Senate News

When the jackpot approaches a billion dollars a lot of people go out and buy lottery tickets, even though normally they hardly pay any attention to the lottery.

Those occasions are good news for Arkansas college students, because the state will collect more money than usual for lottery scholarships.

The Crime Information Center (ACIC) is one of the most important agencies in law enforcement, although many people are unfamiliar with it.

Its primary duty is to operate a massive data system for 250 law enforcement agencies in Arkansas. When local officers take the fingerprints of a criminal suspect, they look for a match in a massive data base with prints submitted by the FBI, the National Crime Information Center and the other 49 states. ACIC is responsible for the entry of all Arkansas criminal files to the national system.

The Arkansas legislature has tried to apply lessons learned by other states when it enacted school safety laws over the past several years. The Senate and House Committees on Education heard an update from the chair of the commission, who said that “collectively we’ve passed some of the most comprehensive school safety legislation in the country.”

The Arkansas Economic Development Commission broke records for job creation and investment last year. Thirty companies invested close to $6 billion and announced the creation of 5,359 jobs. The average salary of those new jobs is $29 an hour.

The state will continue to accept applications from families who want to fund their children’s tuition with Education Freedom Accounts, and perhaps as early as February the state will begin accepting applications for next school year.