Susan Pendergrass speaks with Jason Bedrick, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, and James V. Shuls, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute and head of the Education Liberty Branch of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University, about their new book, The Phoenix Principles: Toward a Rebirth of American Education. They discuss the seven principles behind the Phoenix Declaration, why truth and academic excellence belong at the center of schooling rather than equity of outcomes, and how school board members can put these principles into practice.
Episode Transcript
Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Thank you so much for joining the podcast. Jason Bedrick of the Heritage Foundation, James Shuls of Florida State University. So you guys have a book that has just come out, The Phoenix Principles, and it uses the word Phoenix in a couple of different ways. But first, Jason, if you could just tell us a little bit about the impetus for the book and this meeting that you guys took part in in Phoenix.
Jason Bedrick (00:24)
Yeah, so a few years ago, we came up with the idea of having something called the Conservative Vision of Education Conference, which we hosted in Phoenix because we felt that conservatives were doing a much better job of articulating what we were against than what we were for. And so that meant we were always on defense, we were always being reactive, right? We’re pushing back against, you know, CRT and DEI and gender ideology and SEL and, you know, whatever new acronym the left is coming up with. But we weren’t articulating why we were against these things. So I spoke to a lot of people who, let’s say, got elected to school board who said that they felt like the dog that caught the car and they didn’t know what to do with it. And so, like, I’m against Common Core. Okay, but what are you replacing it with? Like, what are we actually doing that’s affirmative? And so out of this conference, we had something called the Phoenix Declaration, named not only for the city, but also for the mythical bird that rises from the ashes of its former self. And we called it, you know, subtitle, an American vision for education. So this isn’t just for conservatives. I really do believe this is something that is based in the founding principles of the country, and that those on the right and the left who are committed to the founding principles should believe in it.
And so it’s organized around seven principles: parental choice and responsibility, transparency and accountability, truth and goodness, cultural transmission, character formation, academic excellence, and citizenship. And we believe these are the principles that should orient policymakers and practitioners when it comes to American education.
Susan Pendergrass (01:57)
Okay, great. I do want to go through each of those one at a time. But James, you certainly spend a lot of time these days working on civic education and what kids are or are not learning. And you know, we’ve been talking recently, we actually just talked a little bit about this offline recently, about how, regardless of what the standards are regarding civics, history, government within our education system, according to NAEP scores, eighth graders aren’t really learning whatever it is that they’re being taught. So what do we do about this missing component where on the one side I feel like folks on the left say we are running the school systems as these great generators of democracy and citizens and it’s the great equalizer where everyone learns how to be a good US citizen. But the test scores don’t really show that. So what do we do, what should we do differently there in order to at least just improve what kids are being taught about this country and also how well they’re learning it. Big question, sorry.
James V. Shuls (03:01)
Yeah, well, I think it starts with maybe actually teaching some things. I don’t know. Like that might be helpful. You know, I was saying earlier to you offline that I remember when my kid was entering first grade, the social studies curriculum we were told about sounded like a self-help curriculum. It wasn’t anything related to history and civics, what you and I would normally think kids should be learning about our country. And that’s a significant problem. I mean, kids today are not learning the things that I think that they should be learning. So Jason mentioned the Phoenix Declaration, the set of seven principles that we put together. He didn’t mention that there was a follow-up meeting the next year where they released the Phoenix Declaration. And immediately I said, “We’ve got to do a book,” because the Phoenix Declaration is a short statement of principles. Each one has about a paragraph, something like that. And so now we have a book. And Yuval Levin wrote the chapter on civic education, and the title of his chapter is “The Necessity of Civic Education.” And part of the problem is that we aren’t teaching the founding principles. We’re not teaching the history of our nation. In many places, civics instruction is what’s called action civics, and it’s the idea of let’s teach kids how to use the levers of government to achieve the ends that they want.
And so the very negative view of that is to say they’re teaching kids to be protesters or social agitators or something along those lines. But they might be teaching them about how to organize or how to write letters or how to identify problems and get government to solve those problems. But that doesn’t teach them to ask the question of should government solve these problems? Is this a problem that government needs to be solving? What is the role of government, right?
