Episode 5: What happens if Denver school board changes enrollment boundaries?

Transcript

Alan Gottlieb: 0:08

Hi, everybody. We are going to talk today about enrollment boundaries in Denver Public Schools, which might seem like a dry topic, but has a major impact potentially on everybody. The school board is considering revisiting enrollment boundaries really for the first time comprehensively in about 30 years. They introduced a so called executive limitation number 19 that deals with setting up a process for revisiting enrollment boundaries. Enrollment boundaries for schools and this mostly affects elementary schools, frankly, and it affects all schools, but in a particular elementary schools and it they would do this tied to the census every 10 years, but start in the next couple of years in introducing this board member, Scott Esserman said he didn't think that enrollment zones in Denver public schools had been touched since the keys case, the desegregation case that created busing free integration in the early 1970s. That's wrong. They the federal judge Richard Mache lifted the court order in 1995. I was a Denver Post reporter at the time covering it. So I remember it very well. And the school board spent much of the next year in marathon work sessions that I sat through until one in the morning, sometimes at the old 900 Grant street talking over how to do this. And in the end, they decided to go back to a system of neighborhood schools that pretty dramatically re segregated by race and socioeconomic status, Denver Public Schools. This was done very deliberately, but it was also done under a lot of pressure, not only from wealthy white parents, as you might think, but very strong pushback from the Black Ministerial Alliance. Hispanic, Latino advocacy groups, everyone's saying our kids have been bused and we're tired of our kids being bused out of our neighborhoods. We want them back in our neighborhoods. And it's insulting for you to suggest that a school that's a neighborhood school in a low income neighborhood where most of the families are of color can't be a good school. And so Under that kind of pressure, the school board absolutely went back to a system of neighborhood schools. One thing I remembered as I was thinking back over this was there were two voices, very esteemed voices, from the black community. who very strongly objected to this and said, you are making a huge mistake. Do not do this. And those two people were Rachel Noel, who I believe was the first black member of the Denver school board, or if not, certainly the first black woman and a just amazing, a woman of just incredible. I don't even know how to describe her, but if you ever met her, she was just, she had so much grace and so such a soft, but steely manner about her, just a super impressive person. And then Sharon Bailey, who died a couple of years ago, who was also a former school board member and us. And she would bring Rachel Noel to the board meetings because Rachel was quite old at the time and needed assistance. And they would just harangue the board in a very polite way. You do not want to do this. Do not do this. History would suggest, as far as I'm concerned, having watched this closely for the last 30 years, that returning to a system of neighborhood schools created not only segregated schools again, but schools that are, by and large, a demography is destiny, and the schools that are in the lower income neighborhoods perform more poorly than the schools in the more affluent neighborhoods, and they have certainly resegregated to a great extent. So I think there's a lot to talk about here, and we're just going to have a conversation. We don't have a guest. This time, we'll talk a little bit about the executive limitation and where that might go and what we think should and could potentially happen. What are your thoughts about this? Alexis?

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 3:44

Yeah, thanks for the great recap. And I think you mentioning Dr Sharon Bailey and Rachel Noel. Those of you who have been at all familiar with Denver Public Schools history, you'll remember the Noel Resolution is actually what started busing in the first place and so no surprise that you would then see Rachel Noel then push back against that and completely agree with you, since the end of school mandated school busing, we've seen our neighborhoods and as a result, also our schools be, Segregated once again. And so what I do find interesting As a follow up to that is when you were under the Boasberg administration, you actually saw an attempt by by then Superintendent Boasberg to try and address the incredible segregation that we were seeing in the late aughts, early 2010s, 2011, 2012 with with Tom Boasberg introducing enrollment zones. And there's obviously a lot of mixed feelings about enrollment zones, but particularly in the far northeast, there was an attempt to use those as a way to open and expand the boundary. So you could have. You could have access to many schools within that boundary but the intent being that you would increase the diversity of the racial and ethnic demographics, maybe the income demographics as well fast forward to today, though, I'm not sure how much we can really say that even enrollment zones themselves are a success. Alan, did you want to add something before I continue?

