 Please join me in welcoming Ms. Edelman. So glad to see you. And I thank you for choosing a secret profession that's gonna shape the nation as we go forward. I'm delighted to be anywhere within the Darling Hammond and I thank your foundation president for that very generous introduction. You've gotten some figures from us but I wanna talk to you about America's fifth child. Imagine God coming and every fifth child in America is poor. And Dr. King on his last day of life had called to his mother to give her his next Sunday sermon title and it was why America may go to hell. And he said America may go to hell because she's not gonna use the vast riches that God's blessed us with to make sure that we deal with all of those within our mess who are poor. And he preached on the last sermon at the Bastion Cathedral before his death and the story of Lazarus and Diabes whom I'm sure we all know. And he said Diabes didn't go to hell because he was rich. He went to hell because he refused to see his brother and to meet his brother Lazarus with the sores and respond to him. And he was afraid America may make the same mistake. But for me the problem is even worse when we look at that fifth child who is the poorest in America and the younger our children are, the poorer they are. I'm not talking very well into the mic. Okay, I wanna talk about America's fifth child because one in five children is poor and if they're black and Latino and I'll give you they're even poorer. And half of those children almost are living in extreme poverty that's unworthy of us and it's gonna be our undoing. The greatest threat to America's national security and military security and spiritual security is not coming from any enemy without it's coming from our failure to invest in each of our children and you are wonderful to have chosen the profession that you have and this calling that you have and you other than parents are gonna have the most influence and trying to begin to change these figures. I just thank you for what you've chosen to do and how we can and to talk today about how we can work together because children don't come in pieces. They are in good policy should be like good parenting and we should be doing for everybody's children other people's children what we want for our own children and I go wild when people say well choose one thing you want healthcare or childcare or safety or housing or food you want them all you want them all and you need a continuum of care and each of us has to play our role in seeing the children get what they need to grow into successful adulthood. I mean just imagine God visiting our very wealthy family the largest economy in the world. Blessed with five children four of them have enough to eat and comfortable warm rooms in which to sleep one doesn't. He's often hungry and cold and on some nights she has to sleep on the streets or on a shelter and even taken away from her neglectful family and placed in foster care our group homes with strangers. Imagine this rich family giving four of its children nourishing meals three times a day snacks to fuel boundless energy but sending the fifth child from the table into school hungry with only one or two meals and never the dessert that other children enjoy. Imagine this very wealthy and powerful family making sure that four of its children get all of their shots regular health checkups before they get sick and immediate access to act to healthcare when illness strikes but ignoring the fifth child who is plagued by chronic respiratory infections and painful toothaches could sometimes abscess and even kill for lack of a doctor or a dentist. Imagine this family sending four of their children to good stimulating schools pre-schools and making sure they have music and swimming lessons after school but sending the fifth child to unsafe childcare with untrained caregivers responsible for too many children or leaving that fifth child occasionally with an accommodating relative or neighbor or older sibling or even alone. Imagine four of the children living in homes with books and families able to read to most of their children every night but leaving the other fifth child unread to untalked and unsung and unhugged or propped before a television screen or a video game that feeds him violence and sex and racially and gender-charged messages, intellectual pablum interrupted only by ceaseless ads for material things beyond the child's grasp. Imagine this family sending some of its children to high quality schools and safe neighborhoods with enough books and computers and laboratories and science equipment and well-prepared teachers and sending the fifth child to a crumbling school building with peeling ceilings and leaks and lead in the paint and asbestos and old old books and not enough of them and teachers untrained in the subjects they teach and with low expectations that all children can learn especially the fifth child. And imagine most of the family's children being excited about learning and looking forward to finishing high school going to college and getting a job and the fifth child falling further and further behind grade level not being able to read wanting to drop out of school and being suspended and expelled at younger and younger ages because no one has taught him to read and compute or diagnosed his attention deficit disorder or treated his health and mental health problems and help him keep up with his peers. Imagine four of the children in this very powerful wealthy nation engaged in sports and music and art and after school and summer camps and then enrichment programs and the fifth child hanging out with peers are going home alone because mom and dad are working or in prison or they've run away from their parents and responsibilities and escaped in drugs and alcohol and contrary to popular stereotype America's fifth child is more likely than not to have a family member in the workforce but those children too may be left alone because of the inadequate child care system we have or out on the streets with peers doing the non-school hours with much idleness and weeks and months in the summer and be at risk of being sucked into illegal activities in the prison pipeline or killed by a gun saturated nation that kills a gun kills a child in America every or injures a child kills or injures a child every half hour. There is our children of 17 times more likely to be killed by guns and children in an uncomfortable