Patrick Tuohey (00:01.119)
Thank

Susan Pendergrass (00:02.382)
Great. Well, thank you for coming back on the podcast, Patrick Tuohey. kind of don't have lot of options because you work at Show Me Institute. Nonetheless, love having you as a guest, especially when you have work of your own that's not necessarily for the Show Me Institute around cities, because that is a big topic for us, like what to do about the cities in Missouri. And I know that you're an expert on

cities and the health of cities and the economic health of cities. So I'm really glad that you're here to talk to us about this new paper you've written about Virginia and what they might do for their cities. So can you just give us a synopsis of what your new study suggests?

Patrick Tuohey (00:48.831)
Certainly. school reform has taken the nation by storm over the last few years. Certainly the pandemic activated a lot of parents to understand that maybe what was going on in the classroom wasn't up to snuff. They weren't happy with it. Since then, and really always, but certainly since then, there's been kind of a cultural war over what's being taught in classrooms. And then on top of that, there's all the work by you and your colleagues who

have simply been pointing out that we are not getting a return on our investment. Regardless of all these cultural issues from a utilitarian point of view, is this worth what we're spending? And then on top of that argument, it becomes political, you have unions, you have all these things. But oftentimes in my experience, and Susan, I'd be interested to know if you have the same experience, when people talk about

education reform, they simply talk about what the kids are learning. How is this affecting education? Now that is very important and obviously a necessary part of it. But the folks at the Yorktown Foundation for Public Policy were looking to make an argument about education reform that considered the economic development

benefits? What are the economic benefits of school reform that happen outside the classroom, that happen even outside the home that has children? And so while I am not the expert on education policy, I know a little bit about economic development. And so I set about in this paper to find arguments and research conducted in the United States or anywhere.

that made the argument that there are economic development benefits to education reform. And one last point, states, including Missouri, including Virginia, even the federal government, we spend billions of dollars every year on economic development subsidies. We hire people whose job it is to give away taxpayer money. They give away taxpayer money. All of the research I'm familiar with,

Patrick Tuohey (03:06.77)
tells us that that doesn't work. So what I tried to do in this paper is to say, hey guys, if you're looking to really drive economic development in your state, stop giving companies money and start looking at a huge contributor, certainly to home value, which is schools.

Susan Pendergrass (03:26.402)
Yeah, and lots of times the way folks talk about that is like, we'll make a really great school system or we'll be known for having, you know, we'll be the Shawnee mission, we'll be the, we'll have the best schools and so that'll increase the value of our homes and then people will want to live here and then they'll spend their money here. But what I, you know, appreciate about your latest analysis is you're saying, what if we, and you say this all the time about like picking winners and losers and what if instead of trying to make the coolest entertainment district that everyone wants to come to,

Why don't we just give people kind of freedom of choice and we'll let business develop organically where they believe they're going to be able to make a profit and we'll let those kinds of things happen rather than the government saying, we're going to build the best shopping center that everyone's going to want to come to. And the same thing happens with schools where they're like, we'll just invest in our schools and we'll put in, you know, climbing gyms and pools and we'll put like really great football fields and we'll invest in these schools and then people will want to live here.

But what you are saying, what I appreciate is like maybe what we should do is let create a system of education where parents get a pick from a whole portfolio of different kinds of schools and maybe more people will be happier.

Patrick Tuohey (04:32.915)
Yeah.

What's amazing about the discussion you and I are having right now is that it's 2025 and it seems that we are discovering, rediscovering the power of the free market. All the cities in the United States, all the wonderful cities, New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, St. Louis came into existence in an era where government policy and regulation was minimal and people congregated where they wanted to be.

that drove up property values. So they had to build up in order to take advantage to squeeze the most use out of that parcel of land. And now we have inserted so much safetyism into city regulations and building codes that we can no longer build the cities that we tell ourselves we love.

And it's the same, I imagine, with education, which is, you know, the geniuses that we look back on in American society were educated often in what we would consider today to be, you know, underserved schools. But the parents made a decision to support education. It was valued in the home. They sent their kids where they thought they could get the best education. And it was a free system. And in some ways, it was chaotic.

but it worked. And so now we are in a system, thankfully, decreasingly so in the United States, where we have so managed and proscribed education and we tell everybody where they have to go based on the accident of where their house locates. And again, we do it for good intentions, but all those little things over time have acted like sludge in your pipes.

