It was really informative and helpful. And I have a question, I guess maybe a two-parter, on the test scores. I love seeing the cohorts. I think that’s really helpful, as well. But can you tell me, first of all, your first and second grade they were tested on ATLAS this last time as well? Is that correct? Or is that still a year out? 

Jacob Oliva So it’s part of the ATLAS system. But so you’re talking about for the current school year that we just entered in or the results from the past school year? 

Representative Hope Duke The past school year. Were they tested on ATLAS? 

Jacob Oliva So they did the formative assessment part. So their scores aren’t reflected in these charts because these charts reflect 3rd through 8th, like for the ELA. But they did the K2 progress monitoring system, part of a unified coordinated progress monitoring system that’s under that ATLAS umbrella. 

Representative Hope Duke So what are you seeing the trends with K2? Because the 3rd grade scores, I mean, I see the improvements, right? But I’m really curious what we’re seeing. The 3rd grade’s fascinating to me because that’s obviously new implementation of things, though you’re starting to see how that looked with kids going through the system. Similar with K and 1 and 2. What are we seeing? What are the trends we’re see with them? Because that’s really reflective on the implementation of the programs and initiatives and things that we have done in the last couple of years. Do you have that data? 

Jacob Oliva Yes. Now, last year was the first year that we’ve rolled out the K-1-2. So it’s hard to compare data from last year to this year. But we’re in the testing window for the first administration of ATLAS this year. So probably in the next couple of weeks, we can get you that snapshot to look a, How did students do in August and September of last year compared to this year? 

We did have to make some modifications throughout the last year, because it was the first time we implemented– like, in year one of the assessment, we definitely heard from kindergarten teachers that this ain’t working. So we had to go, Okay, we had take that back, work with the assessment company, re-get it right. 

So far you probably haven’t heard from anybody about this year, because I think we did a pretty good job getting that right. But what we’re seeing is, one, we know we’ve deployed literacy coaches to our lowest performing schools, our D and F schools. And as they’re going through the instructional rounds, what we are seeing more happening is explicit systematic instruction around the science of reading. 

And recently you may have seen I’ve gotten some baits about some of our textbook companies not being strong enough in the science of reading. So we’re having conversations with districts around how are we using high quality implementation or high quality instruction materials to make sure that that foundation is laid. So now when we get that snapshot in time, that information will be given to the teacher down to the standard level and help identify skills that they may need more support with. 

But the reality is, one of the questions I’m sure someone’s going to ask, and I get a lot is, Well, how does 3rd grade promotion work this year? And notice that I call it 3rd grade promotion. It’s not just an automatic retention. It’s a screener. So we should know, based on this first progress monitoring system, how many students are at risk of not meeting the proficiency expectation by the end of 3rd grade. 

And if we identify those students now and give them high impact tutoring, give them access to a high quality teacher that’s trained and skilled in the science of reading, we can mitigate those holes and make sure by the end of the 3rd grade, they have those gaps filled so that they can be successful and ready to move on in the 4th grade. 

So I don’t know if I’m answering your question. The short answer is, We’re going to have some much better information here pretty soon because last year we had to learn a lot about the system. But we’re going to be able to give information to students and districts faster in more real time this school year than we ever have, based on student performance.

Faster turnaround in test results

 So if you look at last year or two years ago when we first did the baseline assessment of ATLAS, it took us almost eight months to get achievement scores back to districts. That’s because we had to go through a standard setting process. This year, it took about four months. In fact, we just last week or the week before released learning gains, which was in August. The year before, we didn’t get learning aids to districts until October. That’s late in the year to help teachers understand where their students are.

 When our spring assessment window closes this current school year, 25-26, districts will have access to their achievement levels in less than two days. We are turning this around. The system is being built. And we’re going to start getting real-time information back to students and families at a much quicker pace so that we can make those instructional pivots as necessary and get these students the support they need. 

And, hopefully, we’ll see the number of students at level 1 decrease dramatically and at 3 or 4 increase exponentially. But when I talk to schools about their achievement levels from last year to this year, the number of superintendents who told me, ‘Jacob, I don’t have enough kids at level 3 and 4, but we drastically reduced the number of 1. So we have a lot of number 2’s, but we’ve got a lot less number 1’s.’ That’s a big deal. That means we’re moving the needle.

Representative Hope Duke And you kind of hit the nail on the head right there at the end of what I was getting ready to ask. So the feedback, because the school districts have assessments from the past with their K-2. So even though it’s a different test in theory, they should be relatively around the same standards. 

The feedback that you are getting, do they feel– I’m not asking so much about the test, because the test measures whether what we’re doing is effective. Are they giving you feedback from their teachers that the moves that we are making, they’re seeing– even though we can’t necessarily see it in the data because we don’t have the same access to the data? Am I making myself clear on what I’m trying to say? 

Jacob Oliva The answer to that is 1,000%. Last week, I met with all of our state literacy coaches and they’re talking about the difference of what they’re seeing in schools and classrooms this year versus last year. I’m going into primary grade classrooms and seeing teachers using word walls and interacting with students that I didn’t see two years ago, right? 

So when I tell you there’s a movement happening, especially in those foundational years, which is very pivotal to get right while we’re pushing acceleration of those middle years, we’re going to see drastic improvements in overall student scores. The initiative’s working. 

Representative Hope Duke Because if this is doing what we believe it’s supposed to be doing, then our little kids starting with us under this new system, we shouldn’t have hardly anybody in 1 and 2’s. 

Jacob Oliva Exactly.

Representative Hope Duke Because, what, 99% of kids actually can be taught to read. And so we’re going to start seeing that and catching up the older cohorts, but we’re going to start seeing that in the next year or two, that our kindergarteners, our 1st graders across the state are going to be hitting those targets because that’s what I’m looking for. 

I’ve had longer conversations, but we should be teaching like our hair is on fire because it is. Because we can’t let these kids continue to graduate or continue to move on without being able to read. And so that’s what I am looking for whenever these come in. So I’ll be excited to see that snapshot. I think that’s going to super helpful for all of us to see.

But it’s encouraging. I mean, these numbers are encouraging-ish, -ish. But it’s more encouraging when we see if the new implementation in those younger grades is making the difference that we hope that it is making. 

Jacob Oliva And every cohort of students is a little bit different on numbers because it ranges, but most of them are on 30,000 students. So each percentage point is just over 300 kids. So when you see a percentage point increase, that’s 300 more students across the state that are hitting a proficient target. We still have work to do, but these aren’t small numbers that we’re moving. These are significant swings in the overall preparation of our students with some of the most rigorous test scores that we could define as a state, which was important to get right. 

Representative Keith Brooks Senator Flowers, you’re recognized for a question.

3rd grade retention / promotion

Senator Stephanie Flowers I have a couple of things that I want to know about. One is about the retention of 3rd graders, I think, under the LEARNS Act. Has that been implemented this year? 

Jacob Oliva So that’s the impact of this year’s 3rd graders. So the students that started 3rd grade this year, at the end of the school year, when they take the– what year are we in– 26 assessment in the spring, those results are going to be the results that folks are looking at. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers And the level 2, if they score level 2, will they be retained? 

Jacob Oliva No, ma’am. So when they’re looking at the promotion for 3rd grade, when you look at the performance level descriptors I put up here, they’re using level 1 as a student that needs to be reviewed. It’s not automatically retained. So I want to make sure we clarify that. Because there’s some good cause exemptions. It’s about triggering a meeting around that student to determine the best path for that student moving forward. But they’re using that level 1 definition on the assessment for students of concern. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers When you say there’s some good cause rationale, is that for disabled students? 

