Jeff Livingston: School Funding, Equity in Education, Rural Education, E-Rate Funding

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Welcome to the Learning Can't Wait podcast of Fullmind. At Fullmind, our vision is to ensure every child has access to an exceptional education. Each episode, we will be joined by Pathfinders within and around the education space who are bringing about transformational change. On behalf of deserving students, I'm your host, Hayley Spira-Bauer. Welcome back everybody to the Learning Can't Wait podcast, specifically here for our capstone episode on our funding miniseries with Jeff Livingston, CEO of EdSolutions. Welcome, Jeff. How are you?

Jeff Livingston: I'm doing really well, Hayley. Thank you for having me here, and thank you for the important work that you do to provide context for these important issues at a time when people need that so desperately.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: I appreciate those words. There's so much information that we have to consume as professionals in the education space in order to serve kids, and so trying to shine a light on some big topics so that there is less confusion is my goal. So I appreciate that call out and excited to have you here because I know you have a wealth of information from your experience. But let's context set a bit. Jeff, can you tell us all how you came to be the personal and professional version of yourself?

Jeff Livingston: Wow. I will tell you that I think it is important to note that the beginning has a lot to do with where you end up. And so to understand me, it is important to understand that I was born at the end of 1970 in what was still the colored wing of a public hospital in South Carolina. My lifetime, which is not that long, is the whole history of any attempt at real integration in the place that my family has lived for centuries race. So my view of the world starts there. I went to public schools that my parents worked hard to make the very best public schools that I could possibly have access to. I did well as a student. I went to Harvard undergrad as evidence of my having done well in school. ([02:45](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2FyoPmfSXsg6mFdcfIVBsGM2QiSjeUC6XME-Ph2lLknNP_lZ_C7GmuQCdPe3S1PzZk8eYZ2gTwzhYOztDWEPWMGGytqIw%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D165.69)): I know that education, high quality education built for people who do not look like me, but suddenly made available to me has been a pathway for me and for my family from what just a couple of generations ago was rural poverty to now is a mostly middle and upper middle class life full of opportunities, and my work is about making sure that that pathway is more effective for more students as an entryway to opportunity than it even was for me. So that's how I get here. That's what this is about for me. My career professionally started in investment banking, but I got pulled towards education in a very natural way almost immediately starting a company that became an edtech company during the first dot-com boom discovering the industry of serving school districts, and I really haven't left since then.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: I appreciate the fine point you put on the history that is endlessly and forever entangled with your youth, but the many youth for children of color in the south and in other parts of our country, because that is such a telling component of where we are today and in many cases while the conditions have changed, the promise of mobility is through education for children in our country.

Jeff Livingston: That's right. And that promise is not kept as nearly as often as it should be. It's a lot harder than it was in my day because the realities have become harder. I think the defining fact of my professional life has been the expansion of social and economic inequality. When I was growing up, poverty meant those kids who occasionally slipped below the line needed help and didn't quite have enough. It did not mean that my middle school needed to have a washer and dryer so that half the kids could have clean clothes. It did not mean that when I was coming up, and it does mean that now. So that promise of education is hugely important. That promise has never been kept as fully as I think it should have, and it's kept even less off it today than it has been in the past. So that's sort of what motivates me, what grounds me in this work,

[05:00] **Hayley Spira-Bauer:** And it's an important unabashed response to a lot of current events that are really troubling for a large majority of youth in our country right now. So we are currently experiencing some significant rollbacks in federal funding for education all over the US in different ways, in different capacities, and it isn't the first time we've seen it, right? We've seen rollbacks before. Why is it, in your opinion, why is it so profound? What's happening today? Can you paint a picture for maybe there's an uninformed listener? Why is this different or why does it feel different to you? Okay,

