Laura Anderson and Ash Dhammani Transcript: April 7, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00:00):
For session two of the April, 2025, widening the pipeline Virtual training. We’ll explore how to follow the money when it comes to education spending in local communities. First, we’re joined by Laura Anderson, who is the associate director, the omics lab at Georgetown University. In that role, Laura manages research and special projects and training and the center operations. Laura is joined by Ash Damani, who is a policy and data analyst with the Ed Genomics lab. He leads the school level expenditure, data collection, standardization and publication efforts. Ash’s research focuses on fiscal data transparency through database development and custom and practical visualizations. You can read their full bios on our website@nationalpress.org. Ash and Laura, thank you both for joining us today.
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (00:01:05):
Thanks for having us. We are excited to be here. So what we pulled together for you is the work we do as a genomics lab. We focus on the money, so we look at some of where the money comes from, but mostly what are school districts doing with the money and what are they getting in return for it? So we’re going to go ahead and dive into some of these things that you all are probably thinking about. What is the most consequential ed finance issue for 2025? And a lot of, you’re probably saying the impending changes to federal funds, right? We’re hearing a lot about this in the national dialogue, and unfortunately we don’t think that’s the big issue. It’s getting a lot of attention, but we don’t really think that’s the big issue. And the reason why is that if to remember that for school districts, about 10% of their funding comes from the federal government.
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So most of the money are state and local dollars. So yes, there could be some challenges to the federal funding, but we don’t think that that’s possible because those largest buckets, so Title one and IDEA, which that’s the special education funding, requires a rewriting of the law and that would require 60 votes in the Senate. We feel that based off of previous experience and watching this over the decades, that really this money is popular on both sides of the aisle. We don’t think that that money will change. There may be some changes, but they don’t need to brace for big changes or cuts in federal funds. Ash, before you move on to the next one, there are some things to be watching though right now there might be a hair trim to Medicaid, and that’s something for some districts that would be a larger impact to their budget, but for most it would be pretty negligible to their total overall budget, the money that is being spent at the state and local level.
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So going on. So what do we think is going to happen at the state level? Are states going to fill the holes in districts budgets? Are they going to step up to fill the holes that are left because of the federal relief funding has now has gone away? That funding was to be spent as of September 30th. Our prediction, not really. Most states are seeing tighter revenues and districts should not expect a windfall from their legislature. So really districts are in the position of trying to figure out how are we going to go forward in this next budget cycle spending less. So really the most consequential, what we believe is happening in education, but definitely in ed finance, is how will districts downsize their budgets? So we’re going to dive into a bunch of questions. You can be asking data sets that you can be sourcing and looking and digging into.
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Learn a little bit more about what’s going on in the areas that you’re reporting on and care about. So it is a really busy financial landscape for school districts. We started this a couple years ago with the pandemic calling it a wild ride, and the ride just continues. So the things that we see happening that are putting stress and strain on districts right now, the sups are really stressed about their budgets. They’re acknowledging that this is going to be a tighter budget season. And so when your leaders start acknowledging that, then that kind of trickles down and sets the tone within the district. The end of Esser left holes in budgets, right? They’ve been spending along the last couple of years and now they have this budget hole that they need to try to fill or to reduce enrollment is down. And so that’s across the country.
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We’ll talk about that data in a little bit. But with enrollment down, revenues are down. And so some of districts are considering school closures. That’s a lot of pressure on leadership in communities, right? That’s where a lot of tension comes to play. Which schools are you going to close? Why are you closing them? We all just already talked about this. With the state revenues tightening, the districts are feeling like, okay, it’s on us. We got to do the hard work. Now, the local appetite for taxes is down in most communities, and I don’t know if you guys have seen that, but a lot of taxpayers are feeling their own belts tightened. And so they’re turning in and saying, we all have to do this same work and districts we’re not ready to open our wallet to you. You’ve had a good couple of years. And then there’s this rising concern of federal funds.
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So there’s this deep tension that’s kind of going on within the leadership. And then they’re also struggling with schools that are carrying more staff than ever. So their enrollment’s down revenues are down, their expenses are up, and they’re seeing more staff in their schools and trying to figure out how to balance all of that. And the next, the teacher shortage is over. We put this one here in white because I think you’re going to hear in some communities that they’re struggling to find teachers. And that may be very, very true in some places they’re struggling. I think the important questions is what positions are you looking to fill? We know that there are oftentimes shortages in specialty areas that have kind of what we would say labor market value. So math teachers are hard to come by in some communities because in their other positions that are available within the community, they could get a higher paying job.
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So look at very particular areas. Special education is a shortage. English language learners could also teachers that would teach them that that could be a shortage area. But it’s really important that now that we had this mass hiring with all this esser money, and you’re starting to see the headlines where they’re letting go of some of those teacher staffs. The shortage is over. There are high quality candidates out there, they just need to go and find them. But in some communities, it’s hard to draw them in. Special education costs are crowding out other spending. So special education spending has been on the rise for some time, and we’ll talk about that and where you can dig into that data for your community. And then there’s also financial dysfunction that plagues some districts. They just haven’t been able to figure it out. They had declining enrollment before the pandemic.
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They had budgetary constraints before the pandemic. They got this big influx of cash and they did what they always know to do, which was buy labor and now they’re going to have to reduce, it was something that they were uncomfortable with before the pandemic, and they’re kind of back up against that again. And then parents and staff start to resist these budget reductions, right? So you can start to feel this tension that’s happening in communities, what’s going on? Why do we have to do with less? And then really the big thing that happened early end of January where the national, the NAP scores were outright and the scores are showing that in most locations learning has not recovered. It has not recovered from the pandemic, and in some cases it’s just continued to decline. So we’re going to dig in. Ash and I are going to ping back and forth between some of these data sets.
