$993,780 approved for school Net study

Several state senators questioned the cost and the need for a study capped at $993,780 to assess broadband access, equipment and connectivity at every school in Arkansas, but the Arkansas Legislative Council approved the contract to perform the study by voice vote Friday.

The contract with CT&T Inc. of North Little Rock will begin immediately and the findings are due back to the Legislature by December.

The Legislative Council also approved a $149,500 sole-source contract with Camelot Global Services of Philadelphia to study the operations of the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery and make recommendations on how to increase scholarship revenue.

Both contracts have drawn scrutiny from legislators over the past week during Legislative Council subcommittee meetings, but the approval Friday gives both consultants the green light to begin work immediately.

"There have been numerous committee meetings in which data has been presented to the Legislature. Over the last four months, a good majority of that data has proven to be suspect or in some cases inaccurate," said Rep. Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, who has championed the need for the independent broadband study. "There are a lot of outside groups putting a tremendous amount of pressure on members to make decisions."

THE POLITICAL DIVIDE

Legislators have been fighting over how to move forward with increasing high-speed broadband internet access at the state's schools for more than a year. The conversation has shifted to become a part of the state's educational adequacy plan because the gap in technological access may be creating a gap in educational opportunities, some districts have argued.

Lack of access to broadband has started to cause problems for schools in Arkansas as more standardized tests are moved to online formats. Act 1280 of 2013, passed by the Arkansas Legislature, also requires that every school district provide at least one interactive online course beginning this fall.

Several studies have been conducted by groups appointed by Gov. Mike Beebe or the Legislature, but the validity of those studies has been both touted and questioned by various groups that have failed over the past six months to reach a consensus on whether the solution should focus on a state-managed network or rely on private providers to bridge the gap in connectivity.

Gillam and other supporters of the independent study approved Friday said they hoped the result would be the last piece to the broadband puzzle and provide the needed information to legislators in time for the 2015 session.

But several legislators questioned whether hiring the outside company was necessary.

"We can't just get the Department of [Education] to send them a letter saying what service do you have?" asked Sen. Larry Teague, D-Nashville. "I understand schools have issues, but it just blows my mind that we're going to spend a million bucks to figure this out."

Gillam said the Education Department had tried to collect the data unsuccessfully.

"A lot of these school districts, we are finding out, do not have the right person in charge of their technology ... that's why a lot of the Department of Education was having issues collecting this information," Gillam said. "Put very simply, if we went down the wrong road with this, it could be hundreds of millions of dollars we spent of taxpayer money erroneously because we operated with incomplete data or faulty data."

Sen. Bryan King, R-Green Forest, asked whether the state had the appropriate staff to conduct the study itself. Gillam said he had worked with the Bureau of Legislative Research and the Arkansas Legislative Audit to determine if either agency had the staffing to turn around the study in time to work on legislation for the 2015 legislative session, and they did not.

Much of the political argument around providing broadband to schools centers on whether to revise state law to allow kindergarten-12th grade public schools access to the high-capacity, fiber-optic cable that connects the state's public universities, two-year colleges, research universities and some libraries. The Arkansas Research Education Optical Network, or ARE-ON, is a public-private partnership that uses Internet cable owned mostly by private providers and leased and managed by the public entity.

The private providers want to keep the network closed because they argue they would be put in direct competition with the state for their customers. Education and business advocates have argued that Arkansas is the only state that closed its network to kindergarten-12th grade schools and the state is losing its competitive edge in training the workforce and innovators of tomorrow.

Several letters have been written to legislators over the past six months advocating to open or to keep ARE-ON closed. Legislators received a letter from Jerry Jones, executive vice president of Acxiom and the chairman of the FASTER Arkansas group, advocating that regardless of what the million-dollar study returns, the state should open up ARE-ON to schools.

The letter, dated Sept. 17, lists a number of school districts and other organizations that support the move, as well as noting the only opposition is from "private telephone companies and internet providers."

However, since the letter was sent to legislators, two organizations listed as supporters have sent statements saying they did not give permission to be included in the letter as supporters, including the Arkansas Farm Bureau and EAST Initiative.

