Ever Onward Podcast

Why School Choice Is Growing in Idaho with Terry Ryan, CEO of BLUUM | Ever Onward - Ep. 119

• Ahlquist. • Season 1 • Episode 119

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What does it really take to transform education in Idaho?

On this episode of Ever Onward, Tommy Ahlquist and co-host Roger Quarles sit down with Terry Ryan, CEO of BLUUM, Idaho’s leading nonprofit incubator for high-performing public charter schools. Terry shares his remarkable journey—from Illinois to Poland to Idaho—and how that path led him to help launch and expand dozens of schools serving students and families across the state.

This conversation explores the future of school choice, why traditional systems can struggle to adapt, and how Idaho has become a model for innovation in public charter education. Terry also breaks down how BLUUM identifies talent, supports school founders, funds growth, and helps create schools built around the unique needs of each community.

From rural school preservation to career-technical education, online learning, classical academies, and high-impact charter models like Elevate Academy and Gem Prep, this episode is a deep look at what’s possible when mission, leadership, and community come together.

In this episode:
• Terry Ryan’s powerful personal journey into education and policy
• Why school choice and mission-driven schools matter
• How BLUUM has helped launch and expand schools across Idaho
• What makes great charter schools work
• The role of talent, leadership, and long-term investment in education
• Why Idaho is becoming a national model for public charter innovation

If you care about the future of education, leadership, and creating opportunity for the next generation, this is a conversation worth hearing.

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Welcome And Why Schools Struggle

SPEAKER_01

Today on the Ever Onward podcast, we have a very special guest, Terry Ryan. Terry is the CEO of Bloom, B-L-U-U-M. If you haven't heard of Bloom, it's an incredible organization. It's Idaho's leading nonprofit incubator for high-performing public charter schools. Terry has helped launch and expand 40 schools here in Idaho. They're doing incredible things. We'll get to that on the podcast today. He has an incredible story, was hired by JCAF to come to Idaho and start this 13 years ago. And as we go through his history in education and then what he's done here for the public uh charter schools, it's it uh it's been unbelievable uh the progress and the lives that they are impacting here in Idaho. Um he is a thought leader, he's an author of several books, and again has been in education and leading uh for a long time. So today uh we would like to welcome uh Terry Ryan with my co-host Roger Quarrells. Terry Ryan, thank you so much for coming on with me and Raj. I know you guys were long friends. Oh, yeah. When I walked in on a conversation, I'm like, stop. Let's get on, let's get the podcast going because I want to hear all this.

SPEAKER_00

Well, so you I don't know if you should say that out loud because Terry is a wealth of information. And I'm just like, I don't know if we should say that on a podcast, Terry. But we were we were just talking about why were we talking about Steve Farkas?

SPEAKER_03

We were talking about education, and so Steve Farkas had was in his Oh, school board members.

SPEAKER_00

We were talking about what it takes to be a school board member in Idaho.

SPEAKER_03

And so you triggered this thought in my head and conversation I had with Steve, and um Steve was a survey guru, one of the best in the country at going out talking to groups, be it teachers, parents, politicians, whatever. He was a survey master, and he was excellent at getting people to talk and honestly. And uh he was dying, and he came and visit uh me and uh I wanted to interview him, and so we talked for two and a half hours, and he said everything he learned in um his time, he really is worried that um traditional school systems are irredeemably broken. And he got into talking about the boards and just the political cross currents that school boards have to deal with, the almost impossible uh coalitions that have to be built to get things done. And so school boards have um become mostly management exercises, not sort of change agents that are able to adapt and um adjust themselves to a rapidly changing world, a rapidly way of delivering education. A lot of kids are a mixture of homeschooling. We're seeing all kinds of stuff in our state through tax credits, charter schools. Um, how do you manage this uh at kind of a central office? And who's your friend? Who's your foe? How do you even make those decisions? Um, oh, they're competitors, and they must be foe. Well, really, are they? They may have more in alignment with you than some of the people who are currently and so it was just a fascinating conversation. This is very honest. Um and I've spent my entire life in public education. Uh, and I came away thinking, I'm not sure I'm that disappointed in what's possible. I still believe there's great things that are possible. I do think charter schools and choice, you know, they're they're easier to manage than I feel for a large school district of 40,000 kids and and um the school board and trying to manage that and all the expectations. And uh it's um the advantage that charter schools have, they focus on their mission. They know what they're about, the good ones.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

They know what they're about, and they hire people to that mission, and they stay focused on the mission. And I think that's a huge advantage to have as opposed to trying to manage a system with a whole different collection of school models, expectations. Um, it may be impossible to manage those larger systems. When was this interview with him? Uh about a year ago exactly. Now, yeah, May. He passed away. Yeah. He passed away in May.

SPEAKER_00

He was a phenomenal man. I mean, he was just he Terry brought him in and I got to know him and he loved Idaho.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, he did. Did he live in New York City? Yeah, yeah, he did. It's I mean, I could go on and on about this.

SPEAKER_00

Well, we got other topics.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, but God bless you. Terry, can you tell us a little bit about um your journey?

Terry Ryan Origin Story

SPEAKER_01

Sure. Tell us a little bit about you before we blaze into education, but talk about how your your upbringing and a little bit about your background.

SPEAKER_03

Happy to do. So I was born in Springfield, Illinois. Um, Catholic family. I'm the youngest of four kids. Uh my mom was one of the first generations that went back to work. So when I was in like seventh grade, she went and took a job. Uh, and I gotta tell this story. Um, I was probably five, and it was Roe v. Wade. And I remember my mom taking me to the Illinois State Capitol, and it was packed. And my line was, I'm glad my mom chose life. And that was my first introduction to politics as a five-year-old. That tells you about my mom. This was a dynamic woman, Terry. Um, my father was a very good baseball player. Uh, actually, he was drafted by St. Louis Cardinals. Wow. Pitched against folks like Red Shane Deans. And I know this because my father, we thought he was dying last year. He was he was dying. And um I went there and was with him. And uh he the doctors did an amazing thing. He's still with us, but my sister had me ride his obituary. So I learned a bunch of things about my dad that I had no idea, just how good a baseball player he was. Uh, and so I grew up in a family that had deep roots in Springfield, Illinois, Illinois roots. My sister and my older brother are very much connected there. I go around to with my brother, and everybody goes up to him. They call him Rhino, and he was a very good athlete.