Jeff Livingston: I'll paint the picture for an uninformed listener. So imagine being a superintendent who just discovered that $15 million in previously approved federal funds for critical infrastructure, for learning programs, for assistance to students is suddenly not going to be there, right? Imagine being that superintendent, some people listening to us and watching us on your podcast are thinking, okay, that's a complete hypothetical, Jeff, I'll go with you. Other people are listening and saying, Jeff, you're exaggerating a bit. That's not really what's happening, but I want your audience to know that there are people listening who said, oh yeah, that sounds like last Thursday. This is what is happening. And the fact that there is not a consensus about whether or not that is happening, that is why this is different, that there's not a common understanding of exactly what's happening and how it's going to impact our schools and our communities and our students. ([07:46](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2FRHUUyT8EPM7JBpqSe2S9c5NxfODsk0-WYXbLqDPsNZ1hck1aciiONHdHocfMCAV6sAP4r2m7Cmtbzj7ZVicVpML1H3k%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D466.52)): Now, if it's a recession like 2000 7, 8 9, we saw it coming. We watched it happen. We could plan for it. Covid happened. We got our minds around it. Everybody went home. We linked arms and said, you tried this, you tried this. The one that works together, we'll both do. Who knows what's going to happen next week in funding?It's the chaos that makes this different.It's not knowing how somebody is going to interpret a rule that just got made up that had no public commentary period, that asked for no request for information or comments from the people who understand the situation. Someone wakes up and says, based on our policy, this is the new truth. And what follows is a vaguely worded pronouncement that each impacted community school district person has to interpret for themselves and wait and see how it impacts them. It's the chaos that's different. ([09:03](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2FC2twlhfhZ1jd-HbRzzh6s3Xh1D8OYaTM2CrdUbO0uw4QxYk9lUBTCBZnDuAaNR-T7o0D1GVO9pt_Rc3KxvbeUl2-Wn8%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D543.63)): It's the lack of order that's different. It's the lack of a common understanding of what the problem is that is different. What's also different is even if the executive orders were not being proliferated from Washington right now, changing systems that have been essentially the same for two and a half decades, ESSER funding would still be ending the crisis, and I do call it a crisis in large school districts of losing student population would still be happening. Those things are happening and people wonder how Title I is going to work next year and people wonder what it means that there is essentially no IES anymore. So it's the confluence of all these issues, all of which are related to funding and the chaos that makes this different. And everybody listening to us today just needs to understand that I will make pronouncements today in our conversation based on my informed understanding of what I believe to be true. And I will say things today that I will disagree with next week because things are changing so quickly. We have to live in that world. We've got to make the best decision we can with what we know and know that we're going to learn something new that changes at least a portion of that decision that is new in the business of running

[10:00] **Hayley Spira-Bauer:** Schools. That is new. I know I made a joke before we started recording that this episode's going live so quickly and then I stopped myself because no joke, like you said, it's day to day at this point, what changes are proclaimed handed down and the interpretation of them is so unclear. So we do have quite a few members of our audience that are superintendents and decision speakers that hold federal dollars, state dollars, local dollars. They oversee the deployment of those funds. How will the current proclamations impact some of our most underserved and historically marginalized and systemically oppressed communities?

Jeff Livingston: So I mean, in lots of ways, and in answering that question I have to, especially for your superintendent friends who are watching us. Let's go back a few years to the COVID time. During those times, I was actively involved in helping local education agency and state education agency friends of mine respond to the crisis, and a part of that was I would pick up the phone call friends of mine within the federal education infrastructure and say, how should we be interpreting this part of the ESSER thing? What do you think is there? Or what was the assumption about what this would do when you guys put this forward? And I made dozens of calls like that. There's nobody on the other end of most of those calls today,

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Right?

Jeff Livingston: They're not there.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: They were fired. They're terminated. Right? Exactly.

