The Arkansas

anyway. But now, without state-funded step increases, only districts with tax bases robust enough to foot the bill will be able to give annual raises based on service and education. The state will fund some merit-based bonuses instead, but there’s not much cash set aside for this, not even enough for a single teacher at every Arkansas public school to earn the maximum $10,000 bonus. It will be difficult for poorer districts to entice teachers into a career with no real prospects of a raise, ever.

Plenty of educators applaud the literacy component of Arkansas LEARNS, but bristle at the characterization that the state’s thirdgrade literacy rates indicate “we have failed our children.” Only 35% of Arkansas third-graders are proficient readers. In Massachusetts, the top state for third-grade literacy, 44% score as proficient or higher. Arkansas LEARNS calls for third-graders in public schools to be held back until they can reach reading proficiency (or until they transfer to a private school or homeschool with no such requirement).

To improve literacy, Arkansas LEARNS includes plans for more reading coaches, plus some money for tutoring programs. Not enough, but some.

The rest of the 144-page bill has less to like. Arkansas hasn’t gone in for these gigantic, allin-one, D.C.-style omnibus bills in sessions past, and for good reason. I like 60-70% of the bill, Sen. Greg Leding (D-Fayetteville) said, but a cheeseburger that’s 30% poison is still a bad cheeseburger.

Leding was being generous with his percentages. Some consider the repeal of the Fair Teacher Dismissal Act that protected teachers from petty, political or personal retribution to be the poison pill that makes LEARNS simply untenable. For others, the “don’t say gay” component forbidding teachers to acknowledge the existence of anyone not straight and cisgender until middle school is enough to tank the whole deal. Or maybe sending public money to fund private schools that are by definition exclusionary and unaccountable is the arsenic in the well.

The vast majority of vouchers in states with universal voucher programs like the one codified in Arkansas LEARNS goes to families who were already paying their own private school tuitions just fine but certainly aren’t going to turn down a windfall.

Only the kids at the bottom of that system will be saddled with a new graduation requirement that sounds a lot like the criminal sentence for a first-time DWI offense. With the passage of LEARNS, all public school students will have to put in 75 hours of community service to graduate. Proponents argue that 75 will be easy because high school students can answer phones in the school office or provide unpaid, coerced labor to small businesses. Not surprisingly, private school students are exempt from such requirements, meaning their spring break ski trips and horseback riding lessons are safe from any interruption. Any student who takes a LEARNS voucher but fails to meet the new private school’s academic expectations can get kicked out of not just the school, but the voucher program entirely. Crafters of this bill determined the rightful consequence for such a lapse is a return to public schools, which don’t have the option of booting poor performers. It’s barbs like this one that suggest attending public schools is a punishment, along with LEARNS sponsors’ oddly venomous accusations that public school teachers are indoctrinators and liars, that make lead sponsor Sen. Breanne Davis’ (R-Russellville) pledges that she has teachers’ backs ring hollow. Scheduling the Senate’s only public hearing on the bill for a school day, then joining Sanders staffers in attacking teachers for taking a day off to be there to testify, felt shady, too.

It’s notable that the educators who stand to earn sizable raises are the plan’s most outspoken opponents. During the two marathon days of public comment on the bill, only three of the dozens of public school educators who gave testimony were there in support. A coalition of teachers and other public education supporters are attempting to repeal the LEARNS Act by referendum; others are planning legal challenges.

The Marvell-Elaine School District became the first led into a privatization scheme under LEARNS. Trapped between consolidating with another district because of its low enrollment numbers or going under state control because of low scores, the district is now the first to choose door number three, making plans to hand over the reins to a yetunnamed outside entity.

Will Marvell-Elaine ever get the district back into local hands? Sen. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock) and Rep. Vivian Flowers (D-Pine Bluff), both of whose home school districts have fallen victim to state takeover, scored the rare moderate win this session with the commonsense Senate Bill 364. Now Act 633, the measure limits the time the state can keep their hold on districts to a firm five years before releasing them back into a local school board’s hands. What about Marvell-Elaine, though? Does the new legislation apply here, or can the charter company stay in charge? Florida man and Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva suggested such questions are now a matter of local control.