SPEAKER_01

As the youngest, I guess who's the who's your major league team just because I got asked. St.

SPEAKER_03

Louis Cardinals.

SPEAKER_01

So it's St. Louis Cardinals.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, the Cubs, you know, Cubs Cardinals, it was huge as a kid. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Uh and oh, great memories of going up. Wrigley Field against the St. Louis Cardinals. I saw Cesar Sedanial hit the cycle. It was so much fun. Wow, I love this. Yeah, you know, and my dad, I'm with my dad and my sister, and I'm watching Cesar Sedaniel hit the cycle. So that was how I was raised. Expectations that I went to Catholic schools, all-boy Catholic school, great guys, friends with every dude in my class, and it was a wide spectrum of guys. Um, and uh but the expectations were high, uh, but we always found time to hunt. Um, and you know, it was amazing who who loved to hunt with you. People you'd never expect that loved to hunt um or fish. And so my dad always owned a little bit of land on a river or a lake or something, and so we'd go there on Friday night. I mean, as a kid, my dad would take us. I was like 12, he'd just drop us off on Friday morning, come back Sunday and get us. That's the best.

SPEAKER_00

You know, I mean, it's like we need to drop our kids. I I remember that as a kid. We we would just leave on Friday and come home on Sunday. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Camp. Camp, fish, sleeping bag, and a little bit of food and fish and bowl, whatever it turned out.

SPEAKER_03

I got sick when I shot around squirrel. I undercooked them. I got so sick. Under don't eat undercooked squirrel.

SPEAKER_00

That explains a lot of right now. Okay, so you we you went to you went to the whole Catholic route.

SPEAKER_03

Catholic school stuff. I did that. I, you know. What did you do? I went to a university. I studied, uh I went to a university called the Eastern Illinois University, and uh, I studied history and journalism, and I discovered I could write. Uh, and that was my my thing. And then I was gonna go to law school because my sister went to law school. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do, and so I went through that. I had a uh professor, Wolfgang Schlau, who was German, and he came to me and he said, There's this program, this is 1990, Poland is just starting to transition away from communism, right? And he's like, You should go to Poland and do this. You're the perfect person for this. And uh, I'll write you a letter of recommendation. And it was through Harvard, right? I'm like, I'm an Eastern Illinois, dude. You think I can do this? Okay. So Wolfgang Schlau writes me a letter and they accept me. I'm sure it was like number 35, but I got, you know. And so then I go to Poland and I'm teaching English and an amazing group of young people there. Uh Michael Eisner, you remember him, his daughter was there. Um the some real big names that you guys would know. And just really good young Americans, right? And I'm like, wow, I'm a part of this group. And I came to realize I can actually I fit in. I can, you know, I don't speak the language. They all learn language a lot faster than I did, you know, but I had a speech impediment as kids, I had an excuse. But no, I was amazed at how fast they could learn Polish. And I, you know, did my best to keep up with them. But then we were dispersed out into small towns or cities, and but I had that network of American colleagues.

SPEAKER_00

How old were you? Tell me again.

SPEAKER_03

22. Okay, all right. 22. I'm on a train going from Warsaw to my little town, and this Polish family sees me, and they come up to me, and he's talking to me, and I'm like, I don't know, I don't understand what you're saying. We stop at the train station, he grabs my bag and walks off the train with it. And I'm like, okay, I better follow him. You know, he's a good man, he's a family man. I can see it. He's smiling at me. He takes my bag and he he takes me over another tier and puts me on the other train. He says, and I got it. This is the train you need to be on. I was gonna stay on that. I don't know where I would have ended up. Anyway, he he knew I needed to get off the train. No, he told me. So now I get on this train. This guy tells me to get off and get on, and I get on it, and I go, and then there's a family that meets me at the at the end of the line, and then that's the family that I live with for a year as I teach in this school. And there were still Russian jets flying over. Um, the Russians still had bases, and they would fly over and break the sound barrier, and everybody laughed. They're doing that for you. They want you to know that they're here. Wow. And this is 1990-91. And I went and I saw Leg Bowenza get elected the day he got elected president. We all went to Warsaw to see it. He comes out and waves to everybody, and like, wow, uh, this is wild. You know, yeah. Um I was so fortunate. People were so good to me. When I walked down the street, they call me Pan Americana. Chess Pan Americana and Chess Mr. American. They call me Mr. American. So it's just I'm gonna cry.

SPEAKER_00

I know.

SPEAKER_03

I I I realized, oh my god, this is a big deal. Yeah, it wasn't Terry Ryan, it was I was the American, yeah, right, and representing whatever it is they thought I represented, right? Which was hope and a better future and and all that. So that I grew up a lot that year.

SPEAKER_00

So what what happened? What what happened? What did you how long were you in Poland? One year or did you stay longer?

SPEAKER_03

I was there a year, then I came back to the United States. I worked as a journalist covering the Illinois State Senate for a year, which was a great job. I didn't make any money. I was working 70 hours. Man, I learned so much.

SPEAKER_00

I bet.

SPEAKER_03

And but then I went to graduate school at the University of Denver because they had a connection to Eastern Europe. Kind of Lisa Rice had gone there, and I there was a connection.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_03

And so I wanted to go back to Poland, uh, but I wanted to go back not as a teacher, but more at a at a uh policy kind of thing, or I don't know what I was thinking, but um, so I I went to the University of Denver and they had a fellowship. It's called the Patterson International Fellowship, and it was a family and Mrs. Patterson, they were connected to the Brown Palace Hotel. Uh, and she literally they gave me $15,000 in cash and gave me uh the contact information for a guy I was gonna meet in Warsaw who was gonna become my boss. At this time, the banking system and stuff still so I wasn't quite there yet. I had hundred-dollar bills in my shoes, right? I was like, fifteen thousand dollars cash and a contact in Poland. And so I get I go there, um, and a guy named Shisztow Stanowski meets me, and he's like, uh, we're gonna work together. And they had this thing, the Foundation for Education for Democracy. And the brains behind it was a guy named Viktor Kalerski, who's one of my mentors, one of my favorite people on earth. His family had been, he'd been in the underground. His grandfather had been in the first Polish free parliament in 200 years. His dad had been in the Polish government when World War II broke out, ended up having to go to London because he was being hunted. Victor and his brother and his mom was being hunted. I wrote a book with Victor. I mean, um my wife, so I go and I interviewed Victor, and I got like 17 hours of video cassette recordings. And I have my wife, I'm like, you need to help me translate this, right? So halfway through, she's like, I can't do this anymore. I just because it's just one sad story after another of Victor. So Victor was seven years old, eight years old, and his uncle took him and said, You gotta come see this. You have to bear witness. This is a seven-year-old, you gotta go bear witness to this. Takes him to a death camp and shows him the death camp from a distance and says, See what you see here, never forget, always remember. You must tell the story.