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Leave some time for questions at the end, but we’ve put QR codes and we’ll get our slides to you all. But there’s QR codes if you want to pull up right away and look at your own local areas that you’re interested in, but promise to be bringing you lots of fun stuff. So don’t go too far and dig too far into the data and kind of miss out where we’re going. So we did as soon as the APE scores came out, ran an analysis thinking about spending and outcomes over time. So again, we want to bring in the money story here. So you can see that spending has been going up over time. This is the national picture. The green line represents spending, it’s up about 56% since 2013. And you can see the line for inflation. So definitely above and keeping pace with inflation there.
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But what you see here in the orange are the reading scores. And we use fourth grade reading scores because if students are not on track in reading in fourth grade, they are going to have lifetime learning delays and probably lifetime income shortages. So we’ll talk a little bit about that. So we look at fourth grade reading and eighth grade math. So eighth grade math is the blue line. So you can see nationally the scores were on the decline. There was a steep decline during the pandemic, but they really haven’t started to totally bounce back up nationally. But of course the national pictures, the national pictures. So we also looked state by state and a reminder that a p, it is a sample. And we looked at each one of the individual states and at their scores, and you’ll see here on the left-hand side, there’s stronger ROI.
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So return on investment happening in Mississippi. The investments barely outpaced inflation, but they saw a lot of gains in their reading over time. So I’m sure you may have seen stories around the Mississippi Miracle. This is what we’re talking about where most states saw a steady decline since 2013. They were definitely on the rise and they’ve been able to make that rebound from the pandemic. Little bit less of a rebound in math, but they’re working on it. Where compared to Washington State where I’m from, there’s steep spending increases. And really these declines that were, they were probably almost the most decline that we had seen across the country. So really in a tech city or in state of Seattle, why are our math scores so low and why are we not panicking about this and thinking about what needs to be done. So we have this ROI analysis over time, you can dig into your individual locations.
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We think there are some great questions to be asking about this and what are we getting in return? And to put it in perspective, before these scores came out, so at the end of summer, last summer, we hosted a webinar and we called it the School Spending Errors Tour. And I think it would be worthwhile if you’re really interested in this concept to go back and to watch that video and what we talked about, there are all of these different eras of education. You can see early on with NCLB era, that very first group here, there was a really tight relationship between spending and outcomes. And that era was really tagged for a lot of accountability holding schools and districts accountable. Not to say there weren’t some challenges within that era, but that was where there was tight accountability and we saw a better connection.
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Obviously then you could see the great recession and then you see essa, and then you see the pandemic. So it’s kind of a good way to kind of marry on and see what is happening in your communities and learn a little bit about those arrows. So we’ll make sure that we get the link in here, so you guys can go to that if you want to. But I’m going to turn it over to Ash to go through some of the data sets we have and more of these analyses and what they mean. And then stick with us because at the very end, I’m going to bring it all back to together for you about why now and why are you talking to me about this and what should I do with all of this. So Ash,
Ash Dhammani/Georgetown University (00:11:46):
Yeah, and thank you Laura for setting up the stage there because a huge sort of reason where the money comes from and what determine the money and how much money each district gets is the enrollment, the number of students who attend these schools and are part of these districts that drive the money towards providing them the resources. But we’ve seen a steady enrollment decline, Laura. As I was saying, the enrollment is sort of what determined the money that goes to school district and how they fund their schools. But of late, we’ve seen a massive decline in enrollment in all schools districts across the country, of course, some more than others, some may have seen a bit of a migration during pandemic and gotten more students in their district as opposed to others. But that also meant net loss for a lot of other districts. This is a chart that we prepared using ncss projections of enrollment declines from 2022 to 2031, and it’s going to force a massive downside for years to come, especially highlighting a few states here like Washington, Oregon, California, New York states within the largest district and very, very large student population where we’ve seen an immense enrollment decline with which come a decline in revenues that the district will get to be able to spend money on providing the right amount of resources or appropriate amount of resources for all their students attending those districts, Louisiana, Mississippi, all being a very similar fate.
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So this map is a perfect representation of where we’re headed, sort of in terms of being an enrollment decline, which will also impact the revenues in many districts. As Laura mentioned, Esser, this one time big influx of money really helped districts sort of find that possible reset, but we really didn’t see that immediate impact and are trying to now understand now that this money is gone, where’s all, where are all the recurring expenses that the district made going to come from? Where’s that money going to come from? The US also has a lot of schools now. So one thing that I’ll mention in the next slide will make that point much more clear. Hold harmless, if you haven’t heard of this term before, what that necessarily means is during the pandemic and given this enrollment decline, what a lot of states and districts were trying to do is really help districts maintain similar level of funding.
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So what they were doing was aligning with the enrollment that they had in previous years. And were using averages to sort of help schools stay at the same funding level, but with the continued decline in enrollment, can that be justified? How long can the state continue to fund the districts at the same level when there’s not enough students to sort of justify that revenue that is demanded of that district? And also, money is finite, as we’ve clarified. Not everybody can have everything all at the same time. It’s all coming from the same pool. So if the money is sort of directed towards one particular district, it is missing out on being able to give that money to another district. They’re trying to use state hold harmless policy and be very inequitable towards district that might actually need it. So the enrollment and staffing trends, this is a huge sort of slew chart that we’ve been building both at the state district and national level.
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This national picture actually uses ncss common core of data. I believe originally you mentioned that the last presenter talked about NCS and how that’s a big source of data for a lot of education related data sets. We build these charts to really magnify the idea that we are seeing this continued decline in student enrollment across the board. But we’re also seeing at the same time this increase in staffing. And this is the story for a lot of districts across the country. And if you see we highlighted two particular things dear. The teachers are the bigger expenditure, right? The personnel make up the bigger portion of education. That’s where the money is being driven. Those are the things that we’re actually putting the money towards because they are the ultimate people delivering education to the children attending schools. But also at the same time, the revenue driving factor, which is our students, that enrollment is declining.