industrialized nation what is it with us and gun violence that is really destroying the lives of so many and among black children, 17 times more black children have died from guns over the last 50 years than were lost in all the lynchings in American history of black people. What is it that allows us to continue to normalize violence and to glorify violence and to continue the saturation of our culture with guns? This is our American family today where one in five of our children lives in poverty in the richest nation on earth and six and a half million of them with 14, 15 million children, 14.9 to be precise live in extreme poverty or less than half the poverty level. It is not a stable or a healthy or an economically sensible or a just family our failure to invest in all of our children before they get sick or drop out of school and get into trouble, I believe is morally indefensible and extremely costly. Many years ago we did a book called Wasting America's Future and Bob Solo the Nobel Laureate economist from MIT estimated at that time that having 14 million children be poor in America cost our country a half trillion dollars each year in foregone productivity and crime and other dependency costs. It's a costly thing morally but it's a costly thing economically to let children be poor and to be uneducated and to not have the basic healthcare and early childhood foundation that almost every other industrialized nation does. I don't know what it's gonna take to get us to our senses but we're cutting our own noses off our own faces. Black and Hispanic children are at far greater risk of being poor and of entering what we at CDF call the cradle to prison pipeline. The most dangerous place for a child to grow up in America today is still at the intersection of race and poverty despite the extraordinary racial progress we have made despite the number of black elected officials and what has happened over the last years and a black president in the White House black children are still at the bottom they are the poorest children in America after enormously transforming civil rights movement they're at the bottom and on our watch we are letting them slide backwards and we need to stop it. We all need to really begin to confront our birth defects in this country and to really deal with the deep seatedness still of race because these defects if you don't see them and honestly discuss them and try to provide responses will keep flaring up and while our country had the right dream and aspirations to be a place for their level playing field would exist for everybody and which recognized before God people were sacred and had a right to life, liberty and the suit of happiness we have a few major things that was the rhetoric that was the right dream but then it was based on Native American genocide slavery, exclusion of all women from the electoral process and exclusion of all non-properate men white, black, Latino and everybody else and we have been struggling over our history to try to begin to deal with these birth defects so they keep flaring up unless we kind of pull them up and see them and we've gone through a civil war we went through a post civil war reconstruction period then we went back through a resegregation period and the loss of the progress and the reconstruction era and then we went through a civil rights movement to try to begin to make another spirit forward and try to weed out some of these defects and now I fear with all the demographics and with the things that you're hearing and the conditions that we see every day and with the cradle prison pipeline that traps one in three black boys born in 2001 is gonna go to prison in his lifetime if we don't disrupt it and replace it with the pipeline to college and jobs and successful careers and work one in six Latino boys and I fear with the range of things that are going in this country now despite the enormous progress that we've made that we may well be entering a post reconstruction a new reconstruction a new apartheid era because I believe that mass incarceration is the new apartheid the new resegregation that's gonna undo us and your role as educators can have a key key role in breaking that up and I wanna come back to that and we can discuss that but we have got to deal with the incarceration issue and with the fact that minority children and children of color who are now gonna be the majority they're now already a majority of our twos and unders or the fodder for that pipeline. What is a child gonna do if they get into the prison system early or into the juvenile detention system early and just moving on to the adult criminal system but the problem is that education in schools or one of the major feeder systems enter that pipeline and we have the power to change it. I wanna talk about that in just a minute but so many and again when I talk about race and poverty being that dangerous intersection so many of our poor babies in this very rich nation into the world with multiple strikes against them which is why children can't be looked at as coming in pieces without prenatal care at low birth weight and we're making great progress 95% of all children now have access to healthcare but access is not actual healthcare and when I come to my end and I'm talking about the five things we can all do together one of them is helping me roll children in school systems because it's an education issue the kids can't see the teacher, can't hear the teacher has an undiagnosed attention deficit disorder that child's not gonna learn it's gonna be a discipline problem so all of us have a self-interest in making sure that children are healthy and that their mental health needs are also addressed but they're born without prenatal care without with low birth weight sometimes and often too often to a teen a poor and poorly educated single mother an absent father and crucial points in their development from before birth and until adulthood more risk kind of pile on making a successful transition to productive adulthood significantly less likely and involvement in the criminal justice system significantly more likely one in four of our black children is poor and the younger our children one in four of our preschool children is poor the younger a child is the poorer they are in America during their years of greatest brain development and I hope all of us at NEA with all of your cloud and we're all gonna join together and do what every