 to help you do this work. How do we serve as a resource, as a greater resource, to help you be successful? And so to help us set the table around that discussion of community partnerships is going to be Greg Darneter who spoke with us yesterday about the landscape in the U.S. And so now in terms of higher education and education and so forth. And so I would like to have Greg come over here. He's going to talk to us. I think yesterday you said you were going to tell us some stories from the road. And Greg, as we mentioned yesterday as a special assistant to college access for the Department of Education. So Greg, thank you. Okay, I'll start with the microphone this morning. So just to pick up on a couple things that Jeff and Jacob just shared with you. Not only do we have higher ed act being reauthorized, but we also obviously have ESEA, no child left behind, and the whole waiver process. As many of you might know, we also have put out a blueprint around CTE and the redesign of CTE. The President's proposed a billion dollar investment in helping districts build career academies. This would be above and beyond the $1.2 billion that the Department currently invests in current technical education. So, you know, we'll see where that is in his proposed O-13 budget. So we'll see how that plays out over the next weeks, months, and the such in terms of the budget that's for this year. So there's actually quite a bit of opportunity on the horizon. But there's also a major dark cloud. And then going back to one of Jacob's comments around federal aid and what, 75% of or 77% here in the A coming from us, how in the O-14 budget, so not this current fiscal year, but the following year is projected to have a several billion dollar shortfall. So there are conversations going on within the nonprofit community. Gates has funded eight or 10 entities to begin thinking about what that might mean. That could translate into a fairly significant cut in the Pell Grant. Could. As you might know, the President's proposed an $85 increase in, again, his O-13 budget. So not a significant amount of money. Probably more symbolic, if you will, in terms of his priorities of, which he's made very clear. And he's, you know, and he's defended the support of low income students through the Pell program. And it's not only defended that, but also, remember last July 1st, Congress had to act on student loan debt interest rates not doubling on July 1st. And so he was, we were able to make a deal on that a couple weeks before July 1st sort of thing. So my point is that the President is going to be our strongest proponent in this kind of conversation around Pell, which doesn't, as you know, operate basically as an entitlement program. It abides as an entitlement program, even though it's not labeled an entitlement program. So, anyways, lots of opportunity, but also this fairly large dark cloud in terms of how does the shortfall get handled. There are conversations around limiting Pell if students enter higher ed and not prepared to earn credit. So if they're in remedial courses, should federal funds be used to support that? Should the time that they can be in remedial courses be limited? Those sorts of things. Now, some institutions across the country are making their own decisions along those lines, where if students are in remediation for half a semester, I mean for a semester or two semesters, the institution is saying it's not in your, but we're not going to continue to enroll you. Because it's not in your, you're not making adequate progress. And our concern is about you potentially absorbing more debt and the such. So anyways. So, yes, let me tell you some stories from the road. Let me put this in context. There are five major areas that from when we arrived a little less than four years ago, that have been core to the way we've approached our funding strategies. And these will all sound very familiar, and I'll try to refer to them, and most of them will be fairly obvious, as I kind of share some of these stories. So the first one is around leadership and teachers. So supporting high quality teaching and supporting school leadership. Second is around standards. And this is all related to the conversation in terms of what's gotten most people's attention across the country in terms of the United States falling behind other countries in terms of students' academic achievements or post-secondary degree completion rates and that sort of thing. The third one is around data. And this kind of ruthless honesty about data. The fourth one, which was not part of our original core funding areas, is early childhood. And early childhood has emerged over particularly the last year as a centerpiece of our funding. And then the last area is really our civil rights, our social justice investment and kind of banner to say states and districts and communities need to pay attention to the bottom 10%, the bottom 5%, the dropout factories. You need to pay attention to the lowest performing schools in your state, in your district, the lowest performing students in your district, your state. And so this has been part of our school improvement grant, the SIG grants. It's been our major investment there. But it also comes through in our I-3 funding, in our Promise Neighborhood funding and the such. So as I've shared with most of you, I think I've got the best job at the department because I report to Arnie, which means we exchange emails once in a while and we sit down a few times a year. I can get to him any point in time. He can obviously get to me at any point in time. But when I ran the high schools in Chicago, I had 200 staff people and I had a $45 million budget and I show up at the department and they give me an office and it overlooks the Air and Space Museum and I look to the right and there's the