House Education Committee
January 16, 2025
Representative Keith Brooks [00:00:00] ....world and the state of Arkansas and the United States. And so we want to make sure to get to know them. I encourage you to shake everybody's hands. So today, just a little bit of a rundown of how we're going to do things today. We'll go over just a few little announcements, a few little committee pieces of business, and then we will disperse for the day. And it will be unusual in terms of the time frame of how things normally run.
And so especially the new members, I just want to make sure that you are aware of the commitment that it takes. And oftentimes we can go quite a while in this committee. So just think about that as you plan your day, as you plan your life, that there is a significant amount that is involved. But that's a good thing.
I do want to recognize my vice chair, Brit McKenzie, who is with us. And then a couple of introductions. We have some amazing people who serve our committee as committee staff. We have to my right, Kristen Washington, who is our committee analyst. If you need anything, she is the expert. She's the one that you'll see me turn to a number of times to keep me between the ditches. And she does an amazing job of that. Also, we have Riley Sewell, who's the administrative assistant. And then Taylor Lloyd. Everybody knows Taylor as our BLR attorney who takes care of drafting bills and probably keeping us all going on a day to day basis.
So today we're also going to hear at the end from Secretary Oliva just to give us a little bit of an overview of the state of education here in Arkansas. His leadership has been outstanding and we look forward to it. There's also a chance we might hear from our new ASU head, Dr. Brendan Kelly. He's on the way back from Malvern. So they are trying to get here so he can introduce himself as well. So again, just want to thank you for your willingness to serve on this committee.
Obviously, House Education Committee, that garners a good bit of attention, I think, and rightfully so. As I said, it's also a committee that requires a lot of time. And so that's not just here during our session. It's also during the interim. For those new members who haven't served on this committee before, you need to think ahead about that. You need to think ahead that as we step outside the session and we move into the adequacy process, this committee meets every single month and it is very, very important that we engage in that process. Because the process of adequacy, again, it's outside of what we do here on a regular session basis. The process of adequacy is how we fund our schools under current state law. And it is very important that we are engaged and understand that process.
So I just want to give that primer for you for the months to come. That will be a lot of what next year looks like in this committee. Arkansas is establishing itself as a transforming entity in education in the United States. And I think that's a really good thing. In this committee, we won't be ashamed of taking a very strong approach to what it means to do that and to continue leading.
And above all, this committee is going to approach everything we do under the lens of students first. If you look at the state of Arkansas, somewhere between 15 to 20% of people in Arkansas are a student of some sort. That could be anywhere from preschool to secondary education, postsecondary graduate, technical school, adult education. We have a lot of people who are a student. And the importance of that demands that we as a committee put them first and do everything that we can to ensure their success. Because their success in life demands it and demands it of us.
And so that's why for me it is very important that we establish this as a priority what we do during the session and understand that we are going to look to continue to do things as a state that furthers the opportunity of students in every way to succeed. So I'm going to turn it over to my vice chair, Brit McKenzie, for a couple of comments and then we will move on.
Representative Brit McKenzie [00:03:44] Thank you, Chairman Brooks. Hi, everybody. I first need to apologize to the membership of the committee. I was trying to get our organizing text together and technology got the best of me. We have 15 text chats going through. So hopefully that's the role I can play with Chairman Brooks this year is organizing us. We have regular scheduled meetings, but I'll do my best to make sure we're informed. If there are any changes or anything that needs to be disseminated, I'll do my best.
To echo what Chairman Brooks said, I look forward to this committee. As a freshman coming on to the committee last year, we obviously had a large undertaking with the LEARNS Act, but it's going to be another great year of making sure we put students first. I do believe that this committee is where economic opportunity is unleashed for the future generations of our state. I look forward to this hard work, putting our heads down and thinking about students first and making sure that we can do whatever we can for future generations of Arkansans. So thank you.
Representative Keith Brooks [00:04:39] Thank you, Representative McKenzie. So a few announcements to go through, and Kristen can keep me again straight if I miss some of this. First off, just a little note about decorum. So again, this committee oftentimes has a high amount of legislation that we hear. It can often be very complex legislation. Your colleagues and other colleagues from outside of this room will be sitting at the end of the table, sometimes, from personal experience, for hours on end.
And so it is very, very important that your questions to your fellow member be thoughtful, be to the point. One thing that I will not do, please do not ask me for a follow up question. Please just continue your line of questioning. I want to make sure that we continue the flow as we go through. And so asking 2 or 3 questions is certainly appropriate to this committee. If you start to belabor the point, then we'll try our best to move on, move you to the end of the list. If you do have a question to ask, make sure that you let Kristen know and signal her in some way so that she can keep us on a consistent list and moving through that.
