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Editor’s Note: March is celebrated nationally as Women’s History Month. Here in Arkansas, we also recognize March as School Breakfast Month. If you’re familiar with Arkansas School Breakfast Month, it’s likely because of the diligent work of a handful of women who have championed the importance of school breakfast for fifteen years. Thanks to their persistence and patience, next year students in Arkansas schools will have access to free breakfast. The importance of this one small meal cannot be overstated, and it will take another decade to fully appreciate how all of Arkansas will benefit. Thanks, ladies!

The best news for Arkansas this year? Free breakfast for all students. This School Breakfast for All story spans fifteen years and three governors—some wins are worth the wait. 

by Patty Barker, No Kid Hungry Campaign Director
Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance

The Historic Milestone: Senate Bill 59

With her signature, Governor Sanders made Arkansas the first Southern state and first conservative-led state to pass universal free school meal legislation. This is a game-changer for a state ranked by the USDA as the hungriest in the U.S. Ensuring every student has a nutritious breakfast will have a significant impact on students’ health and academic success. Here’s how we became part of Arkansas’s school breakfast miracle.

On February 20, 2025, Governor Sarah Sanders signed into law Senate Bill 59, which will make school breakfast available free of charge to all 470,000-plus public school students in Arkansas, regardless of their family’s income level, beginning in the 2025/26 school year. The bill, sponsored by Senators Jonathan Dismang-R and Clarke Tucker-D, and Representatives Zach Gramlick-R, Tippi McCullough-D, and DeAnn Vaught-R, plus 83 more bipartisan members of the Arkansas Senate and House as co-sponsors, was passed with near-unanimous favorable votes in both houses.

The Beginning: Governor Beebe

In 2010, then-Governor Mike Beebe was asked by Share Our Strength, a national hunger relief nonprofit, to make Arkansas a “proof of concept” state for their No Kid Hungry Campaign, offering funding and technical support to develop a locally-led, five-year campaign to end childhood hunger in Arkansas.

Without hesitation, Governor Beebe agreed. He returned home, called together his cabinet-level leaders overseeing child nutrition programming, along with key child health and education advocates. He reminded them that Arkansas was ranked #1 in childhood hunger and declared the Arkansas No Kid Hungry Campaign a top administrative priority. You could hear a pin drop in the Governor’s conference room when he finished his pronouncement.

Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe and his wife Ginger provided much needed support as No Kid Hungry kicked off in Arkansas.

Building the Foundation: No Kid Hungry Arkansas

With significant support from Share Our Strength, the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance was tapped as lead partner in Arkansas. The goals were clear: increase participation in school breakfast, expand access to afterschool and summer meals, and support families with nutrition education and SNAP access.

Research showed that students who ate a healthy school breakfast had improved attendance, fewer trips to the school nurse, and better concentration and behavior in the classroom. Yet, in 2010, only about half of Arkansas students who ate a free or reduced-price school lunch also ate breakfast. Barriers included social stigma, busy schedules, long cafeteria lines, and kids wanting to play or socialize before school.

The Solution: Breakfast After the Bell

The answer was Breakfast After the Bell (BAB)—serving breakfast as part of the school day through programs like Breakfast in the Classroom, Second Chance Breakfast, and Grab-and-Go. The Arkansas No Kid Hungry Breakfast team, led by Vivian Nicholson, a former child nutrition director, and a handful of breakfast advocates, including former school superintendents and teachers, set off across the state to persuade school districts to adopt BAB programs.

By 2022, breakfast participation had increased by 7.3 million meals—a 27% rise—thanks primarily to BAB programs. The results of implementing BAB programs spoke for themselves: improved student attention, fewer nurse visits, better attendance, and increased federal meal reimbursements. The campaign successfully achieved its goal: 70% of eligible students who ate lunch also began eating breakfast.  

Legislative Wins: Governor Hutchinson

Legislative efforts further supported school breakfast advocacy. In the 2013 and 2015 legislative sessions, the Alliance partnered with several legislators and the Department of Education to establish the Arkansas Meals for Achievement program, which designated funds for grants to support BAB programs in schools that agreed to provide universal free breakfast to all students. Although the program was discontinued, increased meal participation rates were reported and the groundwork was laid for future proposals.

Governor Hutchinson attended Alliance events, toured schools, and encouraged eligible schools to participate in CEP.

In 2015,  with support from Governor Asa Hutchinson, the Alliance worked with the Department of Education to suggest changes to regulations that governed state funding for school districts, paving the way for districts to adopt the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), a new USDA meal option which allowed eligible high-need districts to offer universal free school breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of their family income levels. Since the revision, over 75% of eligible Arkansas schools are participating in CEP.

The Pandemic: Challenges and Silver Linings

By 2019, Arkansas ranked fifth in school breakfast participation in the U.S. But in spring 2020, COVID-19 closed schools, and for the next two school years, the pandemic produced many serious challenges for schools and students. Regarding school nutrition, however, there were a few silver linings.

Child nutrition teams across the state stepped up to the challenge and developed innovative ways to serve nutritious meals to their students. In addition to permitting meal delivery flexibilities during the 2020/21 and 2021/22 school years, USDA allowed all students to receive free school meals, providing essentially a two-year universal free school meal pilot program to all school districts in all states.

During the pandemic, school meal participation increased significantly, and food insecurity rates dropped. However, Congress discontinued universal free meals after the pandemic. As a result, schools had to return to pre-pandemic policies, requiring students to meet income qualifications for free meals once again.

Several states took matters into their own hands and passed legislation to require school districts to continue to provide universal free school meals to all their students, but most states, like Arkansas, did not.

A Step Forward: Eliminating Reduced-Price Copays

Many families in Arkansas, where over 64% of students qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, were hard-pressed to come up with the funds for either the reduced-price meal copay or the full price of a school meal every day. Families that had grown used to the universal free meal policy during the two full school years of the pandemic did not understand why they again had to pay for meals. With schools required by law to provide a meal to any student asking for one, meal debt balances began to reach record levels—in the tens and hundreds of thousands in larger school districts in Arkansas—and meal participation rates dropped below pre-pandemic levels.

In 2023, to address these issues, the Alliance  team worked with Senators Jonathan Dismang and Clarke Tucker to draft legislation requiring the state to cover the cost of the reduced-price meal copay that was charged to the approximately 49,000 students in that school meal income category. Senator Dismang introduced bills requiring the state to cover the cost of reduced-price meal copays, making meals free for 49,000 students starting in the 2023/2024 school year. Senator Dismang used current funding resources, underscoring the need to address student hunger in a state where two-thirds of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. The bills, eventually Acts 656 and 657, passed unanimously in both the Senate and House. Over 55,000 students qualified for those free meals last school year.

A Defining Moment: Governor Sanders

Despite the success of the reduced-price meal measure, Arkansas still was not reaching many of the hungriest students who needed a nutritious start to the school day. And again, in the fall of 2023, USDA released its annual food insecurity report listing Arkansas as the hungriest state in the U.S. 

With that report in hand, then-Alliance CEO Kathy Webb and I requested a meeting with Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders to highlight several legislative and administrative proposals that could, if implemented, help reduce food insecurity in Arkansas. Governor Sanders, who had already stated her interest in tackling childhood hunger, was receptive and agreed that hungry kids struggle to learn and that they need access to nutritious meals every day.

Governor Sanders supported Arkansas’ participation in Summer EBT and volunteered with her family to help distribution.

Governor Sanders directed the state departments of Human Services and Education to adopt USDA’s newly approved summer nutrition program, Summer EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer), to supplement students’ nutrition needs while school is out. Arkansas was the only Southern, conservative-led state to adopt the program in its inaugural year. According to the governor, over 260,000 Arkansas students received Summer EBT benefits in 2024.

Summer EBT and non-congregate meal programs have been a game-changer for reducing summer hunger and learning loss in rural states. Arkansas Senator John Boozman had long-advocated for non-congregate meals, which allows summer meals to be offered by schools and organizations in flexible ways—multi-meal pick-up, delivery to parks and playgrounds, and even home delivery— in qualifying rural communities.