capital and I look to the left and there's the Washington Monument. But I have no staff. I have no budget. I have a job. I'm supposed to be the senior advisor. I am the senior advisor to the secretary. How do we get 8.2 million additional college graduates in this country? But you get to sit in the secretary's office, which is great because it gives me access to all the different assistant secretaries who are actually driving the office of elementary and secondary education or the office of vocational delta education or to the under secretary and her staff and so on and so on. So I think it's the greatest job in the world because I also only have to be in D.C. when I really need to, which means I can be out here with you guys and keep coming back to San Antonio as you know I love to do. So here are some stories from the road and I'll try to talk about those five core funding areas. Let me just say that if any of these are just kind of meant to be hopefully some of them will stimulate you. If you want to know more about a particular district or program that I mentioned, just come up to me afterwards. I'm happy to do an email introduction and make that sort of thing happen. One of the things I just I love about our community, our education community is a willingness to learn from each other, right? And we're all very proud of what we do and we like to share it. And so the people that I'm going to talk about have just been so generous and open with their time with me over the last three and a half years. Most of what I'm going to share is actually happened in the last couple months because the day after Labor Day I was in Seattle and then have basically spent the last 10 weeks on the road except for like two three-day students back to do my wash in DC and then come back out. But it's been really inspiring and quite motivating to just to see the energy that's out there in so many different contexts. So let me talk about, start on the pre-case side. We met, I mentioned this yesterday, how particularly in rural communities, how when you don't have a local foundation, you don't have a big corporation, you are, and I'm talking about if you've ever been to North Dakota where you can travel for an hour and maybe not even see another human being, you know, as you drive from one place to the other. But in places that are pretty isolated from what we're used to living in urban settings. So Berea, Kentucky. Berea College, anybody ever been to Berea College? This amazing institution that doesn't charge tuition, serves 1600 students a year. You have to live in the Appalachia area. Berea College in the last two years has gotten more federal money from the Department of Education than probably anybody else, any other entity in the country. They've got the largest gear up money in the country. They have two gear up grants that total almost 50 million dollars. They have upward bound programs through their higher ed institutions. They have a Promise Neighborhood grant. Serving half a dozen counties, rural Eastern Kentucky, coal mining country, not much around. But this institution has these amazing leaders, underscore leaders, who have a vision for their young people. One of the districts there, Hazard, has the school system made a policy in terms of this, how do we build this college going, career going culture with our kids? So they did a very simple thing. They passed a board policy that said, any field trip that start with second graders or older must incorporate a stop at a higher ed institution. If you want permission to go on a field trip, that's fine. But you just have to make sure you stop at a college or a training program. Now, these are not large colleges. They're usually a building or two. But what they're trying to do obviously is translate to these young people what the why they're in school and what it can lead to and begin to build this vision and the such. Shasta County, California, Northern California, anybody ever been there? Kind of a gene has been there reporting. So pretty I've never been there. But they decided as a community a number of years ago that they needed to build this kind of image of the importance of school with their kindergarten kids. And so they said, Okay, we don't have any industries. We don't have any foundations we can turn to. But we do have ourselves. And so they started a career fair for their preschool kids. And what they asked was the community doctor to come with his white coat or her white coat and stuff the scope. They asked the dentist to come, you know, with the appropriate professional garments. They asked the forest rangers, the all these different professions to come kind of to illustrate just through their dress. And to talk with these kids but also to put on demonstrations of wherever they could. Well, this started with a couple hundred people. It's now five or 6000. It's turned into a day long festival with free health screenings and dental screenings and fire demonstrations and all this all focused around their four and five year olds. Just to be again to build this image in these kids heads of what can happen. The creativity really hit me when I went to Northeastern Tennessee. Rural Tennessee, a former superintendent retired, had this vision of how do we really build rigor and college opportunity for our kids when I've got schools in rural Tennessee that range from 40 students, high schools, four zero to 2000. Most of them a couple hundred kids. So she actually ended up writing an I3 grant to us and decided to use technology. And I wish I had thought of this when I was in Chicago because it was very similar to the challenge I felt in many urban settings. So in her mind it was like how do I get physics delivered to the two kids in that high school of 40 students, right? With the highest level possible. So