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The Republican leader of the Arkansas Senate refused to support capping spending on school vouchers Wednesday as lawmakers prepare to take up Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ request to spend up to $379 million on the Educational Freedom Account program.
“We never talk about whether we spent too much for K-12. I will never talk about whether we spent too much for EFAs,” Senate President Pro Tempore Bart Hester said. “It’s all educating our children, it’s the most important thing that we do.”
Hester and House Speaker Rep. Brian Evans of Cabot spoke about the session during a Q&A hosted by the Political Animals Club of Little Rock. Roby Brock, the CEO of Natural State Media, moderated the panel and asked the two Republicans about tax cuts, the Franklin County prison project and the upcoming fiscal session, which begins next week.
The men were light on specifics for a potential tax cut expected to come up in a special session after the budget is approved or how the state’s projected surplus could be used. Evans and Hester expressed support for the budget proposed by Sanders, however, with Hester saying he wouldn’t change anything in it.
Sanders’ proposed budget also asks lawmakers to set aside $70 million from the state’s surplus to account for voucher program growth in the 2026-2027 school year, on top of $309 million to pay for existing enrollment levels. The voucher program has grown to provide funds to more than 44,000 students across Arkansas for private or homeschooling this school year since it was created in 2023.
Brock asked Hester if there was “political will” to add hundreds of millions more to fund the program if enrollment continued to grow. Hester said he would “never agree to capping” funding for vouchers.
He said if the cost of funding private and homeschool education with state dollars continued increasing, it would be because parents decided those avenues were the best ones for educating their children.
“If it goes up $100 million a year, so it does,” Hester said.
Still, he added, legislators were committed to increasing funding for public schools, because they are “the best choice for the majority of our students.”
Evans said funding for the program meets “the current need that has been requested.” More checks and balances on program spending have been implemented since 2023, he said, and he believed that Arkansas had “hit that plateau” in terms of voucher spending.
House Minority Leader Rep. Andrew Collins, who attended the lunch, said after that vouchers remain a target for abuse due to what he described as poor oversight and transparency into how voucher money is spent.
“I do think there is some interest, serious interest, in reforms that would make the program less ripe for abuse and less subject to being a runaway expense that we can never bring back in,” Collins, a consistent critic of the voucher program, said. “The higher we go with the spend now, and the more this becomes ingrained, I think it’s really difficult, much more difficult to rein it back later.”
Hester and Evans also said their chambers currently lack the votes to pass appropriations to fund construction of the Franklin County prison project. But both refused to rule out a vote in either chamber entirely in this year’s session.
Hester noted that the Senate has sworn in a new member, Republican Sen. Brad Simon, who ran in a special election vowing to oppose the project.
“He’s begging for a vote so he can vote no,” Hester joked. “I hope we vote on it, I hope we pass it, but you’re right. I think everybody in the room can see the numbers. The votes are not there currently to pass it.”
Evans said there were “creative ideas” with bordering states “to give us some temporary relief as we work through this process.” He also floated building a “temporary-type facility” across the state — possibly privately owned — to “strategically place those older inmates closer to where they have families.”
“That would immediately free up 700 beds overnight,” he said.