A Dream Realized: Universal Free Breakfast

After 14 years with universal breakfast as a dream goal of the Arkansas No Kid Hungry Campaign, 2025 marked a historic milestone. Hunger relief champions—Senators Jonathan Dismang and Clarke Tucker, along with Representatives Zack Gramlich, Tippi McCullough, DeAnn Vaught, and 83 additional co-sponsors—introduced Senate Bill 59. This bill will provide universal free school breakfast to every public school student in Arkansas, over 474,000 children, beginning in the 2025/2026 school year.

Through years of collaboration with legislators, state agencies, and school districts, school breakfast champions Patty Barker, Kathy Webb, and Vivian Nicholson helped pave the way for the passage of Senate Bill 59, ensuring free school breakfast for Arkansas school students. 

Governor Sanders announced her support for the measure in her State of the State address on January 14, 2025, prioritizing funding from medical marijuana sales and privilege tax revenue, now collected in a Food Insecurity Fund. This fund will cover the costs of hunger relief programs, including Summer EBT, reduced-price meal copayments, and universal free school breakfast. The measure, now Act 123, passed with near-unanimous bipartisan support in both the Arkansas Senate and House.

Those 474,000 Arkansas kids join us in saying, “Thank you! It was well worth the wait!”

The Alliance thanks Governor Sarah Sanders for prioritizing solutions to childhood hunger in Arkansas, the legislative champions who helped us create lasting policy change for the good, and our steadfast No Kid Hungry partners at Share Our Strength, and our many No Kid Hungry stakeholders who have worked with the Alliance to help move the needle toward food security for all Arkansas families. Working together, continued solutions to hunger can be achieved, ensuring that all Arkansas children have access to the nutritious meals they need to thrive.

Patty joined the staff of the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance in September of 2012 to serve as the Campaign Director for the Arkansas No Kid Hungry Campaign.  The Campaign is a unique partnership among the Arkansas Governor’s Office, state agencies, hunger relief agencies and nutrition advocates all working together to alleviate childhood hunger in Arkansas by improving access to nutrition programs and educating families about healthy, affordable food choices. She previously served as the Policy Director for the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, supporting a state-wide citizens’ coalition advocating for improved education, environmental and economic policy.  Patty earned her J.D. from the University of Arkansas School of Law and her B. A. from Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College).   

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David Pryor, a natural-born politician who spent thirty-four years in public offices, including governor, the state legislature and both houses of Congress, died April 20, 2024 at his home in Little Rock at the age of 89.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture called him “arguably the most popular Arkansas politician of the modern era,” although the description might have covered a much longer stretch of history. He ran for public offices 13 times between 1960 and 1996 and lost only once—a 1972 race for the U.S. Senate against Sen. John L. McClellan. 

After McClellan’s death before the end of the term in 1978, Pryor defeated two other rising political stars for the Senate seat—Congressmen Jim Guy Tucker and Ray H. Thornton Jr., both of whom would be elected to other major state offices. Pryor would hold the seat until January 1997, when he retired, owing to heart problems and his dismay over the rising partisanship, wrath and extremism in Congress and national politics.

In 2002, years after he retired from the Senate, Pryor’s son Mark, a former state representative and attorney general, won his seat by defeating Senator Tim Hutchinson and served two terms.

His nearly 35-year career in the state and national capitols were marked by passionate and sometimes lonely efforts for better and affordable medical care for the elderly and poor, peace, public safety in the nuclear age, the direct election of American presidents, reform of the state’s ancient constitution and, perhaps most markedly, for collaboration among political foes and parties.

Former President Bill Clinton, who got his inspiration for politics and public service as a 20-year-old Georgetown University student in 1966 from the “Young Turk” state lawmaker from a couple of rural counties east of him in south Arkansas, said he and his wife, Hillary, were deeply saddened by the death of their friend and collaborator, who was always “honest, compassionate and full of common sense.”

In every office he held, Clinton said, Pryor “fought for progressive politics that helped us put the divided past behind us and move into a brighter future together. He was always one of America’s greatest advocates for the elderly, waging long battles to lower the cost of prescription drugs, and to improve nursing home and home care to help more people live in dignity.”

“David made politics personal—from his famed retail campaigning to his ability to calmly and confidently explain tough votes to his constituents,” Clinton said. Clinton was Arkansas’s attorney general in Pryor’s last two years as governor. He was elected governor in the same election that voters promoted Pryor to the US Senate.

“I first met him and Barbara in 1966 when David was running for Congress and over the next 58 years he would be my mentor, confidant, supporter and, above all, friend. Having him and Dale Bumpers in the Senate when I was president was an extraordinary gift. I never felt far from home, and I always trusted the unvarnished advice he gave, especially when the going got tough. I’ll always be grateful that he served as the inaugural dean of the Clinton School of Public Service, where his very presence embodied the nobility and joy of public service.”

David Pryor lived a mythical life of politics and public service, said his longtime aide in Congress, Carmie Henry—starting with his election as president of the third grade. He defined retail politics in Arkansas as a campaigner and in public office, cementing personal bonds with everybody in both parties and in every executive office, including the security workers all over the Capitol. He became easily the most beloved member of the Senate and also with Arkansas voters.

“If any one person’s career marked the changing of an era in American politics, it was David Pryor’s,” Henry said. “There are no David Pryors in Washington anymore.”

Pryor was a liberal Democrat long before it became a term of opprobrium. He was stirred to enter politics, first as a crusading weekly newspaper editor at Camden and then as a candidate for the legislature, by the rise of racial hatred and discord after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 outlawing segregation in the nation’s public schools. A senior and student leader at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Pryor traveled to the Capitol in February 1957 to testify at a dramatic public hearing on a bill creating a state sovereignty commission that would stop racial integration and find and punish people and groups that supported integration—or “race mixing,” as it was commonly called. He thought the bill was a flagrant violation of the federal and state constitutions. He was blocked from testifying, he would learn, at the instigation of university officials, notably the president, who feared a backlash against the school. The passage of a raft of bills to maintain white supremacy and Gov. Orval E. Faubus’s signing them into law in early 1957 and then Faubus’s dispatch of National Guardsmen to prevent nine Black youngsters from entering Little Rock Central High School that fall turned Pryor and his new wife, the former Barbara Jean Lunsford, into crusaders and reaffirmed his notion from early childhood that politics was the best way to spend his life.

David Hampton Pryor was born Aug. 29, 1934, in Camden, the third of four children of William Edgar Pryor and Susan Newton Pryor. His father ran a car dealership, was Ouachita County sheriff for four years and was always politically connected and influential. Governor Ben T. Laney (1945–1949) was a neighbor and family friend, although Laney’s leadership of the Southern white-supremacy  movement and his disloyalty to the Democratic Party in 1948 disturbed young Pryor, whose hero was Gov. Sid McMath from next-door Magnolia and Hot Springs, who had thwarted Laney’s Dixiecrat party and carried Arkansas for President Harry S. Truman that year. Pryor’s mother, who was known as Susie, had been a champion of women’s suffrage, and was the first woman to run for public office in Arkansas, losing a race for circuit and county clerk in 1926. She later won a school board race.

His autobiography, A Pryor Commitment, published in 2008 by Butler Center Books, gave a self-effacing and often humorous account of growing up, pursuing popularity and providential encounters with famous political figures that would shape his destiny. He was an unusually gregarious child who sought friendship with everybody and was attracted to politics almost from the time that he could read, perhaps owing to his father’s engagement in politics and with politicians. (The elder Pryor raised the money in 1942 that kept Congressman John L. McClellan from leaving the US Senate race, which he won in a Democratic runoff primary with Attorney General Jack Holt. McClellan was later shocked and embittered that his patron’s son would run against him. He had expected Pryor to succeed him when he retired.) 

Pryor wrote that he ran for president of Mary Bragg Wheeler’s third-grade class at Camden and that the teacher sent him and the other two candidates into the hall while the class voted.

“Sweating under the tension,” Pryor remembered, “I promised God that if He would let me win this election, I would never again run for political office. Our teacher called us back into the room. I had won! Before I sat down, I was already planning my race for fourth-grade president.”

