70: Kenneth Crowther - An Update from St John Henry Newman College

Join James as he sits down with Kenneth Crowther to hear how the first couple months of a student populated Newman College with has gone.

Please consider becoming a founding donor for St John Henry Newman College, a new independent classical school in South Brisbane.

Music: 'Inspiring Dreams' by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Well, welcome back to another episode of Educating Humans. I'm your host, James, and today I'm joined with the man who couldn't stay away. He was gone for an episode or two, and he's back with us. He's missed us so much. He's got so much to tell us, so we're really keen to have him. Uh Diff is back in the studio, or in his office, and I'm in my office, and we're on Zoom studio, but that'll work. So, Diff, why don't you say hello to everyone and tell them what you've been up to?

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Yeah, yeah, thanks, James. It's um we are in week seven, I think, of the school term. Uh, and I I decided at the start of the year when I was looking at putting everything together that I just it wasn't going to be feasible for me to be able to do regular recordings of educating humans. So I spoke to you about you taking over, whether or not you wanted to, or whether or not we just kind of closed down the whole thing, but you were keen to keep going in my absence, which is great. And uh yeah, I've been flat out working on the new school, St. John Henry Newman College, uh, which started this year. So there's been uh plenty to do there. Um, as much as I miss having the opportunity to sit down and think and talk about classical education. Uh I do it, I do it every day for school, uh, and um the early mornings are really important times for me to get all my work done. So I just couldn't keep going with educating humans. But uh hopefully people have still enjoyed the I've I've heard one of the episodes that you've put out so far. Um and uh yeah, I'm keen to when I can still be able to come on the podcast and have a chat when it works, and um also to talk a little bit about Newman College.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

So, well that's I think that's a great segue because um you you've you've asked to come on and and I've been very happy to have you on so that we can talk about how you found these early weeks. I mean it's it's the founding of a school the the first year of operation with students in the in the classes. Uh so I think that's just fertile ground for good discussion um and some observations you've seen. Maybe um you can tell us some anecdotes and reflections. Um yeah, so well let's let's start with the beginning and then maybe work our way through and you can just jump in with general bits and pieces here and there. Um but how was it that first week? That's what I want to hear about that first week.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Uh yeah, it was pretty surreal, really. Like we've been thinking and planning for four and a half years-ish, about four years that I'd been on the project, or a little bit over. Uh, and you know, 18 months before that time, we didn't have a site, we didn't have any buildings, we didn't have any teachers, you know, before 18 months before we started, just a couple weeks ago. So it it has been surreal and it kind of continues to be surreal. Um, I mean, it's happening, it's every day, it's normal, it's it's just normal life now. But when you stop and think about where it all came from, the first thing that I want to do is pay real tribute to the board. I get a lot of people, like a surprise, a surprising number of people, contact me talking about wanting to start a classical school where they are. So people in um, you know, Armadale or Sydney or Melbourne or wherever, all over the place, people who are interested in the idea of starting a classical school. And it's interesting because it's almost always either parents or educators that are interested in it, which is fine, which is good, and which makes sense, right? Parents want to start a classical school for their own kids. Educators want to start a classical school because that's the kind of education that they believe in, and they can't find anywhere to teach like that. But without a board, you don't have a school, and my board are not educators, and the majority of them are not parents, and the those that were kind of the initial Kickstarters aren't parents, and so I think it's remarkable that a that a bunch of people who neither had any they wouldn't have any personal stake in it other than just the good that it is going to do and is doing. Because most of the time people get invested when they have