Jacob Oliva It can be. Some of it’s prescribed in the law, but basically what it does is it’s designed to have a meeting with the family and the educators to say, this student has a very limited understanding in 3rd grade. If they were to go on to 4th grade without significant supports, they’re going to continue to struggle. 

So what are we going to do? One, should we put them in a summer program? Should we offer them high impact tutoring? Has this student already been retained? Maybe it’s not a good idea to keep retaining them. Maybe it is a student that needs to be tested for a learning disability or has an identified learning disability. The individual educational plan team would make those kinds of decisions around accommodations, modifications, supports for the student. Maybe they’re an English language learner with limited time learning the English language. 

There’s a lot of factors that go into making that decision. It’s not saying that they automatically have to be retained. That may be the best decision for that child. But what it’s saying is that if a student does get promoted to the 4th grade without demonstrating a high level of understanding and literacy, there’s some provisions that also have to be in place. Because schools right now should be using that first progress monitoring system to write an intervention plan for a student that’s at that limited understanding.

 And we need to make sure the school did what they said they were going to do. And then if that kid goes to 4th grade, do they have access to a highly effective teacher, which is required? And are they put in a 90-minute literacy block, which is required, to make sure that they’re getting those foundational skills embedded into them every single day to close those gaps? 

Because what happens, why you have that big shift from the foundational years around that learning how to read, to read to learn, is that systematic explicit instruction in the science of reading gets less and less as kids progress because they get more into text complexity and they’re being asked to do things with the types of text that they’re reading in the classroom. It’s not that these kids can’t have their holes filled, but if they’re not getting instruction, it’s really hard for them to fill it. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers So does the Department of Education review all of those children that are in maybe level 2 or level 1? Do we expect that to happen? 

Jacob Oliva Yeah, I mean, so that’s why it’s important for us to get that progress monitoring data, that snapshot of data in time. And then we work with districts, we work with educational cooperatives. I know we have folks in D and F schools each and every single day doing data walks, data reviews, making sure that we’re providing as much support.

Senator Stephanie Flowers What is DNS schools? 

Jacob Oliva D and F. They’re graded a D or an F. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers At a D-U-R-F?

Jacob Oliva D or F. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Did you not say that we got rid of the letter grade? 

Jacob Oliva I said we redefined the letter grades to make sure they’re reflective of the learning. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers So we still have D and F schools? 

Jacob Oliva Yes, ma’am. And this year we’re going to have graded school districts and graded educational cooperatives based on student performance as well. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Well, when you say that this thing for cause in retaining or making the decision to retain or not retain a 3rd grader, is that across the board? I mean, who determines cause? 

Jacob Oliva Well, the law identifies some specific criteria, when the Arkansas LEARNS put this policy into place. But, two, it also gives the ability for the school district to meet with the student and the family. Maybe they get some literacy coaches, school counselor, school administrator. It’s an educational expert convening with the family to talk about what’s the best path moving forward for that child. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers So you say that the law gives the school the ability. But is it mandatory? And is there some type of appeal process on behalf of the student? 

Jacob Oliva I don’t know if I know the answer about an appeal process. But it’s the law, so it’s mandatory. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers And the department reviews all of this from the school district?

Jacob Oliva What do you mean by review? Like each and every single individual? I don’t know. I don’t know if we’re going to be at that level. This is new for us, too, this year, so we’re still trying to figure that out. I’d have to check with the team and get back with you on that. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Has the department– this is the last question right now. I have one more after this if the Chair will allow.

Representative Keith Brooks You’re recognized. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Have the rules been promulgated that specifically state what we mean by good cause in the process? 

Jacob Oliva Yes, ma’am. And we’re doing trainings with school districts now, hosting webinars, sending out commissioners memos, making sure we can clarify that as much as possible. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers And the last question I had was on the– I think it was your last slide that dealt with success-ready pathways and all the different occupations, I guess you’d call it. 

Jacob Oliva This one? Is it this one? 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Success-ready Pathways. Do all, are all schools required to have a minimum of these courses or subject matters? Or are they required to have every one of them? I’m really interested in construction and welding, those kinds of things. Is that mandatory in schools? 

Jacob Oliva Yeah, so what’s required is that every high school has to have at least three pathways that lead to a certificate. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers So three out of this list? 

Jacob Oliva No, it’s three in total. But one of the three pathways has to be something off this list. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Do you have a list of what schools offer what? I’d like to see that. 

Jacob Oliva We should be able to pull that for you. That’s a great question. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers I’d like to see it. And I’d also like to see– when you break down the percentages, I’m glad to see that there is some acceleration in gains with the ATLAS. But I’d like to see it broken down by, particularly districts that have been under state control in the last five years. 

Jacob Oliva So you want to see the achievement and growth for the schools that have been under state control? We can make that for you. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Within the last five years. 

Jacob Oliva In the last five years? Okay, sure. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

Representative Keith Brooks Senator Love, you’re recognized for a question. 

Senator Fredrick Love Thank you, Mr. Chair. Secretary Oliva, good to see you. Let me start with this. If we were to, if we had enacted this law of retaining the students, 3rd grade students, last year, roughly how many students would we have retained? How many students fall into that level 1? I know we can’t say exactly, but just give me kind of a ballpark.

Jacob Oliva So, what I would say is, if we enacted this last year, how many students may have been identified as at risk, it would probably be close to around 10,000 because about one-third of them were in the level 1. But that doesn’t mean that they would be retained because that would be inclusive of English language learners, students that have been retained before, special education. 

But that number includes this percentage of students at the lowest level of proficiency out of the state. And that’s a lot of kids. And I know the first thing people are going to say is, you can’t retain that many kids. I’m going to tell you right now publicly, we do not intend to add student parking at middle school. 

That is not the goal of 3rd grade promotion. It’s to make sure that we are identifying skills that need support early, intervening, doing our job to mitigate that number as much as we can. 

Senator Fredrick Love Okay, so it would have been 10,000 students? 

Jacob Oliva If I had to guess. 

Senator Fredrick Love Yeah. Moving to the ATLAS scores, and this was pointed out to me by an administrator in the Little Rock School District. Some of the– and they had brought me in and kind of showed me some things with the ATLAS testing. 

One was, and it was a concern, not about the students not knowing the information, it was the use of the computer, it was the use of the mouse. And then sometimes I think they said they had to switch it to the tablet. And there were some issues there. 

Kind of speak to that because that is a very big concern of actually, are you really getting to if the student knows the information or if they can just use the computer mouse to actually click on the button and wait and different things like that.

Jacob Oliva So that’s a good question. So first I’d say, this starts in 3rd grade. So most of these students are 8 years old. So when you’re talking about the question is are we measuring computer proficiency or what the student knows, most of the students have been exposed to the basic computer understanding by the time they’re 8 in order to meet the expectations of this exam. 

Definitely we heard that more in the progress monitoring K-2, which doesn’t go into the school grade. But the kindergartners may not be where they need. So that’s why it’s important for folks to know that that information is just for the teacher. That’s not reflective in a school grade. It doesn’t carry with the student. 

If the student is not able to demonstrate or move that, we do provide accommodations. Teachers are allowed to do prompting and support. That was one of the clarifications we definitely wanted to make sure we provided in kindergarten. Sometimes you have students with sensory skills, maybe they want a paper and pencil version or they need to dictate it, those accommodations are allowed. That’s done more on a student by student level, case by case level. But it’s allowed. 

Senator Fredrick Love All right, that was one of the major things because it was pointed out. 

Jacob Oliva Definitely with the little ones, we heard that for sure. 

Senator Fredrick Love Okay, gotcha. Well, if we address that, then that’s fine, because that was one thing. Let’s move to kind of the high-impact tutoring and the kind of the reading specialist. At this present point, to address the number of students that we have that may fall into the category 1, possibly category 2, do we have enough reading specialists? Do we have enough high impact tutors to address the number of students? 