SPEAKER_00

At seven.

SPEAKER_03

At seven. And while he's there, a little girl runs up, and there are people starving. So she runs up and she's delivering bread. She gets shot, she gets killed. And all the no one can do anything. She lays there and she bleeds out, and Victor sees this. And story after story of him avoiding death, first from the Germans, then from the Russians, then as a student, he always said the truth and got into trouble all along the way. His father came back from London, was part of a show trial. I actually met his dad. His dad spoke beautiful English. At this point, his dad was probably in his late 80s, and Victor had me go meet him. It was one of the great honors of my life. And I sit and I start talking to Victor's father, and his English is impeccable. And I ask him about, you know, his his life, what you know, he cared most about. Uh, and just it was a probably a 15-minute conversation, and I'm like, I can't believe I'm able to be talking to him. And then at one moment he shares with me his wooden spoon. He was in a camp uh that the communists put him in for seven years, and he had a wooden spoon and a wooden bowl, and he kept that, and he showed seven years. Seven years for being in the the freely elected Polish government. Didn't have to come back, he could have stayed in England, probably could have got his family there, but came back. Yeah. And Van Victor saw that so Victor was a school child. At that point, he was in middle school, high school, and all the kids were making fun of him. Oh, your father's show trial, you know, and Victor had to go through all of that. But Victor ended up seeing the um free elections. He was in the underground for seven years, also, and hunted. He never, a lot of those guys would get in trouble because they'd drink or they'd have mistresses or whatever, they make mistakes. He never got caught. Good for him. Um, and but he never saw his wife. Oh and uh his wife was amazing piano. I mean, I when I went to his home, it was a it was a little building attached to the school. It was one room, and it was mainly a library, books, you know, little cooking and a piano. And I remember I brought my daughter who was playing piano, and she played piano with Zosha, his wife, and it was such a great moment to see how how happy she was to see my daughter playing piano. Victor came to my wedding, he was actually at my wedding in Illinois.

SPEAKER_00

Um his wife's Polish, so I I know quite a bit about Terry, but yeah, his wife's from Poland.

SPEAKER_03

So I don't know where this is going.

SPEAKER_00

We've been lucky. So I think Tommy, what we're hearing is you know, his journey is unique, like all of ours to him, but it it's it's very diverse, it's super interesting. And uh Terry, I'm gonna fast forward because I mean I I know

From Poland To Policy Work

SPEAKER_00

you. He has the he has incredible stories. But the first time I met you, you had just come to Idaho from Illinois.

SPEAKER_03

Ohio.

SPEAKER_00

Or Ohio, thank you, Ohio. Um and you were working for Fordham. You'd been working for the Fordham Foundation with Checker. Yeah. And and I know the reason, I know how you got here, but can you just talk about kind of your what you were doing with Checker and those guys in Ohio?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. So I met Checker in Poland. I had a conference that I organized, and I brought Checker. He was one of he and a guy named Chester Finn, and I'll Shanker. I uh deviated just a little, all right. So the the Victor Kalerski, my mentor, knows everybody. And he's like, I want to do a conference on civic education and the future of education in a post-communist society. Help me do this. And and literally, I was just the guy, I could write letters in English, and I, you know, we had to raise money from the U.S. Embassy and and others like that. And it was easy to do because everybody loved Victor. But then we had to invite people, and we invited Al Shankar and and um uh Checker Finn. And Al Shanker was the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Checker was number two at the U.S. Department of Education under Bill Bennett, conservative school choice guy, great man. And so uh those two, one of my favorite memories was that those two are having a debate, I don't know what about, school choice or whatever in the United States, blah, blah, blah. And they're going at each other, right? It's Al Schenker and Checker Finn and like going at each other, and then it's done, and then they're having dinner together, and they're talking together, and they're laughing, and Polish people are saying, How can this be? How could they be have such different opinions and they argue and then they sit and have dinner together and they like each other? How's this possible? I said, Well, that's you know, that's how it's supposed to go, right? You have debates, yeah, and um I remember that and I tell that story because uh it was a great moment to be an American again, right? Yeah, we can have serious debates, we can seriously disagree, but we can also live together. Anyway, so Checker offered me a job, but I didn't take it because I I was offered a job with an Englishman who was doing really creative stuff, and that was a five-year adventure. Guy named John Abbott, who was amazing. But then I'm moving my family to England, and it's right after September 11th. Oh, and I'm on one of the first planes with my daughters, who are like four months and two, and my wife, and we're going to Bath, England, and that's where we're gonna move. And it was just crazy. And when I got to England, this was before we actually went into Afghanistan. People were coming up to me, and I was either getting a hug and God bless you, or with you. I got a son who goes to the university of whatever, or you guys got what you deserve. You're throwing your weight around, you think you run the world. I mean, it was that intense, and people were afraid we were gonna use nuclear weapons in Afghanistan and all this stuff. And I've got these babies and my wife, and I'm like, is this a good time for me to be moving to England? So I go to Checker and said, Hey man, I'm not sure it's a good time for me to move my family to England. You got any ideas? He said, Yeah, there's this job. Uh, he he was running this foundation called the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Thomas B. Fordham was an industrialist from Dayton, Ohio. And so they wanted an anchor in Dayton and then an anchor in Washington, D.C. for the think tank stuff. And he said, Would you want to be my Ohio guy? I need somebody for Ohio. And he knew I was from the Midwest. And I was like, Yeah, I'd be great. So I end up then spending two years in DC in the think tank world, but commuting to Ohio to work on school issues. And what you discover is when you fly in, everybody tells you what they think you want to know, right? So everything's great. We just need a little bit of money and it's all going good. So, you know, I'd report back to Checker, they want, you know, $100,000, and they're gonna do this, and everything's going great. Exactly. You know, you've never heard that, Roger. Have you? No, Roger's not every day. Every day. It's going great. So so then like Checker's like, you know what? Maybe you should go there for a couple years and and kind of figure it out. I said, Yeah, I'll go there for a couple years, I'll move my family, go there for a couple years, we'll figure it out. Well, I was there for 10. Uh, and never really fully figured it out, but met amazing people. And then so charter schools were a big part of it at the time. That was the law had just been passed. The um, the guy who was the junior member of the House from Dayton was a guy named John Husted. He ended up becoming Speaker of the House. He's now U.S. Senator for Ohio, and he was like my peer. We were the same age, and and so he trusted, I don't know if he'd want to hear this. I mean, he trusted us to give him advice on like, you know, education things because I was Checker, I was Checker's guy or Checker's boy, depending on who was talking about it. But everybody knew that I was Checker's guy, and they wanted to know kind of like, and so I got invited to a lot of really good conversations because Checker was in DC and I was his guy uh and got to meet amazing people. The former CEO of Huffy Bicycle, uh, a guy who was the CEO of IME's Pet Food, uh, a guy named Matt Diggs, one of my favorite people in the world. He was Neil Armstrong's college roommate. I mean, this is Ohio, so they all had these. They're all older than me, but I would show up and they had a thing called the BuzzFuzz Club. It was in this kind of a hidden place no one knew about. But at that moment in time in Ohio, we had the Speaker of the House and the number two in the Senate were both from Dayton. And this group had had a strategic process to that was a lot of power for Dayton. I mean, because you had Cleveland, Cincinnati. These guys had worked years to get their two young guys, which like my age, to lead in the legislature, and they had an agenda that they wanted to get done to really transform schools in places like Dayton. Charters are going to be an important part of it. School choice was an important part of it. And for two years, it was, I mean, it was really a lot of cool things happening, a lot of opportunities. But then the next election happened, uh, Democrats uh took the governor's mansion. John, I remember how disappointed he was. They lost the house. Yeah. This was like 2010, I think. Um, so I was involved in that, and I got to the point one year I drove 40,000 miles in one year just driving across Ohio and I almost got killed in a car crash. I'm driving down the interstate, and all of a sudden this car's coming down the wrong way in the interstate and I'm on a bridge, and I'm like, right before I would have hit him, I was able to get off because I just got off the bridge. I get off and I'm like, there's a signal here. And I told my wife, my wife is like, you know, there's something going on. And all of a sudden, I get a note from a headhunter in Boise, Idaho, saying, Hey, do you want to come out and see what we're doing? And maybe you want to be a part of it. And I was like, I can't imagine leaving my job, doing all of this, moving my kids. My wife's like, you gotta do it. Like, if you don't check it out, you're right. And so I come out with my wife and my two daughters, and Jamie Joe Scott greets us. What year was this? 2013.