His boyhood hero was the Razorback and Olympic star Clyde Scott from Smackover, 16 miles down the road from him, to the extent that 50 years later he stuttered trying to talk to the sainted old man, by then a retired insurance executive for Jackson T. “Jack” Stephens. Pryor was a football star for the Camden High School Panthers—a triple-threat tailback who made the all-district team. His memoir, however, confessed that he actually hated football and every minute of practice and the games, but social pressure forced him to stay with it. “Any Camden boy in the 1950s who entertained the slightest interest in peer acceptance—and who could circle the practice field in a heavy uniform without crumpling to earth—went out for football,” he said. Pryor dreaded “the 200-pound linemen” who smashed him to the ground nearly every play. 

Pryor wrote that after seeing the 1950 movie Born Yesterday, starring William Holden and Judy Holliday and set in political Washington, he ran home and sent a letter to Congressman Oren Harris of El Dorado, a family friend, asking if he could be a congressional page that summer. Harris agreed. Pryor drove to Washington, finally found the Capitol and reached the House doorkeeper’s office, where he was rebuked for being late and sent to the Senate, where there was an emergency—an all-night filibuster after all the Senate pages had gone home. When he reached the Senate floor, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (the anticommunist conspiracist who was later censured by the Senate) snapped his fingers at Pryor, scribbled a note, fished out a ten-dollar bill and handed him a ring of keys. 

Pryor’s account: “Here, son,” he said. “Get a taxi and go to this address, and on the floor of the closet in the bedroom you’ll find my bedroom slippers. Bring them to me.” It was David Pryor’s first act of public service. 

After Pryor enrolled as a freshman at Baylor University at Waco his father died suddenly and he canceled his enrollment and went instead to Henderson State Teachers College at Arkadelphia, 45 miles up Highway 7. When he arrived on campus late he was greeted by a sign in front of Womack Hall, the men’s dormitory, saying “David Pryor for Freshman Class President.” He was elected. After a year, he transferred to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He took a horse with him and put the colt in a stable at a farm south of town. He wrote that it had been a stupid thing to do because he rarely found time to ride the animal. He figured that he had done it because the last time he had seen his father alive was when the old man was astride a horse in the 1952 Ouachita County Fair parade.

As the spring semester was ending in 1954, Pryor got a note to call Gov. Francis Cherry, who had defeated his hero Sid McMath two years earlier. Cherry wanted him to be his driver while he was campaigning for re-election in the Democratic primaries against Faubus and two other men that summer. In his autobiography and two oral histories late in life Pryor gave poignant accounts of Cherry’s grace and caring and the agonizing dilemmas the governor had faced in the historic confrontation with Faubus in the runoff primary; Cherry had decided to question Faubus’s patriotism by making an issue of his attendance at a socialist self-help school at Mena, Commonwealth College, and subsequently lying about it. It was to be an evening television speech at the KARK studio, which Pryor called “the speech of Cherry’s political life.” Pryor said he waited in the car for Cherry to leave the mansion for the studio and the governor veered into the shrubs next to the car and vomited. After his stumbling and wooden speech, Cherry returned to the car solemnly and said, “How’d I do, kid?” Pryor said he congratulated Cherry but began to realize that the speech had been a terrible mistake.

It occurred while the country, including Arkansas, rebelled against “McCarthyism,” which had been exposed as a fraud the previous month in the Army-McCarthy hearings before a Senate committee, including Arkansas’s John McClellan. It ended with Army attorney Joseph Welch’s famous putdown of Joe McCarthy, whose bedroom slippers Pryor had fetched four years earlier, for relentlessly attacking a young lawyer at the hearing: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough! Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Pryor concluded that the very decent Cherry had been a poor politician who did not sense the great shift in public attitudes and was unable to rally voters against a smart but unprincipled politician. An even bigger mistake had been the unfortunate campaign line “we’re going to get the deadheads off the welfare rolls.” Faubus made him look cruel. 

After Cherry’s humiliation, a bitter Pryor decided that politics was miserable business and changed his major from political science to business administration. He took courses in accounting, banking and statistics but found them tedious and boring. Then he became violently ill with a strange malady that required multiple surgeries—he withered to 130 pounds and partially lost his eyesight—that cost him a year of school. 

He returned to the university in 1955 as a government major again. From his arrival, he was active in student government, including serving as a senator. Led by Pryor, Ray Thornton and others who would later seek state executive, legislative and judicial offices, the students took a special interest in the conflagration over integration that was growing at Little Rock, which was under federal court orders to desegregate its schools in the fall. A number of punitive bills to head off the desegregation consumed the lawmakers in the January–March session—notably the creation of a state sovereignty commission, which was based on the long-repudiated theory of John C. Calhoun that states could interpose their sovereignty between the federal government and the people. Pryor and one of his many college roommates, Kenneth C. Danforth of El Dorado, the editor of the campus newspaper, The Traveler, and later a journalist for the Arkansas Gazette, Time magazine and The National Geographic, drove to Little Rock to carry the students’ message to the lawmakers and the state that the legislation trampled upon the human rights of American citizens, who would be criminalized for even expressing the view that Blacks and those who might sympathize with them were entitled to equality and free expression and assembly. Pryor was embittered by the experience that day but, according to his memoir, the stayover at the Marion Hotel and association with the legislators and lobbyists, sharpened his understanding that politics and government—in Ouachita County, Little Rock, or Washington, D.C.—did not follow the examples in civics textbooks.

He left Fayetteville with his degree but could not find a job. The Gazette would not hire him, even when he volunteered to work free for a few months to prove his worth. Later, as a lawmaker and law student, he would be the Gazette’s Fayetteville correspondent. He married Barbara Jean Lunsford of Fayetteville, a classmate, and in late 1957 started a weekly newspaper, the Ouachita Citizen, with a printing press acquired from a local businessman. His wife and mother wrote weekly columns and reported, and Pryor sold advertisements and wrote editorials, often criticizing local government officials but mainly Gov. Faubus and legislative houses that went along with everything Faubus sought to do. The city’s daily newspaper, like most others around Arkansas after the school crisis, rarely took issue with the governor and the legislature. Faubus took pleasure in taunting Pryor and his little paper. At a big rally at Camden in his 1958 race against the meatpacker Chris Finkbeiner, whom Pryor supported, Faubus held up copies of Life and Time magazines and Pryor’s little paper, all of which had made Faubus look bad. 

“Life is for people who can’t read,” Faubus said. “Time is for people who can’t see, and the Ouachita Citizen is for people who can’t think.” The crowd roared and Pryor crawled in his car and went home.

But in 1960 Pryor told the county’s representative, a family friend, that if he did not begin to oppose Faubus on legislation he was going to run against him. The representative demurred and Pryor ran against him. He was 26 years old. Pryor’s memoir said he got elected mainly owing to the relentless campaigning of Barbara, carrying their infant son, David, with her as she went door to door across the county asking people to please vote for her husband. The family briefly moved to Little Rock. They sold the newspaper in 1962. He was elected twice more, in 1962 and 1964, while attending law school at Fayetteville when the legislature was not in session. He finished law school in 1964.

Except for his votes, Pryor’s legislative record was unremarkable, which was not unusual for new legislators. A Civil War buff, Pryor read about battles in South Arkansas and at his first session in February 1961 he introduced and passed a bill creating Poison Springs Battlefield State Park about eight miles from his home. It was the site of one of the Confederates’ few big victories in Arkansas, a victory most notable for the slaughter of a Kansas infantry regiment that included former slaves. The Confederates took no prisoners and used wagons to crush the skulls of the captured Black men. 

Pryor became one of a handful of liberals who jousted with Faubus and the legislative “Old Guard” on a wide variety of reforms. Called “the Young Turks” in the media, Pryor, Virgil Butler, Sterling R. Cockrill Jr., Jim Brandon, Hardy W. Croxton, Ray S. Smith Jr. and Hayes C. McClerkin introduced legislation outlawing the poll tax, reforming election laws, overhauling county purchasing and spending (Pryor had been on a grand jury investigating government fraud in Ouachita County), convening a constitutional convention, and overhauling highway administration. They got nowhere with the legislation. In 1961, Pryor introduced a bill to require competitive bidding on county purchases of more than $300, but he could get only few votes for it each year. Faubus had another legislator, Harry Colay of Magnolia, put his name on a similar bill in 1965, it passed, and Faubus signed it.