other industrialized country does we're gonna get an early childhood a quality early childhood system in place to get every child ready for school beginning with home visiting we've made incremental progress the president has put in a strong start bill a 90 billion dollar investment over 10 years to talk about home visiting and expanding head start quality head start and early head start and having universal pre-k system I'm also for a universal case system where we're gonna have common core standards and I'm for lifting the quality then you gotta make sure the children prepare to meet those standards and so I hope that we can all work together on this foundational education program and make sure that we have quality early childhood education in this country every other sensible industrialized nation far less wealth than we do has that in place I am deeply, deeply concerned about the status of the black child though and great number of our states 40% of more are poor and about six states half of them are poor and we have got to see them and black child or black children nine times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than white children in the average wealth of white households is 17 times out of black households when one looks at achievement levels and then crucial role that education plays the fact is about 60% of all of our children in 4th and 8th grade cannot read at grade level 75% of Latino children cannot read at grade level in 4th and 8th grade and about 80% and I've just come back from Mississippi 89% of the black children in that state which helped transform America cannot read or compute at grade level in 4th or 8th grade what is a child going to do in this globalizing world and this competitive economy without an ability to read and write and compute it's so basic and so we've really got to focus in on that because if we don't teach them how to read and write they're gonna be sentenced to the prison pipeline the average literacy level in the Mississippi prison system that is just filled with black boys and black men many of them on drug use charges and unequal enforcement of drug laws is palpable but their average literacy level is 5th grade what are they gonna do when they get out of prison with a prison record but also unable to get jobs and jobs are not there and we've got to talk about how we create jobs and just imagine how many new jobs would be created that we put into place a 90 billion dollar early childhood program and we've got to get public sector jobs on the agenda because people need to work and they need to see hope and we could solve a lot of our children's problems by investing in these programs like early childhood and comprehensive health centers and school based clinics and create jobs as well as meet the needs of children we've got to deal with child poverty with a sense of urgency and we've got to really look at the entire child and I want to talk about what we can do to make sure that our children can have hope the first thing is to just recognize and I say this all the time and again, I think you have such you've chosen to do the most important thing other than parenting in American molding the fate of children is recognize that God did not make two classes of children and that every child is sacred and when you go into that classroom in the morning try to remember that and it's hard I mean, I understand that you're dealing with a lot of very complicated projects but remember the sacredness of your task and what influence you're gonna have to shape that child's future you gotta have high expectations for every child you gotta, because children, you can't fool children they can spell, you can have the fanciest classrooms the best equipment in the world the best staffed laboratories in the world but if you don't love those children and understand and respect those children they'll sense it in a minute and we really have got to remember the sacredness and the importance of our task and I'm sure that most of us do on some days, just as most parents, including me do on some days even when their children are very complicated but hang in there it's not easy but hang in there and try to see the whole child and remember it the child is the point of the school not adult convenience, not adult jobs it's the child and you're molding the future of the nation and I can't tell you how many times I wanna say how grateful I am that you've chosen this sacred mission and profession but just always keep, I tell my staff at CDL keep the baby in the middle of the table when you're making all kinds of decisions stick him there and stick her there and the poorest and most vulnerable child and is this policy that you're proposing gonna help that baby not whether they're gonna be raised money off of it not whether it's politically popular is it good for the child and so you've chosen the right profession so just trying to remember those very frustrating days secondly I hope that we can work together and addressing the needs of the whole child I wanna come back to child health and child nutrition because we've got over a million children homelessness is growing and just imagine what it'd be like in a homeless shelter day in and come into your classroom and they haven't eaten and they've had all this noise and the things that they're exposed to is just unbelievable and so it's gonna be difficult for you if they're acting out but think about what they're coming with and try to begin to get that second breath and help deal with it but keep the child before you hunger is just still a problem we have made enormous strides in hunger but I just came back from Mississippi and hunger is back rapidly across Mississippi and sometimes it manifests itself as obesity your school lunch and your school breakfast programs are terribly important but I hate to read some of the reports I get from my state offices on Monday morning when a child misses, the bus is late and they miss breakfast on Monday morning and they cry and so the school can't simply say that's the family response but we've gotta figure out how to deal with this basic survival need of our children and I work particularly about what happens to our poorest children when summer, when school is out and there's a 90% drop in the food summer program the summer feeding program what do they do all summer and they are hungry and we're now gonna retrace Robert Kennedy's steps and knocking on the empty doors