Mm-hmm.

Or do we fully fund our schools? Do we give 600 million of my dollars, your dollars, our list- the listeners' dollars to Jim and Dee Haslam to build a football stadium outside of Cleveland? Or do we put that money back into our schools, back into our local infrastructure, back toward, you know, trying to find ways to create great-paying jobs here in- in the state? So it's a matter of how we prioritize that budget.

That means fully funding our local schools so we don't have to keep coming back to property taxes every May and November for our student success, for our teacher success, and for our community success.

And that, in turn, will create job growth.

That, in turn, will create, you know, 'cause people will wanna be in our communities, create job growth, you know, have these incentives to- to build out our communities, uh, because we have such strong school systems.

It means hiring more teachers.

It means being able to, you know, go back to open enrollment or have, not have to have pay-to-play systems that hinder the learning and experiential experience of a high school, uh, uh, for- for many of our students out there, especially here locally.

Mm-hmm

[laughs]

And, um, you know, when, when she was first diagnosed, unfortunately the first thought in our head was not whether she was gonna be okay.

It legitimately was, how the hell are we gonna afford this? [laughs] Um, it was kind of like Joe Exotic, like, [laughs] "I'll never financially recover from this." Because it was, um, you know, just all these things you go through, like, you know, up to that point I had had my grandparents that had cancer, um, but I know they had great pensions, they had great healthcare coverage, and I never really worried or thought too much about it.

But here we are in this situation, both 24, not making much money, and trying to study for this, this bar exam to do all this, this stuff to, to move our life forward.

It's a cancer diagnosis and I was thinking like, we're gonna start, like, a GoFundMe page.

We're gonna have to do all this stuff.

Like, I don't really know, like, we're gonna have to put off maybe buying a house.

But from your perspective, what does a stable, equitable state support for public schools actually look like, and where is that money supposed to come from?