person a personal stake. And I've spoken to parents who have said, I really want to start a classical school, and then I drill down and it becomes, it turns out, that it's because they want a classical school for their children, which is good. I've got uh that that's not a bad motivation, but the problem is it takes between two and five years to start a classical school, and often that means that their kids will be too old for that school. That's what happened to me. Two of my kids are too old to come to this school, but we made a concerted we we we had a very intentional approach to the fact that we wanted to start P to three, start small, grow sustainably. So that's what we started with this year, prep to three, and that has meant that two of my uh kids are too old to go to the school. Uh and I could have said, no, no, no, let's start P to three and year seven, and just forced or tried to force or convince the board for the sake of my own children, but I don't think that that would have been the right approach here. Um, I think it's been better, much better to start slow and build sustainably. So I I I think it's incredible that there would be a group of people. I think we've got nine members on our board who are all uh talented, capable businessmen and women doing different things, um, doctors and lawyers and um everything in between, you engineers, and they just decided that they thought that this was a good cause, and so they have dedicated their time and their money for four and a half years to starting this. And I think that's amazing because so many people talk about oh, we need we need classical education, we need classical education. And my response is always, well, then start a classical school. And who who actually puts their hand up to actually do it? Uh, because it is it is hard work and it is and is it is it it is expensive work. So you actually need people to put their money where their mouth is as well. Um unfortunately the truth is that this just isn't gonna happen from a podcast and from a whole bunch of people having warm feelings about it and um getting getting emotional and aspirational about what things could look like. It's not going to happen from a bunch of very good, very enjoyable, and very educational uh conferences. That's not that doesn't start classical schools. Now, maybe it it might inspire people to start classical schools, so I'm certainly not denigrating it, but until someone actually says, I'm gonna do this and then pays fifty thousand dollars in legal fees to draft a constitution and set up the board of directors, it's not gonna happen. So that's that's the that's the first big learning for me is that I'm not on the board, I'm the principal, they hired me. I didn't have the idea to start the classical school. I was pretty happy just going at my school, which was going in that direction anyway, which was a pretty awesome opportunity. Um, but but that that a group of people would say that they're going to do it uh and they're gonna put the time and the money and the effort into it, that's what's really remarkable to me. And that's what people out there who are listening and who have listened to the podcast for a long time. I mean, I guess I have a question for people listening, which is you know, we get a decent amount of listeners to this podcast, and so my question always is why? Who's listening? What are they trying to get out of it? What are they interested in? And sometimes I get concerned that talking about things is a substitute for doing things. You listen to a podcast on classical education, not just ours obviously, but there's other ones international, you know, ones from the states as well, and you feel like yeah, I'm I'm part of this. Um but but if people are listening because they actually want classical education in the liberal arts to take off in Australia, my my statement would be well you have to do something. You can't just talk about it and think about it. And then the follow-up is, and this is painful, and I've said this to people, it costs money. It's not just it's not just gonna be goodwill. When I say you have to do something, you also need to be able to pay people to do things. It's it's a pretty expensive enterprise, it's a charity. I mean, and Newman College is a charity. We don't we haven't received any recurrent government funding for our students yet. Um that'll happen this year, but we've been in existence for four and a half years. So where does that money come from to pay salaries and to you know get leases for land and build buildings and all of that stuff? There's no there's nothing until you actually start, and so that's all from donations.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

