Feb. 26, 2023
Comments & Suggestions on SB294 for Arkansas House & Senate Education Committees
February 26, 2023
Dear members of the House and Senate Education Committees,
Thank you for the hearing on SB294 in the Senate and listening to our testimony. We found 5 minutes insufficient to cover the sweeping changes proposed by SB294 and so we are submitting written comments on the bill for your consideration.
We share the goals articulated by the sponsors and the Governor of improving Arkansas’s education system. Our members are also not satisfied with the status quo where Arkansas lags behind much of the rest of the country in education. We believe in evidence based reforms and robust community engagement to achieve that better education system. We know teachers and many public schools are doing amazing things to overcome the barriers to quality education that exist in our communities, primarily poverty where Arkansas ranks near last in the country, but we also know we can do better with the right strategies and investments.
Simply put, we believe we should invest our scarce public tax dollars on the evidence based reforms that will have the greatest return on investment. Investing in unproven strategies not only will fail to improve outcomes, but it also has the cost of missing the opportunity to make the progress that would have come from investing in proven strategies.
There are many components of this bill that we love and have advocated to achieve for decades because they are evidence based and proven to support children. We have suggestions to improve the language in the bill on some of these sections. There are other components where we just plainly disagree, because they are not evidence based and will undermine our shared goal of a quality education system accessible to everyone. Even where we disagree, we hope you will consider our suggestions that address some of our concerns and, we believe, will strengthen the impact, accountability and transparency of the proposals.
Our concerns about SB294 are not a defense of the status quo, and they are not political or partisan.
We share the same goals of building a world-class education system accessible to all in Arkansas, even where we strongly disagree on how to achieve that goal. The Governor has said that she wants to be the education Governor and the bill sponsors say they want to dramatically improve Arkansas’ education system. We want them to be successful. Their success means our children will be successful.
Thank you for considering our perspective.
Bill Kopsky, Executive Director
July 27, 2022
Statement of the Arkansas Citizens First Congress on the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade:
As an organization committed to equity, Arkansas Citizens First Congress supports reproductive rights as social justice rights. Denial of reproductive healthcare will push women and their children into deeper profound poverty, which will lead to greater unemployment, income disparities, health disparities, food insecurity, and homelessness.
Furthermore, denial of reproductive freedom will have a negative impact on people of color, public health and safety, religious freedom; and the economic viability of our state as corporations look for locations for expansions, headquarters, and healthcare for employees.
We reject attempts by local, state, and federal governments to limit and eliminate access to contraception, women’s healthcare, and sound parental planning. We reject the limits to religious freedoms for all by imposing the religious beliefs of some on everyone. We are alarmed about the increased hardships on vulnerable populations. We support reproductive justice, privacy, and choice about our bodies.
Polling data has shown that 70 percent of Americans support reproductive choice that considers factors such as rape and incest. Arkansas has the highest teen pregnancy rate and the highest rate of food insecurity in the United States. One in five children in Arkansas face hunger and more than 4,000 Arkansas children in the foster care system are awaiting adoption. We stand in solidarity with Arkansas families, and we do not want to see them pushed deeper into poverty, food insecurity, and homelessness.
This ruling is a setback for our country. The Citizens First Congress remains dedicated to protecting the rights of every Arkansan. We are committed to supporting the organizers and activists on the front lines of the reproductive justice movement as we continue the fight for a better future for all.
June 2, 2020
JOINT STATEMENT OF ARKANSAS PUBLIC POLICY PANEL AND CITIZENS FIRST CONGRESS IN RESPONSE TO THE MURDER OF GEORGE FLOYD AND SUBSEQUENT CIVIL RIGHTS PROTESTS
We are sickened by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other Black community members at the hands of law enforcement. Our hearts and prayers go out to their families. These incidents are happening with devastating regularity in Arkansas and across the country. In far too many instances — even locally — perpetrators of excessive force and brutality are not held accountable. We call on state and federal authorities to prosecute careless officers to the fullest extent of the law, including those officers who stood by as Mr. Floyd’s life was extinguished.
A system without accountability is a system designed for injustice.
We are fed up and ready for genuine reform after so many instances that should have shocked our national consciousness. We cannot wait until there is yet another senseless killing of a Black person by police officers.