Jeff Livingston: They're not there anymore. The people that I was calling who were part of the permanent infrastructure of the education, government education system, who knew from one party to another, one secretary to another, one president to another, how things were expected to work, those are the people I would call. And there's nobody to answer my call today in almost every circumstance. What that means to me is that the people who were always vulnerable and the systems who serve them are even more vulnerable. Today, despite the popular press, the US Department of Education does not set curriculum for anybody anywhere. What it does is help to make sure that each student gets what she needs to maximize her chances of doing well. ([13:55](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2FLEfZ-KhiCkfavN0A5I7rfRVBtxc9LhCqWGf-jljCtvRmvC3IXZ8aRkFi9goNwVIdwmS0_DUVJG8Lq4u2p8FVVbVEb6o%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D835.15)): And what that ends up looking like, especially for students with special learning needs and other special needs, and for students who are themselves experiencing poverty or live in communities where poverty is the dominant ethos economically, the federal government has been topping up what resources are available there and doing so in a way that was predictable. You could five years ago have reasonably predicted what your Title I budget was going to look like today and been close enough. I have no idea what it's going to look like next school year. I have no idea what your state government is going to do if it is block granted and sent to them. I have no idea what rules are going to be sent with that block grant. What that means is I have to assume that the communities that needed more federal help will get less federal help. I have to assume that students who were surrounded by an infrastructure that enforced their rights to education access will have that be less true. ([15:31](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2F3EgSlqjeB4Wg7FvWCWvSEfQU-W1-ghD1OFHXriNXvkxXsePm1maKZNeMhUbNKvMHASIOu0--yeM7bN9FtylBWwW5_BA%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D931.82)): I don't think that's what those of us who devote our lives and our energy to education want for the world. We don't want to say everybody will be all right unless you're a poor kid with special needs who lives in a rural area. Nobody goes into education wanting to say that. We don't want to say you're going to be all right unless you live in a state that doesn't think about it the way the state next door or state somewhere else does. But that's where we live. That might be where we are at this point. And so my deep concern is thata sort of startup ethos of move fast and break things is moving too fast and breaking the most vulnerable.That's not fair. That's not right. And that's why government is not like a business, and we just have to figure out how to respond in ways that are going to make sense. Now, I mentioned one financial issue that I think in this series you might've brought up a little bit, which is the student population. And here is another kind of answer to your question. I have some questions. As an observer and participant in the education policy world, I have some questions. For example, I have no doubt that some mid-level district official in the city and the system that I live in and that I love, New York is somewhere right now saying something like the 1 million students we are proud to serve each day, that person might be rounding up by a whole Philadelphia,

[17:00] **Hayley Spira-Bauer:** Right? Right, right,

Jeff Livingston: Right. Might, I don't know. But they might be rounding up by a whole Philadelphia. And so when I ask where are those kids, I get answers like, well, during the pandemic, they moved to the suburbs. They're in Long Island, they're in Westchester, except that they're not because they haven't grown by how much New York has.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: More schools are seeing declining enrollment in the border

Jeff Livingston: Areas, or I hear, well during the pandemic, their families move south. So poor families in New York move to Florida during the pandemic and there are hundreds of thousands buy it. Or I hear, well, Jeff, the homeschool population has increased a lot. I'm like, okay, trying to tell me that low income, black and Latino families now have someone staying home during full-time education during

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Work and school hours.

Jeff Livingston: And there is an answer to this question, Hayley, where are these kids? But the people who fund the research and keep track of the statistics to answer that question are gone, right? Yes. That is something that NCES could have answered for me. That is something that IES would've funded research on that would've

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Answered. But yeah, now those programs are essentially defunct.

Jeff Livingston: So the question is still there, but the means for answering that question and therefore identifying what is happening with hundreds of thousands of students is gone. And I worry that because those students are unlikely to be the kinds of students who would live in my house and therefore have access to my resources or my influence or my knowledge about the system are fending for themselves in ways that we no longer have the capacity to understand what is going on and in a predictable, fair, nationwide way, fix whatever the problem is for those students. And that deeply concerns.