SPEAKER_00

2013. 2013, yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. All right, so it's Jamie, my wife, my kids, and me, and we're going around, and Jamie's taking us around to uh see things. We met, I met her father, I met the board, I think I met you. Um, and then we had dinner, and then she took us to get ice cream, and and and it's it's at the end of the day, my wife's like, Well, we're moving here, right? And she's like, you know, this is like the roll, Tommy.

SPEAKER_01

That's what we do. Jamie has that power on it.

SPEAKER_03

Literally, I I I I tell you this. I I mean I because I was like, I was thinking about all the things that I had to like stop doing and then move and do.

SPEAKER_01

And so when you came here, Terry, your role, you were hired to

The BLUUM Plan Takes Shape

SPEAKER_01

do what? Let's let's get into let's get into all the great things that have happened in a so 13-year period.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. So what I came to was a vision, and I think it I don't know how the vision came about. I'm assuming I know Jamie was deeply involved in it, but so 20,000 new seats in 10 years. That was the vision.

SPEAKER_00

And then it sounded good, 20 and 10.

SPEAKER_03

It just there wasn't a lot more than that. I was like, we're gonna do 20,000 seats in 10 years, and so the the We we hadn't done very well uh before Terry's arrival.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, I got without going into it, but without going too deep.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, just deep, deep, deep passion of the family.

SPEAKER_00

It's important. Yeah. You know, we gave spent a lot of money, we gave a lot of groups $250,000 to try to charter start a charter school. Most of them failed. Um and then we just was like, we've got to do something different. And then this is where this idea of a structured approach with a real expert in Terry leading that effort allowed us to, I think, just be smarter. I mean, I told I told you earlier, we're very risk tolerant and we're willing to try things that most people won't. But then, you know, my approach is hey, there's somebody that's really good at this. Yeah, we just have to find them, and it was Terry.

SPEAKER_03

And so Bloom. At that point, it didn't exist.

SPEAKER_01

It didn't exist.

SPEAKER_03

When did when did it come into existence? So it's interesting because this kind of all evolved. So I the the joy that I was given, I was given a year to go out and figure it out. Which I couldn't.

SPEAKER_01

But the but the but the ethos, the whole theory was hey, we've we've spent a lot of money, it's not working. Let's get an expert in here and figure out how to do these charter schools. Yeah, and we And then you had a year.

SPEAKER_03

So I had a year to figure out kind of like, okay, who's who's on the ground that's good? Yeah, I I'm talking, I'm not the school building level and stuff, right? And so the way you build a charter school sector is you if there's good people doing stuff and you can help them do more of it, that's one way of doing it. Uh if there's a really good model that you can bring in from another place and they can do it well, that's a way of doing it. Or you put together an ability to recruit really good people and you help them figure out how to do it. So there's kind of three approaches that you could take. Well, we quickly came to realize that there were only a handful of schools here that were one at a level of uh performance that we wanted to. I mean, I learned to know how everything not to do. All right. I mean, it's uh what I think wisdom comes from. Exactly. I got to I owe Checker an apology, right? It's been like 12 years screwing things up, but I made me really good at what I, you know, what not to do. Um, and so like who you invested and how you think about it and all of that. I mean, it was based on uh experience. But the first was, oh, we'll recruit models, like really good models, Kip and others, and I had met all these people, knew them, and like we'll go. Well, they would say, listen, like your per pupil funding is like the lowest or the second lowest in the country.

