 So this is incredibly exciting for so many of us. I wanna thank you all very much for coming and for being here this afternoon and this evening. My name is Lisa Guernsey. I'm the deputy director for education policy at New America. And we are just so happy that you could join us here for this incredibly important conversation that is so timely right now. For those of you who may not know New America, we are a nonpartisan think tank with the presence in many cities and states around the country. And many of you might know of our California, New America California office and our California fellows. New America's focus across all of our programs is to renew America by continuing the quest to realize our nation's highest ideals. And our education team, and in particular our early and elementary education team has been conducting research and analysis in California for many years. And we are incredibly pleased and honored to be here today in partnership with the Learning Policy Institute to host this event. So in addition to saying a really big thanks to our partners at LPI in particular, Hannah Melnick and Beth Malloy, I also wanna say a thanks to Heather Huff and Jeannie Mayong at PACE, who first helped us think about when to have this conversation and to take this moment before the PACE conference to really kick off a conversation about early childhood policy. I also wanna just quickly thank my colleague, Kara Sklar, who is our new deputy director for early and elementary education at New America. And to Tamara Torlickson, who is our event coordinator tonight. And to all the funders listed on the program who've made this possible. We will be continuing this conversation at a breakout session tomorrow at the PACE conference. So I don't really need to tell you all this because that's why you're here. But this is an incredibly exciting time for people who follow and who care about early childhood policy in California. And for those of us who are outside California, who are tracking trends in other states and to see the incredible potential that is unfolding here. At New America, as I mentioned, we've been reporting on policies in California for about 10 years, looking at birth through the third grade. And as you walked in, you may have seen some of our new reports. We've been profiling communities such as Fresno, Oakland and Franklin McKinley District in San Jose. We also were facilitators of a new resource. I just wanna quickly mention called Indispensables for Quality Pre-K, which takes research and distills it into one page for you. So I hope you have a chance to look at that. We've organized today's event to lend yet more space to dialogue and research that will inform policy ideas across the state. Given Governor Newsom's emphasis on early childhood, which is incredibly cheering to so many of us, this is a perfect time to talk about how to prioritize. And how to consider the policies that are gonna have the most impact. Given where I come from, just outside DC, the land of dysfunction, it is not a surprise probably for you to know that many of us are jealous of what's going on here in California. And that's not just because you don't have Sub-Zero windshield right now. So anyone anywhere who cares about kids and who cares about families in California is getting really excited right now about what's possible. I'm gonna turn it over now to Linda Darling Hammond, who I am truly honored to be sharing this podium with today. She needs no introduction, but in case you are not familiar with her work or with the Learning Policy Institute of which she's president, Linda is a nationally internationally really esteemed researcher and thinker whose writing on the importance of teaching has influenced leaders around the country, including former President Barack Obama, for whom she served as leader of his education policy transition team. And so without further ado, I will give you Linda. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa, and thanks to New America for cosponsoring this event. Learning Policy Institute exists to bring what we know about the right kind of learning about science-informed learning into practice and into policy. And in early childhood education, we've been working to uncover what works in early childhood across the nation and to understand the status of early childhood education in California. I wanna thank the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and the Heising Simons Foundation for supporting this event as well as our other funders for their work for our early childhood research and policy work. I also wanna thank PACE for the conference that they're organizing tomorrow, which is gonna be terrific, so I encourage you to also engage with that and provide an opportunity to continue the conversation. And finally, thanks to all of our panelists and to those of you who took the time to be here tonight. As Lisa mentioned, the research is clear that early childhood is a critical time for children's development. Young children's brains are developing at lightning speed, forming over one million new neural connections per second. And I have a grandchild who is living with me right now and I can watch it happening. It is so exciting. It is not surprising, I'm looking at Deborah Stipe at my good friend who also has a grandchild. I'm about the same age who is equally or maybe even more excited because that's her area of expertise. It's not surprising that researchers have consistently found and our own review of the research shows that early learning programs are foundational for future learning. We know that children who attend preschool are better prepared for school and math and language and we're learning also in social and emotional skills. The recent getting down to facts, two set of reports in California found that in California, children between K-12 progress at the same or a slightly better rate than children in other states around the country but they come to school however with a much greater gap and further behind. And so the early learning system is really the piece of the puzzle here in California that needs further investment and development. We know that preschool programs have the potential to produce lasting benefits with lower rates of special education placement and grade retention and over the course of the lifespan higher graduation rates, employment and earnings and these long-term benefits pay for themselves. The estimates of returns to investment in early childhood learning range from about $2 to each dollar invested if you look in the short run to as much as $17 per dollar investment if you look all the way through the life course depending on where you take stock of the benefits but these benefits are not guaranteed. Preschool programs must be designed and implemented to create high quality learning experiences and knowing how important the first five years of life are. Most developed countries have enrolled over 90% of their four-year-olds in preschool and states across the nation, both red and blue states including West Virginia, Oklahoma and Georgia are making preschool university but until this moment, California, the world's fifth largest economy has been behind on this agenda. Just a third of eligible children in our state are enrolled in publicly funded programs. That number is just 14% for infants and toddlers leaving many parents scrambling to find care since infant toddler programs often cost more than a college education. I know about that too because we just found daycare for my grandson and we have a little gratitude list. It was on everybody's gratitude list this week. What is more, California doesn't yet have a coherent early learning system upon which to build. We have a patchwork of uncoordinated programs and some of you have seen in one of our publications the famous subway map over here which shows all the different people who are in charge or agencies in charge of early childhood education this one over here is all the funding bodies that contribute and negotiating and managing that system this went viral across the nation is really quite a challenge for a family as well as for educators and providers of care. Importantly, program quality requirements also vary dramatically from program to program as do educators, qualifications and supports for training. We have an underpaid under supported workforce with 68% of our early educators eligible for public assistance themselves. So in your folders you'll find research briefs that describe California's early learning system in more depth as well as one that describes how other states have achieved high quality preschool and what lessons they offer for California we're hopeful that this landscape is about to change in California. There's I think a sense in the public and the legislature about the power of early learning the need for public investments and now we have a governor who understands the importance of early learning. He showed his commitment to young children and his leadership in San