Jacob Oliva Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know if it’s a loaded question, because the educator in me would say there’s never enough support for our most vulnerable students, right? But when you look at what we were asked to do with ATLAS, getting to 120 literacy coaches, we’re able to provide that support for all of our D and F schools now. 

The interesting conundrum, which I think is a good problem to have, is we’ve had schools that exited that D and F status and then hired our literacy coach, saying we don’t want to lose them, they’re part of our family now. And that’s created a need for more literacy coaches. 

So it’s kind of an interesting space because if you exit from a D and F, do we want to take away that support? Maybe we have identified new ones. So I think we’re still going through that balance. We do have some contracts with some outside organizations where we’re not able to get enough staffing that we need. The high impact tutoring, the feedback I get from districts, is they love it. 

I do think one of the things that we want to do better is promote the tutoring grants accessible to families to get additional support. That’s really underutilized, right? So there’s opportunity for more families that participate than are, and that’s kind of what we see in some of those spaces. 

So I think it’s like anything else when you have new initiatives, new priorities. It takes a while to get it kind of up and running. But going into this year, I think we’ve learned a lot from last year in how we communicate with the districts about the expectations and communicate with parents, that will see a much better utilization this year. 

Senator Fredrick Love And then, are kind of the, is the financial piece, do we have that covered to cover the specialists and the high-impact tutoring?

Jacob Oliva In our categorical budget this year, yes, sir. 

Senator Fredrick Love And then, lastly, going back to part of the ATLAS, I’ve noticed that there’s an opportunity for students to kind of pre-test on the ATLAS. Are we making that available or making that knowledge available to parents? 

Jacob Oliva When you say a pretest, like the teachers create assessments?

Senator Fredrick Love Well, I was shown that there was a piece in the ATLAS where students can go in and test. 

Jacob Oliva Yeah, that’s part of the progress monitoring. 

Senator Fredrick Love So, is that made readily available to parents so that they can actually? 

Jacob Oliva Yeah, I’ll have to check. But it should be available where the parents can be able to log into the system, too, to see the progress monitoring. That would be the hope, yeah. 

Senator Fredrick Love Is that knowledge being pushed to parents? Because I remember,  I know this for a fact that when I was made aware but I did not– I was, I was like what? You know, we could be actually having our son test and that knowledge was new to me so I’m just asking. 

Jacob Oliva Yeah. That’s probably an area that we need to continue to get better, right? I mean, a more specific communication plan around the components is probably a good idea. It’s like sometimes we make informational videos and put on our website and assume that’s enough, but if you’re not looking for that information on our website, how would you even know to look for it? 

So I’d love to talk about different strategies on, what is it that parents need to know from a parent perspective to make sure that we’re getting it right and not thinking about it from an educational perspective, but actually from a parent perspective as well? That’s a great idea. 

Senator Fredrick Love Thank you, sir.

Representative Keith Brooks Representative Mayberry, you’re recognized for a question. 

Student accountability in testing

Representative Julie Mayberry Thank you. Over on this side. I know it’s always hard to see where everybody is. House side over here. So a little while back, I was talking to a group of high school students in their class and we were just talking about a variety of education issues. 

And I love getting feedback from students because this is who it most affects, right? So I was asking them about testing. And this class pretty much was an agreement. One of the key things that could be done to improve tests is to make students accountable. They said, look, we don’t even get the test scores back until the next school year. And most of the time, they never even look at the test score. Their parents sometimes get them, sometimes don’t. So they didn’t even know how they did on those tests. So that’s number one, which I think you just said that you’re going to get the test scores back sooner. So that’s good. 

Jacob Oliva It’s tough, because you would want the students to know, especially if teachers are looking at that. Maybe they want to be in an honors class. Or if you didn’t realize somebody was really good at biology, you might be using that result to try an AP biology course the following year. 

And it’s good for the schools and teachers for PD. So we are so excited that this year when that window closes, they’re going to get the assessments before school is out, at least the achievement level results on the state level. 

Representative Julie Mayberry So that’s really good news. I am glad to hear that, that you’ll get it sooner so you can have a little bit more immediate response to that. But the second part of that is that to them it doesn’t really make a difference. And they told me that they know, and of course none of them would admit to doing this, but they know other students who just fill in the bubble. 

Well, I guess you don’t fill in bubbles anymore. Old school. I guess, just pick a number and they just want to get through the test as quickly as possible, that it really makes no difference in their world. And they really don’t want to be bothered by the test. And so is it truly then their skill level or just they’re trying to hurry up and get through a test? So I want to say, maybe it was Tennessee, that does use the test in some way towards the student’s grade in a class. It’s considered a certain percentage of their overall grade or something like that. 

Even if it was considered just as a test, one test grade, there would be some type of consequence or some type of benefit to taking that test and they might take it a little bit more seriously. Because that really disturbed me that there’d be students who just really, they’re just taking guesses. They just want to hurry up and take the test. 

Jacob Oliva Yeah, I’ve seen some states have a myriad of policies around this. Some may have 20 to 30 percent of the student’s final grade is based on the end of course exam. Let’s say for algebra, whatever score they get also correlates to their actual grade on their transcript, which impacts their GPA. 

Some states have an exit exam requirement to graduate from high school, meaning if you don’t pass, let say, grade 10 ELA and algebra and biology, you can’t graduate. I mean, I’m not saying I’m advocating for any of those policies, but if those are the kind of conversations you want to have around putting some meat or kind of incentive behind us, that’s fine. I’d be more than happy to sit with you. I don’t know what the right answer is, but it’s worth a conversation. 

Representative Julie Mayberry I don’t either. I thought, I never really processed that or knew that. But that’s what this class– and this is a pretty smart class. This is an advanced class that I was talking to. And they were saying they know lots of students who finished that test practically as quickly as you possibly could answer all the questions, boom, boom. And they don’t spend a whole lot of time on it. So just throwing the idea out there, food for thought, and something to discuss as we move further. Thank you. 

Representative Keith Brooks Representative Barnes, you’re recognized for a question.

Representative Glenn Barnes With the private schools and your micro-schools not being measured the same way the public school, do you see a problem with students being moved to your private micro- schools to afford the standards that are being placed on the public schools? 

Jacob Oliva I don’t think I’ve seen that. I think when parents are looking for choice options, they’re looking for something they feel may meet the best needs of their own child. And if that’s in a micro school, because they’re getting maybe specialized one-on-one attention, and they know that’s what their child needs, and that’s great, or a private school. 

Now when we talk about accountability for private schools, we do hold them accountable. And they do have to give a standardized assessment because we want parents to know how well their children are doing. And we have made ATLAS available to micro-school families and private schools as well. And some folks are choosing to participate in that assessment as well because they want to know how well their kids are doing. 

Representative Glenn Barnes Let me give you a scenario I have in mind. If I think my child is not doing well, say 2nd grade, and I’m a little worried about the 3rd grade testing. If I move them to a private school or micro school, okay, hold them there until they get to the 4th or 5th grade, what’s the possibility that that happens? 

Jacob Oliva I would hope a parent isn’t doing that. If they’ve recognized their child needs help, to say I’m going to do everything in my power to not give them help, would be concerning for me. So I would say to that parent, this is why you need to meet with your school counselor, your administrators and your teacher to say, how can I reinforce at home and fill those gaps that my child’s not getting at school because I want them to be successful. 

Nobody should be dodging 3rd grade promotion. Cognizant that I’m using that term 3rd grade promotion, not retention. Because we want to move you on to the next grade to be successful. Right now if you look at all those students that are at risk and we’re just pushing through the system, are they graduating? 