finding people with no income and there are six million Americans right now in the latest data that have no cash income and the only thing keeping the walls from the door are food stamps and many of the people have to use their food stamps or trade their food stamps to keep the lights on and to keep the heats on but then what happens in the summer and so the second thing I really want us to all think about is how do we begin to work together to ensure food safety net? I don't understand why if you've got a 100% federal funding program for summer food we can't get the bureaucracy to ease up and to figure out ways to do it but I think that we've gotta make more and more partnerships and more schools are beginning to try to seal how they can stay open in the summers to feed these children we should not have hungry children in America and we should not have millions of hungry children in America that's an education issue it's a basic decency issue and I hope we can work together on how we can make sure that I know many of you are doing lunch pack things and backpack things on weekends though I do also hear that some rich school districts have stopped doing even school lunches because most of the affluent children bring their own lunches and so you've got pockets of hunger even in some of our richest districts we've gotta deal with hunger it's an education issue and it's unworthy of us as Americans and we need to figure out how we can work together and make a mighty noise to say surely we can figure out how we're gonna get children not only enough food but good food and healthy food because obesity is a new manifestation of that secondly how do we work together to get healthcare so that you don't have children sitting who can't hear you or can't see you or who can't focus or concentrate or have attention deficit disorders and I'm just very pleased that we've been working with Aisa the American School Administrators Association with a number of school districts around the country they began in Texas just having in Houston them ask questions on the first day are you, is your child covered by health insurance do you have private insurance or do you know about chip and Medicaid and we had enormous success in Texas enrolling hundreds of thousands of children in healthcare and it is making a difference and through the Atlantic Philanthropies Grant we are now working with school districts in several other states to enroll children in healthcare and I just hope that that can become a partnership that we can work out with in more schools because they're not gonna learn if they are hurting or if they can't see or can't hear and I'd love to talk about that and I hope we can work with you to extend chip because chip funding expires the Child Health Insurance Program next year and we need to get it reinforced this year and I just hope that we won't move backwards we've had huge success in getting millions of children eligible for healthcare the 5% of the, in the 95%, the 5% that is missing in our enrollment of children who are eligible and that enrollment in our eligibility for healthcare or immigrant children and I keep telling everybody child's a child and a child who's not healthy or not immunized is a threat to all of us but at any rate let's keep chip and I hope that we can work together on both enrolling at the local level but at the same time trying to make sure that we get chip re-enrolled third I really do hope that we can all work together and thinking anew about school discipline policies in particular the zero tolerant school discipline policies I am, our first report as a children's defense fund was on children out of school in America and it came out in 1974 and I wanna just read to you what we found we had looked at the census data and found there were two million children not enrolled in any school and 750,000 of them between seven and 13 years old and I couldn't figure out why would 750,000 children between seven and 13 be out of school so we knocked on thousands of doors and 30 census tracks and what we found is that 750,000 children mostly children with disabilities emotional, mental and physical and so our first act nationally was to work together with the coalition of disability groups parents who had disabled children and with coalitions in George Miller came to town same time that we did and we were able to get 94-142 and then which is now the individual disabilities action we made great progress but we still have a long way to go but we also found extraordinary things about school discipline and the children were being expelled for truancy and tardiness and catch all terms like disruption I just have to tell you I don't understand how a child is not coming to school that the antidote is to put them out of school and that there are really long term problems that come from that and we found the largest number of uninsured of children who were out of school and two all white census tracks in Portland, Maine and for catch all terms the suspension route problem had a huge contributing factor to that and so we called then and I want to tell you what we said about what we found about why children are being excluded which is why I constantly say not two classes of children really think about it and as we now are having these changing demographics we need to do that but what we found in children out of school was that if children, a child was not white or was white but not in middle class didn't speak English is poor needs special help with seeing, hearing, walking, reading learning, adjusting, growing up was pregnant or married at age 15 was not smart enough or was too smart school was not the place for that child out of school children shared a common characteristic of differentness by virtue of race, income, physical, mental or emotional handicap and age they are for the most part out of school not by choice but because they have been excluded it is as if many school officials have decided that certain groups of children are beyond their responsibility or and or expendable not only do they exclude these children they frequently do so arbitrarily, discriminatorily and with impunity Charles had come to school I think we should find out why he's not coming to school and work it out and I think that I'm not and the catch all terms of disruption and things like that need to be looked at and the application of school discipline policies against largely black boys and