Francisco which adopted universal preschool as well as high quality early childcare for infants and toddlers and as you know early learning was front and center in his first budget proposal. The proposal would allocate an unprecedented amount of funding for early learning with around $2 billion for young learners. There are a couple of things that are notable about the proposed investments and I know that Anne will speak to these in just a moment that there is a whole child, whole family perspective and there are long run investments for the future around training facilities and long term planning. So we have our incredible opportunity to make a real commitment here to California's youngest children to make sure we build an early learning system that actually works that is high quality and equitable. And tonight we're gonna discuss what it will take to make this possible. One of the architects of this work is Anna Leary, Governor Newsom's chief of staff and one of my own personal heroes and has worked for over three decades in the policy sphere very successfully. So we're delighted she'll be here to bring all of that acumen to the work here. She worked under former President Bill Clinton and for Hillary Clinton as a legislative director during her time in Congress, later as a senior advisor on children and family policy in her 2016 presidential campaign. She's covered a wide range of issues in her policy career but she has always stayed focused on children and families. In addition to her legislative and federal policy experience, she was the founding director of the Center on Health, Economic and Family Security at Berkeley. The senior vice president at Next Generation and the co-founder of the Opportunity Institute. She has continually pushed to improve outcomes for kids through a comprehensive body of policy and advocacy that addresses not only education but family needs and community engagement as well. Calls for increasing equity are threaded throughout much of her work. Ann's commitment to young children was clearly visible in the governor's budget proposal. Indeed, Governor Newsom noted that she wouldn't even consider taking this position as his chief of staff unless he committed to six months of paid family leave. Go Ann! We congratulate her and look forward to what the next four or maybe we should just say eight years will bring. Ann. Thank you so much. It's so great to see so many friendly faces in the audience. I love coming to early childhood events. So thank you all so much for inviting me to be here. Thank you, Linda. Thank you to the Learning Policy Institute. And I'm so happy to have Lisa here in New America Foundation. One of the wonderful things I've obviously had the opportunity to work at the national level for many years. And the great thing about this very moment is that there's so much more to do here in California. So my friends are coming from the East Coast and supporting us and cheering us on and rolling their sleeves up and being with us. And I really appreciate Lisa and the New America Foundation being serious partners in this endeavor. So thank you. Let me tell you a story that's a true story which is that one of the things I think is so important about government service is that I believe public service is a team sport. And that you have to make sure you put together a great team in order to be able to do the good work you're going to do. So there were a couple people who I was like, we have to make sure we've got them on our team. I'm sure more of you I'm gonna recruit. But at the beginning I was like, Chris Perry, you gotta be on the team. So Chris called me up and I said, Chris, let's think about this. So she literally sent me that chart that Linda just showed about the different ways of doing it. And I was like, okay, where's the power? How are we gonna make this happen? So I'm really, really excited. Let me just say a little bit about our team because I think this is so critical. First of all, in the horseshoe we've got Janina Perez, who a number of you know. There she is, give her a good wave. She is our senior advisor in early childhood. Obviously worked with so many of you over many years, started her career in the capital building working for Hilda Solis back in the day, but has really committed her work in her life to early childhood policy and really knowing the ins and outs of how you get things done in the state capital. So I'm so delighted she's on our team. People know that Chris was just announced as our deputy secretary of health and human services on early childhood. And really the first time we have somebody at that level bringing early childhood programs together across all of the agencies and also a senior advisor on the implementation of early childhood because we need Janina to be making things happen but also to make sure that we have the accountability to get it done in terms of the implementation so they'll be working in partnership. And then we're really excited about our first ever surgeon general of California, Nadine Burke Harris, who's not here today. But many of you know her work around adverse childhood experiences and she really, she also said, I'm only gonna take the job if I can focus on adverse childhood experiences and toxic health and all of those issues. So I'm really excited about her. There's a couple other members of our team here and I wanna make sure you know them because one of the really important pieces is that this is a continuum. It's really from cradle to career and that's something that Governor Newsom has talked about throughout. Ben Cheet is not here. He's our senior policy advisor on cradle to career so you'll all get to know him. But some of our K through 12 teammates are here. Jenny Johnson is here and Jamie Callahan, where are they? There they are. They are critical parts. Jenny is on our legislative team and Jamie is on our cabinet affairs team so you'll get to know them as well. So as I say, team sport and we're really, really delighted. A number of us have been in these rooms for many years together and for many years we have lamented on the fact that early childhood did not get the spot it should for so many years. We fought together for the cuts we fought against the cuts that happened after the recession and it's taken many, many years to get to where we are today. But I think that one of the reasons I did go to work for Governor Gavin Newsom is that he ran on a platform of early childhood. It wasn't one of the 10th issue or the 12th issue. It was one of his front issues that he ran on. He talked repeatedly over and over. He ran campaign ads around early childhood development. Nobody does that. So we know that this is not a kind of a small thing. This is something that's front and center to what he wants to do and I think it's, it is so critical that we have him leading the effort and not only that he understands the science and he's got the commitment but he also is a father of four young children and that makes the difference. You see it in the way he thinks and the way that he approaches policy and so I think that that's why you saw a budget that for the first time really in the history of California was as deep and focused and detailed as ever on early childhood development and learning and we're really, really proud of it but we know it's going to take both the inside team that I just announced as well as the outside team to really work together to make this meaningful. One of the things that I'm doing is spending a lot of time in my car driving back and forth between Oakland and Sacramento and I've been listening to a great book that I highly recommend. It's Michael Lewis' new book called The Fifth Risk. I don't know if any of you have read it yet but the reason I recommend it is he, it's a really scary book about the, that should not be so political but it's a scary book about President Trump's transition and but the fifth risk is really about the fact that one of the risks that happens in government is around project management and that if you don't actually manage a project right then very bad things can happen so he's talking about the energy department and nuclear risk but it's true in early childhood education as well which is that this budget is only as good as all of us make it which is to say that on the inside and the outside we first have to pass the budget. We then have to make sure that the government is implementing the budget in the right way but then all of you on the outside who get the dollars and really work to it you have to do the good job and we have to make sure you're doing the good job to do what we've said we're going to do so we are painting a picture and it's a picture that we painted together. Over many years we painted this picture of what would this look like so let me just say a little bit about it. One is, it is partially a joke but I did talk to the governor about paid leave when I mentioned this to him but one of the things we were talking about was infant childcare and we were talking