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So if revenue is not keeping up with the pace that we need to be going toward, where are these expenditures going to come from? Are we really stretching ourselves so thin that we’re not going to be able to afford where we want to be? You might’ve seen a ton of stories lately with bigger districts like Austin, I, the Seattle, Chicago with tons and tons of budget deficits, mostly because those have been immensely affected by losing a lot of enrollment. And because that enrollment was the revenue driver, they haven’t been able to sort of meet the demand of the expenditures that have been keeping up with for the last few school years. And now where is this money going to come from for ’em? Speaking more about the one-time Esther funding that we’ve been talking about so much, it was sort of all over the place.
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Districts got this one-time money very unprecedented. They didn’t know what to do with it. A lot of smaller districts, as you can imagine, they had never seen this one time kind of money ever before. Maybe it was so much more than what they were already expecting for the upcoming years. So given this unprecedented time, we had to jump in at the data people and start collecting the data on how are districts spending this money? What is it that they’re buying? And especially the whole point of giving them this money was, can you use this money to make up for learning losses? This proverbial learning loss or the time being taken away from students being able to actually not only mentally prepare for what’s going on around them, but also keep up with their education and keep up with where they want to go into the future.
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So we as a genomics lab wanted to understand, okay, what is it that the districts are buying at this time? Are they investing in counselors? Are they investing in tutoring? Are they investing in things that are actually going to directly meet the students’ demands where they are? But also at the same time, how can we help encourage people to use this financial data and pair it with outcomes in real time? So if the money was put toward tutoring or was put toward counselors, did it help meet a certain demand or a certain outcome that you were hoping to meet with that particular investment? So with the counselors, did you actually, and you reduced absentee than the students, you see more students showing up to class, did it work? Does the district even know that it worked? So what are some ways that the district could have actually merged their spending with outcomes to understand that it really got students back up to their grade level, or at least back to the level measured prior to covid.
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So we really encourage a lot of the people, and we’ve seen a lot of reporters use our data sets to drive and write about these stories and really ask one, how did the district spend all this money? And if there were anything that actually worked, if there are any success stories, how could we amplify those? But also remind the districts, if you’ve made an investment that was recurring, how do you now plan to keep that investment sustained? Now that ET is gone, especially for very large districts where we’ve seen some recurring expenses in PD or hiring all these teachers, all these new staff, all these counselors, and not to say that they had some idea in mind. These weren’t just investments made out of thin air. They had some ideas in mind. So their time is now for us to question, okay, so if you had this idea in mind, did you measure it against certain outcomes that you were hoping to get? And also, where’s the money going to come from to keep these sustained investments growing? And are we also going to then continue to measure the success of our students with these investments?
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Another data set that I had the pleasure of talking to another NPF fellowship last time about, and thank you for that opportunity was our nerds data set, which as Rachel will tell you, she’s also very proud card carrying member of I am of the NERDS Plan. It’s our school by school spending data set. It stands for National Education Resource Database on schools as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act 2015 law, there was a provision made in the law that required districts to now start reporting their school spending data at the school level, sorry, spending data at the school level. After that point, we were mostly seeing data reported that at the district level in millions of dollars, billions of dollars. And it was really hard to sort of digest and really make sense of what those numbers meant to the variety of different people and stakeholders who play a part in the world of education or how do you explain to a parent that X amount of money being spent on their child’s education.
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So when this SLL was passed, when this data started coming across people’s screens, it was really worthwhile helping explain to them that in a first student term, on a per pupil basis, this amount of money is being spent at their particular school relative to other schools. So it really started building this conversation around, okay, now how do we make comparison between schools that are maybe within the same neighborhood? How much is one A school spending versus B school? And are they really equitably spending given the demographics of those schools? So there’s so many different conversations in so many different stories that started springing up because of this data set. And we’ve seen a lot of journalists really dive into the idea of understanding how spending within a smaller district just with schools that are within the same neighborhood and may see very similar demographics of students attending those schools, how is the spending differing between those two? But also what are the outcomes that we’re seeing for the money that’s being spent at these schools for those students? How are we delivering the return on investment this ROI for the students that are attending these schools? So one way,
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (00:21:07):
I just want to back up and say, you’ve probably have heard, and those of you that have your video on, you may be able to nod that we fund districts differently based on the zip code, right? My school gets less money because of our zip code, and I think that this is where if we can give you one piece of information, one data set to play around with, it really is the nerds data set. So a school district is usually comprised of multiple zip codes. And so we see this in Seattle in particular, and this kind of plays out in other larger urban areas as well, is the school district gets a lump sum of money and then they make a decision about how to distribute those resources to each one of the schools in their district. So in Seattle, at the north end, those schools end up spending more money per pupil than the schools in the south end.
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And I think that the schools in the south end, they are higher poverty schools in Seattle, and they are our higher minority schools. And so people feel that their zip code receives less money, and there was a lot of work over the last several decades to make sure that within a state that there is an equitable distribution of resources within the state. And now what this data set allows us to do is to dive down and say, okay, the district got all the money. What were the district’s decisions with that money? Were those equitable decisions? Did they get the resources to the schools that needed it? How are they changing their funding over time as these data are available? And really for a lot of districts, it was the first time they were looking at it as well. So the dataset starts with FY 19 and goes forward from there.
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So I think this is the really new data in education. What are we spending? Where is it going? And what’s really exciting about the more recent years of this? So now we have FY 23, FY 24 starting to come out. We’ll be able to see when they got those emergency relief funds, which schools did they spend them on, where did those resources end up being concentrated? And then we’re able to look school by school at the outcomes. And so that will be the next piece we’re going to show you. But that’s really why this is the newest kind of approach to analyzing education and allows us to get beyond that district approach, but down to what are the practices happening within these districts that are actually supporting student learning? Let’s show ’em the, because I know most of you, you left eighth grade math and you never wanted to see a scatterplot again, which was similar to myself, but these are fun.