And those are questions that our founders wrestled with. Right. So when Jason and I talk about civic education, we mean studying the founding principles of our country so that you can understand why we have the government structured the way we have. And you get that when you read both the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers and you see the conversations that people were having. If we want students to be able to engage in our society, in our civic process, they have to understand where we come from. And that’s part of the impetus for this book, is really calling for a renewed emphasis, for one, on civic education.
Susan Pendergrass (05:33)
Yeah, so Jason, let’s go back to the first principle, which is parental choice and responsibility. I appreciate we talked a lot about parental choice at the Show-Me Institute. I appreciate the addition of the word responsibility. But also this book seems to be organized around the idea that parents are the first and primary teachers of their kids. And I feel like that is a principle that’s kind of gotten lost in the shuffle. What do you think?
Jason Bedrick (05:55)
Yeah, so actually that section starts with parents are the primary educators of their
Susan Pendergrass (05:59)
Right.
Jason Bedrick (05:59)
children, right? We have to start with that. And I think too often it’s the case that teachers are essentially taught in the ed schools these days, you know, your job is to be a good social justice warrior and to, you know, break these children, liberate these children from the prejudices of their parents.
And you are acting essentially in place of them, instead of alongside parents and really as an extension of the parents, right? That should be the way schools are oriented, not in an antagonistic fashion, but actually supposed to be working with the parents. And if we recognize that parents are the primary educators of their children, well, first of all, there should be school choice, right? They should have the freedom to choose which learning environment works best for their kids, a learning environment that aligns with their values. The funding should follow it. But we also borrow language from the landmark Supreme Court decision, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which talked about the high duty of parents to educate their children, right? That this freedom also does come with responsibility. And so we are placing both on the parents. And that means what follows from that is accountability for the schools, which is the second section, transparency and accountability. Accountability really should be bottom-up, not top-down. It’s not what some elected politician or unelected bureaucrat says. That’s what we’ve been doing in a monopoly system. And when we’ve been so accustomed to that system for so long, we have come to confuse real accountability with top-down regulations. But actually, real accountability is when the people who bear the consequences of an institution’s performance are in charge. And that means parents. So if you want to put parents in charge, that means they have to have the ability to choose, but also they need to have the information to choose. So schools have to be transparent about what exactly it is they’re teaching, how they’re performing, so that parents can make an educated decision.
Susan Pendergrass (07:56)
Yeah, in the last few years quite a few states, including Missouri, have floated this idea of a parents’ Bill of Rights. And in Missouri it hasn’t passed, but as we have discussed at the Show-Me Institute, my reaction was just, to be clear, these are all rights we have as parents. We can delineate them, we can write them down, but the right to see the curriculum your child’s being taught, which in Missouri got pushback, this idea that schools would have to submit their curriculum to parents or put it in the backpack or reading lists, there was pushback, you know, to be clear.
Jason Bedrick (08:23)
Mm-hmm. They’ll say it’s too hard. Yeah. I’ve seen people say, it’s proprietary. It’s like, no, you are a government institution. You cannot be hiding from parents or the public what it is that you are teaching children.
James V. Shuls (08:38)
But Susan, I like that you are basically making a Bill of Rights argument, right? You have them. If we spell them out in a Bill of Rights, we might miss some.
Susan Pendergrass (08:50)
You already have them.
James V. Shuls (08:51)
So that’s funny that you make that argument. But I want to touch on something Jason said, because a friend of mine, when we released the Phoenix Declaration, and he might very well be listening. He listens to the Show-Me Institute podcast.
Susan Pendergrass (09:05)
Hope he is.
James V. Shuls (09:06)
The first line that Jason said was that the parents are the primary educators. And some people hear that and say, not really. Lots of parents don’t actually teach their kids. They send them off to school for eight hours a day or whatever. That’s not what we mean. We don’t mean they’re literally teaching their kids everything. What we mean is that they have the responsibility and it’s their duty, their obligation, to do that. And this stands in stark contrast. When you asked the question, you said this is sort of gone out of fashion. Yeah, it’s gone out of fashion since about the 1800s. The idea behind public schooling and the common school approach was that the state had a primary responsibility of public education. And the state had the ability to direct what your kids learn, and they would build this system of public education that would compel you to send your kids there and they would govern it. And of course, we had local school boards where you got some feedback, but over time that system of public education grew into larger and larger bureaucracies where individuals, as we’re just saying, have less influence over what they’re teaching. And so what we’re pushing or suggesting in the Phoenix Declaration and in our book, The Phoenix Principles, is a return to almost pre-1800s of the understanding that the parents have the right to raise their children.
