By Rob Moritz
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — A legislator sought a state audit today of the Arkansas Committed to Education Foundation, which he suspects may have over-promised rewards to students, including computers, and under-delivered.
The Executive Committee of the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee approved the request by Rep. Randy Stewart, D-Kirby. The full committee is to consider the request.
“It’s not so much that they’ve done anything,” Stewart said in an interview. “It’s just they are not doing what they said they would do.”
Stewart said he decided to seek the audit after receiving complaints from parents of several students in the Kirby School District. The students apparently met the requirements for the program — satisfactory conduct reports, a 95 percent or greater attendance in fourth, fifth and sixth grades and a score of “proficient” or higher on math and literacy benchmarks tests — but have yet to receive the incentives.
Also, those who have received the incentives received calculators or hand-held pen/computer devices, rather than computers, which Stewart said they were led to believe they would get.
The incentives were to be paid for with revenue from specialty education license plates. To date, more than 4,100 education license plates have been told and are now on Arkansas vehicles. The foundation has collected about $70,000 from the license plate sales.
Guy Wade, president of the Arkansas Committed to Education Foundation, which runs the program, said last month that the original goal was to present computers and other devices such as calculators to every qualified sixth-grade student in the 2005-2006, 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 school years.
To date, all students who were in the sixth grade in 2005-2006 have received prizes. About half the sixth graders in 2006-2007 have received prizes, namely the hand-held pen/computers, and sixth graders in 2007-2008 have yet to receive their prizes.
Wade said the foundation quickly learned that the license plate did not generate enough revenue to purchase the incentives, and the poor economy made it difficult to recruit private investors.
Wade did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment today.