Patrick Tuohey (06:31.662)
and we're not getting what we want out of the system. And we're having arguments that parents should never have about content. If you don't like your kid reading that book, whatever it is, then you should be able to send them to a school that doesn't teach that book. Again, whatever it is. So what I wanted to do is look at around the country, where is the evidence that simply removing those barriers? We looked at Vermont, we looked at what Minneapolis did. And again, the suggestion is, and this isn't a,

hard and fast conclusion, but the suggestion from the various research out there is good schools drive economic, certainly drive home values. We know that in the status quo. But of course what happens, which you alluded to, is we lowercase S segregate all that economic benefit within the boundaries of school districts that do really well. And so you might say, well,

People can just move into that district if they want to benefit from that school. But of course they can't because as anyone who's ever bought a house or worked in real estate knows a good school drives up the housing cost. And so again lowercase s not only have we created these areas of great home value because of good schools we've created areas of really poor home values because of low performing schools and the tragedy.

is that the families in those districts cannot afford to move. And so they are stuck in a kind of downward spiral of property value. And all this paper simply observes is what happens if we remove those restrictions and we allow parents in any neighborhood to send their kid to a school that meets their needs anywhere? It doesn't sound revolutionary to say that, yet.

As you know better than I do, this has been a fight in America and a really vicious fight for decades.

Susan Pendergrass (08:33.454)
It absolutely has. now have 13, as of last week, 13 states where parents can choose any public or private school. for whatever it's worth, many of them are Missouri neighbors. So Tennessee just joined the group. have Arkansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Utah, West Virginia. You know, we have 13 states now who have said parents can choose any school, public or private, and take their state money there. And Texas, spoiler alert.

is about to join the pack. The governor's committed a billion dollars. So once Texas does, Texas is good for like four states, right? That's huge. So the number of kids who will be covered by this. So what we're gonna find out is what that's like, because to your point, this is a 70-30 issue. 70 % of parents want this. There is just widespread consensus around this. And then you take the converse situation, which is what I've just been like a CIS-offician working against my whole career.

You have something like St. Louis Public Schools. They have administrative mismanagement. They have financial mismanagement. They have, quite frankly, shenanigans happening in the last couple of years. They finally got their school board back. The school board hired a superintendent. Like many people know all about this because it's been in the news so much. The superintendent, you know, used her SLPS credit card at

Massage envy, it could be fine. I don't know. She used to edible arrangements. Maybe that's fine. I have no idea. A lot of dinners at a steakhouse. So they're just digging in and those kids in this declining enrollment, extremely low performance district are the ones where the state can't even allow them to go to a public school outside their district. Like, no, we had to take those imaginary lines and like walk them down hard because we can't let those kids live. Because we all know that if you let them leave, many of them will leave.

So what does that do for the Saint Louis? Saint Louis economy isn't great. They have a terrible school system and you don't let kids out of it. That can't that can't bode well.

Patrick Tuohey (10:40.456)
And it's not, it is not the case, I wanna make clear, and I know you agree with me, but it is not the case that there is something special about the St. Louis Public School District that makes the people who work there corrupt, right? It is simply, it is simply any time you have an organization, whether it's public, private, nonprofit, that is not held accountable for its results and where,

Reform of any kind is difficult and slow. This is what you get. And so a lot of people who live in those cities will say like, why are you beating up on my school district? And they kind of lock arms and get defensive. And we say, you know, the argument should really be about the quality of education that you are getting for your children. The building it takes place in is not important. The teacher that teaches it is less important.

The bureaucracy is not important, but in a lot of places, unfortunately, we have confused education with the systems that bring us education. And it's been the job of you and your colleagues to try to separate that out in people and say, listen, the public-private argument about education does not refer to the building you're in.

It refers to the benefit to all of society to have educated kids. And all of us benefit when the kids in St. Louis City get great education. I can't imagine quibbling with, well, is the building in which that education takes place owned privately or publicly? But incredibly, that's where we are.

Susan Pendergrass (12:31.48)
Yeah, and then you're gonna see a lot of these correlational things where a lot of people are moving to Arizona and a lot of people are moving to Florida and a lot of people are moving to Texas. They're gonna have the, Arizona has always been called the wild west of school choice. mean, it is a completely open system. I will say in all honesty that the one downside in Arizona is people move their kids around a lot, because you can literally send your kid anywhere. so, people, school shop, but.

That's been the case for a while. Arizona and people want to move to Arizona. So I would say taxes and schools, but they also have the highest growth rates for low income students. Like you see this in the education results. Florida, students with disabilities outperform New Mexico, all students. Florida is wide open and parents can tailor their education. But the reverse of that again is like when you have young parents in...

the city of St. Louis and their kids are getting to be three and four years old. They're like, we got to move. We can't stay here and spend our money here and shop in the stores here and go to the restaurants here because we can't send our kids to the schools here. So it's like, they are so, so connected in a way that people just don't get it. so, and I would say as St. Louis city goes, so goes the region. And if they won't, you know, my

belief is that we should have open enrollment in Missouri and any child anywhere in the state should pick like Minnesota does. You should be able to pick any public school in the state minimally. There is so much resistance to like Boston Open, St. Louis County into one district that I don't even know how we're ever going to get there.