Pryor opened a law practice in 1964 at Camden with his friend Harry Barnes. He liked to mention a case where he represented a man in a dispute over who owned a coon dog. It was finally resolved by bringing the disputed mutt into the courtroom, which wandered around until it spotted Pryor’s client and put a paw on his knee. The judge immediately awarded him custody. For a different reason, the Arkansas Gazette cartoonist George Fisher later always put a happy coon dog at Pryor’s side. But Pryor never got to practice a lot of law.

Faubus’s enmity toward Pryor took a bizarre turn in the summer of 1965. Late in life, Faubus and Pryor would cement a friendship, and he told Pryor that one of the joys of his life had been setting in motion the events that year which sealed Pryor’s long career. In law school at Fayetteville, Pryor had become a close friend of Faubus’s son, Farrell, a shy, portly and tormented young man who would take his own life in 1977 at the age of 36. Farrell had felt shunned and ridiculed by the other students and some of the faculty. The two students studied, played golf, drank beer and got their law degrees together.

In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Congressman Oren Harris to a federal judgeship, creating a congressional vacancy that Faubus was supposed to fill for the last 16 months of Harris’s term by calling a special election. It was Pryor’s dream, but there was no time to put together a campaign organization throughout the large Fourth District. State Auditor Jimmie “Red” Jones, who was known to every voter in the state, would be the automatic winner. Pryor mentioned his dilemma to his friend Farrell. He would learn later that Farrell told his dad that Pryor had helped him get his law degree, was the only person at the university who befriended him and about the only true friend he ever had.

Faubus dawdled about calling the special election for weeks and finally announced that the district did not really need a voting representative for the next year and a half, so he called the special election for the same day as the general election in November 1966. Voters would simultaneously fill the seat for the last two months of the year but also the following two years—two elections for the same seat on the same day. It gave Pryor more than a year to build a campaign organization. Red Jones then chose not to run because he would have to give up his safe lifetime job at the Capitol for a risky congressional election. Pryor won the special election and the general election handily. He defeated Richard S. Arnold of Texarkana, a future federal district and appellate judge, and three other prominent politicians from around the district, John Harris Jones of Pine Bluff, Charles L. “Chuck” Honey of Prescott and Dean Murphy of Hope. 

Pryor’s three terms in the seniority-driven House of Representatives were hardly notable, except for a controversy that he engineered—a crusade over the mistreatment of the elderly and disabled in nursing homes—and his personal dilemma over the Vietnam War, which he eventually came to oppose. 

His mother told him that after visiting friends in nursing homes over the years she had concluded that the warehousing of people in the profit-driven industry had to be a national scandal rather than a local one. Now that her son was a congressman, he ought to do something about it. Having little else to do as a freshman, Pryor started volunteering on weekends as an orderly in nursing homes in the District of Columbia and suburban Maryland and Virginia, and recording the lack of staffing and lapses in medical care that he saw. His mother was right. Nursing homes often were just profitable warehouses for those waiting for the grave. Government inspectors often gave owners notice of their inspections, which rarely found lapses and, when they did, nothing was done about them. The industry had lobbyists who kept Pryor’s congressional colleagues and other government monitors at bay. 

Pryor made a speech on the House floor revealing his secret work. He said he had encountered only two nursing homes where he would put his mother, but he couldn’t have afforded either one on his $42,500 salary. He was attacked by Maryland’s state mental-health director and people in the industry. Pryor called for the House to create a select committee on nursing homes and homes for the aged. A majority of the House voted for his resolution, but it was non-binding and Congress did nothing. The House, led by the 80-year-old Mississippian who headed the Rules Committee, would not provide space or staffing for the committee. Pryor decided to do the work himself, after finding a vacant lot beside a gasoline station near the Capitol. The station’s owner found two house trailers that became the site for Pryor’s investigations and hearings. Pryor tried and failed to set up a permanent Committee on Aging, as the Senate had done in 1959. President Richard M. Nixon joined Pryor’s cause in 1971, deploring conditions in nursing homes and proposing to end payments to substandard homes.

In 1974, two years after Pryor left, the House joined the cause and established the Select Committee on Aging. For the next 50 years, Congress, federal and state administrators and the industry would wage a continuous battle over standards of care for the aged and the degree of regulation that government should provide.

When Pryor went to Washington, the Vietnam War had engaged the United States for ten years. (President Eisenhower sent the first US troops in 1955 and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had raised the commitment.) After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Congress gave Johnson new authority to dramatically expand America’s commitment, still without a declaration of war. By 1968, congressional and public opposition to the war had grown. Vice President Hubert Humphrey asked Pryor to make a short speech to the riotous Democratic National Convention in Chicago—Humphrey was the presidential nominee—in support of the Vietnam plank, an oblique statement that neither endorsed nor opposed the war effort. Pryor went to the convention as an Arkansas delegate and had already alienated other Southern congressmen, especially Mississippians, by voting as a member of the Credentials Committee to seat Mississippi’s Freedom Democrats—Blacks and liberals—instead of the white delegation picked by the party in Mississippi. In his two-minute speech, he urged an end to the war but called for unity and wisdom. Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright had already decided America’s war policies were improvident and conducted hearings that began to turn public sentiment against the war.

President Johnson, who had had misgivings about the war from the first, had then made himself the champion of the war against communism after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He became more and more sorrowful and morose as tens of thousands of Americans a year died, but he could not become the first president to lose a war. In 1967, Johnson asked Pryor to fly to Texas with him for rallies to pump up flagging support in his home state. Pryor would write that Johnson seemed glum and introspective the whole trip. Pryor understood why. As they were flying back to Washington at night in Air Force One, Pryor looked out the window and figured that the lights below were his hometown of Camden. 

“Mr. President,” he said, “it looks like we might be flying directly over Camden, Arkansas. That’s my hometown. If you look straight down at the ground, you might see Jim’s Café on Washington Street.”

The president leaned across him and looked out the window. He slumped back in his seat and shook his head.

“God a’mighty!” he sighed. “I wish I was at Jim’s Café right now.” He was silent the rest of the trip.

For Pryor, the climax to the moral struggle over the war was more personal, as he would recall in A Pryor Commitment and oral histories. On an airline trip from Washington to Arkansas he fell into conversation with a young serviceman from his district who was headed to Vietnam. Many months later, he got on a plane for the same flight back home and recognized the young man, in uniform. He asked the soldier about his tour of duty. The soldier pulled back a blanket across his lap, which showed that he had lost a leg in combat.

 “Congressman Pryor,” the young man said, “I would not have minded losing my leg, if only someone had told me why we were there in the first place.”

Pryor sent constituents a newsletter announcing that he would thereafter oppose any further funding of the war and calling for troops to be brought home. It was not an altogether popular step. At a fishfry at the Carlisle High School stadium soon afterward, a man ran out of the crowd, jumped on Pryor’s back and began hitting him and calling him a traitor. Mayor Bobby Glover, later a state representative and then a senator, pulled the man off Pryor. Two decades later Pryor would write a letter to his son Scott, explaining his dilemma over the war and the consequences. He likened it to the contemporary dilemma over the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

In 1972, McClellan, by then chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which had funded the development of the navigation dams on the Arkansas River in Arkansas and Oklahoma, announced he was running for a sixth term. His hearings on labor racketeering had made enemies of organized labor. Unions representing wood, paper, oil, chemical and electrical workers in South Arkansas had supplied much of Pryor’s political strength. He announced that he was running for the seat, too, along with Ted Boswell, a liberal trial lawyer, and Foster Johnson, a book salesman who for the third straight Senate election went around towns wearing clanging metal campaign signs over his shoulders. 

Pryor survived a rough campaign in which he was accused of being a friend of draft dodgers and a supporter of gun control. (As a freshman legislator, he had sponsored a bill making it illegal to carry a loaded weapon in a vehicle inside city limits—a reaction to a neighboring boy accidentally killing himself with a loaded shotgun on a Safeway parking lot.) But Pryor was a close second in the preferential primary and entered the runoff as a heavy favorite, certain to get all the votes that had been cast for the more liberal Boswell. W. R. “Witt” Stephens, the gas baron and investment banker, summoned a meeting of the state’s banking and business leaders with McClellan in the board room of the Union National Bank at Little Rock where everyone ponied up tens of thousands of dollars for McClellan or pledged to collect it.