We need several specific police reforms right now, including:
Mandated citizen review committees in all jurisdictions that are strong, independent, and have authority, to add a layer of transparency and accountability to law enforcement.
A citizen review of police use of force policies and standardizing these policies across jurisdictions.
Increase the use of community policing and de-escalation tactics. We need to make sure law enforcement has the training, resources, and accountability to do this right.
End the reliance on military-style tactics, equipment, and training in law enforcement.
Cultural competency training and unconscious bias training for all law enforcement officers and members of the criminal justice system.
Accountability for police officers who use excessive force or participate in racial targeting. We need law enforcement to take responsibility for weeding out their bad actors instead of protecting them.
Create a national database of disciplinary actions taken against law enforcement officers, like there are for many other professions, so a police officer fired in one jurisdiction can’t simply move a few miles down the road and resume the same bad actions.
We call on Gov. Asa Hutchinson to convene a Blue Ribbon Commission on Racial Equity that has broad participation from many segments of our society, and to put his political leadership into passing the recommendations of the Commission. We cannot continue to ignore the problems and hope the situation improves.
We all need to be outraged. We stand in solidarity with so many diverse protestors across Arkansas who are coming together to say we are not going to take it anymore. These protests reflect the national pain of inequality ignored for generations across every system in America. There have been no serious attempts by our political leadership to address them.
These protests are not about one bad cop. Our police and justice systems have produced massive disparities for generations. Blacks specifically, and people of color more broadly, are heavily overrepresented in our jails, in our prisons, on death row, and targeted for regular traffic stops and stop-and-frisks. Our parents and grandparents protested these disparities generations ago, yet little has changed.
The disparities extend beyond the criminal justice system and touch every facet of American life.
The COVID crisis is exposing massive inequities in our health and social safety net systems. The life expectancy of an African American male in Arkansas is 10 years less than that of a white man. Black women in the United States have a pregnancy-related mortality rate three times that of white women. Yet our political leaders shrug.
Education funding is so inequitable that opportunities for students of color are more severely limited than our white peers, yet state policymakers create charter schools, voucher schemes, and budget gimmicks that make our system even more inequitable instead of better.
Our economic system produces a 2-to-1 racial inequity on income and a staggering 10-to-1 gap on wealth that includes assets like stocks and homeownership. Instead of investing in community development and creating ladders out of poverty, our policymakers have lavished massive tax breaks on the wealthiest while making the social safety net ever more punitive and the path to the middle class ever more treacherous.
These systematic disparities are the results of policy choices designed to produce the inequitable outcomes our community lives with today. Any attempt by community leaders to name and address these inequities has been met with massive resistance, demonization, big-money opposition, and further dehumanization of our community. It’s time to address our racialized inequity and violence towards Black people and other people of color.
The frustration of fighting, still, for the same rights our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents fought for decades ago can not be underestimated. It is time for political, faith, business, and community leaders to place dismantling inequity and systemic racism in the center of all of their agendas. If you are not specifically seeking justice, then you are willfully participating in continuing injustice. Now is not the time to be silent or passive.
While everyone should be shocked into action, we ask our allies to remember that unless you are Black, you do not feel the fear and frustration that those of us who are Black feel. Unless you are a person of color, then you can not know what it’s like to be a person of color in our society. We need our white allies to support those of us who live these injustices to see them resolved. We need Black voices and leadership to guide the path forward on the reforms demanded by this moment, and we need the support of our whole community to heal and move forward together.
Peaceful protests must be respected and honored. We encourage community members to continue nonviolent protests until we see action. We encourage communities to protest in open, well-lit areas, to have medical volunteers on hand, to have volunteers monitoring and helping keep the peace, and to document their protests with video so that incidents of violence can be prevented. We understand why parts of our community are so frustrated, and police should respond to protests with de-escalation instead of militarized tactics. Large crowds of peaceful protestors should never be fired on with tear gas and rubber bullets.