Are they graduating with the ability to be enlisted, enrolled, or employed? If you have major deficits in reading in the primary grades, school becomes not fun, and then you become disconnected. And then you become a problem, and you don’t want to do it anymore. Because if you can’t read, you can’t succeed. So this is about promoting you with the toolkit to be successful at the next level. 

Representative Glenn Barnes I see the intent. I think your intent is right, what we’re trying to do. But in the minority area where I’m from, you have a lot of schools who do not have licensed teachers. And we’re putting this mandate on them, and we’re saying to these unlicensed teachers, you’re going to have to perform at the level of licensed teachers, got to perform. And between all of the dust, the child is the one suffering. And we are making these rules to me–

Expectations don’t vary with zip code

Jacob Oliva But the child’s suffering because the adults aren’t getting them the support they need. And I will never say, ever, that because you’re a poor kid from the Delta, you should have access to unqualified teachers. That’s a different conversation. We’re not going to have lower expectations for students based on zip code. 

In fact, we should be identifying those zip codes and incentivizing our best and brightest to go in there and lift these kids up. Not expect that they’re going to fail. I expect them to excel. And I know kids in those impoverished communities that can graduate with their AA just like any kid in this state. And we have schools that are doing it. 

We have Palestine Wheatley, I want to say last year alone, graduated 13 kids with their AA. Hope School graduated about 30-something kids with their AA. Lee County, a state controlled school that we just asked about, I think he had four kids. So I get so frustrated when we want to make excuses. 

We cannot love our students into mediocrity and make excuses because their zip code limits their opportunities. That’s up to us to be honest about why that continues to happen and stop perpetuating that cycle of failure. 

Representative Glenn Barnes Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with that. I agree with that. That wasn’t my point. I was dealing with more realistic what’s going on versus what we’re trying to do.

Jacob Oliva And that’s why we’re putting those literacy coaches in to model for those teachers side by side. Because if you remember, I got frustrated a lot. And I still get frustrated with this notion that we should just waive everything and put everybody in a waiver, which is why this legislature says, We’re not going to accept that anymore. We’re not going to let people just be unqualified for 30 years, be evaluated four times, and get a full pension. 

We want to put you on a path where you’re qualified. So if there’s a reason we got you in the door, that means we’re investing in you as an educator and we believe in you. So the question is, how can the co-ops and the system support that educator to give them the skills they need, which is why we’ve deployed those literacy coaches. Because they can do it. 

We need to get qualified educators and we need to celebrate them, elevate them, and retain them at a much higher level in some of our communities than we see in other areas of the state because the staffing issues are real. Getting good administrators is real. Getting systems– typically when you see a failing school, you see a failing community. You’re building an entire system. And we’re not going to accept failure. And our stance and our agency stance is if we see a community that is not focused on what’s best for students, which we’ve seen– we’ve recently did some major actions in Blytheville because they created a system that was focused on doing what’s best for adults while ignoring kids. 

They created a place where adults would go to have a job and kids would hang out. That’s not good enough. And I don’t care if you’re in Blytheville, I don’t care if you’re in Texarkana, I don’t care if you’re in Northwest. We have to do what’s right for students. That is our job. 

Representative Keith Brooks Representative Brown, you’re recognized for a question. 

Representative Karilyn Brown Thank you, Mr. Chair. Secretary Oliva, I just want to clarify some things, and I think this will be a pretty quick answer for you. Pathways are not necessarily considered advanced placement. They’re just strictly a pathway, correct? 

Jacob Oliva I think that’s a great question. And that’s why, when I think of a pathway, it’s creating an opportunity for exit and on ramps. So I think the notion that every student is on a pathway from high school to university– it is a pathway, but it may not be for all students. So you may have some students, they’re going to take some career technical programs. 

Maybe they’re going to take some AA. Maybe they’re going to take AP. It’s about a highway with exit and on ramps. But when you look at the CTE pathways, the intention of those pathways is that you could become a program completer. And if you take a certain level of coursework in succession, it would lead to an industry certification. Ross may be able to jump in there a little bit deeper. 

Representative Karilyn Brown So let me clarify. So the pathways that we were talking about are the ones on slide 18, Success Ready Pathways. 

Jacob Oliva Yes, ma’am. 

Representative Karilyn Brown And those would not be considered advanced placement. It’s just strictly a course of study for some sort of a certification? 

Jacob Oliva Yes ma’am. For these. But that wouldn’t prohibit a student for taking advanced placement courses. But these have specific courses that we would want to see a student complete towards a certification to complete that pathway. 

Representative Karilyn Brown And then my next question that relates to that is, a lot of the schools or several schools, at least in Arkansas, have academies. Are the academies considered a pathway or would they be in addition to a pathway? 

Jacob Oliva They can be. So I think schools are saying they’re going to develop a magnet program or an academy or an area of study, something that says that there’s a school within a school that may be a little bit different. I would hope that if they had an academy, it would be aligned to one of these pathways and not just a random program that doesn’t lead to outcomes for students. So I think that’s the intention. 

Representative Keith Brooks Representative Rye, you’re recognized for a question. 

Representative Johnny Rye Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Gentlemen, let me tell you a little bit about what’s going on in Northeast Arkansas. Back in the 70s and 80s and even 90s, we had a tremendous amount of people working in the agriculture field. And basically what has happened, where you had four or five children that worked from finishing high school into the farming industry, that’s not going on anymore. 

Big equipment has taken over. And if there’s any way, I don’t know– I know you guys are sharp when it comes to these kind of things. But we really do need to, I think, work at our technical part of that, especially in that area. 

Jacob Oliva I agree. And one of the things that we’ve often heard is that we’ve got to expand career and technical education. But then do we really invest in it, right? So I think one of the things that we did as a state, which was a huge statement to say we value these programs in Arkansas ACCESS is we looked at weighted coursework. 

So when we say that this is an honors course or an AP course, we are now identifying career and technical courses that get the same weighted credit as an AP course that somebody may be taking for a pathway to university. 

But a pathway to career, we’re going to say, is just as valuable and as rigorous as a pathway to university. And I think that’s going to help with that perception that we really are valuing career and technical education because we’re telling kids that this is just as important to take these courses as it is an AP course. 

Representative Johnny Rye Thank you, sir. And thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Representative Keith Brooks Rep. McGruder, you’re recognized for your question. 

Representative Jessie McGruder Thank you, Mr. Chair. First, I want to thank you all for the wonderful job of the presentation. You all put in a lot of work. And it’s obvious that we are making some gains here in the state of Arkansas. And I wanted to make sure that I piggybacked off what Senator Flowers stated. I want to see if we can get this data for districts that are in high poverty just broken down for those districts. And I also– 

Jacob Oliva As far as the achievement level or grades? Because I think we were talking about grades, right? Or was it achievement levels too? Achievement levels?

Representative Jessie McGruder The ATLAS, the science, the math and the ELA is what i was looking for. And how close are we to getting all teachers trained in the science of reading? 

Jacob Oliva That’s a good question. When you say all teachers, you’re talking about K through 12, regardless of teaching assignment, whether I’m a band teacher, drama teacher? Or are we talking about in like K-2, foundational years?

Representative Jessie McGruder Folks in our K-2. 

Jacob Oliva We can pull a percentage for you because that would be easier to pull than trying to figure out everybody around the science of reading when you say all teachers or even K-3 space, because we can look at who has met the certification requirements and what percentage we have on a pathway. 

I still think we have a high percentage of teachers that are on a pathway to getting that provisional license. But one of the things that we’re going to be hopeful to present to the legislature soon is we’ve been doing science of reading audits in our teacher prep programs. And I’m going to tell you right now, you’re going to be appalled at some of these teacher prep program scores. And then we wonder why these teacher candidates can’t meet the proficiency in the science of reading to get a professional license. There’s a lot of work to do. 