about the work that I did and I'm proud of my colleague Sarah Crow is here I don't know if Cara Dukakis is here but there are a number of us who work together on an issue called Too Small to Fail and it was really about the fact that parents are so list-simon since here one of our great supporters but it was really about the fact that we really need to ensure that parents have the opportunity to understand the importance of brain development and language development and know the tools to be able to help their child and so as we, as the governor and I were talking about early childhood development and the high cost of infant childcare we were also talking about the importance of parents being able to have the space and time they need to be their child's first teacher and that's how we got to the fact that every child in California should have the opportunity to be cared for by a parent or a close family member for the first six months of their life and so that's why he has come out with a very audacious and very ambitious goal that we should make sure that every child gets a parent or a close family member caring for them for six months by providing parental leave and so I hope that you guys thank you we're gonna all need to work together people are skeptical about this but we are going to work together to make sure that we make this happen because it's a critical part of the early childhood agenda to ensure that we can do that part of it now the other piece I'm gonna go to the other end and then I'll come back to the middle the other piece is I think many people in California simply did not know despite the fact that Marion Wright Edelman has been writing about this for many, many years is that we still do not have mandatory kindergarten in California and we also have many, many California children who don't have access to full day kindergarten and we know that they're one of the reasons that kids don't go to kindergarten is because if you're working a low wage job and you have to figure out how to transition your kid from a half day kindergarten to a caregiver it's almost impossible so we have a very high percentage and I'm always getting it wrong it's either 25% or 30% does anyone remember? Anyway, hi the percentage of kids who aren't going to kindergarten because they don't have access to full day kindergarten so what we said is we have a very generous surplus right now let's just fix this with a major one time spending let's put $750 million in so that kindergartens can really look at what do we need to do to help the facilities one of the problems that's happening is of course you've got the kindergartners and there's only one classroom so they do the morning class and then they leave and then they do the afternoon class but we need to fix it we need to do some facilities updates we need to do some make sure we have the workforce to support it but we feel like with this infusion of cash into this system we'll be able to get to 100% universal kindergarten in California which is obviously incredibly important to the work that we're all doing okay so we've got the beginning fixed and we've got the 55 year olds now we gotta get everything else in the middle fixed so one of the things that we know is that this is a tremendous amount of hard work we wanna make sure that we have a budget that's put together that's very responsible because what we don't wanna do is happen what happened to us in 2008 which is to have to deal with severe cuts so what we're trying to figure out is how do we spend one time's money responsibly but then how do we also say that some of these priorities should be ongoing priorities and so one of them is obviously four year old universal preschool we need to get to the place where we can get to universal preschool what we're saying in this budget is okay well the first thing we need to do is to make sure that every low income child who qualifies for universal preschool gets it right now we know that we don't even have a high enough take up rate why is that? Well we're offering a lot of half day programs that has the same problem as that kindergarten problem I talked about so we say every four year old low income four year old full day should have an opportunity to go to full day universal preschool eventually we're gonna get higher and higher as we go on but that's what's a really responsible starting place and then we said okay we obviously have a tremendous amount of work to do both to deal with the affordability issue and the quality issue in childcare so one of the things that we're doing is we're putting $500 million aside to really work on the issue of how do we make sure that we deal with the infrastructure issues in childcare and by infrastructure I don't just mean childcare facilities but I also mean the workforce how do we make sure that we have a workforce that is able to be able to deal with the demand for childcare out there we obviously have this ongoing real issue in California everybody does but how many, what are the rates we're paying our childcare providers and how do we make sure that it's affordable but high quality that's a big issue we're gonna keep working on it we know that there's a rate study coming out that will inform us as we go into the May budget revise but I think we need to really study this hard and we put together $10 million to really look at a very sophisticated study to help us do this so you may know all this already and I may be repeating it but I'm excited about it and so I wanna make sure that you know what we're doing and that we can really partner with you and we might not have gotten everything right I'm quite sure you'll tell us we didn't but we'll work on this together we'll work with the legislature and we'll really try to make this something we do together the other piece that was really just one last thing that was informed by your work and I wanna also give a shout out to my friends in DC especially at the Aspen Institute that people know Ann Mosley who really worked very hard on the two generation strategy for many years that very much informed our work as we got into the budget I wanna thank Laundee Jose who's not here but she's our new senior policy advisor on higher education and we really put together a piece that allows us to say we need to make sure that when parents are at our universities and our community colleges that they also have access to childcare so you'll see that throughout our budget and that's a really important piece that we're doing together so I know you've got a big long agenda I'll leave you to it but I wanted to say thank you I can't wait to work with you and I really look forward to this thanks everyone. Thank you so much Ann it's a really nice way to kick off what can be an even more in-depth discussion about what's possible. Before we get there and before I introduce our wonderful moderator for today's panel discussion I want to play for you one minute of just some images so that we can remember who we're really talking about here. Many of those videos that are found in longer form on the New America website. Sarah Jackson who will be our moderator today has been working with me at New America for maybe five years almost at this point. She's a, we both come from the world of journalism and when Sarah and I first started talking about what might be possible in California with some reporting that she could do with a policy focus we got really excited about the opportunities that was available to us with Sarah here so I'm going to turn it over to Sarah now we can read more about her in the bio sheet and she will then introduce the incredibly esteemed panelists that we have here today. So Sarah I turn it over to you. Thank you Lisa for that lovely introduction and that beautiful video it's so nice to just see the beautiful kids and remind us of what we're doing here. So I could maybe ask the panelists to come up and join me and I'm going to introduce them. So I just want to say it's such a exciting time to be having this conversation. You know as everybody mentioned there's so much attention. Now on our state and it's just so important that we get this right both for the kids here but also for all the people watching from around the country. So I feel privileged to be able to introduce this incredible panel and to get to ask some questions to help frame the discussion. So as you just heard from Anne the governor's budget proposal includes investments in quality by supporting the childcare workforce, renovation and building of facilities, one time spending of 10 million for a working group, incentives for full day kindergarten, increases in slots and flexibility in the California state preschool program and a much more robust paid family leave. So what we're going to talk about in the next 30 to 40 minutes we'll be able to get a little extra time is whether these proposals align with what the research says is what's best for young kids and in which ways specifically. We're also going to consider questions of priorities