I think that's very valuable insight. Um because you're you're 100% right um that look it's good to be inspired and to think and to learn about this thing, you know, people who are unsure and just trying to figure out the puzzle of what is classical education. Um but we are humans and humans are creatures of action, you know. And so there's always the question of does does thought lead to action, and if so, what action? Um and oftentimes as you just said then, what sacrifice uh is maybe the additional part. So then that was helpful to go back to the journey as well that that you've had till this point. Tell us about tell us about the um the actual classes with the students, uh what's it looking like?

SPEAKER_01 10:49

Yeah, you know what's really interesting? Well I find it interesting, is that we uh have uh not enough room in every future year of prep. So we have applications far exceeding what we have room for in 2027 through to 2030. And 2031 kids are just getting born now, and that's starting to fill up. So and the reason that I'm bringing that up in answer to your question that you just asked is because I don't really feel like we're doing anything magic. I don't feel like we're doing anything that is drastically um what I would have thought would have been really different. But there are people driving over an hour each way to come to this school, passing dozens of schools on the way to come to this school. And so it makes me it helps me to realize that actually doing basic fund, you know, foundational uh traditional teaching and doing that well is actually a really, really different thing these days. I don't know what's happening in the other schools because I don't go to them, but I think it's remarkable that people would drive so far and that we've got waiting lists in every year for what seems to me to be just just like the way that schools should be. So our classrooms are um they're just fun places of of fluctuating between um quiet contemplation, boisterous, loud play and fun, and hard work, you know. So as an example, in prep, I walked past the other day and the Latin teacher was in prep and had thrown a uh a spider, a fluffy like toy spider, over the fan on a string and was kind of pulling the string and the spider would go up and down. And he was teaching the children arane, the word the Latin for spider. And so the little the little preppies, you know, little four and five-year-olds would run up to Nsi Wincy Spider and try to touch touch the spider. And if they didn't say Arane properly, Mr. Watson would pull the string and the and Nsy Wincy Spider would go up and they wouldn't be able to touch him until they said Arane properly. So the kids are like they're having heaps of fun, you know, they're laughing, they're carrying on, they're jumping up trying to touch this cute spider, and they're singing the nursery rhyme for Nsy Wincy Spider, and they're learning Latin at the same time. So that's a pretty that's a nice little indication of what's happening in prep, for example. And then I go down to grade three and um they're learning about auxiliary verbs. Um, they've memorized the list of auxiliary verbs and they're understanding how auxiliary verbs uh the role that auxiliary verbs play in a sentence and um beg on the beginnings of parsing sentences. Uh and so I don't know, this to me, this is desks in a row facing the front, you know, teacher out the front with a whiteboard or getting down to their level talking to them about, you know, asking them questions. Then on Monday afternoons, I get to go down into year three and read uh a novel to them. So I'm reading King Arthur, and uh we we finished the chapter of King Arthur yesterday, and there was the last little sentence was talking about what a true king is, you know, and a true a true king is not someone that thinks of himself, thinks to himself, I'm worthy to be crowned with laurels, but rather thinks to himself, what else is there for me to do to make the world a better place through my endeavours? And I asked the children to put that in their own words because it's a long sentence, uh, and you know, it used some words in there that they might maybe were uncertain of, and they struggled a little bit, and so we put it up on the board, and then we we we spent about 15 minutes on this last little sentence from um Howard Pyle's King Arthur, and there was a real lesson of virtue in there as well, which is uh that leaders they realized that when it says true king, it wasn't really talking about actual kings, it was talking about well, what is a true leader, a true leader of people? Um, what are they? What is the defining factor about them? It's that they uh try to make the world a better place, they try to go out and serve their fellow man as opposed to thinking of themselves as worthy. And and when we got to that leadership thing, one of the kids put their hand up and said, That's like us, we're the oldest, because year three is the oldest class, and they said, We're the oldest kids in the school, and we're in and and so we're like the leaders of the school, and then we were able to talk about so what is this what is this little story from King Arthur been telling you about what it means to lead this school? It's not just about resting on your laurels of being the oldest, that doesn't make you worthy. Actually, what makes you worthy is trying to make the school a better place. So it just uh I mean that I wasn't expecting to do that because it was just the end of the chapter that I was reading, but it's just a a little demonstration of the kinds of conversations or things that can come out of really good quality literature.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

This is so particular, but I just I wanted to ask it so I could know what what system of grammar are you working through with the students?

SPEAKER_01 16:29

You mean like what what's the kind of curriculum approach? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we use two, we use uh well-ordered language and we use writing and rhetoric. Writing and rhetoric is less grammar, so well-ordered language is the real grammar-heavy stuff, but the two of them work in well together because there's still sentence parsing and and grammar stuff in uh writing and rhetoric as well. So we do that in from year two, so um, prep in year one, it's just learning the basics, learning what a noun is, etc. But from year two, we get more stuck into the uh beginning of of uh formal grammar. It's good. Well-ordered language is awesome, actually. Very, very good programme. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

