This article was updated on Friday, Nov. 1, 2024 at 4:40 p.m. with comments from the governor’s spokesperson.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders former Little Rock Christian Academy administrator Gary Arnold to the State Board of Education on Friday.

“What I love most about Gary is his passion for education, his belief that every student can learn and his relentless commitment and pursuit of his faith,” Sanders said in a press conference announcing the appointment.

Arnold is an advocate for school choice and was a member of the “rules and regulations task force” the state used to implement the wide-ranging , Sanders said.

“Through Gary’s careful stewardship, the first school year with Arkansas LEARNS was a huge success, and the second year is shaping up to be even better,” Sanders said.

LEARNS created the Education Freedom Account program, a taxpayer-funded school voucher system that will be available to all Arkansas students in the 2025-26 school year; are participating in the program this year.

Sanders said Arnold will represent the interests of EFA participants during his term on the board, which will expire in 2027. He succeeds Steve Sutton, who stepped down from the board in the middle of his seven-year term.

“The Governor wanted to find the right, experienced addition to the Board of Education who could help put every student on the pathway to success, and that’s exactly what Gary will do,” Sanders’ communications director, Sam Dubke, said when asked why the governor took nearly 11 months to appoint Sutton’s successor.

Arnold is Sanders’ third appointee to the , after and last year. Former Republican state lawmaker Bragg co-authored the LEARNS Act, and Keener participated in a LEARNS work group focused on early childhood education, which is her area of expertise.

The LEARNS Act also raised the state’s minimum annual teacher salary to $50,000 and required literacy screenings for K-12 students.

Arnold praised these and other aspects of the LEARNS Act and said he was honored to accept the appointment and “the responsibility of joining this team.”

He likened working in education to author Mark Twain’s experience as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River in his memoir Life on the Mississippi, which Arnold said he recently reread.

“The most important function and job of the boat pilot is to learn the river, Old Man River, because it changes every day,” Arnold said. “One day the currents will be this way, one day there will be a tree or shoal that wasn’t there before… Life in the schools changes every day. We just have to learn the river and have that growth mindset.”

Sanders said both Arnold and Education Secretary Jacob Oliva “think deeply and critically about how we can fix the areas of our school system that are broken.”

Arnold was head of school at Little Rock Christian Academy from 2007 to 2023. He is now the Director of Head of School Certification at The Council on Educational Standards and Accountability and the founder of the consulting company NextEd. Both organizations serve Christian schools.

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The University of Arkansas at Little Rock has received a nearly $2 million National Science Foundation grant to support STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education that will enable hundreds of students to participate in a peer mentoring program.

This is the largest grant the university has received from NSF.

Researchers will use the five-year grant to implement teaching strategies aimed at increasing student engagement and retention in undergraduate STEM education.

There will be a special focus placed on historically underserved populations, first-generation students and Pell Grant recipients who are likely to encounter barriers to their success in their lecture-based STEM courses, according to a press release.

“Our main focus is to increase the number of underserved students who successfully complete STEM courses,” assistant professor of education Lundon Pinneo said in a statement. “We want to identify current barriers for faculty and improve support systems so campus-wide we can close the equity gap.”

An interdisciplinary team of faculty from the STEM Education Center, the School of Education and the Office of the Provost will collaborate on the initiative.

UA Little Rock will implement NSF-funded interventions including the expansion of the Mobile Institute on Scientific Teaching and the Learning Assistant Program in the Donaghey College of STEM. The university is the only higher education institution in Arkansas that offers these two programs.

MoSI workshops focus on active learning. shows students are 1.5 times more likely to pass courses in active learning classrooms than in traditional lectures.

The grant will provide a $500 stipend for 75 STEM faculty members to complete the workshop during the next five years. Faculty will be recruited to join the first cohort of participants starting in the spring 2023 semester.

The grant also provides a $975 stipend for 605 students to participate in the Learning Assistant Program, allowing greater access for students who previously couldn’t afford to volunteer for this leadership role.

The assistants will provide peer learning support for more than 9,000 of their classmates during the five years of the grant. Officials expect to support about 250 learning assistants per year by the end of the project.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on and .

CEO Evan Marwell estimates about half of those families include school-age children. 

“The narrative is that it’s been about building infrastructure in rural America,” Marwell said, but added, “after decades of investment, affordability is now the biggest problem.” 

