 For more than a decade, Horace Mann has sponsored the NEA Foundation Awards for Teaching Excellence. Because we know how important and deserving it is to shine a light on outstanding teachers who make a difference in their students' lives and who continue to elevate the role. So please join me in congratulating and honoring five individuals who have been singled out by their peers for going above and beyond and becoming this year's Horace Mann Award recipients. Al is just an amazing, amazing person. For me, he's the person that makes me want to be a better teacher. He keeps working at something until he's accomplished it. Honestly, I just describe him as being like the funniest, chillest, high school teacher that anyone would want. He's not afraid to try new things to support our students. He understands that to be successful, you have to connect with each and every student every day. I teach at a continuation school. The student population is 100% at risk. They're all credit-deficient, and they may have had other struggles in different parts of their life. When they come into my classroom, I know that my expertise is math and that's the content that I'm delivering, but I need to give them a little bit more than that. He has a real passion for at-risk students, and I know that transcends everything he does. I was bad in school. I didn't go to classes. With him, I would open that up, and we connected more on a personal level, and he took me into his leadership class. From there, just started to develop her and push her in different ways. I became more involved in school, especially here. And then she decided to step up and coming here because she was credit-deficient, turning it around, getting her credits back up and turning it to her comprehensive high school. Now she's at a community college. He has a desire to help fellow teachers because he sees it directly related on what goes on in the classroom. Al is like the poster child of the teacher leader. He's excited about his work and about his students. They matter a lot to him. He is willing to work hard to accomplish great things in education. And if it's something that fits into his lifetime goals, he's going to pursue it with all the energy he has. When you do those types of things, it's going to lead to good results. He doesn't settle for just, okay, this is page nine, that's all we're going to do. Al is going to do the research. Anything that comes up, any idea that comes up. He tries to keep up with whatever latest thing is in education. He reads upon it. If he believes in it, he's going to go hog on it. Not only did he want to work closely with me, he wanted me to come in his classroom and bring my students. He wanted to co-teach. This was a new thing and we were going to support those students in a gender class where traditionally they would have been taking their math class with me. To me, that was exciting. I believe I have a knack for connecting with people and connecting with them on a much greater level than just whatever the work is. It's more about getting to find out who that person is and what drives them and pulling out what their talents are. He never stops. He seems to have endless amount of energy and enthusiasm for what he does. You know, he's really young still in education, but he's done a lot in that short amount of time. He makes us want to become better at our profession. And if somebody can do that for you, that's amazing.