Ash Dhammani/Georgetown University (00:23:46):
Yeah. So like Laura said, it’s really diving into the data to understand and compare schools that are similar looking or have similar demographics or are within the same districts. How were the district decisions impacting where the money went and how, what sort of results it yielded? So this is a scatterplot, and again, the QR code will lead you to all of our different scatterplots for all 50 states plus cc. And majority of the districts are represented, I say majority because it depends on the amount of spending in each school. And you’ll see some notes on each of our scatterplots. But this particular scatterplot, what it’s representing is eighth grade math proficiency for all students attending middle schools in Washington state. So this is their most recent year of spending, which is 2324, compared to their most recent year of testing, which was also school year 24.
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This scatterplot is sort of split into four quadrants that helps really drive this conversation of how much are you spending and what are you getting for it. So on the left hand side, on the quadrant, you’ll see schools on the top left is what we call our ROI superstars. These are schools who are doing a lot for their students with very few dollars compared relative to their peers, similar to let’s say people in quadrant three were also spending at the same level but not really driving those results as we would expect them to. And on the right hand side, we have schools A and D, and quadrant one and four. These are schools that were really driving our money towards, and the outcomes that they’re getting for those may not really match up with the expectations. So what we really want to understand here using the scatterplot is what can we learn from school B?
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What can we learn from school A can school a drive very similar results with maybe less money or relatively closer to average amount of money as compared to other schools to do the same for their students? Or can we learn something from principal and school B that can help principal and school B really move themselves up that quadrant and do better for the students attend those schools? So I should maybe quickly take a step back and explain what these colors inside mean. Sorry, I should have started there. So the circle individually are schooled in different districts across Washington state. The size of the circle is the enrollment of the school. So the bigger the size, the bigger enrollment of the school. And the color here you see is poverty. So when you go to our website and look at a scatter pot, you’ll see a spread of different colors.
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A green color, if you were to see that scatter pot would mean low poverty schools. Yellow would mean mid-level poverty schools. Orange, which is seen here, is between 50 to 75% poverty. And anything in red would mean higher than that. So for this particular screenshot here, we wanted to bring you 50 to 75% poverty serving schools. So they’re all like schools, similar demographic. And all the circles that we try to highlight were similar enrollment sizes to really when you’re trying to pair schools that may look similar in demographics and relatively close to each other spending, what is it that they’re doing to drive outcomes for their students? When the resources are aligned to each other, are we really then making the most of the resources at the time? What are we doing to make the most of those resources? So some of the stories we’ve seen journalists write out of these images is asking those questions, really holding districts accountable, really holding schools accountable to ask those difficult questions of do you have these resources? X amount of money was spent, what did you really do to drive those outcomes? What are some of those investments that actually led those outcomes? So those are some story ideas where we’ve seen people sort of lend themselves to these images and ask those questions of their leaders and drive those changes and hold them accountable.
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (00:27:30):
Anything
Ash Dhammani/Georgetown University (00:27:30):
Else you want to add here, Laura?
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (00:27:31):
Yeah, I was going to say we’ve been using these displays with school board members and district leaders, helping them think about a way to engage their community in a really productive conversation around how they’re spending their resources and what they’re getting for in return. A lot of people, if you say, well, what are you getting? Or you start talking about ROI, they’re like, oh, you think everyone in our school are widgets? Our kids are widgets, and if we just do X, then Y is going to happen. And we’re saying no, because what we can see here though, there isn’t really a clear relationship between money and outcomes. We’ve got schools in all of these different quadrants, so how can we learn from what’s going on? And very often a school leader will say, well, this isn’t all the context. You don’t understand what’s happening at my school.
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And we’re like, you’re right. We don’t tell us, bring us along. Help us understand. But if you don’t actually marry the spending and outcomes data and you just have a conversation with the school leader, most of them think they are school C, they think they’re under-resourced compared to their peers and that they have lower outcomes even if they’re actually rocking it and they’re up where school B is, they have this deficit mindset, we don’t have everything that we need, but if you can take these sorts of pictures, and so we were talking about the school boards and district leaders and saying, just take this picture to your community and say, we want all of our schools to be above this average line. We want everybody performing higher. And so we’re working on how we’re going to get our resources to the schools that need it.
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But right now, school C and D, you guys are in really similar places with your kids on outcomes. You guys need to be doing better, but it is really hard for me, school D to tell schools C, to keep working hard when they have fewer resources and you have so much more. And the principal again might say, you don’t understand what happened to my school. Tell me more. Let’s figure it out. What’s working? School C might say, can you post my jobs, my openings before you post the openings for schools B and A every time I’m the last person to get the pick of those people who apply. Can I be first? Can I get some of those rockstar educators into my school? Those are the sorts of things where they might say, you keep sending me the most junior teachers. I really need a senior teacher.
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And maybe the district leaders will go to a senior teacher and say, can we stipend you to go to this school, provide leadership for a year, and let’s see if we can make a difference. These are the sorts of displays that allow for those conversations. But if you don’t bring the data and bring the pictures, they always feel like we’re asking them to do more with less. So the pictures have been really, really powerful. Really encourage you to noodle around in there and see what you can learn. You can look at a particular district and go and ask some really critical questions and bring it to school leaders and say, can you tell me about what’s happening here in the schools? Most of them have no idea that their actual allocations look this spread out across their district. And that’s because when they do their budgeting, they use average salaries.
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And so we use the ESSA reported data, which was required to use actual salaries. So this shows at the end of the day what was actually spent at those schools and isn’t masked by some of those averages. So I think there’s a lot of stories that can be kind of uncovered and explored looking at the data. And so I’ll leave you with that thought and I’m going to move on to another topic that I quickly approached at the very beginning of the hour. We’ll go forward to the next slide. So special education costs are rising, and we’ve seen this and the reason why it’s important is that it does put a lot of pressure on district budgets because they’re required by law to fulfill those obligations that come through on an individual education plan. So if more of their students are being identified. So we’ve done these profiles for every state because the data are really hard to come by, and so we pulled them together.