children's special needs needs to be looked at but I just want to say we need to stop the feet of system from the schools to the juvenile justice system to the adult criminal system and if children are engaged in having fun learning and if we have thoughtful restorative justice practices I was very struck back then I could not find one entry in the Harvard Graduate School of Education on school discipline and I really think that this is a time now because of the tragedy of over incarceration of children and the role that school suspensions and expulsions play in that and excluding children from school we need to break that tie and there are a number of wonderful models restorative justice models that are going on but we need to talk about alternatives we need to keep our children in school and to keep them stimulated and I don't know that there's anything that can make me believe that four-year-olds should be expelled and we've got to be able to figure out how we keep our children in schools and there are a number of things in process now I'm very grateful that a number of school districts and others are beginning to reconsider this but I just hope that everybody will think about the implications and we're also working with a number of unions to train security guards in these schools and let them understand the implications when they hand out a ticket for transparency or for tiredness and the implications of that is gonna be for that child staying or not staying in the school so I hope that we can work together on more enlightened and positive school discipline problems and break that tie between schools and the juvenile justice system I hope we can also work together and we are with a number of school districts on some learning loss and one way we can get around the hunger of children in the summer and we have 202 freedom schools which are summer schools with wonderful books that are taught by college students from the communities where these children are growing up and I wanna tell you that a huge number of the black and about a third 90% of black and Latino and about a third of black and Latino males and many of them are changing their majors to go into teaching after having experienced with these children in the summer freedom schools and the children are beginning to learn that there's something called college in their future and not just prison in their future by having people who've gone through the same things they have in their own community who come in with enormous energy and understanding and ability to listen and the freedom schools which come out of the summer project of Mississippi put a really rigorous literacy curriculum underneath the terrific books that give children hope and they can see themselves in it and we're gonna do a major symposium in freedom school training at the Alex Haley Forum which is our movement building school next summer and I hope you'll come the first week in June on cultural diversity and racial diversities and books but our children are finding that reading is fun and what says that learning cannot be fun most of the time and so the summer freedom schools has been a really important thing and I love it because it is making a difference in stopping summer learning loss and we know about that and it's like those of us who have privileges can send our kids to the best camps and enrichment activities but they also work everywhere and they are run in large part by college students but we have nine, we have 14 this summer and secure juvenile detention facilities because in addition to working to make sure that children, the schools don't feed into the juvenile justice system we're trying to make sure that we stop at the juvenile justice system don't have them automatically go on to adult prison we have them in homeless shelters we have them with public schools in a number of places and I love it and I hope that we can begin to collaborate more and engage more public schools and we have a number at HCBU's or historically black colleges at mainstream universities like Duke and Davidson College and the State University of New York but I hope we can look together to see how we might partner further and trying to make sure that children have positive alternatives to the street in the summer I also hope we can work together I'm trying to talk about equal funding for all of our schools our first report before we became a children's defense fund was on Title I and is it helping poor children and the answer was no we examined all the audit files and then HEW and found that money was going to almost everybody except poor schools children in poor schools and my favorite example my least favorite example was that they built a swimming pool in suburban Memphis with Title I money but the formulas have become even more unequal over time and we all need to work together to make sure that poor children are getting fair shake from our funding streams at the federal level lastly I just want to come back to just the importance of what we're doing I want to just my sister sent me an old clipping about everything you need to know in life you can learn from Noah's Ark and it was from some anonymous fellow and the first thing he said was that don't miss the boat and the country is going to miss the boat if we don't educate our children we are lagging behind many other industrialized country and we are going to miss the boat if we don't invest in them first not last and we do not have a money problem in America we have valleys and priorities problem we've got to educate our children and fund education and early childhood second lesson from this anonymous sage was that we're all in the same boat and we might like these poor children who are of color and who have come to all these come to schools with all their problems but they're our children and they're going to be a majority of our public school children in a few years they're already a majority of our under twos I want them to be educated to support my social security system and my Medicaid system and I don't want to be supporting them in prison states are investing on average three times more per prison than for public school people that's a really dumb investment policy and so we need to reverse that we can't afford that we need to not only from the sacredness of every child but understand the common senseness of invested thirdly he said don't plan ahead it wasn't raining when Noah built the Ark and we