SPEAKER_01

And you really don't hit on that a little bit because I I do think because our per capita funding of a kid in Idaho is significantly less, that does bleed over into the charter world. So it's harder to do charters. Yeah. Because it you you just you run the pro forma on a per pupil funding for a charter school, and you're like, well, how does this gonna work?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Well, we'd have a whole conversation on how you bend the curve, and I and and we've done that. What you want me to talk or stop? You talk. Um well, you can't do this without the support of the JA and Catherine Albertson's family foundation, all right? So we went from thinking, well, recruit models, that didn't work because the market wasn't what wasn't big enough and the and the poor people funding was too low. Uh so we were like, we need to develop our own talent, and uh, and then we had some schools that we helped to expand. Compass Public Charter School was a great school, and they were waiting to expand, and there were a handful of Sage International, a great school, and they were waiting to expand. But even that takes uh you know work.

SPEAKER_00

So you you know when when we're trying to recruit a kip, it's like you in your business trying to recruit a chain, you know, like a very successful chain. So we we strategically switched to the mom and pop startup.

SPEAKER_03

And in the well, strategic well, they didn't want to come. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00

The chain wouldn't come, so we had to make a shift. So we said, well, you we we tried to find people, which was kind of Terry's real big step into how do you get a talented leader to come? And I'll remember Brad and Amanda were the first two of them.

SPEAKER_03

So we put together a fellowship, and and we didn't he did it. I saw this in Indiana. So Mind Trust is a group, I everything that we've done, we've stolen from somewhere else and we've modified to our reality here. Leveraged it. Yeah. And um, and in some areas we've done it better, right? You know, in other maybe not, but the so it's about talent, and so we put together a fellowship and we mark marketed it widely, and we had like 35 applicants. We were gonna have one fellow. We had 35 applicants from 13 states, including some really good ones from Idaho, a couple superintendents of uh mid-sized school districts, and that I found that fascinating. Like, why? But anyway, we um had a committee and we vetted them, and we got it down to like five. And we had five people who we thought were good, and um then we ended up getting it down, and we couldn't get it down to one, we got it down to two, and we said, Well, would you two be willing to work with each other? And then we had a relationship with KIP where they're like, if you find two people and you think they're good and we think they're good, they can go through our Fisher Fellowship process, which is a train like a boot camp for new school leaders. It's a year-long thing. The we would outsource that component to KIP and they would do it, and then they'd come back and they'd open a school. And that was how we structured it. And they opened the first school. But then our our next what was their full school? Future public school is what it's called. It's still it's doing well. It's in um Garden City. Yeah, yeah. I remember when you did that. That's yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Well, you know what's so it goes by quickly, but because I one thing that so I love the I love the the way we approach that school. So we had a developer that adjusted his plat to put the school in, sold us the property. The property wasn't big enough to put a playground and a cafeteria, but it's right adjacent to the boys and girls club in Garden City. So they have a gym. So we helped the Boys and Girls Club expand their kitchen and food service area. And on the other side of that is a Garden City public park. So we worked with Mayor Evans to upgrade the playground equipment in that park. So think about the uh, you know, the synergy between those three groups, and think about the population of students that the school was going to serve in Garden City. Preschool, I mean pre-early uh not preschool. What do you call kindergarten? No, when you go in the morning like before school. Like people need a place to go before school. You know, a place to go. Yeah, right. It's like an afterschool program of a before school program. I'm saying preschool. It actually is preschool, but it's not how we're talking about preschool. So parents had a safe place for their kids to get to before school. They could go to school, do their thing, then they had a place safe place to go for after school programming at the boys and girls club. And it saved us financially and the school on having to build a gymnasium and a cafeteria and a playground and everything that went with it. And besides that, the mayor was all in, the boys and girls club was all in, and they just had this great relationship with the two leaders that were the first fellows.

SPEAKER_03

And but that story is great because so many other stories that follow are kind of like that. So the next two fellows were Monica and Matt, and they were traditional educators from um Caldwell that Roger had known and had worked with and had great respect for. And they had this vision of a um 100% at-risk CTE school model. And for sixth through 12th graders. For sixth through 12th. And I remember being a little skeptical because I had grown, I'd seen a lot of people who'd been in districts for a while, and then they'd want to do charters, and they would struggle because it was a different culture and a different vibe. These two didn't struggle. I mean, they they embraced the liberation and the freedom of building, they had ideas and things that they wanted. When was their first school? Oh God, what been like 2000 and I'm gonna say 15? Yeah, 14 or 15 like that.

SPEAKER_00

Somewhere right around there.

SPEAKER_03

I could have brought I should have brought it up.

SPEAKER_01

Well, it's just it's incredible. Like you know, 10 years pass and you look at the successes. I want to make sure because this goes by really quickly, I want to make sure we hit on how quickly this has gone from an idea gonna be a better way to do this, to getting the right person here, to the flourishing of these charter schools.

SPEAKER_00

So uh I'm gonna I'm gonna summarize this in a way and then it'll come back and we can tell some stories in a relationship. But i if you think about the context, we got Terry, we had our first two fellows come through. How many fellows have we had since then? Forty two. Forty-two fellows have gone through. We have opened thirty forty-eight schools. Forty-eight schools.

SPEAKER_03

Open expanded 48 schools.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. We've met the 20,000 kid go. Like, I know sometimes you just start listening to some of this stuff. I mean, you're so modest sometimes, it drives me nuts.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, well, well, guess what? Because I'm not doing the work. I know you're not doing that. I'm supporting this incredible human being and the team that he's assembled. Well, the schools do the work. It's just crazy how the impact. It's just insane. Okay, so you can talk about impact and what scales

Grants Partnerships And School Financing

SPEAKER_00

impact. So, you know, we talked about earlier that money sometimes is just the catalyst to really getting things going. Terry wrote a federal CSP charter school program grant, CSP grant. And because of the work and the foundation that he had laid in Idaho, um, what was the first gift? 26 million? So I'm sorry, DVD.

SPEAKER_03

Am I missing something? No, you're absolutely on it. But uh, it this is important because I so much of what we've done starts with failure. This is another example. In 2017, I I we were one of two the first nonprofits in America to apply for these federal grants. The other one was in Oklahoma and they were connected to the Walton Family Foundation. So I in 2017, we wrote a grant for I don't know, $20 million to the Federal Charter School Program grant. And it's the most kind of bureaucratic thing you can possibly imagine, right? And we hired an outside expert to help us. Well, long and short of it is we didn't get the grant, but we learned a ton by not getting it. Like you get feedback. Okay. So in 2018, I wrote the grant. I'm like, you know what? I can write it better than anybody else, and and if we're gonna be responsible for it, we should own it, right? So I wrote it. My colleague Mark is the finance guy, and we put together a grant. My friend Steve Farkas actually gave some really good input along the way. Roger and others gave input, and we um put it together and we got the grant, and at that point it was 17.5 million. They later bumped it up to 22 million.