Alan Gottlieb: 5:10

I just, in some of those enrollment zones, they even ran buses between schools to try and foster and encourage that kind of exchange between neighborhoods and make it easier for families to send their kids to schools that weren't the closest schools to their homes.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 5:23

Yeah, what I found, there's a couple things I find interesting. One, what you just mentioned was the transportation, busing was obviously a big part of this. And then the fact that you had buses like the express buses going around in the far northeast or in the, Central Park, then Stapleton Neighborhoods is telling the importance of transportation for this. But then now once we get into the secondary schools, the fact that there is so much, there's a lack of DPS provided transportation when you get into that middle school and high school level, that's also something that hinders the ability for low income students to be able to really and fully be able to access school choice especially if they're not comfortable, putting their middle school child. On a public school, but or a public city bus across town, the other piece that I wanted to mention. Is when director Esserman introduced this policy yell 19 back on February 6th. What I did find interesting was this conversation came up and I was certainly part of some of the discussions behind the scenes with friends who are advocating in opposition to school closures that enrollment zones were part of the problem or a large part of putting a large part of the blame on why we were seeing declining enrollment. I don't necessarily buy that. I don't think I don't think enrollment zones are the primary driver or even a major driver of why we see declining enrollment. I think affordable housing broadly declining birth rates are probably a much bigger factor. However to hear that board members at the time when they were discussing EL 18, the school closure policy, were also thinking about introducing enrollment zones into that same discussion. I'm very happy and grateful that they did not do that because that would have been. A disaster. But I will say I'm very glad that this is being taken up. As I had mentioned before, in a previous episode, I'm going through right now the school choice process. We just submitted our choice application a couple of weeks ago. And what I found fascinating through that process was Just how segregated some of our middle schools are. I live in Southeast Denver. My neighborhood school for my child is Hamilton. So we were looking at Hamilton. We were looking at Slavin's. We were looking across town at Maury. And also a couple of charter schools. DSST and Highline. And what I found fascinating is, particularly for Slavin's, which is a very affluent, is in a very affluent neighborhood in Southeast Denver, Just the incredible lack of racial and ethnic diversity walking through that school and then looking up the demographic information for that school in particular primarily white very few low income students, very few students on free and reduced lunch. When I toured the school, not surprising. It was incredible. The, a lot of extracurriculars, a lot of resources, all of the electives you can imagine. And then when I was on that tour, one of the things I explicitly asked on the parent tour was about what is, what are the attempts to foster more inclusion, inclusionary environments given that there is such a lack of diversity at the school. And it was really surprising to hear the principal talk about Who had formerly been part of the Trey Vista turnaround school many years ago was that yes, it's an A priority, but there was really no action plan. So I, what you had said earlier about the wealthy white parents, Alan, I would imagine if you, if they, if this board really tries to encourage the superintendent, the administration to truly create more diverse enrollment zones and bringing in more diverse neighborhoods into affluent neighborhoods. you will see the wealthy white parents revolt. We saw it even a little bit when we were looking at the closure process with Teller and Palmer to hear the parents From the schools that would have to welcome students from the closing school and to hear some of the rhetoric around if you do this, I'm going to have to, poor me, send my kid to a private school. It was very much the othering of these students. And I guess my fear is that. Enough pressure from wealthy and affluent white parents will not actually allow us to move the needle to truly have more integrated schools because that will require us to likely, gerrymander some of these enrollment zones because we know, these concentrated neighborhoods are obviously very wealthy, but then this, the next door, the neighborhood next door it's not like you go from 10 percent free and reduced lunch to 90 percent free and reduced lunch. There are pockets of the city where we see low income communities and pockets of the city where we see high concentrations of wealth. So I, I actually really commend the board for taking this on. And I think the administration has quite the task ahead once they start messing with wealthy white parents property. Values and where their kids go to school. And the last thing I'll just say, because I live outside of the Slavens boundary, you can see the drastic and immediate impact of how enrollment zones affect property values. You might have a small ranch style home for 400, 000 in one neighborhood, and then you cross Colorado Boulevard into Slavens, and that same house is a million dollars. Cool. I see it, in my neighborhood it's very drastic and I know that it's not unique to Southeast Denver.