We are committed to supporting the organizers and activists on the front lines of this movement. We will support the leaders emerging from this moment to run for school board, county quorum court, city council, prosecuting attorney, and the legislature. We need a broad range of sustained activism and organizing, from protests to election strategies and policy campaigns. We hope everyone will make sure they complete the Census, register to vote, and stay engaged when lawmakers convene to debate the very policies we are protesting. We need to make sure we build a movement that is enduring so we can hold lawmakers accountable for delivering on promises to make our systems more equitable.
George Floyd will never again get to cast a vote to hold a politician accountable. We stand with our brothers and sisters to act now before we are asked to bear witness to another recording of another Black American begging for their life with “I can’t breathe.”
CFC Disappointed in Supreme Court Ruling Allowing Partisan Gerrymandering
June 27, 2019
LITTLE ROCK — Today, a divided United States Supreme Court ruled that it is OK for politicians to pick who elects them with partisan gerrymandering. They said it is OK for lawmakers to place their fingers on the balance of our democracy to contort district lines for the sole purpose of preserving and expanding their political power, even if it means disenfranchising the constitutional rights of voters to equal representation.
This decision underscores why Arkansas voters must act to preserve our constitutional rights to a fair democracy by passing an independent redistricting commission and by passing ethics reforms for judges and lawmakers.
“If you take this gerrymandering decision in concert with the unlimited corporate spending allowed under the Citizens United decision, the court is really saying that special interests can buy and distort our democratic system with few checks or balances,” said Scharmel Roussel, co-chair of the Arkansas Citizens First Congress. “We have to fight back to protect our rights.”
“Voters should pick the politicians who represent us,” added Roussel. “Politicians should not get to pick the voters who vote for them — that’s just common sense.”
The 68 member groups of the Citizens First Congress have worked on election reforms for decades, on everything from expanding early voting hours to improving the training of poll workers. We see this decision as a direct threat to our democracy.
The Citizens First Congress is supporting ballot measure efforts to create an independent redistricting commission through a measure on the 2020 ballot. We are also developing an ethics reform measure to hold lawmakers and judges to higher standards and expose the secret dark money that’s infecting our political system.”
We agree with justice Kagan in her dissent today that: "The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government."
It is up to Arkansas voters now to correct the problems of corruption that the United States Supreme Court just made worse.
Poll reveals majority favors minimum housing standardS
March 12, 2019
A poll conducted this week on behalf of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel and the Arkansas Citizens First Congress showed that nearly 91 percent of likely Arkansas voters would favor the enactment of a law that would create minimum housing standards for renters.
House Bill 1410, filed by Rep. Jimmy Gazaway (R-Paragould) requires minimum standards for health and safety in rental properties, allows tenants to either terminate their lease or sue for repairs if they are not made, and prevents landlords from retaliating against tenants who seek repairs. Arkansas is the only state that does not offer these protections to renters. The House Committee on Insurance and Commerce will vote on the bill tomorrow at 10 a.m.
Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy, an independent firm out of Jacksonville, Fla., polled likely Arkansas voters, asking the following question: “Arkansas is the only state that does not require landlords to provide a minimum level of habitability for rental housing, such as fixing roof leaks, providing hot water and removing mold. Would you support or oppose changing state law to require landlords to do so?”
Statewide, 73 percent of those polled strongly supported such a change in the law, and 18 percent somewhat supported the change, for a total of 91 percent. Only 6 percent of Arkansas voters opposed improving minimum health and safety standards for rental housing. A total of 86 percent of Republicans and 93 percent of Democrats supported such a law.
Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy has been conducting public opinion polls in Arkansas since 1986. The poll was conducted March 6-8 among 625 registered Arkansas voters. Those interviewed were randomly selected from a telephone-telephone-matched Arkansas voter registration list that included both landline and cell phone numbers. Quotas were assigned to reflect voter registration by county.
The margin for error, according to standards customarily used by statisticians, is no more than +/- 4 percentage points, meaning there is a 95 percent probability that the “true” figure would fall within that range if all voters were surveyed. The margin for error is higher for any subgroup, such as gender or age grouping.
“This poll shows broad, overwhelming support for providing the most basic health and safety standards to Arkansas renters," said Bill Kopsky, executive director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel. "It's time for Arkansas to protect our families from being forced to pay for unsafe living conditions by passing House Bill 1410.”
See full results here.