 OER is a perfect opportunity to help the students of the technical college system of Wisconsin to thrive. I'm here to plead and ask for the OERs to be part of our school journeys. I think the most important thing to understand is what OER is, open educational resources. Currently, what we as students have to do is purchase a new textbook for each course that we take. The fees associated with those purchases are astronomical. We're struggling with tuition, so some of these books that are very expensive are costing like $600. Make a lot of international students, especially black students, to drop out because we have other things to worry about, like paying our bills. When I came back to school because I'm a non-traditional student, I learned that books are really expensive, and with financial aid it does help, but that's pretty much for tuition. I am a full-time worker. I can only take part-time classes at Marine Park. I have to pay for gas, I have to pay for rent, and with the textbook cost it's been a little tight money-wise. With my past experience at Nicolet, I've had to buy a bundle of nursing books, which we only ended up using about half of them, but it ended up costing me $800 for that bundle, and we didn't have the option to choose individual books that we could buy, we had to buy the bundle. So it would take an entire month of work to be able to afford that bundle, and that's not including, you know, the expenses I have to pay for housing, for transportation. Having one less bill to pay, which is textbooks which sometimes comes as $2,000 a semester, reduces stress. I'm trying to prove to my son, show him that school is worthwhile, and I am finding it hard because my books this semester were $1,600. I am a full-time student, a full-time worker, and a homeowner, so open educational resources would very much benefit me just for the fact that my money working at a full-time job goes towards my home. I don't feel like people should have to choose between whether they're going to eat or their kids are going to eat, whether they have lights or not, and books. We are asking for more funding for OER so that we can provide this open education to those going through the technical college system. The small bills that can help us make a difference is the small bills that can encourage us to be able to sign up for classes and have the force to keep going. That open educational resource allows us to update the needs of our community, the needs of constantly changing fields with the most up-to-date and current information, and by doing that, we've now given and empowered our local educators and faculty, our students, and those of us who then graduate and reenter our communities with the knowledge to perform our job function, the most up-to-date, accurate and powerful tools that we can. It matters because it reduces financial burden for all students, not just myself, but other students across the Wisconsin Technical College system. We would be able to focus more on more classes, getting more students in our campuses, having that student body that we can really advocate for that aren't worried about where their next paycheck is going to come from. So if students don't have to worry about the financial burden of purchasing textbooks, we can in my situation work less hours and spend more time on our studies, which is the real reason we're in college in the first place, is to master new material. With OER, it's actually been great because I found out that most of my classes have different alternatives, like some have PDFs that you can download and print. There's videos that I can watch, so it's been really helpful because I would work so much trying to just pay tuition or whatever. So now that I have these resources, I can spend more time studying, and I study my tickets off. If legislators invest in us right now, we will invest ourselves and repay that back to the state in the future with all of the knowledge that we've gained.