and get into some specifics with all of those here who are familiar with sort of what it takes in the on the ground reality of providing quality preschool and childcare. So these are questions will need to be answered by the working group the administration has proposed which would create a roadmap to universal preschool and expanded access to early learning from children birth to age five. So I'm really pleased to introduce our panelists here. Right to my left is Deborah Stipek who doesn't need a lot of introduction but Deborah is the Judy Koch Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education and a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. She also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. And next to Deborah is Luwanda Wesley. Luwanda is the Director of Quality Enhancement and Professional Development for Early Learning for Oakland Unified School District where she supports over 200 teaching staff while with QRIS Quality Enhancement and Professional Development efforts. She's fairly new to OUSD and prior to that she served as Alameda County's Early Care and Education Planning Council Coordinator Quality Improvement Manager and AB 212 Program Manager. Welcome Luwanda. And then on the other side of Luwanda I think is Kim. It's hard for me to see you guys from here. Kim Petillo-Brownson is the Vice President for Policy and Strategy for First Five Los Angeles. Kim is responsible for strengthening First Five's LA profile and influence on local and statewide early childhood public policy legislative and advocacy efforts. She previously served as the Managing Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Advancement Project and was also an Education Attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. Welcome Kim. And then way at the end there is Hannah Melnick and Hannah is a Research Analyst and Policy Advisor at the Learning Policy Institute where she co-leads the Early Childhood Learning Team. She is lead author of Understanding California's Early Care and Education System and Building an Early Learning System that Works. Next steps for California. I think those are some of the reports that have that graphic that was being referred to earlier. So please join me in welcoming these amazing panelists. And I should also say so we're gonna talk for a little bit and then we'll also be joined by two respondents here in the front row. We have Patricia Elizano from Early Edge California and Samantha Tran from Children Now who are gracious enough to also provide some comments after our discussion and then we hope to take some questions from you all. And I know there's an incredible amount of expertise in the room. So I hope we will be able to get to that as well. So I'm gonna start with you Debra. So your research over the years has pointed out the importance of ensuring that programs are of high quality. And you and many others have stressed that investing in the workforce, those who care for children in our state is a key part of that. So do you agree with the direction that the governor is taking so far? And what parts of it do you think will be most impactful when it comes to building quality programs for the children in our state? I just wanna reiterate Sarah's point that this is a really intimidating audience to talk to because you know so much. We can't put anything over you. I think appropriately the governor hasn't gotten into the weeds on exactly what the quality will look like. And I think I would be a little worried if in the first budget, just after a few weeks of being in his new position, he's had strong opinions of that because it's a very complicated set of issues. And I did like the idea of creating some kind of a panel or a group of people who will be working on the details of that. But I wanna reinforce Linda's comment about the importance of quality. I hear often legislators referring to the research on the effects of pre-K in closing the achievement gap and increasing college going. And I mean, some amazing effects. Well, we see them, but we only see them in those programs that are of very high quality. I mean, frankly light years from where we stand right now in California. So we really do need to invest in quality. Otherwise we're gonna be very disappointed if we expand access and provide far more children opportunities to let's say attend preschool without making sure that the kinds of preschools that they're attending are really going to have those long-term effects. So we don't end up being disappointed down the line. I'm just gonna mention a few levers that we have for both ensuring and improving quality. There are three ones that come to my mind. One is licensing, what we require of programs before they are able to become licensed. And I'm not gonna talk about that. I think Hannah's gonna talk a little bit about licensing. Another is the workforce. And I am gonna talk a little bit more about that. I just wanna mention the third, which we probably won't have time to get to is QRIS. And there are some ways in which California can shore up and strengthen that system as well. So I'm gonna focus on the workforce because I think that that is probably our most powerful lever and the most important one. Right now in California, we have a kind of insane situation where we have huge variability in what the expectations are and what the requirements are for someone who, and I'm gonna just focus on preschool right now, who are given the ability or are allowed to staff programs. So we have, let's say four-year-olds who are anywhere from a program that is licensed exempt where the person who is overseeing their growth and development is not required to have any preparation. And California has far more children in licensed exempt care than most states do. And it is mostly poor, low-income children who are in the licensed exempt care. We also have children who are in programs that where the teacher is required to have 12 units. We have children in programs where they're required to have 24 units. And we have children in TK where the teacher is required to have for a bachelor's degree and a teaching credential. Now without making any comments about which of those is best, just the variability doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So I think that's one of the things we need to look at. But also in California, our requirements are low. The majority of states now require a bachelor's degree. I'm not necessarily a proponent of just going to a bachelor's degree in California because I think a lot more needs to be done to make that effective. But we do need to have a higher bar, I think. One of the reasons why we need a higher bar is more as demanded of preschool teachers right now. Common core in kindergarten is pretty rigorous. And what we've learned from national data is that the kindergarten curriculum is now pretty much what the first grade curriculum used to be even as few as 10 or 15 years ago. That means children have to be much better prepared when they go to kindergarten. So that means teachers of preschoolers need to be better prepared to make sure that they're not being set up for failure. I just want to mention in closing that we can't just increase the requirements for our preschool teachers or the people who are providing care for children because we already have a huge scarcity. And so there are a lot of other things that we're going to need to do and that has to come in a package because if you do one without the other you're going to cause more harm than good. Pay is the obvious one. People aren't going into this largely because of the low pay. So that's obviously going to come along with it. Also higher ed is not really well prepared right now to meet these higher requirements. So we're going to have to give them time and we're going to have invest resources to help them develop the capacity to meet requirements particularly for practice teaching which is not required in California now for teachers of young children. But we know from K-12 work that it's a critically important part of preparation. And finally we're going to have to provide a lot of support for current people who are in the workforce to be able to meet these higher requirements. These are not rich people. These are people who are living on the edge for the most part. So we don't want to push out our current workforce. We want to enable them to meet the higher higher requirements and that's going to also require some some investment. So I'm not saying it's cheap but I am saying it's important. Thank you. Yeah I'll just say also to the variability issue that one of the things we saw in some of the reporting I did was often at the same school a TK teacher teaching in the classroom next door to a state preschool teacher who might have a vastly different training and also salary. So that was interesting. And the teaching same age children right. By the way. Okay I think we're going to go to you Kim next. And I would just like to hear as a policy leader and someone with a long