The two-week runoff ended with the famous televised debate. McClellan, wearing a white suit, taunted Pryor for his support by unions, particularly “labor bosses” from outside the state. Pryor responded that the money reported on his campaign finance forms came from the cookie jars and overall pockets of hardworking men. McClellan responded that Pryor had gotten $79,000 from “bosses” from outside the state. 

“David, David,” he taunted, shaking a finger, “this is no cookie-jar nickels and dimes!”

Pryor’s campaign gifts paled alongside the money from businessmen and bankers in McClellan’s campaign, but McClellan’s commanding performance showed him as anything but a doddering 76-year-old man. But his victory in the election the next week depended more on the massive get-out-the-vote effort by political leaders commanded by Witt Stephens. Pryor got only 20,000 more votes than in the first primary, McClellan 22,000 more. On election night, Pryor faced the TV cameras early, conceded and said the voters had elected the right man, a typical Pryor reflection on his opponents.

Witt Stephens was watching television that night and was struck by the Pryor’s magnanimity. Two years later, when Gov. Dale Bumpers announced he was not running for a third term as governor but instead for the Senate—against Fulbright—Stephens picked up the phone and called Pryor, suggesting that he run for governor. Pryor said he was about to call Stephens and urge him to run (they had served in the House of Representatives together as freshmen in 1961). Stephens said no, he was serious, and promised his full organizational support if Pryor announced. He did, and so did former governor Faubus and Lt. Gov. Bob Riley. Faubus, making his second comeback attempt since retiring in 1966, was shocked to discover that nearly his entire political machine marshaled by Stephens had been diverted to Pryor. Pryor won without a runoff. For the rest of his life, Faubus remained bitter about his old friend and supporter’s betrayal while also warming to the young man whom his son Farrell had asked him to help. 

Providence seemed always to shine on Pryor at election time—but with actual governance, not so much. Bumpers had raised income and motor-fuel taxes and closed tax loopholes. Furious economic growth filled the state treasury so that Bumpers could enhance public schools and higher education, build many state parks, improve highways, expand medical care and build hospitals and college classrooms. Bumpers called a special legislative session to spend the big surplus that had accumulated in the treasury. The moment that Pryor moved into the Governor’s Mansion the nation was hit with a long recession complicated by inflation, and the treasury was depleted. Pryor had to slash budgets and freeze hiring even for filling job vacancies. In his four years, Bumpers had carried out all the reforms prescribed by the liberal group Democrats for Arkansas during the late 1960s—nearly everything but a new state constitution, which became Pryor’s biggest goal. It was never fulfilled.

Pryor proposed a dramatic refashioning of state spending—a 25 percent reduction in state income tax rates and empowerment of local governments to implement the income tax themselves to address all the problems of cities, counties and schools. The Arkansas Plan, as it was called, consumed a legislative session. Pryor traveled the state promoting the plan, explaining to a group at Jonesboro that he was cutting state taxes and allowing people locally to use it in whatever way pleased them—jokingly suggesting that if they didn’t want to levy taxes to build roads and streets they could spend the money on “a new coon dog.” Gazette cartoonist George Fisher labeled it the “Coon Dog Plan” and thereafter always put a grinning mutt at Pryor’s side. The Arkansas Plan failed.

Another passion was litter. Pryor hated the trash along the state’s streets and roads. He started a “Pick Up Arkansas” campaign and proposed a bill levying a small tax on soft drinks, pet foods, newspapers and plastic wrappers to discourage littering; the money would be used for highway and street cleanup. Local governments were encouraged to dispose of solid waste like abandoned cars and refrigerators. The bill passed, but a letter from the state Revenue Department to businesses on how to collect the tax warned that they might go to prison for failing to remit the litter tax. Legislators who had voted for the bill heard from merchants and demanded that Pryor call them back into session to repeal the bill before it took effect on July 1. He did but always regretted it when he saw sandwich wrappers and soft-drink containers strewn along streets and on the roadsides.

Constitutional revision, an obsession with an aging legislator who had been the leader of the Young Turks, was Pryor’s biggest failure. Voters had defeated a liberalized constitution drafted by a popularly elected convention in 1970. Pryor decided to try again after taking office in 1975. The solution had to be to avoid the pitched battles over a few issues such as the state’s antiunion law (the Right to Work Amendment), usury, judicial elections and county-government reform. He offered a bill calling for the appointment, by the legislature and the governor, of 35 delegates who would write a new constitution but leave those and a few other features of the 1874 constitution untouched and then submit the document to the voters in September. On the day the delegates convened, the state Supreme Court voted four to three to abolish the convention because the delegates were prohibited from changing some parts of the constitution. It had to be all or nothing. In 1977, Pryor tried again with a bill that called for the election of 100 delegates in 1978 and a vote on the document in 1980. But voters defeated that new constitution decisively. 

McClellan died in November 1977 and Pryor appointed Kaneaster Hodges of Newport, a lawyer and minister, to finish his term, which ended Jan. 1, 1979. Pryor soon announced that he would run for the seat. So did US Rep. Jim Guy Tucker of Little Rock and Rep. Ray H. Thornton Jr. of Sheridan. It would be a race between three friends and philosophical triplets. A. C. Grigson, a Texarkana accountant, joined the race claiming to be McClellan’s philosophical successor. Pryor barely led in the first primary and Tucker edged Thornton for the second spot. The runoff would also be amiable until its final days when Tucker accused Pryor’s campaign manager of trying to persuade a friend on the state Public Service Commission to approve a rate increase for Witt Stephens’s western Arkansas gas company in exchange for the Stephens family’s support in the runoff. Pryor won by a safe margin. Tucker later shrugged off his defeat. No one, he said, was going to believe that David Pryor did anything even slightly deceitful, and wouldn’t blame him if he had.

The Senate years were Pryor’s most pleasurable. His Arkansas colleague, Dale Bumpers, was a close friend and an ally on most but not all issues. After their retirements, they became a popular team for television and political events, taunting and telling tall tales about each other.

During the eight-year administration of President Ronald Reagan, both senators opposed much of the Reagan program, including the tax cuts for the wealthy in 1981 and later the big binge of military spending. Bumpers, a deficit hawk, publicly opposed the tax cuts, and Pryor finally joined him by voting “present” on the roll call, the same as a no vote. The month after the tax cuts passed the nation fell into a deep 14-month recession with double-digit unemployment, the deepest since the 1930s, although the charming Reagan was never blamed for the longest and deepest recession in modern times or the staggering budget deficits and debt that he ran up for eight years or for the repeated tax increases that the Reagan administration described as “revenue enhancements” instead of taxes.

But Pryor also became a leading critic of Pentagon spending, calling attention to such excesses as the orders for thousands of ball-peen hammers and toilet seats at hugely inflated prices. He also veered from Bumpers and the state’s four congressmen in his opposition to the development of binary chemical weapons. He opposed developing and storing the chemical weapons at the Pine Bluff Arsenal. Vice President George H. W. Bush, a friend who went to Congress the same time as Pryor, went to the Senate to cast the tie-breaking vote for the arsenal.

Even before Reagan’s election, the Pentagon already suspected that Pryor was not a votary, especially after he called attention to the perils of the Titan II missile system after a series of dangerous failures around the country and two catastrophes in Arkansas. When the Defense Department developed the Titan II system—54 underground intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads—US Rep. Wilbur D. Mills agreed to vote for President Kennedy’s tax cuts if he agreed to put a ring of 18 of the new missiles in Arkansas. A fire in a silo with a nuclear warhead near Searcy in 1965 killed 53 workers who were retrofitting the missile’s fuel system. In January 1978, a fuel transporter at a missile silo at Damascus overheated and sent thousands of gallons of deadly nitrogen tetroxide vapor over the countryside. In 1979, after more such leaks in the Arkansas and Kansas missile networks, Pryor and Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas were regretting having Titan sites in their states and talked about whether they should be anywhere near American citizens. 

After rumors of incidents at the silos, Pryor in the summer of 1980 did his own secret investigation and found nine major incidents in the previous 14 months that could have endangered Arkansas lives around the silos. Clearly, the Air Force had been lying about the safety at the Titan sites in Arkansas, Kansas and New Mexico. Pryor gave the detailed results of investigation of the eight incidents to two Arkansas Gazette reporters, who described the incidents and Pryor’s conclusions. Surrounding residents were never informed about any of them, despite an Air Force vow that residents would always be informed.