Representative Jessie McGruder Okay, follow-up? Last question. I heard you state this earlier about teachers within the Delta. I would love to get together and see what we can come up with incentives for teachers to come to the Delta, that area, to teach so we can make sure that we have high quality teachers in those high poverty areas. So I look forward to working with you and your staff on that. 

Jacob Oliva Thank you.

Representative Keith Brooks Representative Beck, you’re recognized for a question. 

Representative Rick Beck Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the presentation. And really, good news, as far as the advancements that you’ve already made. The question I have is sort of built on Representative McGruder’s. What are you seeing now? Because I’m hearing some good things back from the teachers. 

But what are you hearing now as your biggest deficit, the biggest gap that you have concern-wise as far as what the teachers are needing, whether that be additional education for the teachers or resources or anything like that, to implement the program LEARNS, especially in that pre-3rd grade level?

Jacob Oliva So I think kind of when you look at this implementation, state of the state or where we are now, what do teachers need– they need good materials. They need time to plan. They need to look at student data. They need time to observe other teachers. They want to be observed by their teachers and given feedback. Administrators are saying the same thing. Because it was a lot of change, and we got criticized. Why are we changing so much at once? Well, because we have to. 

And these kids should only be in 3rd grade once. These kids should only be in kindergarten once. We can’t wait another 10 or 15 years to get this implementation done right. But the amount of work we’ve done in standards realignment, updating high quality instruction materials, aligning professional development and building out that unified coordinated progress monitoring system, what we keep hearing for teachers is this is great, but this is a lot. I still need to absorb it all. I need to better understand how to use my progress monitoring data. 

How do I take that information and align lessons? How do I work with my peers and my colleagues as we differentiate instruction? I don’t feel like schools are like, no, we don’t want to do this. They want to do it. They want to do well. They just want to make sure they can be validated that what they’re working on is the work that they should be working on. 

And that’s what we’re trying to provide as a state is that layer and safety net to make sure we can help validate them. And that’s why we’re working with our cooperatives and in supporting them as well. Because a lot of times they’re the first line of support for a school district that has questions. And that’s where we’re just trying to do our best is make sure we’re giving them the answers quickly to any questions that they need and the right layers of support.

Representative Rick Beck Just to follow up. So not endorsing any program or anything, a lot of the statements that you made seem to align with the PLC program. So are we doing the implementation of the PLC program– or that training, not necessarily the program. That training, are the co-ops picking that up? Or is that where you intend for it to happen? 

Jacob Oliva Some are. And I think some is at a district level choice. Some some districts are continuing to work in that professional learning community model when it means coming together with your peers, looking at data, designing high quality lessons. Cooperatives are doing that. 

I think it’s kind of an array of support. Some may find other programs or initiatives that work better for them So it’s kind of making sure it’s differentiated and tailored to the unique students in schools that are being supported. 

Representative Rick Beck Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

Representative Keith Brooks Alright, seeing no additional questions. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for the presentation and answering questions. We will move on now to Mr. White for your presentation. If you would please introduce yourself and you’re recognized. 

Career and Technical Education update

Ross White Good afternoon, Ross White, Director for the Division of Career and Technical Education at the department. Give me one second to get this slide switched over. Good afternoon. We’re going to extend a little bit on the information that the secretary just covered regarding success ready graduates. But this is going to be specifically kind of through the lens of career and technical education as it looks at in our schools across the state. 

So specifically this is something we started with quite a bit this summer as we’ve done training across the state with educators, really talking about the LEARNS Act and ACCESS and how those two pieces together are really working to compliment success ready graduates and really looking at alignment of our workforce needs across the state. Because ultimately, that becomes our goal. And how are we meeting and what that looks like for our state in regards to our workforce.

 And so one of, I think, the most important places we start is, What is the vision of a success ready graduate? And part of that becomes, we have to start this conversation early. We have a lot of people who have this belief that magically in 9th grade our students are in high school, and they’re going to start making choices and making plans that are going to put them on a path to success post-graduation. 

And to be honest, a lot of our programs, as we know, start in the 9th grade or before the 9th. And so students are really needing to be intentional. I spent 10-plus years in an 8th grade classroom teaching career development. And so my goal every day was to spend with 8th graders, about 150 of them, talking about what do you want to do post high school graduation. 

When I look back on those years and the time spent in that classroom, most of those students knew really well, typically, what their parents did, and then what we would typically call a community helper. Beyond that, they couldn’t usually tell me what was happening. Our biggest employer in the community I live in, when I would ask students what’s happening there, they couldn’t usually tell what was going on there. It was a manufacturing plant that manufactured food, and they couldn’t tell me anything about it. And a lot of them, that’s where their parents work.

So I think we have to be very intentional in this continuum of what career exposure looks like for our students. And so this is a continuum we use with our schools. I’m really talking about in that 6th to 8th grade band, are we making students aware by early career experiences? And so through the LEARNS Act, that was an important piece of legislation that really gave us, we have to focus on early career experiences. 

And so what are we doing with students in grade 6 and grade 7 in grade 8 around what I always kind of call the three areas of career awareness so they’re aware of careers and why people work, then career exploration where we’re exploring all the things. What are your dreams? What would you love to do? What would not love to do? And then career development, which becomes, how do we start to talk about what you’ve identified, things you like, things that you are interested in, things that you have an aptitude in. How do we start developing those skills? 

And so those become essential for us to do in those middle grades. We’ll get people from time to time say, that’s way too early. And I don’t believe that at all. As somebody who spent the time there, somebody now as a father of a 6th grader and a 9th grader, very intentional conversations I have with them on a regular basis about, what is it you want to do or what are your interests or what do you enjoy as we plan that out. And then, by law, we have student success plans that must be in place by the end of their 8th grade year. And so this marries right into that. 

As we start talking about student success plan, that’s more than just a four-year plan of courses you’re going to take, but truly a system that we should be revisiting on an annual basis throughout our high school experience. But those experiences we do in grades 6, 7, and 8 really make that student success planning tool and resource between our educators, our students, and their families be a much more powerful piece as we go forward. 

And then hopefully that then leads into what we call success-ready pathways and that students are identifying really what are their goals that they want to achieve post high school graduation and building out those processes in the high school experience. Because those pathways become a lot of opportunity but also there’s a lot of things that happened or happen in between there that students need to be able to understand, know, their families need to be able to understand and know. And our educators can support them as they move forward. 

Enlistment, Enrollment, Employment

Then the final piece is we want them to become that success-ready graduate. And you heard the secretary allude earlier about enlistment, enrollment, employment. And that’s really what we are looking at when we began to talk about this, is that we want all of our students ready for one of the three E’s, if not all three of them. 

Students are going to make changes. We know that. We know we’re going to have students who graduate high school in May and have a plan in May. And then by the time August rolls around, that plan has changed. But that we have skilled them to be able to pivot to a different option and still have skills within them that make them successful and able to move forward and be a productive member of our community and our state and our workforce holistically. 

Earlier, the secretary brought these up. I’m going to– they’re on the screen again. These are specific to just our career and technical education pathways. I do want to give you a little bit more information around those. As he mentioned, we revisit them because they’re not just a stagnant list. And this is something we’re required to revisit annually. So when we look at this we’re looking at wage in our state and the demand in our state based off labor market information. 

And so when we look at wage, we’re looking at the wage that is being earned from these occupational codes. And so that becomes very important because we want that family sustaining wage. We want to have Arkansans that are on a pathway to prosperity and making a family sustained income. 