she gathered these principles and superintendents. They built this proposal to us and using the basic question was who's the best physics instructor within our 27 high schools? Who could deliver five or six class periods a day to 25 or 30 kids every class period, three or four, five or six who are actually live in front of the teacher? And the others are basically on flat screen TVs and delivering the lessons. They've recruited three young ladies from China. So they're now teaching Chinese. Underneath all this was to build an AP strategy because they knew that with the fundamental belief that these kids, if they were given the opportunity, could do as well as any other child in Tennessee and the country. But we just needed to figure out the delivery mechanism to these kids subject after subject after subject. In one year their AP offerings went up five-fold just because they figured out a way to collaborate and work together. It's a remarkable, remarkable story in terms of leadership just stepping out there and taking the risk and the such. Southern Maine. Southern Maine Community College. We talked a little bit about advanced manufacturing yesterday in the 60 minutes segment that was on Sunday. So they have this challenge in Maine where the community college president decided to begin to open up some of his shops. So the welding shop and the carpentry shop to students who had dropped out of high school as a drop in place. Without a pressure to get them to enroll in class, it was just a place to kind of hang out. The long-term intent is to get them to enroll. But the first line of the attraction here is just to create a comfortable place for young men and young women just to come. And if they have an interest in learning carpentry or welding, hey, just come on over, spend a couple hours, blah, blah, blah. Well, something like 75% of the drop-ins to these shops end up enrolling. Those who enroll in their advanced manufacturing program are being taken out of that program, halfway one year training program, being taken out of that program, halfway through it, by manufacturers in rural Maine because they're in such desperate need of workers. And then working out with the community college away for those students to finish their certificates and such. So in talking to the president, it was like, this is just the right thing to do. It doesn't cost me a lot of money. But it's a way for me to engage the community in a very meaningful way. CTE, let's go there for a minute. So I'm in Elk Grove, California, just north of Sacramento. And it's National Gear Up Week. And we're celebrating National Gear Up Week at Elk Grove High School. Anybody been to Elk Grove? No Elk Grove at all? Well, the principal gets up and his CTE director gets up and begins explaining some of the projects that the students will be doing this year. The first one was that the kids in the construction trade program are going to design and build a greenhouse and sell it to a family in the community. They've done this before. They've got the architecture and drawing piece of this all together. The kids will actually build it. We'll actually meet with the lawyers in terms of the actual sale of the house to whoever ends up buying it. And I mean just this very powerful example of translating meaning of school into action, if you will. Another group of kids at the same high school that come up with this idea of building a solar powered battery that can be used in medical clinics in Africa. Now where they got that idea? And where they got seated? I don't know. But they've done this. And they were actually at a point of talking about how do we commercialize this product that we've created as the 16 and 17 year old kids. And just the energy and kind of purpose and intent of why we go to school is just you know, you can't you can't quiet these kids in terms of their their inspiration and and the such. One of the on the engineering side project lead the way is something if you aren't familiar with it, I encourage you to look into it's really spreading across the country. It's a curriculum at the high school level. I think it's also down into the middle grades to some extent. But it's all around engineering. It's very project focused. It's very hands on learning. It's supported by professional engineering associations and the such. So something to to look at. Albuquerque. Albuquerque is just built a brand new high school, serving about a 90% Latino population that is I believe it's seven different programs of study. Each of these programs of study has their own building. The county so they have a school of law as one of their programs of study. The county has built a courtroom. It as part of this school of law with a full jury box and seating for you know, observers and a couple of judges gave the school their law books, retired judges gave the school their law. The county intends to hold trials there and for students then to have the opportunity actually have hands on exposure to seeing our legal system in action. The building next door. They are working with Disney to build an entire program of study around animation. And with Disney's help. Probably doesn't get much better than that right. But the vision of this principle in terms of and she had a huge fight with her board in terms of why are we going to spend like 70 or 80 million dollars to build the state of the art high school. And this is on the outskirts way on the outskirts of Albuquerque to serve low income Latino families in her argument. Latino woman is this this sure as hell would not be a question you would ask if those was being built in another part of our city sort of thing. And so she's been fighting for years to make sure that this high school gets built. If you will for for her kids. A couple weeks ago, the college board had