Pryor and Dole went to Congress to push an amendment to the Defense Department appropriation that called for an early-warning system around all the silos. The amendment passed. Three days later, on Sept. 18, 1980, the missile in a silo at Damascus exploded, blowing the nuclear warhead and two technicians into the air. One of the men died almost instantly and the other’s health was permanently impaired. Two years later, the Pentagon decided to abandon the Titans for more advanced, and perhaps safer, missile systems. But Pryor’s negativity about defense weaponry and spending took a political toll, at least nationally.

The payoff came in 1984, when the White House and the party leadership persuaded Congressman Ed Bethune of Searcy—the Pryors and Bethunes were social friends—to run against Pryor with the promise of financial backing. More than 20 Reagan administration officials and Republican senators came to Arkansas for fund-raising events for Bethune. Rev. Jerry Falwell, the right-wing leader, came to Arkansas to call for Pryor’s defeat. Pryor eschewed the same strategy, feeling that Democrats from out of the state would hurt rather than help him. Bethune’s ads said Pryor had voted against the popular former movie star, Ronnie Reagan, on 77 percent of the issues in the Senate. The Saturday before the election Reagan, who was approaching a landslide win of his own, made a speech at the packed Excelsior Hotel ballroom. 

“Don’t send me back to Washington alone,” Reagan said with the smiling Bethune beside him. Reagan carried Arkansas with 60 percent of the vote. Pryor got 57 percent.

In 1994, Pryor ran for re-election and no Democrat or Republican opposed him—a rarity in any state. Betty White, a homeless woman, ran as a write-in and got 832 votes. (Pryor’s son Mark also had no opposition, except for a Green Party candidate, in his second race for the same seat in 2008.)

Pryor spent much of his second term fighting for a taxpayer’s bill of rights, to curb abuses by the Internal Revenue Service. Reagan signed Pryor’s bill into law in 1988.

Pryor’s last crusade was against the pharmaceutical industry. In 1990, he introduced the Pharmaceutical Access and Prudent Purchasing Act, which sought to end the spiral of drug prices; it would have allowed Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate with drug makers on prices that would be charged to Medicare and Medicaid patients. The industry fought back. 

Pryor had a massive heart attack on April 15, 1991. The illness hobbled him for the rest of his career. Majority Leader George Mitchell and Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas took up the cause of drug pricing but they never were able to pass a bill. President Joe Biden finally took up Pryor’s cause in 2023.

Another passionate reform effort was to end the electoral college so that the winner of the popular vote would always be the next president. The most important job in the whole democracy was president, but it also was the only political job in the country, from members of the county quorum court to the top, that might go to the loser. In 1992, sensing that the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot could tilt the election of George H. W. Bush over Bill Clinton regardless of the size of Clinton’s election victory, Pryor again introduced a Senate resolution for a constitutional amendment to end the electoral college and assure that election winners always took office. The Senate never sent the amendment to the states for ratification. Only one election loser had ever failed to become president—Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878 —but two subsequent losers, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016, became president. Trump lost the actual balloting to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.

Like Bumpers, Pryor found the relationships in Congress profoundly different after radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh and Republican House leader Newt Gingrich turned American politics into a war of saintly Republicans vs. evil Democrats. Friendly Republicans departed and were replaced by politicians who called Democrats socialists and radicals who were out to destroy the country. Pryor did not run again in 1996; Bumpers made the same choice in 1998. The Capitol, they said, was no longer an enjoyable place to be.

Pryor’s retirement did not end his engagement with politics and government. In 2000, he was director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He taught courses at the University of Arkansas and gave his unexpended campaign funds to form the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History at the university. He was the inaugural dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at Little Rock, serving for two years. After the murder of Bill Gwatney in 2008, he was chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party for a spell. In 2009, Gov. Mike Beebe appointed him to a 10-year term on the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees, where he did not enhance his popularity by protesting the lavish spending on athletics and stadium additions. A massive stroke in 2016 curtailed his activities for good.

Survivors include his widow, Barbara; his sons and their wives, David Jr. (Judith), Mark (Joi) and Scott (Diane); his grandchildren, Hampton, Adams, Porter and Devin; and his great-grandson, Raven. 

The post Remembering an Arkansas Statesman appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

“By noon they’ll be sweatin’ through their blue jeans,” I think to myself as I slide into the driver’s seat.

We wait all summer for school to start, only to realize that the heat of summer will linger as long as it wants. Arkansas’s summers are almost as stubborn as her people.

Whether it’s weather or a state of mind, we know that fall doesn’t start with back to school. It hardly starts with football season or Labor Day weekend.

Here in Arkansas, fall begins with the county fair.

We’re smack dab in the middle of county fair season, and communities all over the state are coming together in celebration of their own.

Outsiders might think it’s as simple as ferris wheels and funnel cakes. They would be wrong. Our local county fairs in Arkansas are treasures of the communities they serve.

Livestock exhibits feature our youth, the county’s pride and joy. Kids have worked hard to raise and train their animals in hopes of taking home a ribbon to display in their bedrooms. They’ve waited months for this moment in the spotlight as their family, coaches, teachers, and trainers watch in wonder at their hard-earned accomplishment. Not every kid gets a ribbon, but everyone gets a lesson in responsibility and commitment.

We gather for the rodeo, standing together as our American flag is carried on the most gorgeous Quarter horse in the county, decked out in  a sequined saddle blanket, bridle, and headstall to match their rider’s outfit. Together we bow our heads to ask for protection over participants before the announcer’s voice grows excited for the first event.

One by one, our neighbors show off their hard work. Team roping and barrel racing are impressive competitions in our county fairs. The bleachers are filled with rows of fans and friends ready to cheer for our people, no matter the outcome of their run.

Mamas hold their breath as bulls buck their boys into soft arena dirt. This is where cowboys learn courage and mamas learn to let them grow up.

With our shared values of hard work and dedication, everyone’s a winner with a county fair Arkansas audience. 

The summer can linger as long as it wants — nothing can stop our fall tradition. We’re showing up for our people, and that’s as Arkansan as it gets.

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The Simpsons aspect is hilarious when thinking about it without that context. Every time he doesn’t understand a reference, which is of course multiple times in every episode, he searches the internet to help him get the joke. He’s 11 and hitting Wikipedia to search for the presidential election of 1912.

“What is the 8th commandment?“

“Who is Drederick Tatum?”

“Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints”

He’s really into the musicals Rent and Six right now. Obsessed might be too strong of a word, but then again, it might not. We’ve been through phases of Hamilton and In the Heights and Come From Away, but right now it’s all Rent, which debuted in 1996, and Six, which takes place in the 16th century.

“Henry VIII bastard sons”

“Anne Boleyn”

“Mark Cohen’s sweater”

“Different kinds of sweater stripes”

But last Friday he searched for “March For Our Lives.” The day before that he searched for “Robb Elementary shooting”. The day before that he searched for “Arkansas school shooting.” And the week before that, before Uvalde, he searched for “Marjory Stoneman Douglas.” Before Uvalde. Before 19 more kids and two more teachers were shot and killed in another school shooting, my son was thinking about school shootings. And the week before that, he searched “grocery store shootings in Arkansas.”

He’s not going to bad sites. He’s not doomscrolling. He’s not scared to go outside. But he is acutely aware that these things happen. And happen with frightening regularity. And he carries that every day. At age 11.

It is incomprehensible to me that the trauma we are inflicting upon millions of kids through this omnipresent, background thrum of terror, hanging over them like the Sword of Damocles… that THAT isn’t enough for us to do something. THOSE KIDS, the victims of merely the threat of this scourge, should be enough to demand our immediate action.

It shouldn’t take dead children.

It shouldn’t take staggering statistics.

It shouldn’t take graphic, heart wrenching reporting.

Our kids Googling where they are most likely to get shot and killed, mixed in among their searches for Miranda Cosgrove and Top 10 Mario Games and funny cat memes… that should be enough. It’s incomprehensible that it’s not. That scores of actual dead children aren’t, either? Well, that’s just evil.