In 43 states, the inability to pay for internet service accounts for more than half of the digital divide — even in those with large rural populations, according to the report, entitled “No Home Left Offline.”

Congress included a $7.1 billion Emergency Broadband Benefit in the American Rescue Plan last March, but less than 17 percent of eligible households have signed up, the report said. A lack of awareness of the program, skepticism over whether the benefit will actually cover internet costs and confusing enrollment procedures are the primary obstacles to participation, the authors note.

Since the start of the pandemic, millions of students have missed out on learning because of insufficient internet access because they lack stable or strong-enough connections to complete tests, upload assignments and interact with teachers and classmates over Zoom. Problems with technology are among the reasons for high absenteeism rates among remote learners, an issue that has persisted this year with students in quarantine. Experts say states and communities need strong and targeted marketing campaigns to get wary families to take advantage of free and discounted programs.

The report comes as the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package — which includes $65 billion for broadband — awaits a vote in the House. The bill renames the benefit the Affordable Connectivity Fund and allocates $14.2 billion to make it permanent.

‘Can’t rely on volunteers’

The federal benefit program primarily serves existing customers who have faced economic setbacks because of the pandemic — not those who have never subscribed to an internet provider, according to the report. That’s why it’s important, Marwell said, to have staff dedicated to getting students connected.

“One of the big takeaways from the pandemic is you can’t rely on volunteers,” he said. “You need paid staff, and you need really specific data about who you are trying to sign up.”

In Little Rock, Arkansas, Maddie Long is already doing that work.
On a break from finishing her master’s in Indigineous studies at the University of Kansas, she was working as a landscaper in Little Rock when she saw the opening for an fellow. Heartland Forward, a think tank focusing on the needs of states in the middle of the country, is funding the position to help reduce the digital divide.

Now Long attends community events, such as a recent vaccination clinic at the Guatemalan consulate, to talk to those who qualify and provide flyers about the program for the Little Rock School District to stuff in food pantry bags for families.

Parents, she said, are sometimes resistant because they’ve heard the benefit will run out when the pandemic is over (That’s true unless the infrastructure bill passes). The program also includes a one-time $100 credit toward a device, but participants have to get it through their internet provider, which may not be participating in that part of the program

“I don’t think that was set up in the most user-friendly manner,” she said. “Every federal benefit has its own challenges.”

‘A real turn-off’ 

The Los Angeles Unified School District is trying another strategy — using the federal Emergency Connectivity Fund, another part of the American Rescue Plan, to pay for students’ at-home internet service. 

Tanya Ortiz Franklin, a Los Angeles school board member, said that while many internet providers launched discounted programs last year, parents would get turned down because of previous late payments or faced increased costs after trial periods. 

“That was a real turn-off to a lot of high need families,” she said.

The district was inspired by a , run by the nonprofit Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, that serves over 400 families in three low-income communities in the city. The district has now received responses from 22,000 parents who want to participate in the larger, districtwide program, when the contract is finalized, Franklin said. While the district promotes the Emergency Broadband Benefit, she doubts many families are participating.

“It’s another layer,” she said. “A lot of these things are super well-intentioned, but the implementation requires so much social work.”

Students who often put up with dropped connections, broken devices or maxed-out wireless plans are also speaking out about improving access to Wi-Fi.

“People talk about it, but nothing really gets done,” said Marylin Terrazas, an 11th grader at Travis High School near Houston. She’s among the Fort Bend Independent School District students producing and moderating a live Nov. 17 broadcast organized by Connected Nation, a nonprofit focused on eliminating the digital divide. “I thought this was a great way to spread the word that there are people who need help,” she said.

Joey Dyrud-Lange, the district’s media production teacher, said lower-income students with parents and grandparents who “aren’t necessarily the most educated on technology” are especially at a disadvantage.

“I saw a huge gap in learning [last year], and it’s not the students’ fault,” she said. “They go to extreme lengths on their cell phones to try to access their learning.”

The EducationSuperHighway report recommends “broadband adoption centers,” staffed with employees who can help parents enroll in the benefit program. Under the infrastructure bill, the broadband subsidy would drop from $50 a month to $30. With many internet companies already offering low-cost programs for $10 to $15 a month, that’s more than enough, Marwell said, for companies to not only cover their costs but offer faster internet speeds and even make a profit. 

“They’re going to look at this and say, ‘Now, we have 18 million potential customers. We need to build a business plan to get these people signed up,’” Marwell said. “The idea that we can do this is not a pipe dream.”