Alan Gottlieb: 10:44

There, there's just so much to unpack here. And again, this is something I've been studying and working on since my days at the Piton Foundation. And actually, since I was writing about it for the Denver Post 30 years ago, so I almost don't even know where to start talking about it, but one of the really provocative things I'll just say right out is I don't think people actually want integrated schools, including progressive liberal people when it comes down to their kids, there are exceptions to that rule, there are people who will Be the pioneers and move their kids into a school. There will people who there are people who will welcome and be happy about the diversity, but the average parent, especially affluent white parent will move heaven and earth. Not to have that happen, because they think it will slow their kids down. There's all sorts of implicit stuff going on there that we don't need to get into. But it's just, it's, I've seen it in every city where I've studied this. And the sad thing is that there's been a ream. There's a researcher by the name of Richard Kallenberg out of the Century Foundation in New York City who's spent his career studying Socioeconomic school integration, and there is so much evidence that if you have a socially economically socioeconomically integrated school, where, you know, 60 40 50 50 in terms of lower income, non low income, that the performance of the non low income kids does not suffer by the presence of the low income kids, The low income kids are lifted up by being in that environment, as opposed to a high poverty school. People don't like to hear that. They think it sounds racist, elitist, classist, or whatever. But the fact is that there's just so much evidence that's true. And it probably has nothing to do with the innate abilities of the kids, or the intentions, or anything having to do of the parents. What it has a lot to do with is people who know how to work the levers of the system. get what they want for their kids, and that's wealthier parents. And if there are lower income kids in the school whose parents are working three jobs and don't have time to do that, they get the benefit of those squeaky wheels, making sure that their kids get what they want. Now, what you do see in schools like Slavens, Bromwell, around Denver, you talked about all the specials and the extra teachers, they raise so much money through their PTAs, that they're actually able to hire additional staff. There's been moves at times to say this isn't fair, we should divvy up the pot of money raised by PTAs and spread it across schools, but the fact of the matter is those schools get so much more based on, and somehow it doesn't matter that all this Title I money, federal money goes into the low income schools. There's so many restrictions placed on how it's used that it somehow doesn't seem to benefit kids the same way. Bromwell and Slavens and schools like that can just hire more art and music teachers and have that going on there. So again, we could talk about this for an hour and a half and we wouldn't run out of material, but there's so much inequity and people protect their turf and don't want to, don't want to give up. Those privileges very readily

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 13:49

one thing. I don't hear talked about a lot outside. We hear about the PTO is the PTA is raising funds that, these more affluent schools, but one thing I would be really interested in maybe one of these days, all core of this or one of the encourage one of our reporter friends to, to core of this, but you see also much higher retention of teachers in those schools too. So when I was touring slave bins The principal had been there, I forget 12, 13, 14 years, something like that, and she said that she was actually one of the newbies, that some of the educators had been there, well over 15, 16, 20 years in some cases, and You certainly don't see that high retention rate at low income schools where you're, seeing a principal turnover every couple of years and then a whole new staff as well. That's something that I think is missed is it's not just about, the wealthy parents, but it's also and this honestly might go back and also a controversial opinion. So we're both going to be throwing them out there, Alan. I think teachers would much rather teach and I'm not saying every teacher. I think there's a. Teachers aren't doing this. Obviously, for money aren't doing this. For to be necessarily in a white school, but you see a lot less turnover of educators in those wealthy and more white and affluent schools and all things being equal, you're going to see more teachers want to teach in a Bromwell or a Slavens than you will at a school that maybe, facing closure, obviously, but also may have a more difficult to serve population for whatever reason the other component of this that. I wanted to just touch on that you had mentioned with the percentage of affluent students. They do not suffer when you have a larger percentage of low income students. I think a perfect example of that. Another school that I visited was DSST Cedar in the heart of Denver. The DSST Cedar received two different blue ribbon awards, one for outstanding academic achievement. And I forget if that was the middle school or high school, but then the other, again, one was the middle, one was the high, received a blue ribbon award for actually closing the equity gap. And so you can both see high academic achievement across the board. And see academic growth from students who have historically performed lower and who also happen to be students of color. So we, we see it in our own backyard, but those are the things that aren't often touted in these conversations. I think largely because, DSST is a charter school, and unfortunately, charter schools are often demonized in these conversations around enrollment zones.