"The difficulty I've got, is who's telling the truth? It does disappoint me that we have not through the agency and maybe with private providers been able to get to something that we agree is the truth," said Sen. Bruce Maloch, D-Magnolia.

THE COMPANY

The Bureau of Legislative Research received two responses to the Request for Proposals, which was open from Aug. 20 to Sept. 5, from firms interested in the broadband consulting contract.

A response from SHI International Corp in Austin, Texas, was incomplete because the company failed to list a maximum bid and a schedule of work. SHI has several divisions, including one that sells Internet equipment and computers, but has done work helping schools connect students and teachers to wireless networks.

Calls to the corporate office in Somerset, N.J., and to the Austin office were not returned as of Friday.

CT&T of North Little Rock responded with a bid not to exceed $993,780, with up to an additional $15,000 in travel expenses. Gillam said those numbers are maximum costs, but company representatives pointed to relationships with other firms across the state with engineers that could be hired as subcontractors to meet the study deadline and cut down on costs.

According to records at the Arkansas secretary of state's office, CT&T incorporated in 1982 and has operated and paid franchise taxes continuously since then. The company listed more than a dozen telephone, telecommunication and technology companies in Arkansas and other states that it had worked for under contract.

The Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration had records of the company performing engineering work for the Military Department in 2005 and the Department of Education as recently as July. ARE-ON representatives said the partnership has also used CT&T for engineering services when expanding fiber cables into various parts of the state.

Much of the company's past work with the state and some of the private companies has focused on engineering studies. Some legislators said they were concerned that the company might not have the expertise to examine all of the other aspects of connectivity at the schools, including wireless access and cloud storage.

Representatives from the nonprofit EducationSuperHighway, which chose Arkansas as one of two states in which to launch a pilot program to help bring high-speed Internet to every school by 2018, said they look forward to working with the company and praised the $1 million commitment by the state. He also noted that the contractor needed to do more than engineering to adequately assess the schools.

"In order to make sure that this investment has the greatest impact, we would encourage that the focus of CT&T's work be on assessing the state of the wired and wireless networks in every Arkansas K-12 school," wrote Evan Marwell, consultant with EducationSuperHighway. "This is the area where boots on the ground can be most impactful and is similar to the approach that North Carolina and other states have taken to gathering this information."

LOTTERY STUDY

During the discussion of the broadband contract Friday, legislators in a hurry to close the debate and move on with the meeting approved a motion to accept the subcommittee report. The motion closed the discussion of both the broadband contract and the lottery consultant contract because both were part of the subcommittee report.

Several legislators asked for leniency from the council to still ask questions about the contract later in the meeting.

The sole-source contract to conduct a legislatively initiated review of the state's lottery was proposed by Sen. Jimmy Hickey, R-Texarkana. Hickey persuaded other lawmakers during a July special session to pass a bill that prevents the lottery from deploying electronic-monitor games through mid-March.

The lottery's ticket sales revenue and scholarship funding declined in both Fiscal 2013 and Fiscal 2014, and both the Lottery Commission and legislators have been trying to figure out why and how to stem the loss.

State Rep. Debra Hobbs, R-Rogers, asked whether other consultants would also have been qualified to apply for the contract if the state had asked for proposals. Hickey said he wanted the state to use a company that had not just studied lottery operations but had actually operated a lottery.

"There may be individuals out there that could give you their best knowledge on how to run a nuclear plant, but more than likely in order to get your best knowledge on that, you would prefer to have somebody who had actually run [a plant]," he said. "We need a document that we can actually use to turn us around and get the legislation in place before the next regular session. ... We told the company we needed to have a working document and actual suggestions that will [help] us turn this thing around."

Camelot, which runs the lottery in England, will not collect the $149,500 until after the report is delivered at the end of the year. The contract also includes up to $20,000 in expenses. The group has done previous studies in California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York and Texas.

Hobbs and Rep. Kim Hammer, R-Benton, both asked whether the lottery would cooperate with the consultant, or shoulder some of the bill to conduct the study.

"It's no secret that the Lottery Commission has not been as ... cordial to this body as we wish they would be," Hickey said. "It's my wish that they use this study as a tool ... but because the commission is an independent body, I cannot go to Camelot and guarantee them full access to the lottery."

A section on 09/20/2014