These kids are living on a planet that we are trying our hardest to destroy. We have enough resources to rid the world of hunger, and take a big bite out of poverty, but we just… don’t. They are getting a reprisal of the Cold War complete with the threat of nuclear winter. And on top of all that, their parents and grandparents, in what we love to call The Greatest Country in the World, refuse to take even the very first step toward stopping this plague of our own making.

They should never, ever forgive us.

We should never, ever forgive ourselves.

The post The Search for Answers appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

I did not expect to grieve so much. The year ended not with a bang but a whimper. There was no closure. It just suddenly stopped. There were many tears during that first year. I missed my students; still do. I missed my school colleagues; still do. 

I did not expect to have insomnia. My body apparently forgot how to sleep when it wasn’t “teacher tired.” It has taken a lot of time and effort to re-wire myself. 

I did not know that my knees and ankles would not improve much once I was no longer on my feet all day, but here we are. 

I still worry about those kids who needed me, especially the ones whose lifestyles or identities were judged harshly by most. I especially worry about the gay students who may not have someone to support them. It’s a very lonely, scary existence to be different in any way in high school. If your sexual identity does not match the prevailing community standards, the consequences can be brutal. I never overtly singled them out or tried to make them talk about it, but always hung close, kept an eye on them, and made sure they knew I accepted them. Numerous times over the years I’ve stepped in when they were being bullied. Who will be there for them? 

I profoundly miss those days in the classroom when a student had an “aha” moment. As an art teacher my importance in the school was usually related to how good Homecoming and prom looked, but the core of my purpose was crystal clear to me when a kid realized they had created something meaningful that they did not know they could do. Art is not just a class in which you learn to master certain skills and materials. It is a process that, when taught appropriately, reaches into the deepest levels of consciousness. I considered my career to be a journey of self-discovery and spiritual growth for myself as well as my students. It is part art therapy, part imagination journey, part relaxation, part skill mastery, part whimsy, part problem solving, and a lot of perseverance.

All art is self-portrait. To think of it only as decorating for events, although those are also important, is to completely miss the true value of arts education and those who teach these classes. People have been creating and imagining for thousands of years. Long before they developed language and numerical skills humans were painting on cave walls and making utilitarian or aesthetically pleasing objects that expressed their values. They give us an understanding of ancestors and culture. Creativity is at the core of what makes us human. A good art teacher needs this sense of history in order to fully appreciate how fundamental it is to our existence.

Yes. I really am that passionate about it. You may see a childish rendering of a daisy, but I see a small glimpse into something that intrigues that child. They may have spent hours thinking about daisies and how perfectly God created flowers. Art matters. Teaching is not just a job.

Retirement is not without its special charm however. I had always looked forward to the lack of morning chaos. Getting up and ready for school was a challenge my whole life. Arriving anywhere on time–major challenge. Now my mornings are usually quite enjoyable. I can sip coffee for as long as I want. Having that gentle buffer into the day is one of life’s simple pleasures. 

I had also looked forward to not having to rush around all day, then go back later for ball games, conferences, school programs, special events, etc. These days it’s hard to pry me out of the house after 5 o’clock in the evening and I’m ok with that. 

As a retired teacher I reflect on all those years, starting as a naïve twenty-something who had actually hated high school. I saw myself in the kids who felt the same. They sat at the back of the room, sleeping or watching suspiciously, guarding themselves by acting out or withdrawing. I felt my sense of purpose and commitment grow quickly when I realized that they were a big part of the reason I was there. I hope that my presence in their lives made a difference. I believe it did.

Most teachers I have known in my career have so much grit, dedication, and love for their students that they would walk through fire for them. Teaching has always been a demanding profession because in order to do it well you must be all in, heart and soul. Teachers work from instinct as much as lesson plans. Maybe more. They constantly monitor and adapt what they are doing and how they interact with children. They know when to throw out the lesson plan and take an interesting detour. Teaching absolutely cannot be quantified or judged based on data alone. Children deserve to be evaluated as whole people, not by test scores. The obsession with constantly changing technology is gutting education by not allowing the time needed for teachers to do what they know is best for their students. Endless data evaluation, strict pacing guides, test prepping, and micro-managing of content do not improve education. Educators improve education. 

Growing pressure from radical groups demanding to know every single detail in a year of lesson plans, months in advance, are making a challenging career almost impossible. The narrative has become increasingly negative, and paints an unrealistic picture of what is happening in Arkansas public schools. A small but vocal minority of people would have us believe that schools are a hotbed of subversive troublemakers. Nothing could be further from the truth. In recent years teachers have had to grow a thicker skin than ever before. The barrage of criticism has become a very heavy burden. Young teachers are leaving the profession in disillusioned droves. Veteran teachers like myself are retiring heartbroken because we do not know who will be there for our children in the future. 

Too many people in decision-making positions do not understand any of this. They continue to beat the same drums, demanding more from educators while offering no additional compensation or respect. Any governor or commissioner of education should be in constant contact with those in the classrooms who work with the students every day. They should come out from behind their office doors and go into communities to listen and learn. There should be a seamless two-way system of communication with school employees so that ideas can flow freely. State governments spend millions of taxpayer dollars on companies and consultants peddling “the next best greatest thing.” These programs claim to solve problems perceived to be present in public schools. These companies and consultants exist to make a profit. I propose that we change course entirely. We should convene groups of highly trained professionals with advanced degrees and many years of experience who know exactly what education should look like. If the pandemic experience has taught us anything, it is that teachers have proven that they possess the organizational skills and the vision to make education happen under the most impossible circumstances. Imagine what they could do under optimal circumstances, provided with adequate time, space, and compensation. That is how you improve education. 

There is no more valuable resource than our future adults. They deserve the best education that we can give them…one that does not come from outside companies. It comes from teachers. History will judge the decisions we make today. Isn’t it time that we made the right one?

The post The Art of Teaching appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

It was her ability to teach combined with her love for us that made learning in her class so much fun. She inspired me to want to learn more.  

The year was 1973. I was about to start the second grade at England Public Elementary School. That year, I was blessed to be assigned to the classroom of Mrs. Helen Bess Braswell.

Mrs. Braswell had as great an impact on me and my education than just about any other teacher I have ever had before or since. It is hard to put into words how special she was to me and what she means to me still.

Mrs. Braswell was incredibly intelligent. We hope all our teachers are, but she was truly at the top. But it wasn’t just her special knowledge that made her special; it was her gift for teaching that knowledge to children that set her apart from most. She taught me how to write in cursive. She taught me phonics. I could go on and on. So many of the foundational blocks of my entire education I received from her. I can’t thank her enough.

I think I was drawn to her because Mrs. Braswell was always such a happy, positive person. Children can pick up on who is kind, who cares about them. That Mrs. Braswell loved her students was never in doubt. She had a cute smile and always a twinkle in her eye. She always had a hug for us when we needed it and encouraging words when we needed them.

It was her ability to teach combined with her love for us that made learning in her class so much fun. She inspired me to want to learn more.  I have been fortunate to have many wonderful teachers, but Mrs. Helen Bess Braswell will always be at the top for me. Mrs. Braswell is the definition of what a teacher should be.

This picture is from the 1973-74 England yearbook when I had her as a teacher.

The post What a Teacher Should Be: Celebrating the Life of Mrs. Braswell appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

I have never been to Burma but my parents were originally from Burma. We are Karen.

Karen is the third largest ethnic group population in Myanmar. Many Karen have migrated to Thailand, settling mostly in the border of Myanmar and Thailand due to the conflict caused by the Burmese military. The conflict has been described as one of the world’s longest running civil war and the Karen nationalist have been fighting for an independent state known as Kawthoolei more than 70 years since 1949 and counting. Most of the Karen people lost their homes, families, and lives.

The Burmese army try to kill Karen people and want to erase our culture because they don’t like us. To them we are their enemy and every time when they catch our Karen people, they rip our clothing and kill us. Burmese soldiers want more territory. They want the Karen village of Kawthoolei and use violence and genocide against Karen men, women, and children to get it. If furious Burmese soldiers see our clothes, they take them all away. When they come through our villages, they rip the clothing off the lines and torch them. They disrespect our culture. The Burmese army general Shwe Maung said “In twenty years, you will only be able to find Karen people in museum.” They also tell other countries that Karen land does not exist because they fight us and take it away, since my grandpa was born.