From the standpoint of committee testimony, obviously, audience members are extremely valued in what we do and so everyone will have the opportunity to speak. Audience members and those listening online, remember that every single time that we have a committee meeting, we have bills that will be heard, there will be a sign up sheet out front. Please make sure to sign up on that sheet should you want to be recognized for testimony. Again, we will make sure that we hear every single person that comes through this committee because I think their voice is important. The voice of the people of the state of Arkansas is important.
I would encourage you to get to know, again, our partners at the department. And we've got a few folks here. And I shouldn't try to name everybody, but I'll do my best, the ones who will always be here. Secretary Oliva, obviously, will be here a lot. But probably more important than that, you'll see Courtney Salas Ford and Greg Rogers at generally everything that is done. And so I encourage you to get their cell phones. I encourage you to bug them day and night with questions. I'm just going to encourage you to to bug them to make sure that you have a good understanding of the different legal or fiscal impacts of things that we do here as a committee.
The agendas will obviously be up on the website before we meet. We will meet every Tuesday and Thursday at 10 a.m. in this room. Always listen for the announcements in the previous day of session in case something were to change. I would encourage you to please try to be timely so we can get started on time and because the public, obviously since this is live streamed, would expect that of us. Representative Brown, it has nothing to do with that. So that's on my list just so you know. It's all good. We certainly appreciate you, Representative Brown. Obviously, a quorum must be in place for us to start. That's 11 people. So, you know, we all have different bills to run in different places, but let's do our best to try to be here so that we can conduct the business of the state of Arkansas.
The agendas are going to be prepared in accordance with the House Rules. They are prepared two days in advance, so please keep that in mind. Sponsors, you'll be sent notifications if you have a bill that is on the agenda. And so you'll know that you can be here to do it. Those notices come by email, so always make sure to check your email. If you have an amendment, that amendment should be in writing. Please make sure that you let staff know if you're going to have an amendment.
Relative to things like special order of businesses, a special order of business such as perhaps a joint meeting of House and Senate, or if we have a controversial bill that may be heard or a bill that garners a lot of attention, we may have a special order of business, as we did last session with LEARNS, where we met in Mac A and met for an endless amount of time. But so just always be listening for that.
One important thing about this committee that's a bit unique is that there's a fiscal impact that's required on everything. So fiscal impact statements are required for all legislation concerning K through 12 education and scholarships funded with net proceeds from the state lottery or higher ed grant funds. So just know that any bill that you run is going to have a fiscal impact. Kristen is going to head that up. And before we run the bill, we want to make sure we have the fiscal impact on the desk so everybody knows what that will look like. So that is kind of our general announcements.
We will have a committee photo. That will be next Thursday, January 23, at 9:45. So make sure that you dress well. Guys, make sure that you look in the mirror and that your ties are straight and all that. But that will be 9:45 next Thursday on the second floor steps here at the Capitol. And let's make sure we get that, get there quickly so we can get over here and conduct business. Let's see here, I believe that is all the announcements that I have. That sound about right, Kristen? All right.
So I do want to turn it over now to Secretary Jacob Oliva to give us some comments just on the state of education here in the state of Arkansas, and then we'll do one other quick introduction, and then we will be done. Secretary Oliva, thank you for being here.
Jacob Oliva [00:10:02] Good morning and thank you for having me. So I know Chair Brooks, Vice Chair McKenzie. And committee members, when the chairs and committee members were announced, I know our agency was really excited to see some returning faces and some new faces. So we're really grateful to leadership for getting that appointment right. Because from my lens, there's nothing more important that we can do as a state is to get education and our priorities correct and do what's right to improve the outcomes and lives of all of our students.
So for those of you that don't know me or know a little bit about my background, I started as a classroom teacher and also been able to work as a school administrator. I've been a school superintendent. I've been doing state level policy for close to two years, and I know that it takes a great team. In order for us to do work and engage in that cycle of continuous improvement, it's going to require all of us working together.
So I know Chair Brooks introduced some of our staff members, but I do want to make sure everybody knows that there's a really good team that stands committed to supporting the work of this delegated body. And I'd be remiss if I didn't have these folks just kind of wave their hands. Sara Kameny is an education policy consultant in the governor's office that we work with each and every single day. Stacey Smith is the deputy commissioner at the Department of Education and really oversees a lot of our early learning through kind of 12th grade priorities is kind of the buckets we look at.
