LITTLE ROCK — Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Wednesday used a “fireside chat” format at an education policy conference to highlight initiatives undertaken in the first 22 months of her administration.

Speaking at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Office for Education Policy conference on Rahling Circle in west Little Rock, Sanders said she has been motivated to focus on education because it is so critical to individual success in life.

“If you look at all the statistics, Arkansas is basically 48th, 49th, and 50th in every category. If we wanted to see something different — which everyone in this room does and did — we needed to do something pretty drastic,” Sanders told about 200 people affiliated with different levels of education in the state. “That’s what Arkansas LEARNS brought to the table — a total flip of the table and a transformative look at how we approach education.”

The LEARNS Act or Act 237 of 2023 was crafted and championed by Sanders. The multi-part law created the Educational Freedom Account program that greatly expanded publicly funded vouchers for tuition and other private and home school costs. It also raised the minimum public school teacher salary from $36,000 a year to $50,000 a year and otherwise ensured raises for already practicing teachers last school year.

“Frankly, passing the legislation, while it certainly was not easy and came with its own set of challenges, was not the hard part,” she said. “The implementation is the hard part. That is the stage we are in right now — the implementation side.”

The governor said the impact of the landmark act is starting to be seen. She said she doesn’t go into any community without people telling her that their lives have been made better.

In response to questions asked by Josh McGee, associate professor and endowed chair in education accountability and transparency, Sanders said some elements of the LEARNS Act and other recent legislation are not as well known as the vouchers and increased teacher salaries.

Some of those lesser known pieces of the law include the availability of up to 12 weeks of maternity leave paid for by the state and local school districts, she said.

Merit pay of up to $10,000 for teachers is another provision, as is a student loan repayment program and the deployment of 120 literacy coaches across the state to help improve student literacy rates.

Streamlining early childhood education operations has resulted in points of contact in all 75 Arkansas counties that are meant to help families access early childhood education programs, she said. Older, high school students have opportunities to take courses to earn credentials for jobs after high school in 18 high-demand, high-wage job fields.

“We know success doesn’t end at graduation,” McGee said. “The ultimate goal of education is to help our students compete in the global labor market and enhance the state’s economy.”

“One of the big things that I feel frankly we have done wrong for a really long time is teach kids a lot of information but not necessarily how to do something with what they know,” Sanders responded.

If individuals at the end of their educational journeys are not ready to step into a job “we have not done our job,” she said.

As for the Educational Freedom Account voucher program that has drawn some 14,297 user students this year at a cost of at least $6,856 per student, Sanders said she hopes that the numbers grow.

“But that doesn’t mean it is the path for everybody,” she added. “That’s why it was so equally important to invest heavily in public education. In many cases that is going to be the best place, the best location and best opportunity for a student to thrive.”

Sanders also on Wednesday highlighted her concern about student cell phone use and her urging of schools to consider prohibiting student cell phone use during the school day by locking the phones up. Seventy-five percent of districts have volunteered to make their campuses phone free, a response she called phenomenal and a show of how desperate schools are to limit phone access.

“It’s fine for the state to be the bad guy,” she said about calls to restrict phone use on campuses. But she also said that even some students are thanking her for banning phones because it removes some of the stress students feel about the responses to their social media posts.