SPEAKER_02

Wow.

SPEAKER_03

Uh, and then in 2025 or 2024, we wrote another one for 30 million, and so we're up to about 50 million. But truly, uh I I I'm gonna go to the U.S. Department of Education next week and ask for another 16 million because we need it.

SPEAKER_00

Um, I don't know if they'll give it to us or you can't apply for the funding unless you got foundationally something to work with. Yeah. But so which a lot of government programs are that way.

SPEAKER_01

They want to they want to make sure it's successful. It's yeah, I mean it's smart.

SPEAKER_00

I mean it's like Terry, you learn from the best and you try to mimic that and then make it your own. And I think we we all do that in some way.

SPEAKER_03

We've become a model for the country. The JCAF, so this is cool. I mean, everything is the result of the support from the Albertsons Family Foundation. My colleagues, we don't get paid from the federal grant. We have one program officer who gets paid. But we do the work, so Albertsons is paying us, and we're leveraging this money to match it with other dollars or other support. I mean, it's gotten so complicated now. It's wonderful. You got the Albertsons Family Foundation, you've got another National Building Hope, a national partner and charter score growth fund. But then you got a bunch of really good people who developers who donate land. Uh a steel guy who donate rural steel, who donate steel, who and go on and on it goes. Forklifts have been donated. I mean, we've had so this is really when people talk about a private public partnership, that's exactly what this is. And then the state of Idaho has stepped it up, and they're not good about giving you money, and we've never really asked them for money, but they're they've been pretty good over time at giving us freedoms and flexibilities or access to the state's credit rating so that when our schools refi, they're not refining under their history, they're refining under the state's credit rating, which saves millions over 30 years.

SPEAKER_01

And we've done a lot of people. So I I do want to get to a couple of really cool things because watching it from afar, some of the principles of how it they're small businesses. You have to be profitable, you have to make them run long term, you have to all those things. And then and then I do think it's key, the underwriting. Because if you can if you can put the program together, you get the charter going, you can get the help you need, the hand up, not the handout, right? And then and then they function, but you do need that credit on the back end, right? We do.

SPEAKER_03

So it starts though, I'm gonna let Roger I take the credit part of this. It starts with talent, and it's so funny because I was sitting in the Albertsons um main area that you go into, and they have uh a video that's running, and all one of the videos I see was Joe Albertson. It's all about talent. I think it's just an exact quote. And I'm like, wow, this is crazy. This is exactly right. It's all about talent. So we start with fellows, and so we look for talent, we get people, we get them in, and then they get a year to try to tell us, convince us that they're really able to open a really good school. And during that time, then they're they participate in a variety of things with Building Hope with us, others, to actually see what goes into opening a school. Now we have networks of schools, so this is becoming more streamlined, and they're doing really good stuff. But it does start with talent, and then we move into Albertsons funds the fellowship. Then we move into what we call startup funding, which is a mixture of what Albertsons provides and what the CSP federal grant provides, all of that leading to well, how are you gonna do a facility? Where are you gonna do it? How are you gonna finance it? Then there's a whole nother component around charter facility financing. I'll turn over to Roger because he was more involved in building it than we were. But the one component, we also got another little federal grant for pre-development costs, so you can go out and get architects, and it's nifty because it's a risk capital pool. Then building hope engages, the market engages. I think Roger, you're smarter about that than I am.

SPEAKER_00

Well, yeah, so I I'm gonna try to summarize this thing as I can because I I really want Terry to talk about some of these schools. That's what that I was just gonna I was just saying. Like, yeah, so you let's get to some of the results. The the financing comes together with multiple sources. I think I shared that earlier. You know, you've got a private bank, you've got a nonprofit bank in Building Hope, and then you got grant money from us, and then collectively, Terry and his team, you know, they got to put that thing together. Well, we helped it. Mark Caragman's greens behind that. We put it together and then we make the deal happen. And then I think I shared you part of that recycles after five years. They do a takeout deal, they got cash in the bank, but minimally they met their enrollment. They're up and running. What's fascinating is a lot of these good leaders uh aren't good um on the physical plant side. Like they don't, they they just don't think like that. They think about when you're trained for school leadership, you know, you're trained to educate kids and and help educators do it. This is a you you gotta it's a different kind of leader. I mean, not only do you have to have the academic leadership excellence, but you have the operational excellence. And then quickly, with Mark's guidance and support from Bloom, you know, the back office, if you think about managing your finances, so your income and your expenses, Mark is a pro. I mean, and he sets them up for success from day one. And I'm gonna knock on wood, Tommy, but we've done it almost 40 40 plus times, and um they're all financially sound. I mean, operational excellence, and we can talk about that more in a minute. But that is that's a pretty straightforward approach on the financing side of things that it took us a while to work through, but I think we've we've I don't know if we perfected it. The deals are getting harder. You know, money costs more, land costs more. Yeah, you you know all this. It's it's getting a little more difficult.

SPEAKER_01

So talk about some of the schools.

Charter Models That Fit Communities

SPEAKER_01

I want I do want people to listening to understand because the the you know, I I know enough to be dangerous. I was able to speak up at your thing, but you look at some of these charter schools, what they're doing, what they're teaching, the results they're having, brag a little bit.

SPEAKER_03

So what well I love it, and thank you. The um what's neat is in so many states the there'd be like one type of school, the gap closing school, or the um, and that was a problem we had in Ohio, uh it was going to be just in the most screwed up school districts, and they're gonna be all gap closing schools, and they were all look like the same. What's been great about Idaho is we've got really a wide spectrum of schools, both where they're located, terms of school models, terms of uh, you know, scale, you name it. Uh grade levels. Grade levels.

SPEAKER_01

Elementary, middle, high school. And isn't the point there that the communities are different? You're meeting the needs. Yes. And and the And school choice.