[20:00] **Hayley Spira-Bauer:** Yeah, I appreciate the really broad strokes, but also the fine points, as I said earlier that you're painting on this story because what you're helping us to clarify for the listeners here is both what are the sweeping changes that have come in an unpredictable, seemingly unplanned manner, and how are they impacting schools, communities, and ultimately our stakeholders that matter most are children. And even when you look at a small city like New York, no, when you look at New York, there are people whose jobs it is, I've had them on this podcast whose jobs it is to look at attendance rates in New York, study them and then report them over to the folks you were mentioning at the national level. And now their work is stunted. And so it is deeply concerning that some of the issues that are of most import aren't getting allowed enough waste. And one of those topics that you told me that you also would love to talk about that isn't getting enough attention is what I just had Jodie Buenning on Tuesday's episode is the E-Rate program, which helps schools afford broadband access. Now we're going to zoom out from New York City and we're going to talk mostly about the rural communities like those that Fullmind even serves in South Carolina, this E-Rate program is currently under threat. What would rollback mean for digital equity and education?

Jeff Livingston: So let's go back to where we started about my origins, right? I live in the village of Harlem in the wonderful city of New York today, but I was not born here. I was born in South Carolina, and my parents took me home from the hospital to my grandparents' home, which was at that point an upgraded shack with no running water built on top of what had been slave cabins two generations before. I know from rural here, if I still lived in that house, if I still lived in that place, if my family were still there, the chances are that all of my access to the internet was funded by E-Rate. ([23:18](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2Frqt8p1q8kdlq3UQWSRqaS2yAriiI4gxjgKEebx9emdla9JYPmN8OLEsauKWkGcVpGEyjMsj74QTGZtx7Fc28O2glT-o%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D1398.34)): E-Rate funded would've funded the library that I could go to and access the internet. It would've funded any attempt at providing internet access to me directly. It would've funded the school buses that the county school district put Wi-Fi on and drove so the kids would access there. If I were living in that house, E-Rate would be the way my country had decided to involve me in the technological revolution. And if E-Rate goes away as looks more than possible, right now, we are saying that the internet, that artificial intelligence are something that exists in New York and San Francisco, but not in rural South Carolina, not in rural Ohio, not in rural Mississippi. That is a scandal and a horror. I know every time I get my cell phone bill that some of it has been contracted between me and Verizon. Some of it is connected to how much I use my phone and in what ways. ([24:51](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2FY4l5gXMYSmQrvkBtvtGz-Wa7h1V45KmoZUJ-oEyA7z8JjOiVhdYE1-FlGm7VG3sdtW56mOcyvsPrFJmKGXcXfW43eBg%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D1491.35)): And some of it includes fees that I am proud to pay to make sure that every kid has the blessings of the technological revolution that the United States is leading in the world. And E-Rate is how that happened. And people like your previous guest made that happen. They invented this system at the beginning of cell phones, and I'm proud that they did. And I think it's horrible that we are considering isolating them from that world. Right at the moment when this technological revolution is taking off, when artificial intelligence is changing more about our world than the PC did when I last lived in South Carolina, this is the moment we choose to isolate them. I'll go a little bit further to Hayley, please. ([25:53](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2FUgjfEPAoDf8KAMoKgquDQ9nJrQh14skkrme8TzoJvUS9S0AbhB0wCBtkS1onh9hCsOnYk6v3ilEA4-5qw1fsNGeKIVE%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D1553.69)): If I were still living in rural South Carolina as a student, the chances are very high that the working people supporting my life would've been working in or adjacent to agriculture. There are peaches from South Carolina that are not being loaded onto boats and being sent to Namibia by USAID today, there are people who are not working in the fields to get those peaches out of the fields today. And the access to the internet that the rest of us happily subsidized for our rural brethren is being attacked. It feels like a directed attack on rural America. It feels like somebody really has it in for people who don't live in big cities, which is the exact opposite of what you would think this particular iteration of political leadership would be doing. But I can't imagine too many more things you would do if you were trying to destroy rural America,

[27:00] **Hayley Spira-Bauer:** Right?

Jeff Livingston: If that were the goal. What else would you be doing right now then impacting agriculture, impacting tourism, isolating the access to the internet and other technologies? I mean, it just seems really odd to me.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Yeah, there's

Jeff Livingston: Starting to get slightly political there, but

Hayley Spira-Bauer: I told you, bring it. Please, please bring it. When I think a lot about what I've learned about rural America over the past nine years working here, having my entire experience in teaching and leading schools in New York City, it has shown me more than any other type of environment, the resiliency and the collaboration and the ingenuity that is born in rural America. And yet I don't want them to be resilient.