Alan Gottlieb: 16:17

Couple of things in response to what you said about retention of teachers and administrators in those schools. I think there's a couple of basic reasons for that. One is the job of teaching is a really hard job. The job is almost unquestionably easier in a school with more affluent kids for a variety of reasons. The kids tend to come to school more ready to learn, there are fewer behavior problems for whatever reason, and I think the other thing is that stability in leadership of a school leads to stability in staff, and the other thing is that when a school is high performing, as schools with large numbers of more affluent kids often are, the central administration tends to leave those schools alone, And therefore, the principals tend not to get frustrated and leave, which is what happens a lot of times because there's so much interference from central office in schools where things are maybe not going so well. So I think lack of interference from central office leads to stability of leadership, which leads to stability of teaching staff, combined with the fact that the job is somewhat easier. And that teachers who've spent several years teaching in a high needs school sometimes just burn out and. and want to go somewhere where they feel like they can be more successful. And I'm not blaming anybody or criticizing anybody for that. It's just the facts. And you can look at the data on that. One other thing I was wanting to bring up is that 10 years or so ago, A little more than that, 11, 12 years ago, I was one of the producers on this documentary series called Standing in the Gap that was on Rocky Mountain PBS. And there was a lot of research done around that documentary that we used in the documentary by this great researcher who used to be the data guy for the Rocky Mountain, the late lamented Rocky Mountain News, Bert Hubbard finding that actually after busing and in the, at the time he was doing the research, which was again, 12, 13 years ago, White kids were more likely to be in school with other white kids than they were to be in school with anybody else in DPS, and more so even than before busing. There was more, there were the islands of concentration of white affluent kids in schools like Slavens and Bromwell. So it's just points to the fact that the segregation partly by property values, gentrification, everything else is, has just. And I just wanted to circle back for a minute to the challenge the board is going to face if they really get serious about changing boundaries in any way. This is my favorite story from when I covered the end of busing and how they redrew boundaries. I told this to you the other day when we were chatting, but I'll repeat it for our audience, which is, The, there was one school board member, he represented Southwest Denver and his name was J. P. Hemming, and he was nominally probably a Republican and probably the only Republican on the school board at the time. He was a small business owner, I think he owned a plumbing business or something, and he, as they were looking at high school boundaries, they were looking at manual high school, and they were looking at how to draw the boundary around manual. And as the boundary around Manuel today is like a necklace around the sort of northern boundary of Denver, and it's basically all low income communities, although some of those neighborhoods are starting to gentrify. They drew that boundary knowing, as they did it, that there were rival gangs that they were incorporating into one school, and that they were making it a high poverty, very high poverty school. J. P. Hemming proposed that instead of the boundary that they wound up drawing, that they draw the boundary between Manuel High School and East High School straight down York Street, all the way to where it becomes University Boulevard and runs into First Avenue Spear, where the Whole Foods and Cherry Creek is and everything now. And everyone to the west of that boundary would go to Manuel, and everyone to the east of that boundary would go to East. And the other board members. laughed in his face. Literally laughed at him because that would have meant that the families and country club, which is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Denver would have, who had always had their kids go to East would suddenly have their kids go to manual, which was considered a bad school. That was that was very integrated by busing. It was a great. Integrated schools during the busing period so they all laughed at JP and said, there's no way we're going to do that. If you talk to some of those board members now, they'll say, that would have been a good idea. We should have done that, but they didn't. So this just points to the challenges of trying to draw boundaries and the kind of pushback you'll get. And the kind of fury and anger and like threatening. Practically violent behavior you get from families when you start messing with school boundaries. So just be ready school board if you decide to really take this on and please do take it on because it needs to be taken on.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 20:43

Absolutely and more power to the school board for taking it on more power for the school board for being willing to engage community in this because that same example if you were to do that today I would imagine you're going to have a lot of East High School parents showing up at board meetings getting pretty heated public comment and I wouldn't be surprised if you see protest as a result of this. You have to think about this too. You have. People purchasing homes, people moving in, people renting homes specifically for for that neighborhood. If you are, let's say a parent of a third grader and you're thinking about middle school, you're thinking about high school options, you're going to be making some of those decisions two, three years out in order to move into the right neighborhoods. If you have the privilege means and resources to do obviously, the people who are making those decisions to move are going to be more resourced in order to move into those neighborhoods. So for you to then change the boundary it's going to be quite the fight, we're talking about parents and students, but who else are the stakeholders you think here, Alan? I'm trying to think. Okay. Do realtors like how would they engage like the Realtors Association with the chamber get involved like I'm trying to figure out who are the other stakeholders that are going to want to be providing input into these discussions.