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But you can see here in California the red line is the growth of their special education student population as a share. And then the blue line is their regular enrollment growth. So they’re actually increasing at a much higher rate enrollment of their special education students. And we’re not really surprised by this. We had a pandemic and a lot of students fell behind academically, and most students, they really early identification for special education comes out in the reading test scores and people start to go back and figure out what’s going on. And so what we wanted to do by using these profiles is pull together what’s happening around identification because identification rates would be driving the enrollment and the costs. What are the categories where they’re actually being identified? You can see here in California in the middle, and it’s kind of hard to read here, but the blue box at the top, the learning disability category, that’s where dyslexia and regular reading delays show up.
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So it’s a large portion of what’s, but then we look down in the orange box and we’re like, what’s happening in California? So California employ, they employ one FTE for every five special education students, and 47% of those are Paris. And so one of the questions is really whether or not is more people, is a quantity here better for these students or can we reimagine how we’re delivering those services and maybe bring in a few more teachers, fewer paras and change that ratio? And I don’t know, I don’t know that that’s right or wrong, but what we did is we tried to pull into here into this green box some of the things that district leaders could be looking at. So I think if you’re interested in special education or you’re finding that that’s really causing some tension in your communities that you’re reporting on, you could look at these reports and we would have a couple of questions here of looking ahead, what are the things that the districts or the state could be doing in order to address some of this and to make sure that students are getting the services that they need, but they’re also getting the outcomes, right?
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The intent behind these services are to get the resources to those kids and to help bring those outcomes up. And in many places we’re finding that those gaps in their outcomes are just growing. So again, the special education and area, if you’re interested to dig in, we’ve got the QR code here, so you could dig into that and then we’ll go on to the next one. I know this is also another hot topic happening right now in ed finance, the public investment in private options. So we’re hearing about education savings accounts, we’re hearing about vouchers, all of that. And so we have these two sides of this discussion that’s happening. We’ve got people saying, ESA policies are diverting a substantial share of public funds that would otherwise go to public district schools. We need to have those resources maintained and sustained. We can’t give into these policies.
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Then on this other side, we’ve got the money going to ESA amounts to a rounding error. And so we wanted to dig in as the money people and say, which is it? And so we have been following that and tracking it. We have an FY 2324 report, and then you’ll see a 24 25 if you go to this QR code. But really our initial kind of analysis says it’s about 1% of state and local ed dollars are in these private amounts. That varies a lot from state to state, but is this something that we need to help people understand? What is the amount of money that’s going and what does that look like and where would those students be otherwise? But wanted to give you this as a resource. If you’re finding that information, your community and that tension, you can see what’s happening in our analysis state by state.
(00:35:24):
But really the big thing is you’re like, okay, so now what We’ve given you all these data sets and data tools and displays, and I would say, I’ll pause to say we did reference NCS as a data source in here a lot, but we actually use a lot of state data, and we do that for a couple different reasons. One, it’s out way sooner. You can go get the state data for most all of these analyses about a year to two before you can get it from NCS. If you’re thinking in real time, I want to know what’s going on. The states are really a great source for data, and we’re finding that many more of them, I know they’re reliable and they’re more timely, but they’re more willing to work with you if you’re looking for something or if you have a question about the data set.
(00:36:11):
They’ve got the people at the state agency that can answer those questions. So just want to encourage you to use state data, and that’s the basis for a lot of our analysis. And if you’re looking for a file and you can’t find it, feel free to reach out. You’ll have our email addresses at the end and you can say, do you guys have it? We might. And so we’ll go ahead and share that with you. But really we take all of these data points and we say tighter budgets, no doubt, tighter budgets going forward, falling enrollments, and districts are not going to be able to maintain their higher staffing levels. And so staff, just as the state and local dollars are about 90% staff is about 90% of a district’s budget. So they’re going to have to figure out how to reduce their labor costs.
(00:36:57):
They can trim around the edges and get rid of contracts and not renew a curriculum or whatever, but that’s just not going to get them to the sort of budget gaps that they have. So they’re going to have to look at labor. And so we wanted to talk through quickly what you’ll see them doing right now. A lot of them are like, fingers crossed, we’re hoping for attrition’s going to take care of this. We have some senior teachers retiring. We’ve got some teachers who are just burnt out. We hope attrition’s going to take care of it. The problem with attrition is it’s usually uneven. You can be left with too few math teachers or special education teachers because they leave education for other jobs in their communities. And what you’ve left are your teachers that don’t have other labor markets. So you might end up with your ceramics teacher here and then you’re asking them to go teach math, and it just might not be a good mix.
(00:37:50):
So we worry about attrition for that, that it’s not very targeted. Early retirement incentives, those often can come up and it’s like just paying people not to work, which is one thing, but also you might lose your top performers if you’re just offering something and it’s whoever comes and takes it. And then there’s also furlough. So it’s reduced days of work, but then students are getting fewer days of learning. So if they take furloughs in order to fill that budget gap, we’re back to fewer days of learning. They might reduce their administrative or their specialist. Just as one note is that during the pandemic, they opened a lot of new positions at school districts and they promoted teachers into specialist roles. They said, you are a really great reading teacher. We’re going to make you a reading coach and we’re going to hire a new third grade teacher and a new fourth grade teacher.
(00:38:40):
We want you to coach them and to improve reading in our district. And now if there’s a big call for reducing the local administration teams or the specialists, you might lose those really high performing teachers that were promoted into those positions. Salary concessions, you might see them freezing their step raises or they might delay raises or trim stipends also creates kind of a bad environment. People get really upset and kind of a little concerned and worried about their job and feel like they’re underappreciated. So that creates its own sort of environment within the district. And then eventually you’ll see here these colors are getting a little bit darker in the blue. They’re going to have to get to teacher layoffs, and it’s like how do they get there and what do they do and how do they run through those layoffs? And a lot of locations, seniority will drive the layoff, so it’s last in first out.