The other side of that then becomes demand. Is there demand in our state? We look at this statewide, all 75 counties. We know we could narrow down into one specific county, probably have some outliers that are there. But holistically, when we look at it statewide, we still see the same common needs across our state, no matter where we are. 

Success-ready pathways

And so those are our driving forces when we’re looking at our success-ready pathways that are career and technical focused is that labor market information and, specifically, at wage and demand. Because we want to ensure that we’re preparing students for pathways that there are jobs and then there are jobs that are going to pay a decent wage for them looking forward. And so this is revisited annually. 

So as we mentioned earlier, there were 18 on our initial list. If you were looking at this one here, you’re going to notice that this number actually is a little higher than 18. And through some work we’ve done this past year, as we move into the 26-27 school year, we’re going to have 22 pathways that then meet our wage demand. A part of that is us reworking programs we’ve had. 

We have a lot of programs that have been the same way for a long time, and we haven’t really visited what are the skills that we’re teaching and how we’re teaching them. And so through some extensive work over the past year and a half, we have really revisited all of those pathways, re-aligned the standards that we are teaching, and those standards align to the skills that go back to the careers and their occupation codes. 

And so being very intentional with that, we were able to adapt programs to meet more of the needs in our state. And that becomes a big part of our conversation too, is that when we look at these pathways, we’re focused on the needs of Arkansas and Arkansas alone, specifically, as we go forward. 

So as the secretary mentioned earlier, from those pathways, students can graduate with Merit and Distinction, which now becomes a part of our school accountability A to F system. And so that’s very important. As Representative Mayberry mentioned earlier, with our students, how do they take interest and buy-in. And to our assessments, I think this becomes an important part in our schools. 

They’re required and have been required my entire educational career to have three career and technical education programs on campus. How intently they’ve paid attention to them or how seriously they’ve taken the programming they’re offering and how rigorous it is and how appropriate it is and how aligned it is to their community needs, I think is something that can be of question sometimes. 

But now that we have this in our school accountability, it definitely has our schools looking a lot more at the programs they’re offering and their alignment with that. And then ensuring that students are leaving with two things. And I always go with merit and distinction. There are two important pieces. One is they’re completing a pathway, which is at least three courses. 

And those three courses, we’ve built a foundational set of skills and knowledge that they can go on to work, they can continue their education, they can enlist in the military. But they also have something tangible they can take with them beyond their high school diploma. 

When we have conversations with employers, and we do on a regular basis, a lot of times what we hear is, That high school diploma doesn’t mean a whole lot to us. Most people have that. So what else do they have with them? What other skill do they have beyond being a high school graduate? And so that becomes a really important part of our success ready graduates is there is something tangible that they’re taking with them, whether it be an additional credential that’s been to earn, it’s an additional post-secondary credit, it’s scores on different assessments that’s going to put them earlier in line for maybe an interview or opportunity is really what we’re looking at when we discuss merit and distinction. 

And these two slides really talk about the two differences in those. Something that I do want to point out a fact to you is the class of 2024, so when they graduated, obviously the LEARNS Act was still very new. Obviously they’d been in high school through pretty much the entire process. If we would have taken that class and looked at Merit and Distinction, we would’ve had 9,028 students out of the 36,000 plus students we graduated that would’ve met Merit or Distinction.

Okay, that’s not a number that I’m necessarily proud of. To say that we had 9,000 students that were considered success ready by how we define Merit or Distinction. Now, again, the class of 2028, our current sophomores this year, they will be the first class that has gone through the full four years of high school under these new rules and regulations. So my hope is by the time we get to the class of 2028, we see this number has had some tremendous growth. But it’s also kind of our baseline to watch because that becomes a really important part of our conversation. 

When we have employers that are looking to locate in Arkansas and they are in that process of trying to determine, is there a workforce to meet that, we know most of the times they’re looking at, what are we graduating out of high schools, out of post-secondaries, because they don’t want to steal from the workforce that already exists a lot of times. So how intentional are we? When I look at this number, 9,028, it’s not a perfect number of exactly every student being success ready. But it paints a picture based off the programs we’ve built and the opportunities we’ve provided students. 

And so I think that’s a challenge to us and our schools right now is how do we continue to grow that? And they’re doing a great job. We’ve had lots of trainings, lots of questions, lots of changes in programs that maybe have always traditionally been offered to meet the workforce needs of a community, of a region as we go forward. So as we look at enrollment, to give you a general idea, we do have middle school career and technical education courses. 

And so from the previous school year, we had about 106,000 students in a career and technical course in grades 6, 7, or 8. A lot of that is around exploration. So they are exploring careers that exist and why. Then if we look to the high school side, 9-12 enrollment, we see it over 252,000. I always like to add that can be a duplicate number. We have a lot of students who are taking a lot of courses within a pathway that might be two, three periods of their day. 

So we have a very healthy enrollment in career and technical education. I think the part that then becomes something that we have to continue to look at and have conversation about is this right here. So we use the term ‘concentrator’ and ‘completer’ in career and technical education. And that’s a federal term, but also we use it heavily in our state. And that’s the number of students who are completing programs.

Concentrators and Completers 

So concentrators means they completed two courses in a program or a pathway. And then we have a completer where they completed three, which is the full program. So you can see that from last year, we had 73,000 students who would have met the concentrator. And then completers, it goes down to 32,000. So I think we go, well, how did we lose more than half of them? Like, what’s happening there? That should be concerning, and it should be. And there’s a lot of factors that go into play. 

And sometimes it’s the student has found they are not interested in that career field or that pathway, that it is just not right for them, and they make a switch. And that is perfectly OK. I think it’s great to learn that you have a fear of needles and blood before you go deep into a medical profession’s pathway. But we also know we have a lot of students who have a lot of other opportunities at school or they’re not required to be at school all day and they don’t have to finish a schedule, and so they leave and they go to work. 

We do have work-based earning programs that allow students to earn credit while still being enrolled in the school, getting credit for it but also working. They would be included in this count. So we do see a significant turn there. So it’s also a big part of our conversation around letting students complete pathways. And so we anticipate these numbers to get better, but it is our reality of where we live. And they’ve been pretty consistent for this way for some time, as we look at the pathways that are offered. 

And then there’s secondary career centers that I know you all are very familiar with across the state. So we have 31 secondary career centers, not including satellites. And those are very regionally focused and then very driven programs, meaning that students are going to have to usually take at least half of their school day to be there. So it’s not necessarily right for every student. 

And then of course, we don’t offer every pathway known to mankind. They are usually very regionally focused on the workforce of those areas. But you can see we’re averaging a little over 10,000 students there a year, which is a good number. But at the same time, we have 31 of these centers across the state and the continual growth in that. 

And then our connection with post-secondary there. For the vast majority of these, they are on a post-secondary campus which means those students are earning concurrent credit while they’re doing this work which means moving them closer or they’re already earning a certificate of proficiency, a technical certificate, or an associate’s degree while enrolled there. And I think those become really important pieces. And so our continued growth with this, we know, as we discuss success ready pathways and we put out merit and distinction, that we’ve already seen more of a demand for these programs and more enrollment occurring at faster rates, which then puts us to this last bit of facts. 

So in the 24-25 school year, we had over 19,000 industry-recognized credentials earned in our state. And so we’re happy with that number, but I will tell you that number is not necessarily always the greatest industry-recognized credential known. We have spent the past year really reviewing this. And as we go into the current school year that we’re in, we have really narrowed our list of what’s industry-recognized credentials. 

And this list has become, I’ll be honest, kind of a headache to manage. And it’s become very vendor driven. We have vendors that can come up with credentials for about anything in the world. But then when we talk to our employers, our employers are like, I’ve never heard of that, or I don’t know what that is, or I didn’t need that, or I’d rather teach it myself. And so we’re really trying to revisit the industry recognized credential piece and being very intentional with that. 