There's another colleague of ours. That's the commissioner of Higher Education, Dr. Ken Worden, who's at a university or school right now. So we want to make sure that we introduce him to the committee as well. And then Courtney Salas Ford is the chief of staff, and she's going to be a lot of the point contact with a lot of the policy work that we're engaged in and getting meetings and everything's organized to support the work that you're doing. And then Greg Rogers is our chief financial officer, so don't be surprised if he starts every conversation with no. That's what he's been trained to do. He does a really good job of making sure we balance our priorities.
So Chair Brooks, we will follow up with an email to staff with all of our contact information because we want to make sure that everybody has all of our cell phone numbers. There is no other agency priorities for us that are more important than supporting you in your work and getting this right.
For those that served on this committee or were part of the legislative delegation last session in 2023, in March of 23, Governor Sanders signed into law what I consider the most comprehensive, bold, innovative approach to improving student outcomes. And that was known as the Arkansas LEARNS Act. And I'm here to tell you that we've garnered a lot of national attention. When we think about what we were able to do successfully, we were able to empower parents. We were able to elevate and celebrate teachers by raising salaries and recognizing teachers for the outcomes that they're getting in their students. We were able to improve access to early learning environments.
And we started laying the foundation to build more pathways for students through career and technical education. And everything that we were able to do, we were able to make kind of a comprehensive approach that we often like to say it touched everything from cradle to career. And while we've done a great job laying that foundation and working towards implementation, we still have a lot more work to do. And I think a lot of us heard that we're starting to see some of those positive outcomes through LEARNS implementation.
We implemented a new standardized assessment called the Atlas, the Arkansas Teaching Learning and Assessment System. We're building out a unified coordinator progress monitoring system. So we're going to be able to better support teachers because we know that's the number one impact on improving student learning with real time information about student performance and getting their priorities right. But we also heard from Governor Sanders there's some other things that we know we want to prioritize and work with this delegation as we look forward to, now that we've laid that foundation from early learning to K-12, how do we make sure that transition to postsecondary success is attainable and achievable in a seamless manner?
So we like to start talking about the three E's: Are all of our students leaving high school ready to be enlisted, ready to be employed, or ready to be enrolled. So when we look at the lens of the work that we're going to do, Chair Brooks talked about this is going to be a student first committee. And I don't think that's anything that we would want to change. That is the right way that we have to look at the decisions that we make, what's best for students and are we putting them on that pathway to be enlisted, enrolled or employed. So we know we want to look at how can we support the expansion of non-degree credentials. There's a lot of people that can do short term credential programs and improve their household income in a very rapid manner that may not require a full degree. We know that a one size fits all approach doesn't meet the needs for every student and family. And every student is not on a highway to university. While that might be a path for some students, that's not the path for all students, which is why we talk about access to education comes through a highway that has many exit and on ramps. And there's things I think we can do that we want to work with this delegation on supporting that.
We talked about maybe even exploring some of the funding models to support schools in our state colleges and higher institutions to get the right levels of funding, to build and expand on some of those programs. We want to simplify credits and transfers and applications and make it so that people don't get frustrated and give up on their dreams of higher ed because bureaucracy got in the way and people just throw their hands in the air and say, I can't figure this out, I'm going to give up. So there's things we can do to make it a little bit more seamless and a little bit more approachable.
And then we've also heard from Governor Sanders some other priorities about expanding access to universal breakfast. Right? We have a lot of students and families and kids, if they come to school hungry, that's going to interrupt their ability to learn. So if there's things that we can do to make sure that everybody gets at least one solid meal a day. That's going to be a win for all Arkansans.
And then we've started and have provided updates to committees around some of the detriments to social media and access to cell phones and the distractions that this causes in schools. And we implemented a pilot program this past winter, beginning of the school year, fall, and asked schools if they'd be interested in looking at adopting policies that would restrict access to cell phones, especially in middle and high school, where we see it more and more prevalent and saw a large number of school districts say that we want to do that. And I can tell you the feedback that we've received from teachers and parents and school administrators, there's something very positive and a momentum.
They're saying that cell phones have become a distractor. There's a harsh reality. And as we started coming to this committee and presenting data and information, our students are lagging behind the nation in reading and math at those very key metrics that we measure. And we know third grade literacy proficiency rates aren't where they need to be, and we're not going to stop working until we get 90 to 100% of our third graders at or above grade level. And those benchmarks in math, are students at those proficient levels where they're going to be able to hit one of those three E's in those priorities?