That's good. I think um that's one of the I reckon that'll be one of the difficulties of starting a new school um is having no curriculum, and so every piece that you choose, you know, um you'd be the wanting to choose the right one. Because it's you know, you don't want to have to be changing.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Yeah, yeah, okay. Here's but you know, like the people that have spoken to me about wanting to start classical schools, without exception, every single one of them has wanted to talk to me about curriculum. And I have and I have had to disappoint them and say, listen, curriculum is the easiest part of this whole piece. It just is. Because because usually I'm talking to teachers and I'm like, that's your bread and butter, that's the stuff that you actually understand. You need to stop thinking about curriculum and start thinking about business. Unfortunately, it's just the reality. These schools are, for lack of a better word, businesses that need to be able to pay their own way. And if you don't have anyone on board, either on your board or your principal or a business manager that understands how to balance the books, that understands uh tax, that understands cash flow projections, uh, then you're not gonna get anywhere. You're just you're not gonna make it. And in fact, you probably won't get accreditation because the accrediting bodies want to see that somebody there understands the stuff that matters the most. Independent schools receive over time millions of dollars from the government. And so the government wants to make sure that it is spent appropriately, and so you need to uh one of the big things that they're always looking for on accreditation reviews is uh protecting against fraud. They want to make sure that this money that the government is giving for the education of children is going to the right place, and so you need to have a lot of checks and balances in place to do that. I have learned there's not there's no single area that I've learned more in over the last four years than in business, maybe maybe business and legals, both of those things I hadn't you know very limited experience in. But I say all of that to in your response to the curriculum because look, I don't think you said you've got to you you want to make sure you choose the right one. I don't know that there is a right one. What I mean by that is I don't know if there's the perfect curriculum and all the others are sub subservient to it. I don't even know if there's the right curriculum for a particular school. I think well-audited language is great. Um, we use different curriculum at home with my kids, you know, for homeschooling. And I think that's great as well. So I think people can agonize over, and teachers would because it's it's what they're going to be doing every day, and they, you know, they want to make sure it works and everything. There's probably bad textbooks, but there's a lot of good textbooks. The curriculum is so subservient to the teacher. Whether or not we get the right curriculum is at least half, if not 20%, as important as whether or not we get the right teachers. The right teachers can make any curriculum, any textbooks work, but the wrong teachers can't make even the best textbooks work. So people I don't know, like I I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's probably just because there's such a long there's a long list of what those books could be. But you know, there I people people generally complain about other people's curriculum and think that theirs is the best because it's what they're used to. Um I don't I'd I have no I would never say, oh, don't use Shirley grammar, use uh well-ordered language, or don't use well-ordered language, use Michael Clay Thompson. I'm just like, just use what works, and most of it works if if you understand it.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. So tell us, what um has been one of the biggest surprises for you from the perspective of what you thought it was gonna look like compared to what it does look like now that kids are in the class and there's like this degree of um maybe life injected into the premise, and with life there's often variation and change. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Um it's not uh a surprise from what I thought it was gonna be like. It's just simply what I didn't uh really reckon with completely, which is just the um the incredible amount of energy that little kids have. Like my My most stressful times are break times. So between 10:15 and 10:45, and between 12:45 and 1.45, when those kids are out in the playground, that's when I am like, please just get through this break without hurting each other, man. Because, you know, we started off. In fact, I was I had Father Stephen David from St. John of Cronstadt around the other day, and we were chatting about this, and I was just reflecting, and he said this is exactly the same thing that happened at his school, which is we started off with the kids immediately. We're like in a on a block of land with a lot of trees and stuff. And so they immediately started picking up sticks and playing with the sticks. And I'm like, this is cool. You know, I want I want to let kids be kids. This is uh I I've got no problem with kids being kids, and they were climbing trees, and like, oh yeah, climbing trees, it's so good. And then after about three days, I said to the kids, listen, with the whole sticks, it's good. I want you to do it. But if you can't control yourself, if you can't have this stick in your hand and not hit each other with them, then I'm gonna have to take the sticks away. Turns out that they can't control themselves. So eventually it went from like the sticks were swords and then the sticks were guns. And then I said, you can only have very small sticks as guns. And I'm like, you can't hit anyone with that. But then they were putting the sticks in their hand and grabbing each other and then scratching each other with the sticks, and so then we had about two weeks of sticks before I had to have a no-stick policy, which was really sad. I it's really sad. Like, I I don't I didn't want that to have to be the case, but there's a few things at work there. One of them is we're in Australia, which is a litigious society. I think in America you can get away with things very differently. But here, like if someone got injured and I had a policy that said you're allowed sticks, then my policy would be define, like would be libel, it would be a bad policy. Um, and so the dream of what you would imagine, you know, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer just out on out on a raft, like you just can't you can't emulate that, unfortunately, in an Australian school. And but that is okay. That's it's that's not the end of the world. It's not a hill I was gonna die on. But even but just just um just yeah, just the sheer energy. The fact that even if it's a 37-degree day with 90% humidity in full sun, these kids will want to run and just run for an hour flat. It's uh it def it it defies uh beggars' belief for me. But um, so yeah, I actually think that's the that's the main thing. I've got four daughters, right, that we homeschooled. I've now got a son, but um, and but he's still very young. So homeschooling for me, and this is why I always say people shouldn't promote homeschooling as the ideal that everyone should do because every family is different. We were able to homeschool because in general, even though my kids can be very rowdy, they will also sometimes spend an hour quietly knitting, right? And I and I've come to understand that that is not the norm. There are many kids, most of them boys, who will simply never do that, and so you've got to let them get their energy out. We've got very big lunch breaks, hour and a half in total, and two sessions of PE. So we really believe in getting letting the kids get out and run around. But yeah, it's just surprised me how much they want to.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

I think that's so funny. I'm just imagining you coming home to your wife and being like, Did our kids just run around and hit each other with sticks all the time?

