 Okay, folks, so everybody's ready to leave. Buses are outside, not gonna take too long. But I do have some final things. I mean, you can stay if you want, it'd be fun. Hello everyone, I think I've met mostly everybody in here. If I have it, my name is Elena Silva. I'm the director of Pre-K-12 Education at New America, part of Team PIA, proud to be part of it, proud to be part of this growing community. My job here is to close out a wonderful and inspiring couple of days. I have a few big thank yous I have to give. I know we've been thanking and thanking, but I'm gonna give them again. And a couple of requests of all of you. But first, I am bound by the title of this closing, which is What's Next for Youth Apprenticeship? When we look back in 10 years or in 20 years, and we remember that time when we were at Trident Tech, remember when we were in Charleston, and there were all those people there. They were folks from Maryland, my home state, Tennessee, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Tennessee, Colorado, Washington state, and the list goes on and on. They were more than, was that a shout out to a state? Okay. Who did I miss that needs the shout out? Texas, Kentucky, Colorado, goes Tennessee, yeah. So more than 30 states are here. That could be even more than that. That's pretty impressive. So we've heard from apprentices, we've heard from employers, we've heard from educators, and we've shared ideas, and we've shared lessons, and we've shared a common vision of what youth apprenticeship, high quality youth apprenticeship should be. The question here is, are we gonna look back after those years and say, oh, yeah, that was cool, but it was another. That was cool, but it was another, a come and gone education reform. There's a lot of those. Another effort to improve workforce development. There's a lot of those. Or will we remember it as a starting point of something much bigger? Now so we're betting on the latter, and I think as Mary Alice said earlier, it's a big bet. But we're betting on the latter for a few big reasons that bring us all here together. First, we believe that youth apprenticeship taps a sorely needed and more diverse talent pool for employers. They're confronted by an aging workforce. They need ways to grow their own talent, to grow their own pipelines for workers. New America itself has done a tremendous amount of research and analysis on apprenticeship, adult apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship, and we know that it's a proven strategy. We know that it can prepare and connect more people to stable, well-paying jobs and to help build local economies and strengthen communities. But I want to focus for a minute on the youth part of youth apprenticeship. So I have a 14-year-old son. He's about to turn 15. It's terrifying to me that some of the young people that were up here, just a couple years older or maybe even his age, because I can't imagine him doing this work. I can't imagine him being up here and being that impressive. He's impressive in his own right, but anyway, he's recently told me in no uncertain terms as 14-year-olds want to do. That he just wants to finish high school because he wants to be done with learning. He wants to get a job, just enough money to pay for an apartment, food, and probably his video games. And so I said, done with learning. And he's used to me, so he rolled his eyes and he's like, no, mom, I'm not done with learning. I'm still gonna learn, but it's gonna be learning that matters. And so I've heard this a lot. And we probably all have, if you've worked with young people, what matters to a young person? We heard the apprentices yesterday. Byron and Stephanie and Candice and Jordan and Josh. Also the ones we met at halls. We heard them say that they cared about their family, that they didn't want to be embarrassed, but they wanted to be challenged. That they have dreams and they have interests and they have passions. We heard all of that. And we heard, I think it was Josh that said that he wanted to get out of his comfort zone. It challenged him to get out of his comfort zone. I've been working in education and in youth development for more than 20 years. And it's a little scary because I think I've been saying that for a while, which I'm gonna have to start saying like more than 25 years at some point. Anyway, but it's been a long time. And I can tell you, I can do one thing about high school students, about adolescents or high school age youth. And then another thing about high schools, which are really important for this work in youth apprenticeship. About high school students or adolescents. They crave relevance. They want to belong. They want meaning and they want purpose. And they're at a stage of their development where they're forming their identities and they're really trying to connect to something. They're looking for something to belong to and they're looking to make meaning and feel like they matter. That's the stage of development that they are in. And when you sit right next to that, this fact about the American high school, where the American high school by design is built to isolate adolescents from the rest of the world. Not the other way around. Like we act as though we were confused by why is it so hard to connect high schools outside? It's built that way. Not all high schools are, but the traditional high school is, and most high schools are, and the high school system is built that way. And so what happens is, we have a sort of a lock box, a nine to 12 lock box, and you could add middle school if you wanted, where they're kind of stuck there. And so it's not surprising to hear Mayor Woodfinn say that recall being bored, talk about how people bored, there's a tremendous disengagement right now among young people. It's not a new thing, but a lot of folks and data will say it's growing and that that's a real problem. It makes it a really an uphill battle then to find a high school that can make learning matter. Like learning that matters. So I hope what we can think about that because I think youth apprenticeship is a potential solution to that. When you look at all the redesign and transformation efforts that have been done for the high school across decades, what they all have in common, they're all designed, they're all about making it more permeable, more connected to the outside world, more experiential, more related to real world experiences. Everywhere you look, if you look at high school reform and high school transformation, those are the words people are using, that's what they're trying to do. It's what we've been trying to do for a very long time. We haven't done it well enough, but it's the right thing to do. And it is the way in which the high school has to transform. And there are a lot of high schools that are doing this, that are trying to make these connections. We've made huge inroads in the connection between high schools and college. We've got good examples of that. Dual enrollment in this case is a good one. How good of a job have we done connecting high schools to career? For all the talk, for college and career ready, education and training, we put those words together a lot. Haven't really done a particularly good job at that. In part, as I