LGBTQ+

The church lady caucus came in hot for the 2023 session, gunning to protect innocent eyes from lewd and lascivious drag shows. Republican morality police duo Rep. Mary Bentley of Perryville and Sen. Gary Stubblefield of Branch humiliated themselves with their sophomoric stabs at drag shows that almost certainly never happened. Bentley claimed a good Christian family asked for her help after seeing a drag queen wield a dildo as a microphone during a parade. Stubblefield claimed it was a drag queen who implored him most passionately to save the children from all the jumping up and gyrating that goes on at drag shows.

Of course, drag is a form of artistic expression that spans cultures and centuries, and our Constitution protects it. A legal case against the original drag show ban bill would have been a slam dunk. Bentley’s and Stubblefield’s attempts to regulate drag shows like they were peep shows or porn shops was eventually so watered down that it does nothing at all.

Still, LGBTQ+ Arkansans and the people who love them took plenty of hits this session. As we await a ruling from U.S. District Judge James Moody on a challenge to the 2021 ban on medical genderaffirming care for Arkansas youth, legislators hedged their bets by piling on more impediments. Lawmakers passed a bill that adds new restrictions on access to gender-affirming care for people under 18 and creates debilitating malpractice liabilities for any medical providers involved.

Pegging bathroom bills as the nonsensical economy killers they are, the Arkansas business community saved us from such legislation in the past. They dropped the ball this year, though, sticking Arkansas with two humiliating hate laws targeting any trans person who happens to be in Arkansas when nature calls. A bill that would have made it a sex crime for a transgender person to be in a bathroom when anyone under 18 was also present nearly passed, but a commonsense suggestion added at the last minute — on the suggestion of a dad of a transgender youth — adds the caveat that the adult in this situation would have to be in the bathroom for the purpose of sexual gratification. The law passed, which is redundant since peeping tom and sexual assault laws are already on the books. Transgender kids’ bathroom habits also got a creepy amount of attention from lawmakers. Arkansas’s public school educators will now have to police bathrooms lest a trans person uses the facilities corresponding with his/her/their gender.

And speaking of pronouns, it’s probably best that we find a way to work around them entirely, as Rep. Wayne Long (R-Bradford) was successful in passing his Given Name Act. A plug-and-play piece of legislation crafted by the anti-trans hate group Alliance Defending Freedom, this new law that right-wingers are shopping to red legislatures across the country polices what teachers can and cannot call their students. A signed permission slip from parents will be required before teachers can show their students the respect of using preferred names and pronouns.

Taxes

Same song, new verse: Lawmakers passed yet another tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy, which Sanders has framed as a first step toward eliminating the income tax altogether. Retroactive to Jan. 1, the state’s top income tax rate will drop from 4.9% to 4.7%, which follows a steep reduction of the top rate — from 5.5% to 4.9% — by the legislature in a 2022 special session. Under the new plan, the top corporate tax rate would drop from 5.3% to 5.1%. Combined, the cuts will reduce state revenue by an estimated $124 million per year.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates 80% of the benefits of the income tax cut will go to the top 20% of earners and that $20 million of the $24 million corporate tax cut will go to out-of-state shareholders.

The legislature also approved a phase-out of the state’s “throwback rule,” which required sales that multistate corporations based in Arkansas make in other states or to the federal government that aren’t taxable to be “thrown back” to Arkansas for tax purposes. The change will ultimately reduce state revenue by $74 million in fiscal year 2030 and beyond.

That $74 million would have been more than enough to cover free school lunches for every student in the state and a full year of Medicaid coverage after birth to ensure the health of new mothers, and we would still have tens of millions to spare. It’s all about priorities, and in Arkansas, corporate profits for out-ofstate investors trump the wellbeing of our own mothers and children.