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Like, what is what a what a kid sometimes they did, but not every single day, you know. Like, but yeah, it was, yeah. I mean, but it's fun, you know. Like, kids come in with with fake first aid every second minute, and um uh yeah, I mean there hasn't been any kind of major surprises to be honest. Like, I've worked in schools long enough that most of the things that have happened have been exactly what I would have expected. But I just have never worked with very young children before, so that's why that surprise came in.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

Last last kind of um avenue for us to talk about, and then I'll I'll let you get back to the busy work of running a school. Um But I just want to know what what's the what has the early kind of school community been like? I just I remember because before you had when when you'd first found the site and stuff, you were doing barbecues with parents and things like that, and I'm just I'm now just imagining because this is all all great, and I'm imagining that all the parents that are driving an hour out of their way past all these schools to get here, um I just imagine that they'd want to be a part of it as much as they can. And so have you had much parent engagement? What's that been like?

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to speak on their behalf. I get the impression that they're all that they all really like the school. Um I mean, it came with sacrifices, right? We're a small site, we are constantly developing, so there was a price to pay for sending your kids to our underdeveloped new school as opposed to the shiny school down the road with the three ovals and everything else, right? So there's always things that they would want to be different, which is fair enough, I get that, and I try, I really do try to give parents uh that which aligns with our vision and good ideas that they have. Um we're only seven weeks in, and I do keep telling myself, but mostly other people that because I think people are like, oh, let's do this, this, and this, and let's have these committees and let's get involved. And um, and I'm like, we haven't had a single full term yet, which means we haven't really gone through all the rhythms of of a term, and so I'm just I'm very slow and steady, right? Well, uh maybe not not all the time, but I I believe in going slow to go fast. So I don't want us to burn out right at the start because we're trying to do a million things. I also think, and we've talked about this before, we talked about it during um the SCOLA sessions, that um the that schools do too much, they overburden themselves and then other things start being the driving force. I really want to spend this term, if not this year, just focusing on the fundamentals of what it means to be a classical Catholic school and getting that right. But that being said, the parents, the parents are a great community. They often turn up early and hang around at drop off, chatting to each other, and then leave late, and then they um and then when they pick up their kids in the afternoon, the same thing happens again. You know, I have a lot of great conversations with them. They're all very um very keen to see the school continue to to grow and do well. Um there's things that I want want to do in the future, like uh night classes for the parents to give them information about what's going on in the school and maybe even teach them some of the content when we get to more tricky content, you know, in the upper years. Um what I I think that a bunch of the mums have started a book club um reading the books that the kids are going to be reading. So I think at the moment they're reading To Kill a Mockingbird, even though obviously that's not gonna be for quite a while for our kids. They they weren't gonna do, you know, uh although I did recommend Win in the Willows, but you know, um which which will be happening I think in year two next term. But um, but yeah, so there's stuff like that, and then and then there's conversations about fundraising. Um, people who realize that our school lives and dies on donations, and so they want to they want to help, they want to help doing some fundraising efforts or volunteering their time, you know. So I plan to have a working bee on each holiday where people can come and help in the gardens and maintenance and things like that. We have mass uh open to the parents every Monday. We have three masses a week, but Monday morning mass is open to the parents, and so that's wonderful. Usually there'd be somewhere between 20 and 30 parents in the chapel with with all of us every Monday, which is great, and they hang around afterwards and chat. Sometimes they go out for coffee. So it is a it is it is awesome. That is something that is one of the the greatest things about it is this little community that's building uh a community of like-minded people, a community of people that believe the same kinds of things about their children and about the faith and about um what it means to live the good life and and encouraging each other to to keep doing that as well. So I do, yeah, I do love that. And same with the teachers, like our teaching stuff is just phenomenal, and I'm so stoked. We have two staff meetings a week. Monday afternoon is kind of uh a admin sort of staff meeting, but really we talk, we just talk shop, we talk about quality teaching and assessment and and pedagogy and curriculum, and then on Wednesdays we have a scholar meeting, which is just reading something good and chatting about it. So we we're we're we're doing the abolition of man, but we only just we've been doing it all term, but we only just finished the first book, um, the first the first chapter of