history of advocating for equity. What did you first think when you saw the governor's budget and priorities and is this in line with what you would have hoped for and. Yeah. I think like many folks in the room it was. Sort of a unreal pinch me moment right. This this is not just a high water mark for California. But we actually pulled some data from around the country and found that this is the single largest gubernatorial investment ever made by a sitting American governor. And that is noteworthy in the magnitude but it is also I think quite noteworthy in the scope of what his ambition has been in terms of thinking about how children and families actually exist in the world. Which is to say that it's it is ECE but it is also health. It's developmental screenings. It's home visiting. It is also encompassing of economic supports in ways that we have parceled out chunks of a child in our prior imagination. And so I think this idea that the new administration is looking to live beyond silos and recognize that children and families live beyond silos is really very inspiring and very exciting. There is also I think a very clear lens on helping children who are the least advantaged. The the aspiration that I think that we heard from Anne earlier wasn't let's just start with universal preschool writ large. It is let's start with low income children first and the roadmap that the State Board of Education and the Department of Social Services and DOF is tasked with creating is not again a universal aspiration but it is let's start with kids who essentially live at the bottom of our social strata and make sure that subsidized child care exists as a program that is targeting children and families who need the most. There are also a number of smaller things I think that are particularly noteworthy as we think about sort of special populations that have not actually gotten so much sunshine in the budget in the past. So in LA County, which is my hometown, a small hamlet you might have heard of. Black babies are three times as likely to die before their first birthday as our white babies, which is an astonishing medieval bizarre fact of our modern life. And so that is in the budget and that is a gubernatorial leadership plank that we have never seen before. There is also attention to developmental screenings which we know are challenging and more onerous for low income communities but also communities of color. You're twice as likely to have an undiagnosed developmental delay as a Latino child as you are as a white child. That has implications for children who are in need of services early and whose parents are struggling potentially self blaming in the interim until their child actually is diagnosed and received services. But it also has implications for what I think of as preventable harms. There are very inexpensive things that young children, if caught early on some of these delays, if you need a hearing aid, if you need fine or gross motor practice in the early years, it's a lot less expensive to remediate in those early ages than it is if you are a K to 12 student going to special ed programs for 12 years where the cost is borne by everyone. Then the equity implications are society wide. Then every school district is having special ed programs where our programs and our systems aren't yet good enough to distinguish between children who are poor and have easily addressed delays versus children who actually need 12 years of special ed services which in the K to 12 system are about 2x the price of traditional K to 12 education. And so when we think about planning for the future, it's not just what I appreciate about the governor's approach is it's not let's do charitable handouts. It is not a charity agenda. It is a change agenda. And that is profoundly different and exciting. Thank you, Kim. Luanda, I'd love to hear from you and just maybe you can help us bring some of the voices and experiences of teachers in Oakland and the other places you work to this conversation. Which of the governor's proposals do you think is gonna do the most to help low income families? Is it state preschool slots or improvements to quality childcare or other things? It's actually all of them, but definitely the slots. Right now I think about the demand that families have to try to overcome and uproot themselves out of poverty. I'm also born and raised in Oakland by coincidence and it's really difficult. So if they do not have a place to put their children in care, then they can't be a part of a viable system that allows them to work or attend schools such as myself when I was moving from CalWorks to the workforce into pursuing a higher education. But the other piece of it is the quality. And I kind of go back to what you were saying, Deborah, thinking about the workforce. I literally have the opportunity from being the planning council coordinator in Alameda County to sitting with teachers in Oakland Unified School District who plop themselves on my desk and say, Ms. Lawanda, I'm 15 units shy. I know if I can get 15 more in units or go somewhere, then this will allow me to move higher on the school district pay scale. But I don't have the time. I don't have the money. If I do go back to school, the return of investment, and they don't say it in such that way, but I'm gonna pay back these student loans. This is like current reality. And I sit there almost every other week grappling with them, trying to find programs that are doable for them. But in reality, I don't wanna feed them a lot. And so one of the things I feel like in the workforce is that we know that the majority of the workforce are made up of women and they're made up of women of color. We also know the majority are earning below $15 an hour. So in a high cost county like Alameda and specifically in Oakland, how are they to live? So they're driving for Uber and Lyft and working second and third jobs. And today, just alone, I saw one of my teachers who's getting ready for a QRS visit who was slumped over asleep. And I wanted to go hug her and touch her and say, how are you doing? But I said, no, she needs to rest. And I have some information to share with you because you have a visit tomorrow. You have your Eckers visit tomorrow. Your environmental rating scale visit. You know, anything about the system. So I'm trying to bring voice to the reality. They are stressed out. And you think, I call it, I have coined it the vulnerable, taking care of the vulnerable. So I too am receiving public subsidies. I am on CalWorks receiving CalFresh. I am too on Medi-Cal. I am too taking advantage of HUD housing, section eight housing, however it looks. And yet you're asking me, Ms. Lawanda, because you just did this wonderful workshop or you sent me here in the county on this wonderful training about building relationships with children. But I'm walking in and I'm stressed out and all I want to do is run to the bathroom before I can even greet my children. So we have to figure out how to raise the compensation for teachers at least a livable wage, consider what that looks like in a high cost county. We're trying to fight for it through different measures, whether it's a county measure or a city measure, the $15 an hour fighting for that. And I also wonder if it's a coincidence because it's women and women of color. And I speak that. Yeah. We also have another workforce issue called leadership. And I'm looking at all the investments that Gavin Newsom and I'm so, I said one thing I said to the panel, are we gonna thank him? Because we have to thank him. Like, is he gonna be here? Can we thank him? And we'll thank him. But I still come with some concerns and my concerns is that it's still, we still need something that's going to be streamlined and leveraged for more permanency of the resources for both the parents who are, I think about when I was on stage one. So it's so funny because I was in the workforce and I'm also the parent who took advantage of the subsidies to lift myself out of poverty. And I just think, my goodness, there still isn't the resources that we need to still make it work well. When I was on stage one, I would hear a lot of my friends in the circle saying, oh my gosh, I'm worried if I get to stage three, basically they knew the stages. I'm gonna have to go back, quit my job, go back to stage one so I could get full-time care. So I heard someone in the audience I talked to about, maybe we can get 12 month eligibility in stage one. I'm excited about that. Yeah. Because it took me at least five years to lift myself out of poverty, raising five kids. And now because that dual generation, you talk about two gym, my mom was on aid, Cal works for most of her life and she's still on some type of public subsidy. But I wasn't able to break that cycle because I took advantage of the programs that paid for my childcare. I also see on the workforce side that I couldn't stay a teacher and still take care of my family. So I get it on both ends. And what I would say is we have to keep looking at