So you might hear some conversations about that over the next year, because we are really tightening that list down to what we feel like is more appropriate, and then really driven by Arkansas workforce and what Arkansas workforce needs. And then the post-secondary credentials here, this is something that the numbers now we don’t love. 

But we know that we are already on a path to see great changes here based off of things from the LEARNS Act and the ACCESS Act. So keep in mind these 24-25 numbers are focused on mostly students who would have graduated this past spring. But a little over 2,500 certificates of proficiency, 137 technical certificates, and five associate’s degrees. These are all specific to career and technical education.

So earlier when the secretary mentioned Palestine Wheatley and Hope, those are probably more in your general studies area. These are going to be in very technical fields. And those are all coming out of our secondary career centers. So those numbers aren’t where we want them, but from the legislation that has been passed and the work that has been put in, we already see very much an uptick in this trajectory as we go forward and anticipate these numbers to be at a much greater scale in the next two to three years, and especially that class of 2028, our sophomore class, seeing it almost double or quadruple and what those numbers would look like as we meet Arkansas workforce needs. 

And so that really is where we sit in our current reality with career and technical education as it extends on what the secretary shared earlier, but also the success ready pathways. There’s a lot of opportunity here. It’s also brought up a lot of conversation with school leaders and communities around what are our needs and how do those align. And then of course at the same time with post-secondary, ensuring that we’re creating pathways for our students that we know the vast majority of them are going to continue their education in some form or fashion. 

It might not be a four year baccalaureate degree, but there’s going to be some additional training. And that we are able to break down some of those barriers and make those pathways a little bit more seamless for our students and the process, but also filling Arkansas workforce needs as we continue forward. And so with that, I believe that was my last one, so I’ll take any questions you have. 

Representative Keith Brooks Senator Dotson. You’re recognized for a question.

Senator Jim Doton Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ross, a couple of slides back where you were talking about the class of 2024, the merit and distinction graduations, 9,028. Do we have any numbers in like 2023, 2022, leading up to that? And I’m sure you don’t have ’25 yet. 

Ross White So yes and no. So we have some numbers we could run based off of what merit and distinction looks like. It’s just not a perfect example of it. But I would say we’ve looked at it. And I know the team, the public school accountability team, has done a lot of work in here. And it’s been pretty consistent around when we look specifically in the realm of just career and technical education and completing a pathway and earning that credential or post-secondary credit, that we’ve been running about 10,000 or so usually is the ballpark of what our graduating class is. That’s pretty consistent in that 30,000 range. 

Comparison to other states

Senator Jim Doton So roughly 25 percent. Is that consistent nationwide or with other states?

Ross White It varies. So you have states who have a requirement of career and technical education, workforce-specific. So obviously theirs is going to be tremendously higher than ours. And then you have some states who have no requirement, so it’s going to be lower than ours. I would say we kind of just run in the middle of the pack when we look at career and technical education. 

Especially when we start talking about completers of CTE programs, which is meaning three courses, we always just kind of fall right in the middle, probably 25, 30, when it starts to look at number of completions. Now I think the other part we have to take into consideration is, number of completions is great, but then also, what are they taking with that besides just completing the program. 

Because I can have a student at one school that completed a program, and I can say, Man, that was extremely rigorous, they’re very trained. And I could maybe have another program in another district and just the quality of the educator might not be as great and it might not mean as much. 

So that’s where we’ve added in that readiness factor, that second piece. That is some outside piece, credential, post-secondary accreditation piece, assessment, that is carrying with them that shows they have a skill set. That, I think is really important. That’s new to us that we wouldn’t have had prior to this previous year. 

Senator Jim Doton So states that don’t have it as a mandatory, we’re right in line with where they’re at, more or less? 

Ross White Yes, sir. 

Senator Jim Doton Thank you.

Representative Keith Brooks Representative Duke, you’re recognized. 

Representative Hope Duke Thank you. Thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you for the presentation. It was very interesting. On that slide, I think it’s slide 15, right before the end, where you talk about the certifications and the post-secondary credentials earned, I’m assuming those are like 137 technical certificates represent 137 students. Correct? 

Ross White Correct. 

Representative Hope Duke So can you give examples of what these certificates in all of those areas may be your top ones? 

Most popular programs

Ross White So for technical certificates, it’s typically going to be in the medical field. Those are going to be our most common there. Your certificates of proficiency is typically going to a lot of automotive, a lot of welding. Those are usually our biggest numbers because these are coming specifically out of our secondary career centers. And so those are going to be most common. 

You might see an advanced manufacturing thrown in here depending on the area. But definitely medical, automotive, welding, a little bit of construction tech. But some of those, like specifically to construction, a lot of those have an industry recognized credential that sometimes the employer is looking more for than necessarily the post-secondary credit. But those would be our most common that we’re going to see from that list that’s there. 

Representative Hope Duke And do you have– follow up, if I may? Do you have, are we tracking these kids at all? Are any of these career centers tracking them after they leave? I mean, I have a little bit of knowledge over the welding. As I got introduced to that, how much they’re making whenever they’re graduating with some of this, are we tracking that so we know? And do you have that? 

Ross White So one of our federal requirements, but as a state, we are doing a very good job at this, is this number right here. So our concentrators and completers, those students, we have to track 18 months post-high school graduation. And we have track them on what’s called post-secondary placement, but it’s just placement in either the workforce, part-time or full-time enrollment in post- secondary, the Peace Corps, or the military. 

And so we do have to check all of our students 18 months past high school graduation with that. So we have that information in all of our districts receive that annually on kind of where they’re at. I will say our post-secondary placement based off of those students, we typically run about 80% are meeting the placement requirement, which means 80% of them are either enrolled full-time, part-time, or employed, what’s considered full- time, are in the military or are in the Peace Corps. 

Representative Hope Duke So is that information that you could get us as well so that we can see? 

Ross White I can give it to you by school district. They have their amount that we have to track that annually and submit it to the US Department of Ed. 

Representative Hope Duke So we know, basically, this kid took the welding classes or automotive classes and they stayed in the industry 18 months later or they did not? Yeah, I think that would be great to see. 

Representative Keith Brooks Senator Flowers, you’re recognized.

Senator Stephanie Flowers And thank you for the presentation. I wanted to know about the certified pre-apprenticeship leading to registered apprenticeship and just general overall how is CTE set up with school districts, individual school districts? Is it left to the school district to determine and to fund the career technical courses? 

Ross White So I’ll start with that question and then we’ll go back to the certified pre-apprenticeship, if you’re okay with that. So in our school standards for accreditation, they are required, I believe, as the secretary mentioned earlier, they have to have three career and technical education programs of study. And so that’s a part of accreditation, which then goes to their foundation funding. So that’s one of those requirements. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers And one from your list. 

Ross White And then one of them has to be that high wage, high demand. That was new from the LEARNS Act. And so every school has to have three. Again, most districts actually have more than three. It’s pretty common. Our smallest districts typically are just having the three. But I’ll be honest, most have more than that. And so that is where their requirement is. 

They have obviously in their foundation funding the piece that comes in with career and technical education as a requirement in standards for accreditation. And then we do receive federal funding, so the Carl D. Perkins Act, so Perkins funding, that comes into the state. Now that is a state award. And then we have to use it in higher ed and in K-12. So right now 70% of it goes to our K-12 districts and 30% goes to our post-secondary campuses that are eligible. And they receive a federal award with that. 

It is a very, very small amount of money. Our state federal award is a little under $15 million as a whole, that then we have to split among every K-12 district in the state and then our post-secondaries who are eligible for Perkins. So I always remind people the federal award isn’t really a lot of operational. It’s typically a supplemental piece that helps offset the cost of equipment or credentialing for students. 