While we might think of it as intuitive, it has not been intuitive in our public education system. And so we think it’s important for people to understand this idea, and that’s what we’re trying to do in the book is give them the philosophy, give them the understanding, the argument, so that they can really defend that position.
Susan Pendergrass (10:49)
What I think is probably one of the more controversial parts of this book is that you make the declaration that there is truth and goodness and kids should learn it. And I think the public school system, if I could represent them to a certain extent, would say, No, no, no, no, we want them to just have a safe place to explore ideas and there is no absolute truth or absolute evil, and you’re suggesting that that’s not right, right, James?
James V. Shuls (11:17)
Do we make that claim? Yeah. You’re saying it’s true that we make that claim? I mean, that’s
Susan Pendergrass (11:19)
I believe so.
Jason Bedrick (11:20)
Yes, so yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (11:22)
Yes.
James V. Shuls (11:24)
how truth works, right? There are certain things that are true and aren’t true. Now, some things we know, we know, we can prove mathematical truths. There are certain things we know, and there are certain things we debate about whether or not they’re true. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not a truth, right? Just because people debate what that truth is. But part of what we’re trying to get across to people is that education is the seeking of truth. Like that is part of what the process of education is. If there is no truth, then why would we even try to educate children? Like there’s nothing to educate them towards. Do what you want, you know, believe what you want. And so we think it’s an important foundational principle for people to understand that there is a thing that is truth.
We can debate that, but there is something that we call truth. Jason, you want to add to that?
Jason Bedrick (12:22)
Yeah, yeah, look,
Susan Pendergrass (12:23)
Yeah, please.
Jason Bedrick (12:24)
this is the Rachel Cobb has a fan from Belmont Abbey has a fantastic chapter on this, where she argues that look, at its core, education really is about the pursuit of the transcendentals. And you actually have to take as axiomatic that there is something called truth or the entire enterprise falls apart, right? We couldn’t even agree on what color my shirt is. We couldn’t agree on what the rules of traffic are. You know, you say that was a red light, I say it wasn’t. It’s all relative. Right? No, there are certain things that are true. And James mentioned math. If you don’t believe that there is ultimate truth, then you can’t teach math at all. You can’t teach anything really. Now, again, that doesn’t mean that every single thing people are going to agree on, but at its core, we have to agree that there is something called truth, or it’s not even worth having a conversation. There is no intellectual exercise to be had. It is merely the pursuit of power, and isn’t the entire Western way of thinking based on an idea that there is truth?
Susan Pendergrass (13:27)
Well, in that particular vein, in the last, I don’t know, has it been a decade now since there were some alternative theories mentioned about the founding of the United States, right? So the 1619 Project came out and said this is really the reason for the Revolutionary War and really what turned the United States into a superpower was when the first shipload of slaves was delivered in 1619. And there was a lot of pushback on that from folks on the right saying that’s absolutely wrong, first of all, and then Hillsdale or somebody created an alternative curriculum, and I don’t know that we’ve exactly solved this, from the point of view that public schools feel very threatened if you tell them what they can’t teach. You know, we are arguing in Missouri about whether they should be able to use a failed approach to teaching reading called three-cueing, and they are pushing back saying, you can’t tell us we can’t use three-cueing. Because when we’re in the classroom, we sort of are in charge of this whole thing and we can teach what we want. And I guess what you’re suggesting, Jason, is that we cannot allow that to be the case.
Jason Bedrick (14:32)
No, and I think that our system of education is intended to do a lot of different things, but one of them is to produce good citizens. It’s meant to do a lot more than that. But especially if you look at the time of, you know, the founding era when they were talking about education, they were concerned that, you know, if we’re going to have a representative government, if we are going to have democracy, we need to have an educated citizenry. That means that we need to have citizens who understand how the government functions, why it functions the way that it does, what the principles that underlie it are. They need to be familiar with their founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They have to understand what it means that all men are created equal, where that idea came from. Right? There is a lot that they need to understand. And so that’s why, again, we called the Phoenix Declaration an American vision for education, because all Americans who are committed to that, whether right or left, we want them to be involved in this project. We don’t think there’s any room in the public school system for the 1619 Project that you mentioned, which fundamentally says America wasn’t created in 1776, it was created in 1619 when the first slave ship arrived. And the Constitution, the Declaration, these are just white supremacist documents that the whole system is inherently racist from the top down. We need to scrap it and start over.