the dollars that have been proposed and how they're dedicated to figure out how we can make them long-term or patch them together. But then I go, I don't even like the word patch but we have to do better. And you talk about the skill workforce, Deborah, I'm so with you. But I will say we have 50% of our children in our programs who are experiencing trauma throughout the country. So you think about a community like Oakland where I came from, born and raised, you can just make that 80, 90%. We just found a body on one of our campuses today. And I was, my supervisor is amazing, she dealt with it. But it's so common that I was talking to another partner who said, I work in the space of trauma and I'm really fortunate to do the work around trauma. I said, we have to develop a protocol because we need healing and restoration for our teachers. Because we're gonna ask them to go back tomorrow when there was a dead body murder. Someone was murdered to go back and do their best work when the families witnessed it, the staff witnessed it, the administrator. It's a community thing. So the dual generation is real. You have to lift the entire family. But if you only get to the children, you're gonna have atrophy. It takes both. We need both. And the workforce deserves to get paid. And when it comes to trauma and the 50% of the kids experiencing trauma, the teachers are not skilled. And you wanna talk about preschool exposure and suspension, I wrote an article on Black Boys Lives Matter in preschool about exposure in preschool, I'm against it. But when I go talk to the teachers, even in my own district who I did a little mini training on it and re-reviewed it, they're like, then what do I do? I don't know what to do with them. I'm not skilled. I don't have a background in early education that's special needs or anything of that matter. There aren't many trainings. So they're trying to figure out how to do their best work. They don't wanna expel and suspend children but they don't have any other tool because they're trying to look at the common good of the rest of the children in the classroom. And even doing this work around trauma as I train across the state, I still think about that. So there's so much to think about. Again, we're thankful for the budget commitment. But one time is almost sometimes you wonder how that's gonna look long-term and that's what I worry about. But grateful that it's been proposed. So I'm just trying to bring the voice of the teachers. Last thing is a leadership gap. My colleague and I, Mary Ann and Eva Vandalo, Mary Ann Doe, we're working on realizing that there are many children who are in our programs that are color. The teachers tend to mirror the demographics of the children of color, but when you go up the ladder, guess what? The faces that look like me aren't there as administrators and leaders. That's a systemic institutional problem. That's not by mistake. Something is going on. So my colleague, Eva Vandalo, who did a project with Elan, early on learning action network and we met. Now let me tell you, we're working on a project with Mary Ann Doe with the California Mentor Project to think about how do we disrupt that and we build that part of the workforce because who's gonna lead the teachers? Yeah. Thank you. I'll just also say if we, I'm not sure how much specifics we're gonna be able to get into, but we do have a lot of incredible models of work being done to help get educators the support they need. We've been doing some reporting in Franklin McKinley School District outside of San Jose where they are doing some work to help give teachers the tools they need to help kids develop those social-emotional skills. I know you all are doing work in trauma-informed practice. So I hope we can talk about some of that, but I wanna give Hannah a chance down there and she has a lot of expertise on the importance of taking a comprehensive approach to improving the early care and education systems in California. So I just wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about how you see these components of the governor's plan working together well if you do and what you hope for in that area. Sure, thank you. So I was sitting here thinking, I'm so excited about the governor's budget because of infrastructure and that's hard to follow Luanda and talk about infrastructure, but I do think that's important that we invest in spaces for our kids to be in when we are able to get those slots you're saying we need and the training for the childcare teachers and the educators so that they don't have to do their training on their own time and their own dime. So they are important one-time investments and I was very excited to hear Anne say that they're gonna be followed by ongoing investments. So what I would say I would hope for for our early learning investments going forward is that they become more coherent and they become more equitable. So we do not have this crazy system that Deborah and Linda have described where whether you're born in August or September is the difference between whether you have a teacher with a credential, whether you have eight children per adult or 24 per adult in your classroom. And whether the program you're in has anything to what the quality standard is their meeting has anything to do with the funding it gets from the state or the needs of the children sitting in that classroom. So you've spoken a little bit about the work we've done studying other states at LPI but what is really apparent from all of them is that when they expanded access to ECE when they got results they were making sure that a focus on quality and continuous improvement were a first priority. In North Carolina for example when they started this work several decades before some other states they first started with high early learning standards that were connected to curriculum and child assessment. And then they required that all programs childcare and preschool participate in their quality improvement systems. They have to meet a minimum level of quality but they support their programs with regional infrastructure called smart starts that support the educators and all of the administrators in getting there. They have things like tuition subsidies so that teachers actually can get some help in their higher education. Wage subsidies through a program called wages and coaching especially for new teachers in their first few years who are trying to make sense of this all. So those are all things that California really needs to think about how are we going to build these into our entire system not just bits and pieces of it. So it's gonna be a big lift to make sure that we invest in quality slots not just quality especially given how diverse and how large our state is and how much unmet need we have with just 33% of currently eligible kids getting subsidies that they are eligible for. However, we really need to remember that quality is what gets us our return on investment and it's easier as our friend David Kerp recently said to go from better to bigger than to go from bigger to better. True. Is it okay to just take five more minutes and get, okay I already gave me a warning but I'm gonna take five more minutes and sorry. And I would like to dig into a little bit more specifics and see if any of you have some concluding comments before we get to our respondents and just imagining that everything was funded by our legislature and they were looking for some key provisions to insert. What should they make sure they include and what should they make sure not to do? And I was hoping that maybe as part of this discussion we could get to whether there are examples or stories of what has worked well and why because I know there's a lot of great innovation happening at the local level in addition to other states that we can learn from and adopt to our own context here in California. Does anyone wanna jump in there? My ex-boss is here, Donna, it's Nearinger. There once was a project called the Child Care Careers Project in California and the Child Care Careers Project was hyper-focused on professional development that provided those participants to move together through an AA program, a program that was a part of a cohort. I was one of those folks, I live here in Sacramento but I work in Oakland, it's complicated. But, and so we had one of the most successful retention rates of that program and I believe it was because it was a partnership with Department of Human Assistance, which Los Rios Community College District which was the higher ed, it was also a partnership with Department of Social Services, California Department of Education and we ran at least my tenure about four to five cohorts and we made sure they were intimate and small and they were able to complete together. It was funded, we took care of their books, their tuition, their transportation, we even did career building skills, we provided professional development books to read in their spare time but they did it together and the retention rate was amazing. I