Jeff Livingston: That's right.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: We don't want to force resiliency on kids. We don't want to force resiliency on leaders. We don't want to force resiliency on communities. Sure, I'm proud and grateful that rural America shows such resiliency, but to your point, if we eliminate all the components of sustainable living in rural America, that is the outcome we will have to be hoping for.

Jeff Livingston: And to that point, Hayley, they had enough to direct their resilience at last year. They didn't need any more. Life hadn't suddenly gotten really easy for these communities, and therefore they needed a quick kick in the butt to help the, that's not what last year looked like. This is just unnecessary. It's gratuitous the impact that seems to be happening in these places right now. So anyway,

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Jeff, listen, we've done a lot of talking here about what's happening, why it's happening, who it's impacting, which I think is an important conversation for this particular miniseries. But in general for our audience. And I'm wondering as my final question, which I could go for days and keep asking you more, but I'm going to respect your time and the listener time here as a final question, let's turn the conversation to what can we do about it. So you have quite the background. You have seen many sides of the stakeholder equation and education, so feel free to do all of them or even just pick one stakeholder. Sure. What can we be doing about the concerns you've raised here?

[30:00] **Jeff Livingston:** So you're right, I have seen lots of different perspectives of this. So I will do this in order of power. I was an undergraduate government and economics major. I like to think about the world through that lens. Let me start there. Parents, every parent in America who sends their kids to public schools and has no choice but to send their kids to public schools needs to do a couple of things. First, do not assume that the way this school year began is the way next year school year will begin. Do not assume that there is no reason to assume that. Second, find out how your school district, your school and your children are going to be impacted. ([31:16](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2FdMwj0dbHwDCAXZuj3ONLS6Tzk7YtaVLb6w1K3_eBiJg6LUepDMXJwSjOSzzRxiJSbqghggnQ42ZuLDGYbowyG7U9LB4%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D1876.24)): Third, the 15th time somebody tells you, I have no freaking idea. Call your congress person and ask them why Nobody has any certainty about what school is going to look like next year. Call both your senators and ask them why. Nobody has any certainty about what the school system is going to look like next year. And we didn't talk about this because you and I think largely in K-12 terms, but if you have a kid in college for whom federal student aid is important, you are not allowed to assume that that process is going to work as smoothly as it did last year and nobody thinks it was smooth last year. So add that to that. Then if you are a school building classroom teacher, ask your principal and your building leadership every day what they know and when they tell you they don't know those same congresspeople and members of the Senate represent you two, call them and ask that same question. Same thing for the school building leaders. Ask your superintendent and your school board how they think next year is going to be, what is special education going to look like in our district in the 2025-26 school year? How's it going to be different? Tell me, tell me what you were planning. ([33:02](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2FDXNCvkYAKwerZpQXtvurWxAIbjw4k4yIRksFelzhoys4gyYGNfbM-oxdC2LvUEPcvcznVHTMAN8yC5Dh5Dx8Qe1y9i4%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D1982.63)): District leaders, same thing. Ask your state chief state school officer, if Title I were sent to you as a block grant today, can you get the money to the school systems for the next school year? How under what circumstances using which formula will you do that? Everybody needs to respond to this by first hearing people like me and like you who are paying close attention when we say we don't know. And we used to be the people who do to understand that you don't know either. And I would not want to wait until August to find out. I would not want to wait until the first day of school to find out how many teachers got laid off because there was no funding for them. ([34:11](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2FJh2av55JdeRAoTndma4juXdG3JYzcALXTJvWSHJXwsBcyT0x2K86UFEcaJLINhSBT6_-XMg4kWI1Nrgmmi5o-sBIIb8%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D2051.48)): You mentioned the people whose job it has been to collect student data and send it to DC being stunned today. You are being nice. They are being laid off today because districts have to find money somewhere. And if nobody's collecting that data anymore, it's not there. So it is the responsibility of all of us to do whatever we can to figure out what the 2025-26 school year is going to look like for our kids. And because we are Americans and we are generous, let's ask about other people's kids too. Let me sitting in Harlem Wonder what school is going to look like in rural South Carolina where I began life next year too. ([35:14](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2FMZYu_qH0lamjvEB5qc-1P8kR5SYsCjHNK-ITi4sjHB-cyvRh5tsxYzTsUoId_sIaGOzb3f4M9LHUEo493yTHxWx_a9M%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D2114.96)): I am invested in them. They are invested in me. If I have outsized influence because I have outsized information and I have outsized resources and I have outsized access, it is my moral and civic responsibility to use that outsized influence, not only for my own family, but for families who lack that too. And those families tend to have less money to live in more rural communities, to live in states with less well developed education infrastructures than some do. And all of us have to do this in this together. I mean, the more I say this aloud, Hayley, it feels like a new pandemic. It feels like that it's got those feelings from where we were at the beginning and people were like, well, what's happening? What's happening? It's five years later,