Those in the far right who say, Yeah, you know, the founding fathers took a wrong turn with John Locke, and all his ideas that, you know, undergird the Declaration. We need to scrap those and we need to go to a European-style conservatism that is more throne and altar or blood and soil, right? We reject those too, those also don’t belong in the public school system. So we do need, we need to cultivate attachment. We want to develop a civically educated and patriotic citizenry. And we believe that students who are exposed to the American story will naturally develop an affinity for it, recognize the greatness of America, even when we are clear about its flaws. I mean, one of the critiques that we’ve heard is you’re just trying to whitewash American history because you’re talking about patriotism. No. In the Declaration itself it says students should learn the whole truth about America, its merits and failings, without obscuring that America is a great source of good in the world.
So we want children to learn about the horrors of slavery and of segregation and of Jim Crow, and we want them reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. We want them reading Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Both of those are liberal critics within the tradition who say, I believe in the Declaration of Independence. And if you really believe in the principles of the Declaration, then you’re going to oppose slavery. You’re going to oppose segregation. So those voices are within the tradition. They should be taught in schools, but schools have no business. You know, college is a different thing. College is where we really should be introducing the critique, but first you have to understand the system. You have to have an affinity for the system. And so in K-12 we don’t really have any space for the 1619 Project or the post-liberals.
Susan Pendergrass (17:55)
So James called this the Phoenix project, the idea of Phoenix rising from the ashes, which I guess implies that our public school system is in the ashes, maybe. But we get to this one point on academic excellence, and this is where I spend a lot of my time, both on parental choice and academic excellence, because I think some of these principles that you’re talking about, Jason, it’s like, yeah, but our kids can’t read. And our kids can’t do math. And so you get this UCSD story about their incoming freshman class needing elementary school math. And in Missouri, forty percent or so of our fourth graders are below the basic level in reading. It’s almost functionally illiterate. So, James, how do we get all of this sort of elevated stuff happening in our school system when it is no longer doing the basic functions.
James V. Shuls (18:43)
Yeah, so Robert Pondiscio wrote our chapter on academic excellence. And I love what he does in there because he basically says, I mean, the chapter is called “Excellence as Equity: Why Rigor, Knowledge, and Character, Not Fashion and Ideology, Define a Just Education.” Part of what he does is he explains why excellence, academic excellence, is important. I think part of what we’ve seen over the past, you know, decade, maybe two, is a shift away from excellence towards other aims like equity. And I know a lot of people on the right, we have a knee-jerk reaction against equity. We hear it, it’s like a boogeyman or something, we’re scared of it.
But the truth is, equity is not bad unless you define it badly, unless you define it poorly. Equity, the idea that you want to care for poorer individuals or people with disadvantages, there’s nothing wrong with that. Most of our faith traditions actually encourage us to have that sort of compassion. And even in Missouri, I studied school finance there for a long time. We have equity principles within our system. So Normandy gets more money from the state than Ladue and Clayton do because it’s a poorer place and we try to give them more funds to raise it up. That’s an equity principle. And there’s nothing wrong with an equity principle in some cases.
But if you apply it wrongly, you start crushing excellence. So if you want to solve financial equity in Missouri, and you put things in place that take money away from Clayton, Ladue, the wealthy school districts in the state, so that you keep them from raising money, so that you can close the gap between the bottom and the top. Well, you’ve just done a terrible disservice to this state.
Susan Pendergrass (20:34)
Right.
