There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen, and for Arkansas, our future decades are bleak because of the coming weeks.
At the time this is being written, a massive 122-page bill entitled the ACCESS Act is set to be heard by the House of Representatives as early as March 4.
The bill guarantees a future where the governor has complete and absolute control over the educational system by purging all of the locally led associations of Arkansas from their positions within the Department of Education and giving her the ability to appoint whomever she pleases without any required representation of actual Arkansans.
They are killing both rural and urban public school districts alike by dissolving programs that give rural schools more elective courses as in Sections 7 and 10 while also changing the rating system for schools (which is how they get their funding) by cutting out all considerations of teacher qualifications, AP resources, community involvement and diversity (all things that the LRSD and NWA tend to specialize in) and keeping considerations of neighborhood crime rates which will just defund urban public schools.
After that, they are gutting scholarship programs under the facade of creating new ones with catchier names like, for example, the “Hero Scholarship”, which conveniently cuts out people whose parents served in the military or first response and opts to only include those whose parents died in those occupations.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
By now, it may be questioned how they are going to prevent public backlash to these changes, and the answer is simple — they are going to SILENCE the public. Throughout the bill, there are numerous sections that blatantly stomp on the First Amendment protections of our constitution, like Section 23, which will cause the detaining and potential arrest of any high school students who deliver legislative testimony or stage protests on charges of truancy, and Section 60 that allows the Governor-appointed Division of Higher Education to completely revoke tenure from professors that go against standards that the governor-appointed division sets entirely by themselves without any public representation.
This goes hand-in-hand with previous changes to alter our constitutional rights to propose their own legislation and constitutional amendments through petitions.
The purpose of this legislation is crystal clear. The Governor wants to make the people of this state servile and powerless within our very own society — which by extension means our very own lives.
The reason that she, and her political allies, want this for us is because they are the extensions of a growing oligarchy within our state and country that openly disdains the general will and best interests of the people. The corporate donor class and tech billionaires have combined their strength for the last 20 years to bankroll every single election campaign of our political system, and in doing so, they have taken our government away from the people.
The state motto, “Regnat Populus,” meaning “the people rule,” is meaningless. The people have been beaten down for years and now we are being completely removed from our own education system. The time for change is now.
THE STUDENTS OF ARKANSAS CALL UPON THE PUBLIC to join us in opposing this monstrous legislation when it is heard in the House of Representatives by FLOODING our legislature with public statements against this authoritarian and unconstitutional nightmare of a bill.
The hearing is not yet scheduled as of the writing of this letter but it could be heard as early as March 4. Below is a form where you can put your name and contact to be notified of when exactly it is to be heard, the moment that the hearing for SB246 is announced. If “Regnat Populus” won’t be our government, it will be our battle cry.
Rhône Kuta is with the Students of Arkansas. The sign-up form to be notified when SB246/HB1512 is heard in the state House is here.