the abolition of man. I was trying to get through the whole thing this term, but um uh but yeah, so so and that community is great, you know. We um we don't get to see each other a lot during the school day because it's so flat out and we've got limited staff, so there's all you're always on duty every day, and um it's very, very busy. But um and there's also a growing number of people who are coming to volunteer to help out in in classrooms and uh on weekends mowing lawns and things. So yeah, the community element's a wonderful part of it. I think everyone knows, right? Like everyone knows that thing that I said at the start that that this school doesn't exist outside of people's generosity. Um and that any school that any school across Australia starting up outside of people's generosity is is is really gonna struggle, let alone if it can start at all. But for us, I mean like what I said before, we are um we we we are adding a year every year, and we've got prep more preps than we can handle every single year. And so we need to build, but building costs have gone through the roof. So we're building two prep classrooms this year that'll have like an undercover area attached to it and some toilets and also a small car park down somewhere else on the site, and that's that's estimated to cost us over four million dollars, which I just can't get my head around how two classrooms and car park cost four million dollars. But that's just the that's just what's happened to building. So to be completely open, one of my reasons for wanting to get on this morning and talk to you and talk to everybody is to ask people to consider donating to the school because this is brilliant. We love this, it's really, really good, but it still lives and dies on people's generosity. And for four years now, for as long as I've been working on the school project, you and I have been doing educating humans, and we've never really asked anything of our listeners uh to give. You know, podcasts usually have either ads or some sort of subscription service, and we've talked about it, we toyed around with it, we we but like I never was that comfortable with it because I didn't think that necessarily we oh I was doing it just because I love it, you know, and because I care about classical education in in in Australia and I want it to do well, but um that's why like for those people who listen to this, if they care if you care about classical education, if you want to see these schools uh and if you want to see them succeed, then you have to. I I really want to encourage people to do something about it. And so anybody that has listened, that's been a listener for a long time, all I'm asking for from people is to commit to give ten dollars a week. So depending on where you live, that's either one or two cups of coffee a week. In I'm sure in Sydney and Melbourne it's probably one cup of coffee. In Brisbane, it's getting close to one cup of coffee, maybe still out in Tawanbridge, too. But it's not much. But if everybody that listened regularly to educating humans did that, that would make a massive, massive difference to Newman College. It's it's tax deductible, um, and it all goes to building to literally building a building so that these kids, these families that want to send their Newman College their kids to Newman College can actually do it. So the ability to give has always been in the show notes. I don't know if people read the show notes, but there's a link in there to the uh donation portal online. But you can search for Newman College and go to donate. You could send me an email. Um, you could do anything, but I really encourage if you're not if you're not actively trying to and giving your money to some other classical school, but you're invested in classical education, as demonstrated by listening to this, then please support Newman College. I would say support whatever your local classical school is, um, but if there isn't one near you, then please support us. We really want Newman College to be a model that can be replicated. Like I say, people come and ask me how we did it, and I and I am always more than happy to spend as much time as I can with other schools, with other groups, helping them to think through how to start a school. Uh, because we're not just about we're not the board and I are not just about the success of Newman College. We want this to be the beginning of something far bigger than just us. Um but Newman College does need to succeed in order to show people what's possible. So uh please, we would I would love, love to see some listeners of educating humans who have been hopefully enjoying our hard work and sweat and tears over the last four years, um, maybe consider uh giving back as well.

SPEAKER_00 36:16

Well I think that that was a fair request, and I'm sure you'd uh I'm sure you're not gonna say no to someone who says I can't give you ten bucks a week, but I can give you five, you know.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

Um no, that that's uh and anything. And I also wouldn't say to someone, don't don't only give me ten. If you can afford to give me a hundred bucks a week, do that. And it's not me, I should say as well. I shouldn't say give me, right? Because you know, it doesn't it's a all the building fund, it doesn't even go to operations. So there's no way it could possibly go to paying anybody.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

We appreciate your time, Diff. It's been good to hear from you again. Uh and hear how things are going with Newman College. It's it's an exciting time, sounds like a very lively time. Uh and you know, looking forward to seeing how it continues to grow and succeed and the the changes that happen in these little kids' lives. So thank you.