their annual conference in Miami. So I went over to Miami Dade schools. This was two days after they had just won the Broad Prize. So they were in a very good mood. But but one of the things that Miami has done is use the the National Academy Foundation to build up their CTE Academy offerings in the district. And I believe tongue in it last night, I think they've got five or six of those 16 programs of study that that they're that they're focused in on. So let me tell you about the most amazing place I've been to Long Beach. Anybody familiar with Long Beach's story? So you can correct me if if so I'm I'm I'm typically the guy that's half full in terms of the glasses have full in terms of how I view these things. But this really got me excited. I was there just a couple weeks ago. And their superintendent's been in place for 11 years. Chris Steinhauser over those 11 years and a few years plus. So his predecessor, this amazing partnerships been built between Long Beach Community College in Long Beach and Cal State Long Beach, which basically guarantees for every Long Beach student admission into Cal State Long Beach. Now, why is this amazing? Cal State Long Beach gets 60 to 70,000 applications for 4000 seats seats each year. Okay, 60 to 70,000 applicants, 4000 seats. They also admit something like 3500 transfers from the community college systems and and the such. Cal State Long Beach made a decision to set aside at least 1000 of those 4000 25% of those seats for Long Beach students. Now think about this, they the Cal State Long Beach probably could admit 4000 kids with 4.0 GPAs, right? But they have decided not to do that, not to not to do that fully. They're saying, we will take these kids from Long Beach ISD and guarantee them admission into our system. So why would they do that? Part of it is on a social justice and civil rights. Part of it is about seeing their future as a community truly truly in the hands of their young people. And we're going to give our young people the best education possible. Now, if I'm the president of Cal State Long Beach, I'm not going to make that bet. Unless I also have confidence in the community college system, and in what's happening in K 12, right? So Cal Long Beach ISD has this long standing superintendent, he just signed another four year contract. He told me I happened to be there when it was principal for a day. So I got to actually hang with the superintendent for four day as we popped into school after school after school. I didn't see one student not engaged as and we were popping into schools totally unannounced. He wouldn't even go to the principal's office to tell the principal he was there. He would just go straight into classrooms sort of thing. We didn't see one student. We saw a couple thousand students who was not fully engaged in learning as we popped in and out of classrooms. So what have they done? I want to use Jeff's example about algebra but at the high school level. So they have offer high school algebra to their eighth graders, something like 70% of their eighth graders take high school algebra and 80% of them are passing it. So they're basically addressing this transition academic rigor piece as early as possible to tell students, to see students the fact that you can be a successful high school student and we're going to show you that as early on as possible. He is a leader that has very clearly outlined to his principles, his expectations in terms of what he expects those principles to put in place programmatically. And so that if you're going to, I notice back over here, the Harlandale has implement avid with fidelity, right? So we like to talk many times about our programs, but we all know as administrators that it really gets down to this issue around fidelity. Right? We can design all the most magnificent tools and feel really good about our design. But if they don't get implemented by those teachers in those classrooms day after day after day with fidelity, you know, we've, what have we really accomplished? And so this becomes as much of a managerial challenge as it is having the right tools in place. I know going back to how we, we put together a electronic portfolio portfolio for our kids in Chicago that started in fifth sixth grade. The issue was, where does that fit into the curriculum from a time standpoint, right? When you took go into the middle grades and talk to teachers administrators about that. And so for administrators who really get it, that's a very short conversation, because they figure out how to do it, right? For others, it's a much longer extended conversation in terms of, now, why am I doing this? And, and do I have to? Yes. And, and what, what if I don't and, you know, all this stuff. But for administrators who really get the importance of it, it's not a conversation at all. You just figure it out. And you figure it out, not by dictating it down. You figure it out because you introduce it to your staff. And you figure it out together, right? And then it just gets done. And, and you figure out that and how to, to monitor it. I had a quarter million kids across 650 schools that I had to try to figure out a system to monitor it in terms of, of the implementation and fidelity of just that one tool. You know, we had avid in 250 schools, had about 40,000 kids in it. How do you monitor the fidelity of implement, implementation a consistent basis, and the such. And of course, data helps with that. And just having having the right staff to oversee it, and are able to, to interact appropriately with administrators and teachers is, is critical as well. But the Long Beach story is fascinating. It's a district of about 84,000 students. So it's fairly large. Majority Latino. And yet these institutions of higher ed have been able to work with the school superintendent. And