Because of this conflict, my family was forced to flee to Thailand, where I was born in a refugee camp. My parents tried their hardest to put food on the table while living in Thailand, despite the fact that it was still difficult. My parents have low-wage occupations.

The difference between living in Burma and Thailand is that we have to go hungry and fear the Burmese military in Burma. But in Thailand, we never go hungry, and we never have to worry about the Burmese military pursuing us.

In Thailand, it is necessary to pay to attend school. As a result of our modest income, my parents made the decision to relocate to the United States in 2014 in order to offer a solid education for their children, as well as a healthy life choices. My parents moved to the United States as part of a special migrant worker program. They could come and sacrifice themselves for their children, so that we will grow up with wonderful knowledge instead of growing up in the jungle without education.

My future plan is to make my parents proud. I want to accomplish my goals. I will allow myself to chase my dream that I believe in. Someday, when I get old, I want to be a wise person with knowledge. I will help my Karen people that are left in my country.

Even after all we have been through, the Karen dream of having their own independent state is still flourishing. I am just a young girl but I decided I could fight back against those who want to destroy us—by preserving out traditional clothing. Even though we do not have our own country, our culture is a very crucial part of us. Culture gives us identity and helps us grow our character. Personally, our traditional clothes have a huge impact on our people and the culture as it represents who we are as a nation.

There are different types of Karen traditional clothes in many categories, such as the black Karen traditional shirt with sarong for a married woman. White Karen traditional dresses are for women who are not married. For the men, they wear a Karen traditional shirt with longyi. Karen traditional clothes are kept as a treasure because they are delightfully handmade with very good quality. The skills that Karen people have are unique. Wearing the clothing makes me feel comfortable and good. It makes me look pretty and proud of my culture. I am who I am, and I don’t have to fit in. I embrace my culture it reminds me where I came from. Karen clothing is part of Karen culture because our ancestors represent our culture and where we are from. The traditional clothing is very special gift that has passed in from our ancestors. So, we maintain these attractive clothes and pass them on another generations that lies ahead of us. As long as we do this, Karen culture survives on Earth, in defiance of our murderers.

Karen are so few; we are not very well known, nor are our traditional clothes. Women wove more Karen clothes to pass to a new generation, so it can be known permanently. We celebrate the Karen new year by wearing Karen traditional clothes. Everyone who went to Karen new year wore Karen culture clothes.

So we maintain these attractive clothes and pass them on another generations that lies ahead of us. As long as we do this, Karen culture survives on Earth, in defiance of our murderers.
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I learned that these clothes are what make me stand out; they’re what my parents always wear. My great-great grandmother always wears Karen clothes everyday. There is not a day that goes by where she isn’t wearing it. So, a way to fight back is to keep wearing Karen shirt, never stop wearing it everywhere for Karen holidays. A way to say “we are still here” is to speak up about what happen in Kawthoolei. My friends and I shared our traditional clothes with our friends of different races and teachers in Arkansas at our American school. They are unknown clothes but are the most beautiful traditional clothes, because it describes where we came from. My parents told me that wherever I go, do not forget where I came from.

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The American holiday of Thanksgiving is new to me. My homeland is Myanmar, and my people are Karen. We are hated by the Burmese government so the military hunts us, burns our villages, and tries to destroy us. Because of this danger, my family fled our home and escaped over the border of Thailand. I was born in a refugee camp there. My whole life was in that refugee camp until I was ten years old. One day we got the chance to come to America and that is how I ended up in Clarksville, Arkansas. We don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving with turkey like everyone else, but my heart is full of thankfulness.

I am thankful to have plenty of fresh water and to have enough food to eat so I don’t go hungry.

When I hear the word thankful, I immediately think of the simplest and most basic things we might be grateful for, such as health, friends and family, food, time, and a variety of other things. To me, being grateful also entails being grateful for the fact that I am alive. When you are Karen, that is a significant reason to be thankful. 

We can always be grateful for simple things when time are tough. Henrik Edberg stating that “Because even if things look tough today or for the next 3 or 6 months, I can always find something or several things to feel very grateful for about my life.” There are many things to be thankful for. These are the things I am thankful for: my family and friends, they are the people I need when life gets tough, as well as all the love, support, and kindness they show me. I am thankful to have plenty of fresh water and to have enough food to eat so I don’t go hungry. Having internet access is important to me as well. It’s incredible how we can learn about anything from what other people share online, because when I was in refugee camp, we only had books, a blackboard, and chalk. We never have access to the internet.

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I am grateful for my parents' sacrifices in order to give the best life for us, because coming to America for us without understanding the language was quite brave.
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One of the things I am most thankful for is having a roof over my head and a warm home, because when it is cold, windy, and raining outside, I can safely return inside the house without fear of being soaked or freezing to death. Many people do not have a home and wish to have one. We should always be thankful that we have a beautiful home and we’re living in it. 

The second thing I am thankful for is my parents. I am grateful for my parents’ sacrifices in order to give the best life for us, because coming to America for us without understanding the language was quite brave. My parents encouraged me to value education and taught me how to create goals, which helped me build ambition. Paul Hudson stating that “Parents were the teachers before teachers were teachers.” Having a caring mom that cares about me and supports me is absolutely precious, and I should be grateful for it. “Parents should support their children until they can support themselves.” I am thankful for who my parents are. They are deserving of praise, gratitude, or credit, as well as being pleasing, acceptable, appreciative, and agreeable.

 I am so thankful I came to America and to Arkansas where I can have a better life.

The last thing that I am most thankful for is having a good education. I am grateful that I was able to attend Clarksville high school in Arkansas because there were so many individuals in the Thailand refugee camp who wished to attend school. They are unable to attend school due to financial constraints. Instead, they have to go work with their parents at such a young age. When I was in Thailand refugee camps, schools were not free, and school supplies were not provided. For example, I wanted to go to the expensive private school in the refugee camp which offered a much higher and more decent education, but I was forced to attend the refugee school, which provided very little instruction. I recognize that life is more about appreciation in a refugee camp. I have been encouraged and driven to make every effort to achieve an education.

In conclusion, it’s important to be thankful for what we have. I’m thankful to have a loving and supporting family, a good education, and a lovely home to call home. Robert M. Miller stating that “The month of November brings us Thanksgiving and a chance to take stock of our lives and consider all the things we can be thankful for.” I am so thankful I came to America and to Arkansas where I can have a better life.

The post A Thankful Reflection appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

I recently left a grocery store on a Friday when teachers were in conference and children were out of school.  As I walked out with my bags of groceries, I saw a family.

This family included a mother, father and five small children.  All appeared to be malnourished.  They were very quiet as they walked to their vehicle.  I thought to myself “I wish I had checked out behind those people, I would have given them money or bought some fresh fruit for those children.”

Donating to charities for those less fortunate than ourselves is a good thing, but seeing hunger face-to-face is very different.

As I opened my car door, I noticed the woman using a windshield cleaner to wash the side of a very old looking SUV with a dent in its side.  I thought to myself, “I really need to go to the carwash to get my own car cleaned.”  As I drove away, I saw the little children looking out the windows watching their mother.  I immediately chastised myself, thinking I had missed an opportunity to offer help to people in dire need.

My initial thought was to help that family, but very soon, thoughts about myself took precedence.  We read about hungry children and families, but many of us might not see them in our lives.  Donating to charities for those less fortunate than ourselves is a good thing, but seeing hunger face-to-face is very different.  I found it shocking, and for a few minutes, I could only look.  It was as if my mind could not process what I was seeing.

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As I drove away, I saw the little children looking out the windows watching their mother.  I immediately chastised myself, thinking I had missed an opportunity to offer help to people in dire need.
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I have worried about that family ever since.  Because it was a Friday, with school not in session, I suppose those children did not get food that weekend they usually get in school on Fridays and maybe snacks to take home as I hear some schools provide. 

Why didn’t I stop when she was cleaning their vehicle and offer help?  Why didn’t I act quickly?  I may never see them again in person, but I will think of them continually as well as others who are poor and hungry.

I ask all readers to be alert for help you might offer and act quickly as I did not.  I plan to do so in the future.  Some people might refuse our help but I know, by their appearance and demeanor, the family I saw that Friday would have welcomed it.

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