Mandatory email affects many in Arkansas Works

Many Arkansas Works enrollees will soon have to have email accounts and access to computers if they want to keep their health coverage.

Using their accounts, they will have to log in to a state website, or portal, and report whether they met a requirement to spend 80 hours a month working or on other approved activities or that they qualified for exemptions.

That’s a concern for some lawmakers who were briefed on the work requirement Wednesday at a meeting of the Legislative Task Force on Workforce Education Excellence.

“You mentioned portal several times,” Sen. Eddie Cheatham, D-Crossett and a member of the task force, told state Department of Human Services officials. “Some of my folks don’t know what a portal is.”

He added that Internet access is scarce in some areas.

In Eudora, for example, the public library has “four or five computers, and every time I’ve been in that facility there’s a waiting line,” Cheatham said.

Rep. Reginald Murdock, D-Marianna, said he’s especially worried about some of the people he spoke with while campaigning door-to-door this week.

“Listen to me, you guys, there’s no way that these people I’m talking about are going to have an email address,” he said. “They’re not going to get there.”

Kelley Linck, the Human Services Department’s chief of legislative and governmental affairs, said help will be available.

For instance, enrollees will be able to use computers at each of the department’s 83 offices around the state.

Staff members at those offices “will walk [enrollees] through and help them and quite honestly probably do a lot of the reporting for them through conversation,” Linck said.

Department Director Cindy Gillespie said the agency has been increasing the number of computers available to enrollees in those offices.

In the next few days, she said, the department will send letters to enrollees with information on other sites with public Internet access.

“In those places, we’re trying to make sure we have capacity, as well as folks who can help [enrollees] know what to do and work with them as they come in,” Gillespie said.

The Legislature formed the task force, made up of legislators and industry representatives, last year to recommend ways to improve the state’s job training programs.