his basic attitude is, if it's the right thing to do for students, I'm going to do it. Oh, it's against state policy. I don't care. If it's the right thing to do for students, I'm going to do it. And they've worked this out. In terms of the community college teachers and professors sitting down with his teachers and figuring out the seamless system of instruction. Algebra just one component of it. Now the community college does a couple other interesting things. It doesn't use Accuplacer or Compass. It gives it places students into credit bearing classes based on GPA. Now, there's the University of Chicago about five or six years ago started making this argument that GPA was a much better indicator of student success than actually ACT, SAT, Accuplacer or Compass. The only reason that they use Accuplacer and Compass is basically for diagnostic purposes to get students the skills that they're lacking in certain areas as quickly as possible. In other words, they don't have to take the entire semester remedial course. They just need to work on the skills. So suppose you're doing that in that wasted senior year, right? And so that students are leaving Long Beach ISD knowing that they're going to be placed into credit bearing courses. The other thing the community college does, and I used to have this argument with Chicago Community Colleges all the time, because they were very proud of like the 5,000 courses they offered, right? They had posters and they had brochures up and down the ying-yang about all the things that they offered. And I said, this is not helpful to Chicago Public School students. You guys need to tell them exactly what they're going to be taking, at least for the first semester, right? I mean, because you control, I mean, it's great to have individual choice and all that, but you control that that step into higher education. And these kids need direction in terms of at least that first semester, if not the first year. So Long Beach Community College literally gives Long Beach students no choice. Here are your courses. Here are your professors. This is what you'll be taking. Now, the data at both Cal State Long Beach and at the Community College is showing that the kids coming out of Long Beach ISD are outperforming at both institutions all the other students that those institutions are admitting. They're outperforming at the Community College the other thousands of kids that are entering. And at Cal State, they're outperforming academically those kids who supposedly have those higher academic skills coming into Cal State Long Beach. It's really an amazing, amazing investment and commitment on a part of community institutions to to basically deliver this message. Again, a district that's largely low income, heavily Latino, basically saying there is a future here. And we are going to do everything, everything to make sure that you're successful, if this is the pathway that that you want to go down. All right, a couple other thoughts and examples. Let me go back to engineering. Detroit, Detroit has a program that starts their engineering sequence with kindergarten students. It's called DAPSA, Detroit Area Freak Legit Engineering Program. One of the unique aspects of this is that in Chicago just started a similar program is that from kindergarten through third grade, this is not a drop off program for your student. The parent must attend the sessions with their child. They must attend. If you cannot come with your child to a certain session, your child may not come. The whole purpose here is to not only educate the child, but to educate the parent in terms of the disciplines around and supports that they need to give their child and to ingrain those into these mothers and fathers at the earliest point possible. If you go to the University of Michigan School of Engineering, before you open the door to go into the building, there's a plaque on the building from the University acknowledging their partnership with DAPSA that's been in existence for 35 years that says, basically, we honor our relationship with Detroit Area Freak Legit Engineering Program. This program has reduced hundreds of engineers into the automobile industry, and thousands of minority students into medical, teaching, engineering, STEM fields over the last 35 years. But it's done it in a very realistic way to say, if we're really going to do this, we can't start with our juniors in high school. We can't start with our freshmen in high school. We can't start with our 10 year olds. We have to start at the earliest possible point. It's really an amazing example, I think National Science Foundation has been helping to seed this work in Chicago with million dollar grants for each of the last three years. Part of it is that the guy who started the Detroit program is actually from Chicago. He retired from Detroit Public Schools. A few years ago, and I said, Kenneth, you have to come home and you have to do this in Chicago. There's like five or 6,000 kids in DAPCEP every year. He tells a story about how he hopes that the sign up day, which is usually in February, Detroit can be a little cold. He hopes it's the worst day weather wise, because he uses it as a way to test the determination of families to get their kids into this program. They have to do the registration at where the Pistons play basketball, because so many families show up to get their kids into this program. It doesn't cost anything. What he asked them to all you have to do is deliver your child. This is an after school and Saturday summer program, just deliver your child on time to participate. And by the way, if your kid is four, five, six, seven or eight years of age, you have to come with them. It's really quite amazing. Alright, let's see. What else can I tell you? You want another example of a great partnership