Workforce bill clears state House after being amended

A bill allowing neighboring school districts to pool resources into regional workforce training centers passed the House on Tuesday after it was amended to include most of the state’s two-year colleges to participate. Senate Bill 288 is sponsored by state Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Sulphur Springs, who owns a plastics company and is a former member of the Gravette School Board. The bill allows districts to share the costs of the equipment, facilities and staff to make a larger, better-equipped and more comprehensive center than a single district can build by itself, he said. The bill passed 88-2 and goes the Senate to concur in the amendment. Businesses would cooperate in efforts to teach students skills needed by area employers. People skilled in needed trades such as diesel servicing and repair or machinery operation could teach there, he said. The bill originally allowed technical institutes such as the Northwest Technical Institute in Springdale to participate in these projects. Hendren and school superintendents wrote the bill with western Benton County in mind, said Blake Robertson, president of Northwest Technical. The institute has worked with those districts in technical education programs. “This was drafted with Gravette, Decatur and Gentry in mind,” Robertson said. “That’s what this is all about.” There are only two technical institutes in Arkansas, Northwest and Crowley’s Ridge Technical Institute in Forrest City. Bill Stovall, executive director of Arkansas Community Colleges, said he met with Hendren and he agreed to amend his bill to allow wider participation. Arkansas Community Colleges is a lobby for the state’s two-year schools and was formerly known as the Arkansas Association of Two-Year Colleges. “I did not want it to just be a wide-open opportunity for community colleges to go find other revenue streams, and that’s why we worded it very tightly,” Hendren said of the amendment. He was pleased with the final result, he said.

James Hall, spokesman for Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville, said the college supported the amendment. Robertson said Northwest Technical didn’t oppose it.

“What happened is that lawmakers in south Arkansas said the bill would not benefit their school districts at all,” Robertson said.

The amendment restricts participation to only those 17 schools that had a “secondary vocational center” in operation on Jan. 1. These centers are job-skill-specific centers, usually inherited from mergers between community colleges and vocational-technical schools.

The Bentonville college doesn’t have a secondary vocational center, having turned it over to Northwest Technical years ago, Hall said. Still, the community college has programs teaching construction trades, heating and air installation and repair and other vocational courses and can contract with a regional workforce center to teach, said both Hall and college President Evelyn Jorgenson.

The bill also would allow a training center to benefit from property taxes, which would have to be approved by the home county’s quorum court, or by a sales tax within the area the districts would cover, which would have to be approved in an election.

The district also can receive contributions from the private sector under the bill. The biggest change, supporters have said, is it allows school districts to spend their taxpayers’ money outside of the district that raises the tax to establish and operate a training center.

School districts will be able to provide transportation to the centers under the bill. Debbie Jones, superintendent of the Bentonville School District, said at a recent public forum a similar program provided by her district at the community college requires students to provide their own transportation. That makes it impossible for many students to participate, she said.