Alan Gottlieb: 21:57

They might do it behind the scenes but real estate agents constantly are telling people which schools are good and which are bad and they're basing it totally on test scores and demographics and so it's probably not the best measure but and steering people to certain neighborhoods if they can afford it because that's where the good schools. affluent white schools are. I think it was at that board meeting on February 6th, where this was introduced, it might have been Scott Esserman, who said something about we already have school choice. We have school choice because school choice is where you buy real estate. If you're affluent, I can't remember if it was Scott or somebody else who said that, but I thought that was a really good point. And the other thing that's always worth mentioning and that people are always aware of is that Colorado is very unusual and that it has at least 30 year old school choice law written into it's not in the constitution, but it's a state law that basically says that you can't mandate that people go to school within their enrollment. So there are other places on the East Coast and other cities where you live in a neighborhood and that's the school you go to. And, maybe you can do some sort of crazy petition to the board or to the administration of the district. get some sort of waiver to get your kid out of your neighborhood school, but it's very difficult to do in Colorado and in Denver as well. If you, if there's space available and you're willing to get your kid to another school and drive them there, whatever, put them on a bus RTD bus, you can send your kid to any school again, space available. So Slavens and Brownwell are never going to have any space. So that's not going to be an issue, but it is just a another factor in this whole thing, as are the existence, of charter schools that Also provide another choice within neighborhoods. So you can draw the enrollment boundaries you want, but they're pretty leaky in Colorado.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 23:31

Do you think they're going to be touching enrollment zones as a result of this as well? I'm going back and reading this policy. It says, it looks like they're also going to be discussing enrollment zones, not just enrollment boundaries. So as a refresher, enrollment boundaries are for a specific school enrollment zones are for multiple schools in a larger geographic area. I'll be curious to see how they differentiate those discussions if at all. I here's another like radical idea that I'm sure is going to make a lot of wealthy affluent white parents upset is what if we just get rid of enrollment boundaries and just have large enrollment zones, we still have to solve for the transportation issue. But if you were to. If you were to open up Bromwell and make that boundary much larger to go further north, even, let's say all the way up to Colfax what would happen what would happen if you were to take Slavens and take it all the way to I 25? Or manual, right? Trying to change manual now you would have a lot of, like I said, a lot of those parents at East who moved into the East Boundary quite upset, but I do think if you were to open up enrollment zones and remove neighborhood zones, You would see more integration. However, you would also probably see a lot more pushback. I don't think it's a political reality. I think a lot of the school board would there would be another petition to recall the board if you did that. But, if you're if we really want to say this is something to take on, it has to be like, A top three kind of priority issue. If you're serious about it. Otherwise, my worry is it's going to be it's not going to be comprehensive. I worry it's going to be it won't be as powerful as it could be because of the political pressures on this board.

Alan Gottlieb: 25:21

Yeah, and I also think that I feel like school integration, whether it's socioeconomic or racial, it's not, it's something that neither conservatives nor progressives really like for different reasons. It's an old fashioned liberal like me thing that people tend to believe in, and on the extremes it tends not to be. all that popular. Maybe this is a good way to close, even though it's not about Denver specifically, but I want to talk about one place that I've visited back in my P Town Foundation days that it was a very different place than Denver and had much more ironclad control over where people were allowed to go to school and other things like that. It was Wake Forest. public school system in Raleigh, essentially Raleigh, North Carolina, and its suburbs. And they had the most successful school integration program for a while around in the early 2000s of any place. And here's what they did. They created the best magnet schools in the city, in the heart of the city, in the lowest income neighborhoods, in the schools in those neighborhoods. And then they opened up those schools, half of it was a boundary school, so the kids who lived closest to the school got in automatically, and the rest was by lottery. But they had a fantastic Arts Magnet Elementary School, I still remember visiting it, that was directly across the street from a big public housing project. So it was if you know the city of Denver at all, like where Fairview Elementary is, relationship to Sun Valley Housing Project in Denver. Fairview's now closed. Parents from the suburbs driving, I was, I visited the school and there were parents driving up in their Lexus SUVs, having driven a hat, their kids a half an hour. I'm not even sure they provided transportation for those families to go to that school because it was such a good school. And because of the kind of control that district and board had over its system, they didn't allow the suburban schools to, to emulate that model. You can't have a fancy art school out in the suburbs. The only fancy art school is going to be here. And so if you want it, then you could do a fancy art school. You got to drive them into the hood. Basically it was really successful until the parents in the suburbs started whining about how far they had to drive their kids. And then they got it. There was a school board election, the board flipped and they killed the whole thing. So it's fragile, but it did work as a way, make the people who can. Make have the luxury of making the journey a little bit of a distance to the best schools. Do that. Just it was just fascinating. One of the people I took on one of the trips that to Raleigh to visit was a current school board member, John Youngquist back when he was I think he was an assistant superintendent back in those days. So John, I know, believes in this stuff. I don't know about a lot of the other board members.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 27:59