James V. Shuls (20:35)
You’ve closed gaps in spending, but you’ve done it at the cost of taking finances away from higher spending districts. That’s essentially what we’ve done in many cases in terms of education when we’re thinking about academics. So we haven’t seen this as much in Missouri, but we’ve certainly seen in other places closing of gifted programs, taking away opportunities for high performing students in the name of equity to try to raise up the lower performing students. But we’ve also seen, in schools throughout the state, ridiculous programs that try to target low performers with the idea that you’re going to bring them up. So for example, I taught first grade in Missouri, and they would pull students out of my classroom to give them extra reading instruction, which sounds great. We should certainly do that. But we sometimes might do that and take them away from other important things, maybe they’re missing a history lesson or maybe they’re missing some arts enrichment or whatever. And so we’re giving them more reading instruction under the guise of equity while we’re handicapping them in another area. So the point that I’m getting at here is that when you make equity the aim and simply closing gaps is the goal, it sometimes leads you to do really stupid things. And so that’s why we’re trying to put the emphasis back on excellence, excellence for all students. At the top, at the bottom, we should be aiming for excellence. We should be aiming for challenging students. And what Robert lays out in the chapter, this means, for one, a content-rich curriculum, that we should be teaching students stuff. All right. You know, when I was a teacher, I would hear people say all the time, we gotta teach kids to think critically. And I would say something like, you know how scientists think critically? It’s because they know stuff about science. I can’t think critically about nuclear fission because I don’t know anything about nuclear fission, right? You can only
Susan Pendergrass (22:40)
No.
James V. Shuls (22:41)
think critically when you know stuff. So you gotta teach kids content, especially in the early grades. We have to have curriculum. This goes back to your three-cueing and your reading practice. We have to go
Susan Pendergrass (22:53)
Right.
James V. Shuls (22:54)
with tried and true practices that actually generate learning gains.
Rather than following fads. And that’s one thing again you hear in education all the time: this too shall pass. These fads, teaching practices, come and go all the time, but there are practices we know work and we need to pursue those things. So that’s when we say, you know, excellence has to be our goal, trust the tried and true, content-rich curriculum, read the chapter and find out more.
Susan Pendergrass (23:24)
No, it’s a really good chapter. Robert does a great job. And I just, you know, want to circle back a little bit, Jason, because we started the conversation about this and that, and I get stuck on this when I’m hearing about the rise in the popularity of socialism, the decline in people’s feelings about capitalism. You know, Pew’s been doing surveys, Gallup’s doing surveys, it’s definitely out there, and certainly there are candidates winning primaries that are winning it on socialist principles. And I think that when some of the same surveys that find those attitudes also find that forty percent of Americans don’t know how many branches the federal government has or don’t know what we just celebrated the 250th birthday of, then it makes me kind of want to just toss the survey, like, okay, they feel that way about socialism and capitalism, they probably don’t know a lot about it because they don’t know the basics. And so I know that when you have that vacuum of knowledge, it does bring the opportunity for somebody else to fill it with something incorrect, right? So you’re like, this must be great. I don’t know what it is, but it sounds really good. You know, and I wonder if you think that is happening, or why are so many people who are just coming out of the school system, people under the age of thirty, having this change of heart about the economic system of this country.
Jason Bedrick (24:46)
Well look, certainly there’s, what we might term the purple-haired teacher problem, which is the teachers that are coming out of ed schools that, you know, they’re not reading Doug Lemov’s, you know, work on, you know, how to run a classroom. They’re not actually content experts in their particular fields. You know, they’re reading, you know, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and they’re essentially having their heads filled with left wing indoctrination and then they’re bringing that into the K-12 classroom. But actually, I mean, for the most part, the problem is that we aren’t even teaching any of this stuff at all, right? So the kids just aren’t… not even that they’re being indoctrinated to be left-wing, they’re not learning anything substantial about the founding. You know, maybe they’re learning about the Revolutionary War and, you know, the Declaration is sort of in the background, you mention, okay, they declared independence, they might read it once, but then they move on. What the Phoenix Declaration calls for is that students should develop a deep understanding of and respect for a nation’s founding documents and the ideas they contain about ordered liberty, justice, rule of law, limited government, natural rights, and equal dignity of all human beings. And so if students are actually studying that, and if they’re studying history, they’re studying American history, if they’re learning particularly about the 20th century and the various experiments with communism around the world, then I think that is going to inoculate them against becoming a radical, either a right-wing or a left-wing radical for that matter.