So as we're going back to basics, I like to say we got to go to a back to basics approach in supporting teachers and making sure that they have the right tools that are aligned to support the students that are serving them and giving them access to training and professional development to learn and build out their toolkit for strategies that are going to work best for those students. We're going to see the student outcomes improve. And those student outcomes improving means that our students are going to be better set to be more successful in life.
So I look forward to working with this committee, presenting ideas, being a thought partner. We're not going to tell you that we know everything and have the answer to any challenge or problem that you're facing. But collectively, I don't think there's one issue that we couldn't put the right heads around to come up with the right solutions. And I know as you're working with your local delegations, I encourage you to talk to your superintendents, talk to your principals, talk to your teachers, find out from them what's working and get that feedback because it's important for us.
And when we passed Arkansas LEARNS and said we've got to now develop rules, we went back to those educators that know our students and asked them to help us write those rules. We had over a thousand teachers and leaders respond and said, We want to have a seat at the table. And we made sure we heard those voices. Those voices are still out there and we want to make sure we hear them, because when we include local voices, we get it right. So as we navigate through the next few months, I'm very excited because I think there's going to be some great opportunity to improve the system, to make sure that we're getting the desired results that we want to achieve.
Representative Keith Brooks [00:19:32] Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Appreciate your time. Are there any questions from the-- I don't want to go too long, but any questions for Secretary Oliva since we've got him at the end of the table? You got off easy today.
Jacob Oliva [00:19:45] This will probably be the last time I sit at the end of this table and not receive one question.
Representative Keith Brooks [00:19:50] I just wanted to give you a feeling for what it might actually feel like one time. Well, thank you, Secretary Oliva. Thank you, staff, his staff and everyone involved. You guys do an outstanding job and you're tremendous partners, and we certainly appreciate it. One other introduction that I want to make, who just walked into the room a moment ago. We have the new system president of Arkansas State University, Dr. Brendan Kelly, who is here with us. Many of us have worked for a number of years with Dr. Chuck Welch, who headed Arkansas State. But we know that they are tremendous partners of ours. Dr. Kelly, if you'd like to come to the table and just say a word. We're glad that you could make it in. I think they were driving feverishly from Malvern to get here after another talk this morning. So we're glad that you could make it.
Brendan Kelly [00:20:33] Absolutely. My pleasure. And thank you so much for giving me a moment. One, I'm thrilled to be in Arkansas. Chuck Welch has been a friend for many years and coming into a place that was familiar because of him, but one that I thought was filled with opportunity is pretty tremendous. Second, I really appreciated what the secretary had to say. Our number one mission is connecting people to what they want to be in the world and making certain that the value that they create by being it creates value for somebody else, industry and community included. That's the number one focus that we have across the ASU system. And I have traveled the entire state. I've met every employee that we have, met hundreds of students, have visited every square inch of every campus we have. And I feel like we are incredibly well positioned to be the type of strategic partner that elevates individuals economically and elevates this state economically moving forward. So thank you so much for including me this morning. Couldn't be more thrilled to be here and work with you all.
Representative Keith Brooks [00:21:43] Thank you, Dr. Kelly, for being here. We certainly appreciate you. Look forward to working with you and all of our higher ed partners and everyone else across the spectrum. Members, are there any questions this morning before we adjourn? So it's a good question. So obviously sometimes we might introduce, but I decided to just kind of move on. And I think we all know each other. We have the chance to get to know each other. Sorry. In retrospect, did you have something specific? Representative Beck, you're recognized.
Representative Rick Beck [00:22:24] I was going to recognize that I was looking forward to working with you as the chair of this committee. But now I don't know.
Representative Keith Brooks [00:22:34] Well, I think you did a good job of getting that in. So obviously, the question was relative to members introducing themselves. Sometimes I can go a little bit long and we've got session coming up here at 10:30. So if there are members of the audience who don't know someone on the committee, the committee roster is available online through the website.
You can grab anybody here in the room and grab their cell phone, get the contact information for them. Likewise, committee members, if there's somebody that you feel like you need to know in the audience, we have a number of stakeholders who are here, then I'd encourage you to get to know them. We will all see each other a lot over the next few months. So without there being any other questions, again, thank you so much for your willingness to sacrifice and be a part of this committee. We will do great things for students here in the state of Arkansas and hopefully enjoy ourselves along the way. Seeing no other business, committee is adjourned.