Apprenticeships

And then for the certified pre-apprenticeship, so we have two options with apprenticeship. We have certified pre-apprenticeship, which is newer for our state. And that’s with the Office of Skills Development over at the Department of Commerce. And students who have the opportunity to go into an apprenticeship opportunity, but it’s the pre- side of it, because they might not be meeting the age requirements that the apprenticeship might require. 

And this allows them to start working in that field and gaining on-the-job training and related technical instruction hours towards the apprenticeship once they reach the age that they’re able to be an approved apprentice through the United States Department of Labor. 

And then we have a youth apprenticeship, which is very similar. And it is where they’re identifying they are a youth, and they are aligned with an apprenticeable career. And the hours they earn while they’re in that youth apprenticeship count towards the amount of hours that have to be earned in the actual apprenticeship once they become of age. 

So really the only differences there are the certified pre-apprenticeship is more Arkansas controlled and local; the youth apprenticeship is through the United States Department of Labor and has a little bit more federal oversight. But both of those are opportunities we have for students in our state that have been approved. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Approved by the feds?

Ross White Well, so, good question. So there is, on the youth apprenticeship side, obviously, we would have to have an approved apprenticeship within the state that’s been approved through the United States Department of Labor. 

With a certified pre-apprenticeship, it’s pretty much the same because we also want it to be an approved apprenticeship, which, as of right now, we go through the federal side of it for the apprenticeship to be approved. So you do have to file an application with the United States Department of Labor to have that apprenticeship career approved. Once it’s an approved career in the state, providers can go from there. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers If a school district is required to just choose one subject matter from your success-ready pathway, the other two– but they’re supposed to have three. 

Ross White Yes, they’re required to have three for accreditation purposes. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers So the other two, how are they funded? I mean, and what qualifies them as a program that would be acceptable as a career? 

Ross White We spell out our pathways and our courses, so they obviously have standards, just like we have for all of our other courses. We have standards for each course. And so they’re choosing the pathways that they have for their community. Also, we have a state plan for Perkins federally that defines size, scope, and quality. Those are the three things federally we have to define. 

And so it defines what is the size of the program, the scope of the problem, and then how do you identify quality in the program. And so every district, their programs they offer have to meet those. And so we have, at actually each of our education cooperatives, we employ a CTE coordinator, each one of them, that is there to support our districts across the state in making sure they’re meeting size, scope, and quality. 

And so, it’s no different than them having, in my opinion, a math, English, science program. We have staff that’s there to support them. We have standards that are set. And they implement those programs because they are a part of their requirement for accreditation purposes. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers So at some point, at the local level, those leaders in that school district and the business community, I suppose, would come together and figure out those other two? 

Ross White And that’s a good question. So that’s a requirement they have annually, is they’re supposed to have what’s called a stakeholder engagement. And that’s a meeting between the educators there at the district, the education leaders, those teachers, but also then their business and industry. And what programs do we need to be offering? What are the needs of our community? What are our workforce needs? To identify the programs that they need to offer there. And they’re able to choose those at the local level. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers One last question? The U.S. Department of Education, do they fund any of this career technical education? 

Ross White So that’s that Carl D. Perkins Act that I mentioned earlier. So the Perkins funding that we receive comes from the feds and that is what is coming from the US Department of Ed to fund career and technical education in the state, in all states. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Are we projected to receive some Perkins? 

Perkins funding details

Ross White So we’ve received our initial payout for this year. And obviously we’ll get our second one on October 1. And it’s just right under $15 million, as I mentioned earlier, so it’s not a big pot of money. But that is what we receive and then we split it 70-30%. 70% goes to K-12, local education agencies. And then the other 30% goes to our post-secondary education agencies that meet the requirement. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers But only the agencies that have met the requirements for whatever the Department of Ed through Perkins has outlined?

Ross White So our K-12 districts, all of them meet it because it’s a requirement for them for accreditation. So all K- 12 public districts are eligible. On the post-secondary side, they don’t have a requirement. So they’re able to do that. But pretty much all of our two-year community colleges receive Perkins on that. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers So what you’re saying is K through 12, all K through 12 in the state– 

Ross White Public school districts receive it.

Senator Stephanie Flowers Receives—- is it split proportionally?

Ross White It’s a formula. So the formula looks at two things. And the formula is given to us by the feds as well. It looks at the population of the community and then the poverty of the community. And those are the two things that calculate in to form that. It’s similar to how Title I is funded in districts. It’s the same formula. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Is all this data on the Department of Education website? 

Ross White So you can go to the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education page and on finance you can see the breakdown of how much dollar amount each district receives under the finance section. I will tell you, districts have the option to join a consortium with the career and technical education funds, which means they’re putting all their money in one pot together and working as a group. 

And most of our districts choose to use that because it’s a small amount of money. And so we have a consortium at each of our education service cooperatives. And so most of our smaller districts, of course, which is a large number of our districts, are a part of a consortium. But every district that’s K-12 that’s public does receive a piece of that dollar each year. And then they choose to either keep it or put it in the consortium. And we can get you that list if you’d like a breakdown. I mean, that’s very easy. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers I would. I’m not that savvy with this computer and going online, all. But I’d like whatever kind of breakdown you have for students that are engaged in that career, technical, by the districts. You’ve given us some because we can look at what you have from 24-25 to kind of see, because some of this is backed by Perkins and the Department of Labor. And so is it correct to assume that these numbers that are up here for concentrators and completers was all federally funded? 

Ross White No. I mean, so I would say no. Because, again, our federal funds that are coming in are such a small amount. They’re usually there to help provide above and beyond what schools already receive. Because, again, for our K-12 districts, it is a part of their requirement. 

And so when we go back to just their funding as a district, then that is what they’re receiving for all their requirements under standards for accreditation and they’re required to have those programs. What comes in with the federal dollar amount is a very small amount. So most of our districts are using that typically for educator training, equipment that they’re buying. 

And I say equipment, usually one or two pieces of equipment a year. And then paying for students who are sitting for these credentials that they are having to pay for, and they’re covering the cost of those credentials so that it’s not going to the student. But our largest recipient in the state as an individual district is receiving probably $400,000. And that’s all they’re receiving. And that is our largest in the state. 

And we have some districts who receive less than $10,000 in Perkins because of how the formula works. And it’s just such a small amount of money. And that comes to us federally. So I would say we have way more state invested funds than we have federally invested funds in career in technical education. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Because the federal funds would have to be targeted for certain types of courses. 

Ross White They just have to meet that federal definition of size, scope and quality, which all of our programs meet that when they implement them, because that’s how we ensure that they’re meeting that when they offer them, whether it’s state or federal dollars. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Even the ones that are not on this list? 

Ross White That 22 list is just the ones that are meeting wage and demand. We offer 63 programs of study. 22 of them currently meet the state’s threshold for high wage, high demand. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Well, whatever you think might help in understanding how this works and whether it’s new. This is my first year on Education Committee, so I’d like to know more of the background of the CTE and if it’s regional. I think over in Sheridan, they connected with Malvern and some other places. So that’s a regional kind of career tech. 

Ross White Yes, ma’am. 

Senator Stephanie Flowers Okay, thank you, Mr. Chair. 

Representative Keith Brooks Thank you, Senator. Seeing no additional questions, Mr. White, thank you for your time. There is no additional business before us, so I want to give a reminder that we are meeting tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. in Pine Bluff, where, no doubt, Senator Flowers will roll out the red carpet for all of us. So we’re excited for that. So seeing no additional businesses, Joint Education is adjourned.