SPEAKER_03

Parents, not all parents are the same thing. Kids are different, demographics are different. You got it. Socioeconomic things, yeah. But we believe that. And we, you know, and so we have a spectrum. I mean, uh so we have what are on one spectrum, I'll call them the classical academies, American Classical Schools of Idaho. Uh we recruited a U.S. Air Force colonel, retired, and he's a classical educator, and he's outstanding at it. And um, the kids wear uniforms, they wear, uh, they speak Latin, they it's a classical school. Uh, and he's building on a network of those, and he's got other military guys that are involved with him. And then we've got more, let's call them progressive schools. We talk about future public schools, they have a very different approach, you know, and and for me, they can all fit into this basket as long as they're delivering results and as long as their economic models work and they get enrollment, that's school choice. And then in there, you've got the career tech education schools of the Elevate Academies and what they do, a very different niche.

SPEAKER_01

Talk a little bit about Elevate. I know about them. Absolutely incredible. So you if I talk about this, Carrie? I know you love them. I do too.

SPEAKER_00

Well, I do. So yeah, just an interesting story. Monica and Matt both worked for us when I was the superintendent of the Caldwell School District. And after I left, they complained. They would call me and say, uh, I don't know if I can do this, you know, whatever. And I just encouraged them to keep going. And then finally they complained so much. I said, Terry had Terry had his feet underneath him. I said, you know, I'm pretty much I'm tired of hearing you guys complain. Why don't you just come over and meet with Terry and see if you can do a fellowship and open up your own charter school? That's how it all came to together. They went over, met with Terry, they fell in love. Anyways, their whole approach, Tommy, is when we talked earlier about, in my opinion, school's irrelevant for most of the kids from sixth grade on. For the group of students that they serve, they weren't gonna graduate. They weren't gonna make it through the traditional pipeline. Um they picked the toughest community in regards to that at the time they started in Caldwell. They said, get in the lottery. They went out, they knocked on door, they knocked door to door in the toughest neighborhoods and said, We want your child to come to our school.

SPEAKER_01

Amazing.

SPEAKER_00

And you know, it might be good to have them on at a later date if you heard some of the stories they've they've had. But so, anyways, their whole approach was how do you make school feel or mean uh or look different in a way to where you can get what they call students to next step ready? And so next step ready was when you leave with your diploma, uh, you have the opportunity to take that next step, whether that's to a college, a community college, or to your job. Minimally, you're gonna be trained up through these different career tracks to enter the workforce to get a job where you can take care of yourself when you leave here. Yeah. It's amazing. And so they have signing day. So when these students get jobs, like you and I signing to go to college, they've got the employer standing behind them and saying, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I want to, we don't, we didn't do this. Can you guys can you get someone on the on the computer here? Can you pull up Elevate Academy.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I I do want to get to some of the URLs because this went by so fast. So I want people that listen to this, because there's people from around the state to understand the work you're doing. I want them to be able to dig and go down the rabbit holes that I have.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

But Elevate Academy, so it's Elevate uh Elevate208.org. They just opened in twin, right?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Uh yes.

SPEAKER_00

They're getting ready to next year.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. They've got the leader, they've got the building getting built.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so Tommy, Caldwell, Nampa, Post Falls, uh Idaho Falls. Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01

It's incredible. It's unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, you gotta look at this, Terry, and doesn't it just make you like it's awesome.

SPEAKER_03

What a great. I mean, and these people are also one of the neatest stories about Elevate, I have to say it is so I go up there, they have the one in Caldwell, and then I go up to North Idaho, and I meet these three guys who had graduated from the school in Caldwell. They're now on the construction crew building the elevator up north. I mean, that was one of the community. Or the general, I don't remember. Whatever.

SPEAKER_01

A lot of community involvement. Because I know because I know Mark Schmidt, my good friend, CEO of DMB. He calls me, he's like, hey, you gotta go meet these Elevate Academy guys. You gotta see what they're doing. We're donating. And so it's cool how they also get their their community integrated. Yeah. So they're like, hey, we're gonna meet the needs of the community and the employers here, but you got to help participate and help us outfit our. I mean, it's just a ground up grassroots. What does the community need? How do we integrate this? Unbelievable. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

You know, uh we talked about this earlier again, but you know, right leader, right community, right model, right governance structure. Uh it works. And the right supports up front. The right, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03

And it does money.

SPEAKER_00

And money up front. So, Terry, out of our mom and pop startups, we have three or four schools that are replicating more often. And that those would be we talked about.

SPEAKER_03

So you have Jim Prep, which is the biggest.

SPEAKER_01

Jim Prep. Hey, pull these up as we go. I really want people to dive deep. So so first of all, Bloom, because we're cruise past. Bloom.org. Bloom.org. B-L-U-U-M. B-L-U-O-G. So everyone listening, B L-U-U-M.org, and you can learn all about Terry and this incredible program. That's the first one. We already hit we already hit elevate208.org. That's when we just talked about it. Gem Prep. And now Gemprep.org.

SPEAKER_03

One thing about Gem Prep, so they they've got like eight brick and mortar schools now, but they started out as an online school. And what they're doing now that's really innovative is what they call learning societies. And these are like 20 kids schools that um can operate in the basement of a VFW in a rural area, or they have a partnership now with the um girls uh basketball EU basket basketball team, right?

SPEAKER_00

Kids that were kids that need to be homeschooled or they travel so much, they can now be part of these learning societies. And Jason's figured out a way to deliver a high-quality, amazing curriculum and education.

SPEAKER_01

So these are like nationally recorded. The one thing that technology has got to done over the last 15 years, it's got to be allowing them to have the tools, all the arrows in their quivers to have all these options for the online stuff, and how do you integrate that to the kid making?