between Community College for your institution and a school district is Orlando, Valencia College, and their relationship with Central Florida University, and with the Orlando School District. Another place to check out. A great example of where data is beginning to bubble up in terms of importance is that 15 states have come together that have state GERA projects, and they basically are partnering with ACT, and they have agreed to use the E-PASS system, so the Explore Plan and ACT test for all of their gear up students across these 15 states, so that they can do some comparative data analysis on some of these outcome measures like high school graduation rates and post-secondary enrollment rates and password completion rates and that that sort of thing. That's huge from from our standpoint at the federal level, because we don't have the data, the research to kind of support many of the federal investments that are that are being made. As I mentioned earlier, we put 1.2 billion into Perkins. We put another 1.1 billion a year into gear up and trio of programs. And one of the things that we need better information on is is just what's the added value to these investments. Fastphone. So I've been talking to some of your state people over the last couple of years to say that if you're willing, as some other states have been, to basically push individual verification of your student's fine of fast reform, we would encourage you to consider doing that. They amongst other states are concerned about violating FERPA. However, there are three states that for the last several years, the lawyers in these states have said we don't think this is a FERPA issue. Because we're not revealing any particular piece of information on that student's form. All we're doing is confirming a very simple question. Does Johnny have a completed fast reform? Yes or no? So states like Colorado, Illinois, Maine, just talked to Massachusetts last Friday. I think they're going to come on board fairly quickly. They've said, yeah, we think we don't think this is a FERPA violation. And so they have been pushing out to their districts. Once Memorands of understanding have been signed off on individual verification, just as three of three of the districts in the room are participating in the FASA completion project, our argument has been, why not do this for every district in your state sort of thing? So I think where this is going is that eventually, there will be guidance sent to state officials to say that this is not a FERPA violation. And folks at state levels, the people in Illinois and Colorado, Maine have been more than willing to talk to their colleagues around the country. Usually it's the state agency that oversees the state scholarship in the state and say, here's how we came to our decision and how we became comfortable with progressing to a point of working with our districts. And what it's doing is exactly what's happening today and what you guys have been involved with in your conversations over the last several years, particularly, is building this college going culture, both at the at the district level and within each of the buildings. And how do we really, really build the infrastructure to support all all this work? So the FASA piece, as I've been arguing since I came to the department is really a foot in the door for most districts in terms of being it the importance of a data point. And to hear the 77% figure is is more than important, because my own experience in Chicago is Chicago kids, it's a 90% low income district, those kids are not going on to post secondary education, unless they start with that federal Pell Grant, which opens up the door for in Illinois case for $5,000 from the state, in addition to the 5500 from us. And so their options, obviously, just get broadened. And yes, we there's kind of a two pronged attack here, right? We have to work with our students in terms of building their academic rigor and abilities and such. We also have to give them the realistic opportunity financially to be able to access higher higher education. So let me see if I have anything else here. Oh, so so about six months ago, I started a monthly call, I was been on it. And I want to invite a representative from each of the districts. If this is of interest, it started out by identifying people within school districts that are driving this work. Many times it's the counselor, but many times it's not. So districts like Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, St. Louis, Chicago, rural districts in North Carolina have been hiring into a position somewhat around college and career, you know, the college and career executive director, college and career director, Denver, basically to work alongside the school counselors, but to drive this whole college and career going work. So I started a call about six months ago for an hour. And basically, it's just a way to exchange information and to kind of meet some of your colleagues across the country. We've had people from Harvard who've been doing research on say summer melt present. We have been just sharing kind of our own frustrations and opportunities and and the such. So the next call is actually this coming Tuesday. And if you're interested in being part of that, just come up to me afterwards or tell Ira, and I'll give you my card and I'll make sure you get the call in number and the such. So there's about usually about a dozen or so people. The call is set according to my schedule. Sorry, but it basically have to be in the office to actually execute the call. But it's usually at 11 o'clock Eastern time. So 10 o'clock your time and and the such. And so if you're interested, just just let me know. But I've been toying with what are some of the other subgroups across the country of folks that that where, you