 At Horace Mann, we applaud educators' dedication to teaching excellence, ensuring all students receive a quality education. We believe in helping educators find solutions to help them achieve financial success, to live better and retire happier. That's why we proudly sponsor the NEA Foundation Horace Mann Awards for Teaching Excellence to honor educators selected by their peers for their professional excellence and dedication to their students. Please join me in congratulating and honoring the five individuals who are this year's Horace Mann Award recipients. This school is the only alternative school for elementary school students in the district. We work with children who have discipline issues and social issues but the teachers and the staff, the principal are devoted to helping children. Many of my colleagues, when they hear about alternative school, they tend to run from it but I run to it because those students, they have to be taught as well. Everything has worked before now so if we don't reach them now, we have some kids that will never be reached. Elementary school is the foundation. I think we are one of the final interventions before some of our kids get on that prison pipeline. A lot of them have parents and maybe even grandparents who are incarcerated and we're trying to break that system. We don't want that to continue. Let's get ready to spell. T-O-A-S-T-I-N-G-O-S-T. All right, good job. It doesn't stop here at the school. Once the day is done here at the school, I shift into second gear and move on to what is next and that is community service work. Leah is the consummate teacher. She's the consummate leader and union activist. You might see her working with children or you might see her working with the NAACP. We start this off with a photo that you're going to draw. I can't give up. I can't give up because I know that it's no telling what would happen if we did. Rap music emerged. What does it mean? What does it mean? Can somebody give me an idea of what you think it might mean? Yes, Andrew. To appear. To appear. That's right. I didn't have too many people that would kind of like take that time and that effort that she gave to him. I'm like on the 6th grade, 11th, I'm doing great because she really helped me. She put her heart out to help me. I want to be the person that they said that no matter what, I didn't give up on them. Every time I see her, I get a big smile on my face because she represents the best of Baton Rouge. She puts students, she puts people, everybody else before her and that's what makes her great, her compassion. She's a great teacher. She's going to really make it in life because she got a great heart like happy people with a lot of things. It feels amazing to see these kids transform over the past 11, 12 years. I think that I've made a great impact on the students I've touched in. For many of them, they told me that I not only taught them academically, but I've taught them life lessons and that was my goal.