are very short term quick fix culture the next quarter these children today are the workforce tomorrow or the prisoners of tomorrow and we look at the responsibility and the opportunity you hold in your hands to shape the future of America the fourth lesson was don't be criticized Noah wasn't popular they thought he was crazy but if you don't want to be criticized don't do anything don't say anything and don't be anything and I just hope that we will be willing to kind of get out of our comfort zones and really talking about the need to make education early education and children first not last and our budget priorities and our nation's priorities but my favorite I'm not going to go through all seven of the lessons but my last one I want to mention because I think we have to have a movement and all of us have to be a part of it and it has to be focused on children and ending child poverty in the richest nation on earth and the one I love the most is to remember that the Ark was built by amateurs and the Titanic by experts everybody seems to be waiting around for Dr. King to come back he's not coming back Dr. King never led a movement in his life he didn't spark them he came he embodied it movements and transforming change comes from all of us coming together around an overarchingly important cause and our children are that overarching important cause and I just hope that we can work together keeping them on the middle of the table and figure out how we're going to make sure that we give them all healthcare and the world's biggest economy that we speak out to end child poverty and we're going to be issued a report at the end of this year and ways we can end child poverty based on what we're already doing just investing more and it's not a token of what we're spending in the military or not a token of what the top one percent and the top one half of one percent are getting we don't have a money problem but we have a voice problem and an organization problem and an insistence problem and we've got to reorder these parts of America really is not going to fulfill Dr. King's very scary priority I also hope that we can just end with a prayer because my favorite introduction ever was by a former school superintendent state superintendent of education in North Carolina and he shared with me and I now try to share it with everybody I can a prayer by my friend Anna Hughes and I want to just end with that just to keep you going on days when you really want to throw in the towel and you're very frustrated and you think nobody appreciates you just really, really keep yourself grounded in the sacredness of your task and the absolute essentialness of your task as you're trying to prepare this country for the next era and to compete with increasingly challenging competitors and so let's just think about the children when they're acting out in class and to see if you remember these children and she let me play around with some of her words her name is Anna Hughes and she was a reporter for the Knoxville Times and but this is a wonderful thing about again all children being our own and this is called a prayer for all children we pray for children and accept responsibility for children who sneak popsicles before supper who raise some holes in math workbooks and who can never find their shoes but we also will pray and stand up for and accept responsibility for children who can't bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers who were born in places we wouldn't be caught dead and who never go to the circus and live in an x-rated world let's pray and accept responsibility and teach with love those children who hug us in a hurry in our own homes and forget their lunch money but let's also pray and speak up for and protect those children who never get dessert who have no safe blanket to drag behind them who don't have any rooms to clean up whose pitches aren't on anybody's dresser and whose monsters are real let's teach and pray and respect those children who spend all of their allowance before Tuesday throw tantrums in the grocery store picket their food like ghost stories who shove dirty clothes under the bed and never rinse out the tub who get visits from the tooth fairy don't like to be kissed in front of the car pool who squirm in church and temple and scream in the phone whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry but let's also recommit and the wonderful choices we've already made to be a teacher or an administrator or an educator to pray and accept and hang in there with children whose nightmares come in the daytime who lead anything who've never seen a dentist or a doctor who aren't spoiled by anybody who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep who live and move but have no being let's pray and accept responsibility and build a movement to invest in all of our children those who want to be carried and those who must be carried those we never give up on but those who don't get a second chance for those we smother and for those who will grab the hand of anyone kind enough to offer it your choice of profession your choice of mission and work has already sort of made you take a side and I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart and I do hope that we together are gonna come together and form that next transforming movement my first visit to Washington was to set up an order for the Poor People's Campaign for Dr. King and he was coming and he got assassinated as we know and the riots broke out all across the country and I went out into the schools here in Washington DC over near U Street and tried to talk to the kids and tell them not to get into trouble not to riot, not to steal, not to loot because they would ruin their future and one little boy about 12 looked me straight in the eye and said, lady, what future? I ain't got no future I ain't got nothing to lose and we have yet to answer that boy's indictment and are militarily rich and economically rich and yet too spiritually poor nation it is gonna be our undoing but you and I have the power to change that and we are going to change that and we're gonna work together and keep children at the middle of the table to change that and we're gonna make children not jobs, not anything else not our convenience, not our fatigue we've gotta keep children there and that is doing God's work and that is saving the future of this country and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.