know, some sort of interchange might be helpful. The College Board has been has been initiating conversations, certainly with their with their interests in school counselors. And the report I mentioned yesterday, which again, I would encourage you to pull down. But the the other is that they took about three months ago, a step where they invited people in like Ira to who are not counselors, and basically said, so this is Pat Martin, if you know, Pat at the College Board who leads their school counseling work and said, you know, tell us how counselors get in the way of you doing your work. So there were no other count. There were no counselors in this conversation. It was about 30 people from from the College Access work because the world and we said, we just want we want your honest opinion. Ira, what did you say? Thank you, dear. You didn't mean to put you on the spot there. But but but I thought it was a really it's one of these courageous conversations, right? Because I know my staff, even though I worked with an oversaw school counselors in Chicago, I also had another part of my team that had nothing that weren't school counselors. And who back in the office would I used to describe a bless you describe myself. My job is being, you know, one third administrator, and one third kind of strategist and such. But the other third was being this professional counselor, where you know, where people come in, and they you close the door, and then they just start telling you stuff like, and you never know where it's going as a supervisor. But so I thought it was a really, really important step to begin to honestly engage, you know, what we what we have as a common goal, but where jealousies. And when when we started this work in Chicago, for the first two years, it was hell, because the school counselors thought I was out there to take their jobs. And it didn't help that the community college had two years before that fired all of their counselors at a board meeting. And those people want to work the next day and didn't have a job, you know, and the Chicago school counselors thought, Oh, my goodness, the same thing is going to happen to us. This is really just a ploy to ploy to get rid of us sort of thing. So we had, we had to work through that, right? And it wasn't a set of necessarily easy conversations at times to get to a point where we could collaboratively really, really work together. So I'm thrilled that it's happening at a national level, we'll see where it goes. Because we are all in this together. And what again, what I love about what's happening here in San Antonio is the critical importance of these intermediaries, like the educational partnership in Jean's role from the mayor's office and the the P 16 council and such this work doesn't this work will not progress. Unless we have communities have those types of intermediaries, who can build the trust across all the different constituencies and have and keep the vision alive in terms of what what can what can be accomplished. It just is not happening anywhere that I that I know of in the country without that sort of vision and support mechanism that can, you know, call gatherings like this together. This just didn't happen, because you got an invitation to come today, right? There was a lot. Somebody was doing a lot of legwork to make these couple days of success and and to keep this keep this process going because it's a process and it's not necessarily a linear process. There's lots of curves and and back tracking at times and the such. And we just have and you need leadership with the vision. And certainly in your case, having something like Mayor Castro. In my case, it was arning. It was not the mayor. We brought the mayor along, but it took us about four years. Because Mayor Daley thought the only job Chicago public school students could barely get would be in the service industry in the hotels in Chicago. And we had to convince him that no, there is so much potential here with your students, Mayor. And we just had to demonstrate it. One of it one was through data, but also is through the accomplishments of students and the accomplishments at the school level. Sometimes programmatically, sometimes just by individual student accomplishment. And so I'll leave it at that. But again, if you're interested in this call, let me know if you're interested in any of the examples I used, all the people that I mentioned are more than interested in connecting with their colleagues across the country. And I've got lots of other examples too that happy to explore with you. I'll be here the rest the rest of the day. So so we have time for questions. We have five or six minutes. Okay, reactions. Observations. How do they do that? We can do that. Yes, we can. Yes, we have to. There's a great group in Salt Lake City, Latinos in action, started by it's run now by one of their principles. It's all about building leadership at all the way down into the middle grades, heavy focus on high school students. It's heavily connected to their Abbott strategy in Salt Lake City. I want to Salt Lake City not I've never been there before. They have something like 110 languages in their school district. I was I was thought of, you know, you see a bunch of white people sort of things. Sorry, but it was anything but I mean, it was unbelievable, the diversity in Salt Lake City, and this huge growing Latino population. And here's this group, they're actually have a foothold somewhere here in Texas. Yeah, sanctuary city or yeah, yeah, so that's what Salt Lake City is too. But yeah. So anyways, Somalians and Ethiopians and yeah, it's it's amazing. Really, really exciting. I'll have to look it up for you, but I can get it for you. Everyone stunned. Okay, or you want to break. Alright, I'm around. Thank you all. Appreciate it.