think we could design a BA level program that doesn't charge them but that we encumber the costs and make sure that we can build up our workforce both for teaching workforce as well as leadership workforce. That's something that I would love to see come back and I'm biased because I support that. My hope is that we don't nibble around the edges, just expand this program, maybe improve quality here or there but that we really take that complicated network of programs that are incredibly inefficient and almost start from scratch and think if we were going to serve children and families in California, what kind of infrastructure and organizational structure would we need? Because it is so complex, I don't know that you can really come up with a very efficient way of improving both access and quality without really tackling that whole system of the way we deliver services in California. I'll offer two thoughts. One is around lifting up what's working at the local level. So in Los Angeles Unified, there's a pilot of again, LA pilots are 8,000 large at LAUSD for expanded TK and it is a transitional kindergarten program that meets all of the state preschool requirements. It is 24 children, three adults. All of the teachers have BAs or MAs, 80% of the TAs have AA degrees. Everyone has professional paid PD days that are not just in the summer. There's been coaching made available and there's trauma informed care. These are large, they're targeted in the LCFF context to concentrated poverty schools. So it's not universally available. It's about 85% Latino kids. It's about 60% English-English learners and they are coming into kindergarten performing on par with their middle class peers. There are pockets of excellence, I think that are worth thinking about. And then the second piece I think of when you lift up excellence is also to include the political calculation, which is to say that I'm delighted by our surplus but I don't expect it to be forever. And thinking about what alliances we need with more moneyed interests than perhaps the early childhood world brings and I'm thinking about CTA. CTA defends when children generate ADA. And I think not just thinking about the child development side but looking at the long-term political economics of who will go to bat for our kids. And then the second one, sorry I'm just gonna lift one more up, which is around workforce development, the idea that we're facing something that's never been faced before of a workforce that is being asked to do more than they've been asked to do previously. And the example that I think of many, or some folks in the room might know Sharon Scott Dow who was a lobbyist at Advancement Project Many Moons ago. And she described a scenario when during World War II, lots of men went and were conscripted into World War II and women joined the workforce and joined the K to 12 system. And many folks did not have BA degrees. Many were housewives. Many had incomplete degrees. Many were good on the natural but didn't have formal education beyond high school. And rather than pushing everyone out, there was a system that enabled a slow bringing along of people who could meet standards. And the BA was seen as a proxy for the ability to teach and to essentially light the mind on fire of a child to be excited about learning. And they weren't pushed out but they were given a longer timetable. And most importantly, I think there were financial incentives for reaching higher. It wasn't just asking people to develop their workforce out of the goodness of their hearts. On that, no matter how we expand our system, we're gonna need to invest in the workforce. And that's a great example. And another more modern example of how we can do this systemically is what happened in New Jersey in 2000. They took four major steps that we could, we should need to take in California to develop their current and their incoming workforce when they expanded preschool and their Abbott districts. First, they developed a P3 credential and then they built up the capacity of their institutes of higher ed to make sure that they were able to handle an influx of new teachers. They also gave scholarships to teachers so that they could pay for that, they didn't have to pay for that degree out of their pockets. They offered more funding for wages. So once you had a degree, it was worth their while. And fourth, the state ensured that they had coaching for their support, their new teachers in the field and make sure that those investments were sustained after they got out of the university. So I do think that we can make these investments in California. New Jersey went from 15% of educators in private settings meeting their standards to 97 in seven years. So it's doable, we can do it, but we need to make sure we're thinking about the long term. Absolutely. So I think I'd like to, before we go to the audience, go to our wonderful respondents here in the front row. So Petruzia Lozano is here from early edge and she's graciously agreed to give a few comments. Yeah, is this on? Yes. Yeah. Oh, well, thank you. And I'm also very excited about all these new investments and I think it's like, it's our time. And my reactions are for the workforce, I think, yes, we need to invest in new qualifications. And, but I want to think about what are the competencies that we need to define and ask from these teachers and I experienced it firsthand. When I was a preschool teacher, my first day, a room full of two year olds running around and I was like, what do I do? I knew all the theory, child development, everything. And I was like, I have no clue, these kids are, their attention span is five minutes and they started running around and I'm like, but I was lucky enough to have a great coach who like supported me through the process and gave me opportunities of training. So I think the second piece is, okay, let's define the qualifications, then also the coaching system with all the content that we need depending on the communities that we're serving is not only financial, which is huge, but also emotional and a career development. So I had an amazing coach that gave me all the opportunities that made me select the right path to be here. So every time I think about this, I'm like, it's because of her that I'm here. And the third thing is pay. I mean, I think that we can't, it's our time to recognize our teachers and our providers and mainly women and it's their time to be recognized. So I think the main question for you all is, where do we start? So what do we do first? The administration is showing support, is giving us funding and, but the main thing is, what do we do first to get where we wanna be? So next we have Samantha Tran from Children Now. Yeah, it's amazing to be in this room with so many thought leaders who know this work deeply. And I think the panel really put out there, just reflecting on the different things that you talked about, about how powerful this comprehensive vision is and how big of a lift it is. And yet at the same time, we can get it done. There's examples of other states and places throughout California where we are doing this good work. I think one of the challenges we face that again, we can overcome is that, sitting as an advocate, government by necessity is set up in silos. It's how we function because it takes the deep, detailed work to deliver on a budget line item and implement a program and bring things to scale. But it's not very conducive to a comprehensive vision, right? So there is leadership that's needed to hold that in our heads broadly, to put that out there. And that's why it's so exciting that Newsom has brought together this amazing team of knowledgeable people who've been in it with us to figure it out. And I think in addition to just the way government's set up, even how we pursue policy. I mean, right now we've got a number of things in play that can move this ball forward, but they're taking on pieces of it. And just the workforce conversation. As we think about setting expectations for the teaching community and how we move forward on that front, that's playing out in certain venues. When we think about compensation, that's related to rate reform and getting our finance system aligned, getting data in place, and then building this infrastructure of training and support. It is complicated. There are different people in leadership positions who are holding it and can move it. And I think collectively as a field, we have a job to do to make sure we're helping to connect the dots and doing the deep work at the same time. Thank you. So now I think we can go to the audience, finally. We have a question back there. Can you just wait a sec? We're, thank you. I'm Donna Snarringer with the Child Care Resource Center. Oh God. Boy, I didn't think that was gonna happen. Okay, thank you, LaWanda. I just wanna point out, as we think about all this important systems work, we cannot lose track of the fact that there are 1.8 million income eligible kids in California getting nothing right