(00:39:35):
So some of those cuts might eliminate some stronger teachers. There are a lot of communities that spent the last, I would say five years building up a teacher workforce that looked like their students that match their students culturally and racially, and they are going to be in the position of having to reduce those positions. And so I really think this is a place to dig in what were the goals of the district in recent years in their hiring practices and what is going to change what they can keep or how they would prevent those losses going forward? There will be more impacts to higher poverty schools. They often have more junior teachers at those locations. So those schools will be more likely to lose staff. And like I said, it reduces the teacher diversity. And then target layoffs could exit weaker teachers. So we’ll talk about that next week.
Really, if districts wanted to and have the flexibility to by their contract laws, if they could target their layoffs, they could exit their weaker teachers and then that might have a benefit for all of their students. Another option, which is not very often that districts will employ this idea, but they could look at reducing the benefits costs on their part and transferring some of those costs to the employee. And you might say, no, no, no, no, don’t do that. Teachers are already lower paid. We don’t want to put more costs more burden on them. But when we, very early on during the pandemic, we did a lot of research and focus groups with teachers on this, and they actually preferred to pay more individually on benefits than to see their peers laid off. So if the district’s really struggling with this, and in some districts you’re never going to make that up, your benefit bill is not high enough to cover what you have to cut, but in some places it might be, and teachers might be more willing to take that on in order to preserve the school communities that they have and what they believe is working for their students.
(00:41:33):
So we’re just really thinking this is an area to be watching because if it’s done poorly, these labor reductions can have a lot of impact on instruction and especially for the highest needs students and schools go forward one, but I said there’s also these bright spots. We could redeploy some of those experts that we pulled up into those specialist roles back to the school level. So if we’re looking to cut administrative positions, we could move them into the places where there might be attrition. And also we could do that targeted layoff to get rid of the weaker teachers, and we could end up with a smaller but stronger workforce. And so reducing the need for some specialists in remediation, if we’ve got that higher quality and more experienced teacher in there, we might have that opportunity to have fewer positions as a specialist, and we might end up actually reducing our special education placements and then reducing the cost of services there.
(00:42:29):
So right now is a really important time. We’ll go forward here. One slide Ash, and I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the cycle of how budgeting happens. So we’re right now in this April May timeframe. So districts have been working through their budgets since September. The kids got back to school. The finance team started to put together their budget for the following year. They had a budget work session, and then they kind of tinkered around the edge. They’re like, oh, we want to make sure that we have enough for teacher raises so it doesn’t look like it, so you need to go figure that out. So the finance team went back and worked on it. They came back to the second session and they basically said, guys, we’re not going to do it. We got to figure out what our trade-offs are going to be here.
(00:43:10):
And by the way, in the next few weeks, we have to be sure to notify staff if we’re going to be laying them off. Those things are happening right now in the state of Washington. They have, I think till May 15th to make those designations. So we’re right in this really hard time for district leaders, but also really critical time for reporting into thinking about what’s going on because they’re in the final decisions. The harder time to even report on this or to have an effect is once they’ve approved the budget. So a story that says they approved the budget last night, and lo and behold this is a shocker or A, B and C is going to happen next year. There’s really some great reporting and some work that could happen in these next two months before those final budgets are signed. But what we don’t have on here, which I think is another story to think about, is they approve the budget in June.
(00:44:04):
And do you know what happens at the end of June, July? They get their state test scores. So now after they’ve approved their budget, how are we going to spend our money in the next year? They get their test scores that tell ’em, your students didn’t get any better in math. And very few of them, very few of them go back in a board meeting and say, what are we going to do about it? Do we need to make adjustments to our budget? I think there’s a really important time when those test scores come out, to go back to the district leaders to go back to state leaders and say, Hey, doesn’t look like our math scores got any better? Doesn’t look like we have any room in the budget to make added expenses. What trade-offs are you considering in order to improve your students’ math outcomes in the next year?
(00:44:52):
What are you going to do when the school year starts or even before that to make sure that we can get these kids back on track? So we’ll go forward one slide here, Ash. So I think these final budget workshops and any school board meetings, this is your date night, this is your thing you got to go do, you got to go to these. They have a lot of real consequences for district financial health, the staffing that’s going to be happening in your communities and layoffs, school closures, and what kinds of services could be delivered for student. This is it. So if Ash, I can say anything to you. This is the ed finance issue. You’ve got a couple months of really good opportunity to kind of cover, ask these questions about what are they doing, and then to come back after the budget’s approved and ask some other critical questions.
(00:45:42):
Once those test scores are out, what are we going to be doing differently? How will it look and feel different for these kids? What are the opportunities? So that was a lot of information. I hope it inspires you. Maybe some chilling effect, but maybe not as much as last one. And you feel some good hope and some ideas for stories. So Rachel, we’ll pause and see if there are questions or how you’d like us to go forward. Next, we will take questions. You’ve got our email addresses. We have a newsletter that comes out about once a month, kind of hits on some of these issues, would be a good place to kind of get some new story ideas. And if you really, really love ed Finance, we do a program in it. We train district leaders, advocates, state leaders, and we’ve had a lot of journalists come through the program as well. So we’d love to have you, if you’re interested in this kind of stuff.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:46:35):
This conversation has been extraordinary for me in that the past 40 years have been trained, follow the money, whatever kind of story that you’re doing. But when it comes to this issue, particularly in this moment in time, are we looking at sort of a perfect storm of potential challenges in that? Again, the Esser funds ran out, covid Delta Blow Public Education across the board in June. As you say, schools are in the budget format right now, but Title one funds whatever left become available in July. So does this sort of heighten the need for journalists to try to unpack what’s going on in their communities and create stories about it?
