Arkansas passed Act 565 (originally House Bill 1062), the so-called "Teacher & Student Protection Act of 2025," this spring. It went into effect in early August. On the second day of school, our daughter's gen-ed teacher and SPED teacher (responsible for 90 minutes / week of push-in support) invoked it against her after she became dysregulated upon seeing a student wearing a pair of ear protectors that looked like her own. The district reassigned her to an ALE before they had even contacted us. In an MDR 9 days later, the district conceded that the behavior was a manifestation of her disability but insisted on adhering to the law, which says that she cannot return to her original classroom. We had already hired an attorney and filed for due process by that point; we finally had the first four days of our hearing a couple of weeks ago, and we have another three days scheduled for early December.
Ignoring for a moment the obvious conflicts with IDEA (which you will probably identify immediately), Act 565 ostensibly gives a teacher the ability to unilaterally remove a student from the classroom permanently if the student poses a threat to the teacher or other students. The law defines violence broadly enough to include verbal threats or even the mere perception of a threat. It allows districts to place the child in an "interim appropriate learning environment" (a term cooked up especially for this law) for 10 days while awaiting the completion of an MDR. Regardless of the result of the MDR, the student will not be allowed to return to their original classroom.
We have yet to see a specific model bill in the ALEC fashion, but I've always assumed that it's based on or inspired by similar bills from other states. The legislator who brought it forward would trot out homespun tales about meeting teachers with black eyes and broken bones, but that never passed the smell test. In his initial presentation of the bill to the House Education Committee, the sponsor very explicitly said that he believed it was time for Arkansas and other states to begin challenging IDEA; a few weeks before that, he told a newspaper that he expected his bill, if passed, to face a legal challenge. It was very much designed to set up a test case.
As has been suggested upthread, the rhetoric around these laws all take for granted the notion that teachers are being relentlessly assaulted, day after day, by unruly children. In the 45 total minutes of actual discussion regarding HB1062 / Act 565, it was taken as gospel that teachers were leaving the profession in record numbers due to student aggression. No data was given, no hard numbers were produced, and certainly no inquiry was made into what alternatives to full-on removal might be considered to improve this situation. In the Sarah Huckabee Sanders era, Arkansas has attempted to outpace Florida, Texas, and other states in the wholesale voucherization of education, and any suggestion that smaller class sizes, more supports, better training, etc., could help is clearly outside the window of acceptable discourse.
Throughout the month of October, I filed FOIA letters with the state's 20 largest districts and 10 smallest districts. I wanted to see what they were saying internally and externally about this bill from its introduction through to its passage, as well as what they said and did once it became law. The first thing I learned was that the superintendent of one of the state's largest and wealthiest districts was feeding the sponsor a lot of advice on how best to circumvent IDEA. She wanted to use her ALE for punitive placements and was pushing the sponsor hard to change state laws governing ALEs. I get the sense she lost all interest in the bill once she realized he was unable or unwilling to go that far.
In other districts, administrators saw the bill for what it was, straight from the jump. In one district, an assistant superintendent emailed her boss a single sentence after reading the first draft of the bill: "This looks like a violation of FAPE and a lawsuit waiting to happen." SPED directors from different districts were emailing each one another, saying the same thing. The professional organization for the state's ALE teachers and administrators lobbied against it. All their warnings went unheeded.
The Arkansas School Boards Association writes model policy language for school boards. Most districts in the state just adopt that language wholesale. The ASBA's new section regarding this law has a huge disclaimer at the top, warning teachers against attempting to invoke the law against children with IEPs, saying that teachers who do put themselves at "grave personal risk" for legal action, and that districts are not obligated to come to their aid in those cases. I think most districts saw that language and took the hint; our district, which does not adopt ASBA model language for its local policies, clearly didn't.
Lisa's outline of how this all fits into the voucherization playbook is spot on. Back in January, just after this bill was introduced, the superintendent of the state's largest school district emailed a representative to express his support for the bill's intentions. He said that he believed that well-off families were moving their children out of his district and into charter schools and private schools specifically because they did not want their kids to share classrooms with special-ed students. In Arkansas, a district receives a base of $8,162 per student, so obviously he's worried about that money going elsewhere. Additionally, he said that he did not think it was fair for families to transfer their SPED students out of the district to "avoid discipline" and take their money with them--he wants to keep those students in-district, preferably at an ALE, where he can keep their $8,162 along with the additional $5,212 that comes from an ALE placement. The voucherization of the educational system has turned it all into an accounting game for these districts. They want to keep the rich and able-bodied in district, but they can only do that by shifting all the disabled kids out of the classroom and into behavioral compliance facilities. They want to keep those disabled kids in the district, because they're especially lucrative, but they have to keep them segregated from all the "normal" kids. Sure enough, that district has lost more than an elementary school's worth of students this school year, so I would expect this superintendent to ramp up his efforts to please the rich white folks.