And I should mention this is another critique that we often hear: you’re just trying to indoctrinate the students, right? And that’s not actually what we’re trying to do. We do recognize and criticize the problem of left-wing indoctrination, particularly in district schools, but that doesn’t mean we want to replace it with right-wing indoctrination. And so what do we mean by indoctrination? Indoctrination is the idea that students should be presented with only one point of view that they should accept unquestioningly and uncritically. And that’s not what we want. In our section on cultural transmission, we say students should study the best that has been thought and said, engaging in the great conversation among competing viewpoints that comprise our intellectual heritage, so that they may freely make the best views their own.
and Plato. Let’s have that conversation. Let’s hear about what great minds on different sides of an issue had to say. That is real education, not indoctrination.
Susan Pendergrass (27:30)
Alright, so James, you’ve got your Phoenix principles written down. You’ve had a lot of smart people write full chapters about them. Where do you go from here? How do you turn this into action?
James V. Shuls (27:43)
That’s one of the criticisms, I think, that we had from the get-go. When we put out the Phoenix Declaration, people said, that’s a nice list
Susan Pendergrass (27:50)
Great.
James V. Shuls (27:51)
of seven principles. What is it gonna do? Well, then what happened is the Florida Department of Education adopted the Phoenix Declaration as a
Susan Pendergrass (27:59)
wow.
James V. Shuls (27:59)
resolution, which again people said, Well, big deal, what’s it gonna do? That doesn’t mean anything. Nothing comes from it, there’s no teeth in it. But these were a set of ideas, and that’s the point Jason and I have been trying to drive home with people, is that ideas matter.
And so these ideas are in place, and now what’s happening is they’re influencing policy in Florida. So Florida has revised the teacher preparation standards in Florida. And now if a college has a program and they want their teachers to be certified, there’s a set of three courses they have to include. One of them is on Western civilization, right? And the Phoenix principles or the Phoenix Declaration, the language you can see in some of the documents that the Florida Department of Education has put out.
So it’s having a real impact in Florida, and it can happen in Missouri and other places too, if the Board of Education adopts it. So one of the things we did in the book is at the end of the book, we put a series of questions that school board members could ask. And so the idea is that you can go through that list and ask if you’re on the school board, or even if you’re a concerned parent, go to the school board meetings. And ask these questions, and Jason probably has them pulled up in front of him, but the time you spend asking those questions helps drive the agenda rather than spending time on something else. Jason, you want to list some off?
Susan Pendergrass (29:22)
Throw some out.
Jason Bedrick (29:24)
Yeah, so I don’t actually have it open literally in front of me, but just, if you’re talking about cultural transmission, okay, so what is it in terms of content that we are trying to transmit? What kind of teacher preparation do we have to make sure the teachers know what they’re supposed to be transmitting? You know, how are we measuring performance? Like, do we know that the kids are actually learning the things that we want them to learn? Same thing when it comes to say character formation, right? So, you know, what virtues are we trying to cultivate, and are the teachers prepared to cultivate them? How are we measuring it? And so for each of the seven principles, we have a whole series of questions that in particular it’s aimed for school board members to use to ask principals and superintendents that are coming before their board. So it’s like, look, here are the things that we care about. We have adopted the Phoenix principles now in our school district. We’re gonna hold you to it. Here’s a series of questions that we want you to have answered by our next meeting. And like James said, every minute that the principal or superintendent is spending on implementing this agenda is a minute that they’re not implementing DEI or, you know, SEL or any other, whatever the next acronym the left comes up with. They’re focused on doing these things. So it’s not meant merely to be a symbol. It is meant to be a symbol that then orients practice in the school systems.
Susan Pendergrass (30:54)
Okay, so The Phoenix Principles: Toward a Rebirth of American Education, edited by Jason Bedrick and James Shuls. It’s available everywhere you get books, I’m sure. So I really appreciate you guys coming on to talk about it. I’m sure a lot of people will be interested in reading it and finding out more. And, you know, I’m hopeful that we’re at some sort of an inflection point. Certainly COVID spurred it on, where parents and school board members and teachers and school leaders are ready to talk about these things and think hard and long about what we’ve been doing because the results haven’t been great. So I think it’s time for a book like this. So thank you so much for coming on.
Jason Bedrick (31:29)
Thanks for having us.
James V. Shuls (31:29)
Thanks for having us, Susan.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