[35:00] **Hayley Spira-Bauer:** Here we are.

Jeff Livingston: And we haven't recovered from that, right? ([36:26](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2F2pdQdtqEALemqV5OzfVsyr7gNCbpH4_-dyzCxxlRWAx6BbFNZzvkkVSHbTRvVGb68KKcooIxxePNHaefuKuCUSYo2UY%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D2186.76)): Nobody who has seen any student test data in the last year thinks we have recovered from that last one. And I think we might be in a new one. This is not a health crisis yet, but it is a structural crisis. It is a consistency crisis. It is most certainly a funding crisis, which means it's going to be a learning experience crisis for the most vulnerable students. And all of us need to figure out how to fix this. I certainly am doing what I can. I know you are. Too many, many people are trying to do what we can because we can look ahead to the beginning of the next school year. ([37:23](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rev.com%2Ftranscript-editor%2Fshared%2F3DGOeLwvIH2WCwK85QIgUiI74r-NZN4S2bzTo17resjvgCKwBsO3pVyI3KgwWWjD33nQx9nHb5LcTznxPGihdhU-l6Y%3FloadFrom%3DDocumentDeeplink%26ts%3D2243.19)): And our informed view makes us worry more than others are worried today. And the people who are not worried, are not worried because they don't understand, not because there's nothing to worry about. And that's the sad fact, and that's at least how I see it. I have enjoyed this conversation. You're right between the two of us, we could have this conversation all day long, and I sincerely hope that we have inspired more of these conversations in your listeners. I hope somewhere someone is saying, well, you know that Jeff is full of it. I don't think this. What do you think? I want those conversations to keep happening, right?If we can't yet be the source of answers, let's be the source of more questions,

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Right?

Jeff Livingston: Better questions, engagement. And that's why I am happy to be here with you today on your amazing podcast and honored to be your guest.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: No, Jeff, this has been really wonderful. The topic is difficult to talk about in the sense that it is dramatically currently impacting people's lives and will have very, very significant consequences in the coming months and years. And you kind of ended with this call to action for folks listening to ask questions and look for helpers and connect with one another, which I really appreciate because there is no more important thing in times of strife than getting more active and not retreating from the problems before us. So thank you for that. And thank you for coming on The Learning Can't Wait podcast. It has been an honor to interview you.

Jeff Livingston: Thank you so much. I am delighted learning Can't wait, and I am so glad that I could be here with you in this conversation so that it doesn't have to wait. That we can start now fixing what is happening and imagining a new future that is better for all students.

Hayley Spira-Bauer: Well said and thank you to everybody who tuned in today. Thanks for listening to the Learning Can't Wait podcast. If you like what you heard, please rate, review and share this episode. Be the first to know when we have a new episode by subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. If you'd like to be a guest on the show or have a suggestion for an episode, email us at podcast@fullmindlearning.com.