now. And I am all about building a quality system, but we have to walk into gum at the same time and we can't let this generation of little ones wait while we figure out all the systems work that needs to happen. So I just implore us to think about what do we need to do to serve kids now at the same time we're thinking about how we make it better down the road. And just my little anecdotal, we got about 11,000 voucher slots last year. My organization enrolled 1,300 kids. It took us less than four months. Our waiting list went up 11,000. We started at 41,000. We enrolled 1,300 and our waiting list went up 11,000 because they tell each other they're enrolling, they come out. So I just want all of us, as we think through this to understand that we have to do both. It's a yes and time. And that's my two cents. Thank you. Anybody else? Linda? Hi, I'm Linda from the California Child Care Resource Referral Network. I think there's a couple things I just think as part of this mix and complicated puzzle. One on the workforce is, since we've done some studies, particularly with home-based providers, is the challenge of what minimum wage and the other options people have. So while we're thinking about compensation, but just thinking about well-being and that there are these other, I guess, polls, particularly not just wages but benefits, that are attractive elsewhere. So in thinking about how we build our system is to think about what are those other things that are also attractive for folks. I think the other thing about, and I totally understand, like there's many ways to tackle this, this challenge we have of trying to meet as many people as possible. And so that means, like on the kindergarten side, is to make that full day so that parents can access that preschool in particular. But also thinking about the changing work demands of parents and particularly the things about varying hours. And then so making sure that the supply or what we're hoping in building that people will then be able to come because they have other conditions that might prevent that. So thinking about that as part of the equation as well. Then if you guys wanna respond to either of those two very important comments. We have too many. That's part of the silo problem. I know that there are state preschool slots, so to speak, that are empty because parents need childcare and a half day program isn't gonna work for them. But we have state preschool that is in one place and we've got childcare in another. And so that's why I think the importance of whether we consolidate somehow all of these different funding sources and programs and states have done that. So it's not undoable, I'm sure challenging. Or whether we just create greater coherence at some level, we're not gonna meet families needs in any kind of meaningful way if we have this fragmentation and think of the child as this part of the day is to prepare for kindergarten and this part of the day is to, I mean, it just doesn't make sense because it's one child. The other issue that we're facing at least in our school district is we have an increase enrollment at 2.9 year olds. But those, and that's because parents have been waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for infant-toler care couldn't get in. So we have this higher enrollment and we still consider them in the three-year-old group. The challenge with that is their needs are much greater. So they're younger, right? And so again, once again, we have them in this classroom and because of where, if it's about parents' choice, you're not gonna say let's put all the 2.9 year olds in this part of the county or this part of the city or this part of it. So we're trying to figure out how do we get support? It goes back to workforce. We wanna serve these 2.9 year olds. Parents are waiting because they need the full time but the young children are, they're still working on their developmental level but they need skilled teachers to be able to do that. And the other thing is making sure we also continue to serve those three-year-olds even if they're at 2.9. I also think the piece around non-traditional hours is a growing part of our workforce and that's not going away and we need to figure out what the mechanisms are that, excuse me, best serve families who basically need off hours but on an ongoing basis, not on a temporary basis. I think part of the up-leveling of our expectations though has to be that if a child is eligible for overnight care that somehow that they're gonna be barred from an early learning program during the waking hours of their day is unconscionable. There is no middle-class family that says you can either sleep safely or you can go to school, right? And that is an indefensible choice that we're asking poorer families to make. Can we maybe have time for two more questions? Hi, this was a great panel, by the way. My name's Randy Wolff. Most recently I've worked with developing early educator apprenticeships around the state and let's not forget that the governor is equally enthusiastic about apprenticeship as a model of professional development. But I wanna make three points about the workforce that I don't think to sort of remember the frame that we're working in. And the one is, I mean I've spent my entire career working with early childhood. There's every fiber of my body believes in the importance of young children and giving them a chance. But I think it's a mistake in terms of workforce to talk about workforce development for the sake of the outcomes that will ensue for the children. Of course that's important but we need to talk about the workforce being important as human beings, as women, as women of color, as new immigrants who deserve a reasonable lifestyle and compensation because they're human beings. And that, you know, okay, right. That's number one. It's a little bit passion. Number two is that to me when we talk about what kind of a professional development system do we need? We have to think of it in the largest framework. As long as a person doesn't have the choice to make a career of working as a preschool teacher, the way a third grade teacher has a choice of working as a third grade teacher for her whole career if she wants. That has to be the frame. The fact that we don't have a credential, the fact that we don't give people those opportunities. We know this, the researchers confirm this. All of the best and brightest and most well trained are gonna keep emigrating to not only elementary ed, but to healthcare and other viable options. So we have to see our workforce as part of a larger whole and not ask them to be the sacrificial lambs of an imperfect system. And then the third point is, I think we have great models and you spoke of one, forget what you said it was called, but the co- The childcare careers. Yeah, yeah. We've had really good models in this state of professional development programs. And then there's the word sustainability. So people rely on grants and they rely on foundations. You cannot run a system on grants and foundations. And anybody who's going after grant dollars, if they had a sustainability plan, they wouldn't be going after grant dollars. That's the reality. And so somehow we have to be able to think of this in a way that doesn't set us up to try a new set of pilots with really good results. And then at the end of three years, we start another new set of pilots with really good results. Thank you, Andy. I think we maybe have time for one more. I just have kind of a quick comment. My name is Vilma and I'm a teacher actually in Oakland Unified. And something that was, I really value the expertise of everyone. And I think it's really important that there be teachers, practitioners at the table. I mean, I hear the idea around. So I hear what we're saying around the full day kindergarten. And I also ask that you come and do full day kindergarten as a kindergarten teacher, a transitional kindergarten teacher, which I was for a long time was a preschool teacher, transitional kindergarten teacher. And I have to say that we need to be creative of what we're, I think I agree with having the implications of childcare having the full day option. And I really think about, we have to think about what is the toll on teachers, especially without assistance. My first year as a transitional kindergarten teacher, I had 25 students and no assistant. And I had a preschool background. I went to grad school. I had an early childhood background. So what I'm saying is we need to have these voices at the table so that when we're making decisions, we're thinking about, we're not just burning out the adults, the caregivers, the teachers who are facing the day-to-day decisions that are up here, that are being made by people who may or may not have the experiences of being in the classroom. I think that's a really good place to leave it. Thank you all so much for joining us today. And we have a lovely reception in the lobby, but thank you everyone for being here. I hope the discussion can continue.