said, because that system is pretty locked. Yesterday, Dr. Thornley said that youth apprenticeship was, she thought the most exciting thing for community colleges. So I just want to offer that the high school, that other point on the triangle of PIA, it's probably one of the best opportunities for high schools to really, truly change. Because it's gonna connect them in a way they haven't been connected. It's gonna be a leverage point we really haven't used before. And there's tons of reasons that I can't get into why we haven't used it, but we haven't. We say we want them to be connected, this education and training, but youth apprenticeship is an opportunity to challenge the notion that education and work are separate entities. We function that way in the society and we need to do better than that. Yesterday when Eric, I think yeah, Eric was mentioning the, he was monitoring the panel and mentioned who's, or made the remark, who's influencing whom. And he was talking about the relationship between an apprentice and an employee mentor about how one learns from the other. It's actually an exchange, right? It's not just the apprentice that's learning, but it's the flip as well. And I would offer that that's the same for education and employment. We don't do as good of a job, but this is a way to bring it together so that culturally and structurally, we are connecting those two things, connecting education and work together. Can we do that well? We're gonna find out and we're gonna find out because of all of you. We have a community here that's growing in number. It's growing in ambition. Already we've seen more energy and interest than we ever anticipated when we started this. We named the endeavor PIA, the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship, because it's not something that lives at New America. It's not something that lives at any one of the partners and it's not something that even lives in the collective of the partners. It lives outside of that. It's a partnership that we always envisioned would be growing outward, would be a network of activity across the country. And that's what you all represent. So that's why I was naming all those states and districts or states and cities. You all come from different places and you have different perspectives and different contexts. We see this though as a moment when we can build from a common vision. Starting from that, we come together around a common language and as you've heard throughout, common principles for high quality youth apprenticeship. The principles you've probably been hearing quite a bit. They happen to be on the wall because we just, in activity, career oriented, accountable, equitable, portable, adaptable. We hope these work because we've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what are the core messages and what are the core principles that really undergird high quality youth apprenticeship? Excuse me. I wanna, I was gonna go through the principles, but we don't have time and there's a bus and I feel as though it's important that people probably get on those buses since they will leave us behind as some of us know. But I do wanna, I wanna highlight one in particular. The last one I was gonna mention that I was gonna dig into is equitable. And the reason I wanna dig into that in particular is that equity and the definition of equitable is a central tenet of New America's work. Certainly a designing principle for PIA and how we see the work going forward. And back to my points about the high school, it's one of the thorniest ones. If you look at the sticky notes in our exercise, equitable got a lot of them. Okay, we went around and we were identifying challenges and folks were putting them up there. Equity has been difficult for our country. It's difficult for our education system. It's difficult for employment outcomes. It's difficult across the board. So I mention it because it's the for whom question. And if we design this and if we move forward with youth apprenticeship and we do not design it with equity at the center as a starting point, then we could very well end up in 10 or 20 years looking back and saying, oh, that was really too bad. You know, we did some cool things because we can design really strong, great programs. They will be sustainable, they'll work and they'll serve the same kids that are already being served right now. And that's not the point of this. The point of this is to serve the kids that are not being well served, to open up access to more kids who don't have built-in networks and don't have the social capital that other kids have. So the equity one stands out for us. We hope it stands out for you. All of them are important, but I want to bring it to your attention and bring it to the fore because it really is a defining principle for all of our work. So a request, consider yourself part of PIA. If you could keep your eye out for an email, we're gonna be following up, we will find you. We hope, and at that point we're gonna be asking you if you would, if you could please sign on to support those principles and support the work. We hope and you see yourselves as part of this community not just to stay connected with us as PIA and the partners in PIA, but also with each other. So we're hoping that we've built a network here where you all are cross-pollinating on your own. Second, please share what you've learned. You all have your own networks, your own communities and we want all of these materials, all of this information to go out to your folks and to your networks. Melissa asked me to mention that on your, what's this called, flash drive? It's a cool flash drive. Yeah, so all of the Trident Tech and Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship materials are on this, also share those. So don't just share them widely. We want them to be shared as far as possible. And then finally the beauty of a partnership, again I think I'd said is that it's a huge diverse collection of assets and people and that's awesome. It also means there's tons of thank yous. So bear with me for one minute. I wanna thank our partners. I wanna thank our funders. You all shared the vision of a more connected employment and education pathways from the beginning and believed as we do that ultimately will lead to a more inclusive economy and society. We thank you for being partners with us from the start and we will look to build that further as we go forward. Also special thanks to Trident Technical College for hosting us. Y'all have been wonderful. Thank you to Dr. Thornley. Thank you to Mitch and Melissa. Thank you to all of you who've been such gracious hosts. And I have to thank my colleagues at New America because Team PAIA has been running on fumes to make this happen on our end. So thank you all. You're not even in here to hear it. I don't know where you are, but thank you. And there's a couple last things I wanna mostly end with a thank you to all of you because it took a lot of time out of your lives to come here and be together and represent a nation of people that are trying to build high quality youth apprenticeship. So thank you because the answer to what's next for youth apprenticeship is that you all are what's next for youth apprenticeship. So thank you.