Any party thoughts,

Alan Gottlieb: 27:59

Alexis,

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 28:01

That last comment you made is an interesting one and not something I had considered. And I actually think that's incredibly important. Reasonable and doable in a place like Denver and the surrounding suburbs, which I think are more on the progressive and liberal side of of politics. And so if you were to take a Mori or a Denver School of the Arts and duplicate or replicate those schools and put one, if you were to put a more in Fairview or down in Southeast Denver where Kip and, or I'm sorry, Kepner and Koonsmiller are, what would that do to those to those neighborhoods and being able to provide and still have a boundary where you still give priority access to the boundary? I think that's, that would be really interesting. Cause we do have very few magnet programs here. I think DSA. And Moria are the only ones, if I'm remembering correctly. And then the last thing I'll say that I think it's less realistic, but certainly something we've seen traditional, very aggressive reform efforts is true lottery systems that you saw in D. C. Several years ago, but I think we're, given our school board and given the stronghold that we, that the teachers union does have here in Denver, I think that's unrealistic, but I hope that that the board does consider that Wake Forest example of, look, if we really want to do this, where, how do we increase those magnet programs in those low income communities? I'd love to see an attempt to do something like that.

Alan Gottlieb: 29:29

Yeah. And in fact, the magnet programs that were intended to do that became huge segregating vehicles in Denver that the IB program at George Washington high school was one DSA under the new, he's not new anymore. The principal there now they've made huge strides in trying to diversify that school. But it was always an abomination in terms of diversity and in fact, there were so many kids in that school from Littleton and other suburban districts. And because you had to audition to get in, kids who lived right near the school happened to be low income kids of color whose families couldn't afford private dance, music, etc. lessons, had no shot at getting in that. I think that's changed and is, or at least has changed somewhat. But man, those parents would fight that. That changed so hard.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 30:12

One thing that really surprised me my, my child is magnet eligible for Maury that I wasn't expecting on that tour because I asked her some other question at Maury as I did it at Slavens when we were doing the tour is not only is Maury over represented as far as the white population because of the magnet program, the highly gifted magnet program, but it also is over represented by male students. So Maury has an over representation of white and male students and something I didn't realize in that. I. And one of the things that I've since asked several of my teacher friends and former teacher friends is I didn't know that male students are more likely to be identified as highly gifted than female students. So that's just something else that I hadn't considered in this whole process. But I really appreciate that we were having this discussion. I'm often critical of this board, but huge kudos to Director Esserman and the entire board for taking this on. I will be cheering that they are successful and they have quite the task ahead of them in being able to achieve this executive limitation 19.

Alan Gottlieb: 31:12

Luckily, I don't think they're going to try and do it this year during an election year because that would be political suicide for them. And last comment I'll make, just a little snarky comment, is that Board member Sochi got town today, a post on Facebook that she was going to try to add an amendment to this or a piece to this executive limitation 19 mandating a cap on class sizes, which doesn't seem in any way to relate to this to this issue of enrollment boundaries. But it certainly does seem to be a major pander to the Denver classroom teachers association in our election year. So same on her for doing that.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 31:47

Yeah, no, it doesn't make sense to me. Class sizes would be great, but that seems like a whole nother executive limitation you could introduce.

Alan Gottlieb: 31:54

That's it for this week. This has been a kind of wide ranging, freewheeling conversation. We would love to hear your thoughts about it. It's a controversial issue. It's going to get really interesting if, and when it comes up, this hasn't even gone to first reading yet and the school board. So if they decide to take it on, you probably won't hear anything more about it until later this year, and then they wouldn't probably dive into it until I'm guessing after the election, if they're smart,

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 32:19

this is a great discussion.

Alan Gottlieb: 32:20

Yeah. Talk to you soon. And so long, everybody. We'll be back in a couple of weeks.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan: 32:24

Bye everyone.