Crime And Prison

Arkansas already has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and it’s not working: The state also has one of the country’s highest crime rates. But solving difficult problems has never been in modern Arkansas Republicans’ wheelhouse. So while the likes of Texas and Oklahoma are embracing economically and ethically wise reform to reduce their prison populations, Arkansas plans to build a new nearly-half-billion-dollar prison and keep offenders locked up longer. The “Protect Arkansas Act,” sponsored by Sen. Ben Gilmore (R-Crossett) and Rep. Jimmy Gazaway (R-Paragould) and crafted with heavy input by Attorney General Tim Griffin, will eliminate parole for the most serious felonies and require those who commit other serious crimes to serve 85% of their sentence.

Sanders and Griffin said that the new prison would allow county jails, which for years have housed overflow state prisoners, to go back to serving local communities. Griffin said misdemeanor justice had been effectively removed from the state criminal code because of the county jail backup, but now we will have room to lock up the scofflaws once again.

“I was going to Chick-fil-A the other day,” Griffin said at a press conference announcing the plans, “and there were people riding wheelies on dirt bikes — and I love dirt bikes — riding wheelies on dirt bikes that aren’t street legal with no helmets … If you think you’re going to get jobs to come to this state with that kind of nonsense going on, you’re sadly mistaken.”

Energy

Arkansas’s booming solar industry will see a slowdown thanks to a new law. Senate Bill 295, sponsored by Sen. Jonathan Dismang (R-Searcy) and Rep. Lanny Fite (R-Benton), will end Arkansas’s one-to-one net-metering policy, where customers who generate electricity, usually with solar arrays, get credited at the full retail rate for any excess power they generate. Instead, solar customers would only get credited for the wholesale rate. The difference today would amount to about 5 cents per kilowatt hour.

After negotiations with the Arkansas Advanced Energy Association, the bill was amended to grandfather solar projects into existing net-metering policy until Sept. 30, 2024. It also caps the project size at 5 megawatts and allows the solar array to be located within 100 miles of the location of the business that owns the array (Little Rock-based Central Arkansas Water’s solar system, for instance, is located in Cabot).

Dismang said that in 2019, when the legislature passed a law that allowed net metering, thenPublic Service Commission Chairman Ted Thomas admitted that net metering would lead to what’s known as cost shifting, where the expense of utilities having to pay the retail rate for excess solar generation gets passed along to customers without solar. He said Thomas promised lawmakers that within six months the PSC would evaluate the cost shifting, but failed to follow through.

Thomas, in fiery testimony in House and Senate committees during this session, acknowledged that promise, but said that Entergy and the electric co-ops had never demonstrated that cost-shifting amounted to anything significant. The Arkansas Court of Appeals has also upheld the net-metering rate structure.

Hunger

A commonsense bill by Dismang and Rep. DeAnn Vaught (R-Horatio) to ensure that any student who qualifies for reduced-price school meals would get them for free sailed through the ledge. But another proposal from Dismang aimed at helping the working poor was amended to be almost meaningless after Sanders dissed the original.

Arkansas is one of only a handful of states with restrictive asset limits from supplemental nutrition assistance payments (SNAP, or what used to be known as food stamps). SNAP eligibility is based on family income, but Arkansas additionally limits recipients based on their savings. If you’ve got more than $2,250 in assets, you won’t qualify. Dismang’s bill initially would have raised the asset limit to $12,500, a move that would have given families the breathing room to save up for a car, education expenses or a deposit on a better place to live without having to starve. Gov. Sanders’ spokeswoman, Alexa Henning, announced Sanders’ opposition early in the process: “We oppose expanding welfare and trapping more people in lifetime dependency that is paid for by the labor of hardworking taxpayers.” The bill then got amended to raise the asset limit to $5,500 if the federal government approves a waiver request from the state.