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (00:47:35):
Definitely. Actually, we’ve been using the phrase Never waste a crisis. If we go back to those NAP scores and we look at that, we can’t ignore this anymore, we really cannot ignore that. What we’ve been doing has not been delivering outcomes for most students. And it doesn’t mean that we have to do more with less, but we have to be really good with the money that we have and we have to be really good about making sure that where we’re spending it, that every single one of those individuals involved needs to understand what their role is in student outcomes. So we talk a lot about trending around communications because you very often, and you’ve probably even written these stories like, oh, the XYZ school district approved a salary raise last night at 3%. And there’s a quote from the district leader, we’re so glad we’re able to thank our teachers and we appreciate them so much.
(00:48:36):
This raise is so meaningful, so glad that the board voted for it. And the union is like, teachers are the heartbeat of the school and they deserve this raise. And that is great, but it forgot to connect that raise to students and the outcome for students. Same story, district leader. I am so excited that our school board approved this 3% raise last night. Our teachers have worked really hard with our students. We’re following our students’ outcomes and we’re excited about the progress our teachers are helping. Making our students make this raise is really important to the hard work that the teachers are going to have to do next year to improve outcomes for our students. Same story, totally different connection to what’s happening and how that works. And even in interviews when asking teachers about how much is spent at schools, they don’t know and they don’t think that their salary should be counted.
(00:49:27):
We need to connect that money. We need to connect all of it. We saw communities where they spent a lot of money hiring counselors to improve the mental health of their students coming out of covid. They wanted them back at schools. They wanted to make sure they had the service for ’em. And you’d ask the counselors like, how’s it going? Oh, I only saw one or two kids. Well, what can you do to drive improvement in outcomes? Why would I have anything to do with test scores? I’m just trying to get them to school. It’s all connected. You have to help ’em feel that connection. So we’re saying it’s never wasted crisis. This trajectory of the outcomes bottoming out. It’s got to change.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:50:09):
Are there any questions? Speak up if there are. I Leah, you’re on mute. Okay.
Leah Kincaid | WGXA News (00:50:17):
Yeah. Hey, my name is Leah Kincaid. I’m a digital content producer with WGXA news in Macon, Georgia. This is really interesting to me because one of the biggest issues that’s been going on in, well, Macon’s in Bibb County. So in the Bibb County School District, a story that we’ve been following has been school consolidation. There’s so many schools and Macon Bibb, and I’m new to the area, but the reporters that have been there have told me that they’re low performing schools and they’re a bunch of them. So now the district is trying to MER schools and we’ve really been following the consolidation meetings that they’ve been having with parents and that. I did have a question though in regards to either curiosity about, so the districts and Quadrant D, in that graph that you showed us scatterplot, what have you heard about? So they have a lot higher budget and they’re having lower student outcomes. What were some examples that these school districts have told you guys of why this happening?
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (00:51:28):
Well, so the number one thing we would hear when we would talk to school leaders about this, they said, I have no idea that I had that much more money than my peers. They’ve no idea that they have that much more money. And when we’re talking to them about what do they think are their challenges, they’ll talk a little bit about their staff. I get a lot more staff, but their junior staff, and so they aren’t as practice in classroom management. And so then I have to bring a vice principal in to handle more of the classroom management issues. And so my school just keeps getting more and more expensive. What I’d really like are some really more senior experienced teachers. And so they might be asking back and forth on that. Some of them will talk about the uniqueness of their student body and all of the challenges that brings.
(00:52:23):
And oftentimes we’ll say to them, then you need to be working with your district. What is it that you need? But most often we say to them, probably the best impact you could have is go back to your school, show them this graph and say, okay guys, every year their budget is set. There’s no ATM that they’re going to go to get more money once that budget is set for the year. So we say, go back and say, okay guys, here it is. We get more money than X number of schools in our district and our outcomes aren’t where they need to be. We kind of knew that, but we actually need to roll up our sleeves, so let’s figure this out. And sometimes that’s where they’re like, you know what? I’m a third grade teacher because I like reading. I do not like math.
(00:53:01):
I am not going to be helpful in those math scores. And another teacher might say, well, I could take on more students just for math, but I don’t have the time to be doing the social studies. And they start to think differently about how to leverage and to use the staff they have. So those are some of the stories that we’ve seen. We’ve seen leaders use this information in school closures say, I know you love your local community school, it hasn’t been producing results for your kids for years. And we really think our job is to educate your kids. And so going to do that, which means we’ve got to go to another location where we’re getting those results for kids. And we’ve seen in Cleveland, they did this when they did some closures, this was years and years and years ago, they took the information. They said, you’ve got a year. I need to see some really real improvement. And then we can talk about preserving your school. But right now I want your kids to be in a school where they’re getting the outcomes and then we’re going to figure out what’s the staff combination that comes with them and all that. But those are the sorts of things we hear.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:54:12):
Any other questions?
Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (00:54:15):
I had one Gabby,
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:54:17):
Introduce yourself.
Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (00:54:18):
Hi, I am Gabriella Nunez with WXIA, Atlanta’s NBC affiliate. I’m a special projects producer here, and I actually just helped with a database and report for one of our general assignment reporters, like 10 years of information on our superintendents. Because in metro Atlanta we have a bad habit of hiring a superintendent for three years and then firing mid-contract, but we still have to pay them and then we have to pay the new superintendent and spend the money on the find. So that’s happened in several of our counties. So now I’m trying to look forward and thank you all for this information. I feel like Georgia follows a lot of these trends. I’m trying to find a way now to find teacher salaries and see now that you’re mentioning that layoffs could be happening to staff. I don’t know if there’s a database or a better way to go about other than me individually asking for public records on teacher salaries and how often teachers are let go, like mid-contract or hired for a brief period of time and they go on leave and et cetera. So any direction to find data now as we move down, like the staffing list beyond superintendents would be helpful.
