 And now it is time to present the first National Bank of Omaha award for outstanding service to public education. Now this award recognizes an individual or an organization that has made exceptional contributions to advance public education throughout the entire nation. We extend our deep appreciation to first National Bank of Omaha for their extraordinary support of this award. So please everybody help me and all of your enthusiasm welcome Scott Smith, Senior Vice President, Partnership Management, who will be presenting this award. I'd also like to invite Valerie and Sarah to join us on stage. Scott? It's a lot of energy, I hope I can carry the torch. But first of all before I start I'd like to thank each and all the educators in here, all the awardees tonight. You have probably the most important job out there in helping teach our kids. So give yourself a round of applause. So I couldn't be more proud tonight to present this award. You know the recipient of tonight's award really joins an exclusive club of members like Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, President Bill Clinton, Linda Darling Hammond, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and many, many more. So tonight I'm proud to announce the winner of the Outstanding Service to Public Education to the Algebra Project. This company for the last 40 years has had a mission to develop math literacy in all of our schools and our children. Their founder Bob Moses, who is a celebrated civil rights and math scholar, you know he believed all children including children in historically marginalized communities should have access to advanced mathematics. So let's take a few minutes and we have a short video to explain a little bit more of who the Algebra Project is and their participation in We the People Math Literacy Initiative. All across the country over the last two and a half decades there have been in some sense little springs that have popped up, people have decided they want to own a piece of this problem. There are people in schools that have been working it, people in universities that have been working it, people in other institutions. This math literacy empowers young people to rethink how they view math as you know not just something that is hard and I'm either good at it or bad but something that I can work through and talk my way through. So doing math literacy work is a tool that enables you to really experience and practice and grow into stepping into your power. And it's not just an issue of saying then well let's just teach the mathematics because if you're dealing with students who already feel like it is not for them but we know that it can be. We know there's nothing inherent in the mathematics that is going to shut people out then what do we need to do in the classroom and what do we need to do to help them demand entry into the spots in college, in their lives, in their jobs and everything. In order to change the culture of education in schools you have to also change the culture around education, the place where the kids come from. YVP keeps chipping away at that question. There are ways that the young people can be meaningful change agents around raising the floor for math literacy for all kids in the country. Kids are being engaged, kids are taking it and running with it right not just even taking it to the level that we wanted at but taking it to a whole another level where it's more applicable for them in their lives that they're enjoying it that they're seeing a future in it. We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity to ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. It's a simple declarative sentence and we have to decide if we are going to be of we the people in this country. On behalf of the 4,000 employees of First National Bank of Omaha I'm proud to present this year's award for outstanding service to public education to the Algebra Project. Accepting the award tonight is the director of operations for the Algebra Project Ben Moynihan. I'm executive director with the Algebra Project and Ms. Ladonde Love the vice chairperson of our board of directors joins me tonight. She's right there, give a wave. All right, we're so grateful Scott to you and the First National Bank of Omaha for this tremendous for this tremendous honoring of our late founder Bob Moses and for this recognition of the Algebra Project through the 2022 award for outstanding service to public education. We also extend our gratitude to Valerie Lasseter, Sarah Snead and Meg Porta and the whole team at the NEA Foundation for lifting up the continuation of Bob's legacy. Because for us, mathematics is a critically important civil rights issue and a foundational component of a quality K-12 public education. For almost 40 years, Bob Moses and the Algebra Project have been weaving together lessons from the Mississippi voting rights movement of the 1960s with mathematics, education, philosophy, theory and practice into a fabric of instructional materials as well as pedagogical and organizing strategies that raise the floor of math literacy for students in marginalized school communities around the country. Last summer, shortly before he passed away, Bob Moses wrote, amidst the planet-wide transformation we are undergoing, from industrial to information age economies and culture, math performance has emerged as a critical measure of equal opportunity. We can see the collateral damage of inequities in math education in the way that students are tracked into dead-end math courses and how that tracking is then used to deny them other opportunities because they cannot demonstrate the required math competencies on standardized tests. Students and teachers, currently encapsulated in the inequities and disparities of the current public education system, like the sharecroppers before them, must be deeply involved, as you all are, in crafting the opportunity structures that will be needed to deliver 21st century math literacy. The nation needs a federal civil rights bill for education, one that opens up the funding and policies needed to assure full access for all students who are currently being left out of the critical literacies that will be required to thrive in the 21st century. So folks, in responding to Bob's clarion call to action, we also extend to you all two invitations. First, this July 28th and 29th, the Algebra Project and the We The People Math Literacy for All Alliance are hosting a free online conference highlighting student and teacher-led math literacy initiatives. Please visit www.algebra.org to register. And second, please visit perhaps the longest URL in the world, www.qualityeducation as aconstitutionalright.org, to join a growing coalition of organizations sparking a national conversation about the need for a federal guarantee for quality K-12 public education. So thanks again to the First National Bank of Omaha, of course, to the NEA Foundation and to you all for this great honor.