SPEAKER_03

So we spend a lot of time on that and I'm learning a lot from these guys. It's not about putting kids in front of computers. I mean, it's it's the actual technology facilitating the delivery of instruction. Yes. And it may very well be with a teacher. And what's kind of a cutting edge now is the learning societies, the use of artificial intelligence, not to teach you, but to help the teachers better facilitate the lesson plans. They have data, they're reacting faster to where the needs of the kids are. I mean, and this is all evolving. Future public school, I'm sorry, Eli uh, good God. Um Jim Prep is is is far out on this stuff in terms of like testing it in appropriate ways and proper ways. So you've got Elevate, which is doing some of the coolest CTE stuff in the let me try. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Bringing the efficiencies of technology and AI into instruction. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00

And in use of data, use of teachers' time and I would say even the effectiveness of teaching and learning, you know, because everyone's an individual. I'll just go back to we talked about this earlier today, but yeah, you could you can tailor make a lesson plan for you and for me and for Terry just like that. Aaron Ross Powell Whereas before those were it's just a guess. Not even possible, or a guess. Well, I mean it's an educated guess. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03

And and you know this is controversial because you're opening up there's right ways of doing things, there's wrong ways of doing things. What I'll say about Jim Prep is that they that they're very strategic, they're very thoughtful. They don't just jump into something. I mean, they do it in a deliberate way. Uh and I think that's why they're doing it so well. And so other states are interested in what they're doing. They're interested in kind of um how we support that. Uh but what's amazing about what we've done in Idaho with Idaho, mostly with Idaho people, uh, is one of the coolest CTE models in the country is Elevate. Jim Prep is one of the most innovative. We've got one of the best classical models that's emerging in this state. And I could go on and on. All of this is your classical URL. What was the American, it's uh ACSI.org.

SPEAKER_01

ACSI.org. American Classical Schools of Idaho. ACSI.org. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And then you you some of you got Alturas Academy. Alturas, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Um I've toured that. That's incredible.

SPEAKER_00

We have we have as part of the network that we've supported and helped, we have uh what's the Idaho Arts Charter?

SPEAKER_03

Idaho Arts, Compass Poet Charter Schools. I mean, up north you got um the STEM.

SPEAKER_00

The North Idaho STEM against the great school. I mean, it's That was Lorna's, right?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, it was Lorna Finman. Yeah. Um, I like the best.

SPEAKER_00

I wish we would have this stuff's all available on Bloom's website, but I mean I'm I'm probably drawing a blank on a few. Can I just tell you that one of the coolest things that we've done, like that I'd say they're all cool, but so Hollister, part of the Filer School District. Hollister's down between twin and jackpot, out there in the middle of nowhere. Terry comes over, he's got the I got this crazy idea. He said Hollister, uh, Filer School District wants to close Hollister because it's too far to bust kids and it's too much of a pain to operate it. So we found Julie Coyle. Julie Coyle. Julie Coyle. Julie Coyle found us. Julie Coyle found us and she said, I want to become a fellow. I would like to turn the Hollister School into a charter school. I don't agree with the district's position on closing the school down. She became a Bloom Fellow. She's not a traditional educator. She served on the Filer School Board as three years. She was the board chair, yeah. For a long time. So we made Julie Coyle, we brought her in as a fellow, Terry trained her up, she went down, and with that community, turned the Hollister School into the Hollister Charter School, and is now operating a school with how many kids, Terry?

SPEAKER_03

Oh, I'm gonna say there's 65 kids there.

SPEAKER_00

So you want to talk about the impact on rural Idaho? You should drive by there. If you're ever driving on 95 South, before you get to just turn right and go over and go look at the Hollister Charter School. She doesn't run the school.

SPEAKER_03

She's well, so this is interesting because what happened was is this they got into this, and Lava Hot Springs is another one of a similar sort of story that um they realized that just how hard it is to run a school. And so uh we mentioned Al Tourist Academy and Michelle Ball. So we connected Michelle Ball uh and said her model might fit your guys' need, and and and you should certainly learn from Michelle, who learned from our friends up in um Salmon long ago about how to structure the academic program and that sort of thing. Well, fast forward now, and they're slowly moving towards a relationship where there'll be a satellite school for Al Tourist schools. So Al tourist will have three larger schools in the Idaho Falls area, and then they're gonna have tentacles in Lava Hot Springs and in Hollister. But the Hollister uh there's a lot of details that can get into the governance and all

Rural Schools And Long Term Commitment

SPEAKER_03

that.

SPEAKER_00

See, you can tell the guy that spends all his time like really in the weeds. I mean, he gets it, but he Terry's also really good, Tommy, helping like our elected officials and decision makers.

SPEAKER_01

Understand this.

SPEAKER_00

Help him to understand it. Now we we can't advocate and lobby, but we can educate. And so Terry is often the one that's called when our lawmakers or our or our charter school commission or our state board of education needs a more in-depth understanding of the impact of what school choice means, and then how do you do that in a in a meaningful, productive way? So you just heard um learning societies, kind of micro school ideas, brick and mortar traditional schools, online schools, saving rural schools from being shut down. Um Tommy, we've got a school in Island Park. How many kids are in that thing? No, say thirty. Thirty was gonna be just kindergarten and first graders. Now we have pre-K and kindergartners and first grade run by two people. It goes up to four kids don't want to leave.

SPEAKER_03

Like, you know, they keep saying so the third graders are like we don't want to leave, so then she does a fourth grade, and then when it's time for them to leave, they're like, well, do a fifth grade. The these are all fragile, though. I have to tell you that the rural ones, I adore these people, but they're they're fragile. They're personality driven, really. And like, so how do you replace a Connie Day or uh our friends up in um Salmon, Jim and Sue? Yeah, and I don't know so this is a dilemma that I struggle with. I've talked to Roger about it. I think it's of interest. If we help a community keep their school for an extra six or ten years, that's worth something, right? And maybe maybe we can't make it work for 20 or 30, but so probably so dependent on that individual, their blood, sweat, and teeth ago.

SPEAKER_01

Well, hey, Terry, we could have had four hours. Oh, this is fun.

SPEAKER_00

He could do this for 12 hours, Tommy.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely fascinating. Um but congratulations on the difference you're making. And you gotta be very You know, I think I am proud.

SPEAKER_03

I'm proud of the people I get to work with. I gotta say this, and and I say this and I mean this with all sincerity, the Albertsons Family Foundation, their commitment to this for 13 years. If if other I get asked in other states and other, you need to have a anchor organization that's truly committed to it for the longer haul. So often people think, oh, just if I, you know, we can do it in a couple years. No. This is a and that's the genius of the Albertsons Family Foundation, is their commitment to this has been unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01

And and the for the listeners, the the diversity in these schools is unbelievable. Well, or model agnostic. It just it's crazy. But we care about results. But impact is impact and results are there.

SPEAKER_03

Impact, influence, and leverage are the big three things we'll talk about.

SPEAKER_01

Look it up. Uh Terry, thank you. Roger. This has been awesome. Yeah, you're the man. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.

SPEAKER_03

All right, bud.