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (00:55:22):
I can see that Ash is already looking to see and then it’s hard and we actually just spent a lot of time in Washington state, state and they’ve got some great data, but it’s still hard. We sent a note earlier this morning to the state we’re going to, so we have people on here and their FT is 2.0, 3.0. Can you explain that to me so we can see if we find something and we can get it to you, but it is a hard slog for sure, especially on data
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:55:54):
As we wind down. I wanted to quickly ask you to sort of expand a bit on this issue of teacher training so that teachers reflect or are able to relate to the communities that they’re teaching in. And although it’s good to have the context that most schools get their funding from state and local sources, this pot of federal funding that supported that. If that’s in danger, how does this sort of give us a four or five year outlook in terms of the impact that that will have if those teaching slots aren’t there?
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (00:56:41):
I think as a researcher, and I think as a journalist, my big question would be that the districts are in charge of spending the money that they have, their state funds, their local funds and their federal funds, and they can spend those dollars in a lot of different ways to whatever goals they have. And I don’t want districts to walk away from a strategy that’s working for their kids, their kids because that funding stream is gone or reduced. They have that big pot of money and they need to learn about trade-offs. And that’s a lot of what we do in our training is you have a goal for your students and you’ve got a ton of different strategies that you can employ to get there. What are the ones that you believe are highest leverage for your mix of kids, the kids you are actually having in your schools this next year?
(00:57:38):
And how do you make those trade-offs? And it’s so hard because districts over time, they’re way less nimble than even our own personal budgets. If our budget gets turned back at home, we kind of take a look around. I’m like, yeah, maybe I don’t need to go out tonight or maybe I’ll buy the discount laundry soap. I really like the smell of tide, but I’ll buy this other one. Districts have not become accustomed to that. They haven’t had to do that exercise in a long time. And so they don’t know how to weigh those trade-offs and primarily because those trade-offs involve people. And so they’re like, ah, we just hired her and she’s so sweet and she’s amazing. That librarian makes sure that every kid has a book in their hand. I’ve been waiting years to hire the perfect librarian to do that. And they don’t want to make that trade off.
(00:58:31):
They don’t want to lose that resource. And so what they need to do is figure out how to weigh the trade-offs in terms of student outcomes. Then go back and figure out the who and how do they make that work. And maybe that’s where that librarian can be traded off for two reading coaches and the great reading coach goes back down into third grade. I don’t know. But what I worry about is any message that makes people feel like they can’t do something, they have a lot of control within that money. They just aren’t practiced at those opportunities. And so what can we do to poke them a little and to think about it differently? And I think that that is a big role that we as researchers play and more so journalists telling the story of their communities and asking those questions that I think people don’t know to ask, they don’t know to say You had two choices with that money you chose. Tell me about it. Not that it was the wrong choice, but tell me about it. How did you come to that decision?
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:59:35):
I’m going to ask both of you to now sort of send these journalists back to their beats and to their newsroom with a sense of how education is a beat, but this issue sort of transcends any single lane. And so send Ash, start by sort of helping the journalists understand how communicating these things to the public is sort of vital when it comes to the community development piece. Understanding what would you say?
Ash Dhammani/Georgetown University (01:00:14):
I mean, as Laura pointed out, the results of today, their outcomes today are a great predictor of what’s to come in the future. There’s a very famous economist out of Stanford, I believe Eric Ek, who did a really good research and predicted that these two grades and particularly eighth grade math outcomes really result in a loss of future earnings. And there’s a number attached to it that I can’t think of right now, but I want to point you to that. But also bringing in the community piece. It’s the taxpayers of today that are funding the education of the future children coming after them. So it’s really a community effort. It takes the village and all of our investments, people on this conversation are all part of this endeavor, and their dollars are also going towards producing these future leaders. So really tying in the idea of today’s children children’s outcomes are a predictor of how this country is going to shape up into the future, how they perform today, what they’re learning in classrooms.
(01:01:09):
Of course, we always have conversation of tests are and everything, yes, but also adding context to these test scores. They’re the best we have right now. So how do we use that as a metric to really drive this conversation of building the future leaders, but also are we doing right by them? So bringing in this community to really understand, yes, we’ve been doing business as usual, yes, we’re used to seeing and doing the things the same way, but can we pivot and be nimble enough to sort of innovate? Can we hold education at the same level as we hold other industries accountable? Can we be nimble and be able to pivot and do right by the students? And also bring in the idea of how can we all as a community come together because these people will go back and contribute to the wider community at large.
(01:01:52):
Education will lead to the future leaders. So are we doing right by them? Are we doing right by them today? But can we make sure that we keep pushing them forward in the right direction and build stronger leaders and more educated and more informed leaders starting at the ground level and starting very early, starting in fourth year, starting in third year, starting in kindergarten? It doesn’t have to happen. I’m not taking away from the fact that eighth graders don’t need help right now, but the sooner we start, the better we’re setting them up for success in the future. So I think that’s my cry for help in that regard.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:02:22):
Laura, you have the last word.
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (01:02:24):
I’m going to say ditto. It’s individual lifetime earnings and health. The education is a predictor of, but it’s your economy in your larger communities and your workforce that you can draw on and what will be possible. So I think we all value education. We just haven’t really learned how to put this question, this pressure around what are we getting for our dollars and making it feel like it’s important and not about widgets. It’s really an important time that never waste a crisis moment.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:03:02):
I’m going to actually steal that from you. So I’ll put you on notice right now. It’s an important lesson for all of our NPF trainings in terms of the situation we’re in right now and how reporters need to view these topics. So Laura Anderson and Ash Dani of the Georgetown University Omics Lab, thank you so much for joining us for this very important conversation.
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (01:03:31):
You are welcome. Thank you for having us. Thank you.
Ash Dhammani/Georgetown University (01:03:33):
Thanks for having us.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:03:34):
And we’ll be in touch in terms of questions or other projects that the journalist might be working on, but I’m so grateful to both of you.
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (01:03:44):
Thank you so much, you guys. Take care. Enjoy the rest of the day.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:03:47):
Bye-bye.
Laura Anderson/Georgetown University (01:03:47):
Good luck.
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