Cindee Joslin, the owner of a school in Bentonville that teaches yoga instructors, was preparing for her first training session when she received a letter from a state regulatory board in July notifying her that she had to get a license or apply for an exemption. Otherwise, she risked being fined.
At the time, her future students had paid their tuition and had temporarily relocated from other states.
"I was very concerned -- very, very concerned," said Joslin, owner of Yoga Story. "I was on pins and needles there for awhile."
Seven months later, because of a change to Arkansas law that the state's 12 yoga teacher-training schools initiated, Joslin tossed out the "stack" of paperwork she had been working on to receive a license.
"I was so relieved when I got to throw that away," she said. "It's a huge victory."
Twenty days after Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, and Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, introduced a bill to exempt yoga teacher-training schools from the authority of the state Board of Private Career Education, Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed it into law.
The legislation, enacted Feb. 11, amended the code governing the board -- which oversees private post-secondary career schools for fields such as real estate, bail bonds, and tattooing and body piercing -- to prevent it from exerting its authority over yoga teacher-training programs and other instructor-training programs, including dance, music, horseback riding, and sewing, knitting and other needle-crafts.
Lindsey said the programs were "avocational and recreation" and therefore should not be regulated by the state. Collins said the board's action to license the schools was "government overreach" because "there was not a breakdown in their system as it currently existed."
Now, the state Board of Private Career Education is sending back applications and refunding fees submitted by three yoga teacher-training schools that went through with the licensing process.
"We will not license them," said Brenda Germann, the state agency's director. "We'll go from there and move on. If they need us for anything, we're here."
Germann said she was not aware of any instructor-teaching programs for dance, music, horseback riding or needle-crafts in Arkansas.
"None of those have ever come up," she said. "We will not pursue anyone in those fields that are listed."
During the back-and-forth between the board and the schools, Germann maintained that licensure was necessary to protect the students who pay thousands of dollars to go through the programs.
The state would have required schools to have an attendance policy, a refund policy and a process set up to receive complaints. With all of its schools, the board makes an on-site visit to inspect its facilities and equipment, and it looks at the content and objective of its programs, Germann said.
Joslin said the state was imposing "ridiculous stipulations," and a few school owners warned that the fees would shut them down.
Germann has said the annual fee would average about $2,125 per school, but the agency's board may have lessened that for smaller programs.
Sherri Youngblood, owner of Little Rock-based Sage Yoga School, testified against regulation during a meeting for the Board of Private Career Education in December. She said the bill's passage was a "kudos for small businesses."
"One thing on our side is what happened in November, when Republicans swept the whole country," Youngblood said. "It was a huge thing that ended up being to our advantage -- they're tired of the government putting hands in our pockets for no reason.
"There are some schools that need to be licensed, but ours? No. It would've been relinquishing our freedom -- our autonomy."
Rajan Zed, a Hindu cleric in Reno, Nev., distributed a statement last month thanking Arkansas legislators for passing the bill through the Senate and House. He went on to say that yoga has its roots in Hinduism and that regulation would be "burdensome" and an "unnecessary obtrusion."
Helping the schools in their battle against state regulation was the Yoga Alliance, a nonprofit organization that establishes yoga teacher-training standards for about 3,200 schools nationwide.
The organization, which wants the yoga industry to regulate itself, hired Catlett Law Firm in Little Rock to first fight the board and then lobby in the Arkansas General Assembly. Barbara Dobberthien, acting president of Yoga Alliance, said Arkansas schools will "no longer be a target" of the state agency.
"Yoga Alliance is honored to advocate on behalf of the Arkansas yoga community and is very proud of this tremendous success," Dobberthien said in a statement Thursday.
Yoga Alliance is now focusing its efforts on Colorado, where a bipartisan bill to exempt yoga teacher-training schools from the authority of the state's Division of Private Occupational Schools passed through a Senate committee Wednesday.
According to a Yoga Alliance news release, the legislation was introduced after the division sent letters to Colorado's 82 schools asking for information to determine whether they should be licensed.
Youngblood said Arkansas acted as a "catalyst" for yoga teacher-training schools in other states to fight regulation, and Andrea Fournet, who has operated Arkansas Yoga Center in Fayetteville for 10 years, said the months-long struggle has "put Arkansas on the map" for yoga teacher-training.
"I'm grinning from ear to ear," Fournet said. "I'm excited for the future of yoga in Arkansas."
Something good came out of this from the board's perspective, too, Germann said.
Soon after the bill was made into law, an individual who is working to open a yoga teacher-training school called to thank her "for the professionalism that this office showed through all of this," she said.
"She said she's going to open a school, and she learned a lot from what we have our schools do," Germann said. "So, hey, you know what, we didn't license them, but we still accomplished something. And that's all we want to do."
Metro on 03/01/2015