Patrick Tuohey (14:12.904)
Well, we had that experience in Kansas City as well. I live on the Missouri side, of course, because I have a choice to, right? But I know plenty of neighbors, former neighbors, who have picked up and moved to the Kansas side because the public schools there are better than the public schools on the Missouri side. And maybe they've been sending their kids to private school, to Catholic school, and they just don't want that burden anymore, so they move. We all know people who have done it.

Susan Pendergrass (14:19.328)
I of course.

Patrick Tuohey (14:41.968)
I generally tell people when I find out, I get it, but you know, when you cross state line, you're dead to me. Don't ever come back. But it does hurt. And it is an experience that everybody in Kansas City knows left, right, and center. We understand the pressure and we, know, with the exception of me, perhaps we don't hold it against people to pick up and move. They are making a decision for their family. It would be great if

Susan Pendergrass (14:49.602)
But it hurts.

Patrick Tuohey (15:12.71)
if people who lived in Kansas City had better options, if they could pick and choose what school they go to. And by the way, and again, I know you know this and your listeners will know this, we already have kind of a modified school choice, even among publicly run private schools. I'm not including charter schools, the magnet schools, know, in Kansas City, in Kansas City, the two schools that the public system talks about the most is Lincoln Prep and the Paseo.

Susan Pendergrass (15:33.39)
Yeah, there's some magnetism.

Patrick Tuohey (15:41.883)
You have to test into those schools. You can be kicked out of those schools, but they are the crown jewel here. I think exactly because the school can decide who goes there and who doesn't yet. Yet that is the foundation upon which they attack private schools or school choice. Like, well, they can pick and choose. And again, there are

Susan Pendergrass (16:03.874)
Right. Yeah.

Patrick Tuohey (16:07.976)
There is one school here on Troust that I forget the name, unfortunately, but even before school choice was adopted in Kansas City, it was the place that took the worst performers in the public school district. And they have always struggled with maintaining their scores with DESI, the State Department of Education, but they have always wanted to say yes.

If you look at our performance, we're not great, but if you look at a student by student, where they were performing when we got them and where they're performing now, and again, these kids were dropouts. So I would love a system that is more subtle in how it judges schools, that takes into consideration the difficulty of the students they're taking, but absolutely, parents should be allowed. And again, Kansas City and St. Louis are no exception, the parents who live in those school districts.

who live in the underperforming school districts. They know exactly that that is the case. They are often the biggest champions of school choice. They wanna be let out. And the argument that again, the Yorktown Foundation tries to make in this paper is that school choice already exists for the wealthy. One of my first experiences at the ShowMe Institute

Susan Pendergrass (17:26.69)
and not even the wealthy, middle income. I mean, most, you just talked about people who moved to Kansas, are they all wealthy? Yeah, I mean, it exists for people who move, yeah.

Patrick Tuohey (17:33.565)
No, no, no, no. and in fact they, and right, and they move because they're not wealthy, because they want to depend on public education, but they're wealthy enough to buy a house there. One of the first things that, one of my first interactions with James Scholes 12 years ago when I started with ShowMe is saying, well, we already have school choice because people pick up and move. So can we provide education choice to people?

Susan Pendergrass (17:39.404)
Yes, yes.

Susan Pendergrass (17:43.702)
move.

Patrick Tuohey (18:02.492)
the paper looked at, can we do it in a way that raises everybody's property value, not just those lucky enough to live around a good school district? And the answer is yes. And we know it because not of supposedly conservative states, maybe like Florida or Arizona, but Vermont, which has never had kind of public schools the way the rest of the country has had. They don't have school districts. The cities run their schools, but Vermont is rural.

And so what they say to people, which again is brilliant in its simplicity, is if you don't have a population in your city that justifies you creating your own school system, you can take the money that you would have spent on that student and send them anywhere in the state. And so people do that and they see that they have broken the boundaries of economic development. It happens everywhere. It doesn't just happen in those

anointed areas. And then the last thing that I really like is if you are concerned about communities maintaining a sense of themselves and encouraging people to stay there, when you remove the need for people to leave to get better education, they stay in those areas. They maintain that community and that's a value too.

So again, the whole point of the Yorktown paper was just to say, let's look at education policy, not just from a return on education investment, but economically, how can we all benefit even if we don't have children?

Susan Pendergrass (19:38.766)
Yeah, and it is not dramatically different from the things you've discussed around TIFFs and entertainment districts and things like that. I mean, the idea is the government has been saying, you give us the money, we'll distribute it, we'll put more money into these terrible schools and we'll let these schools over here run themselves the way they want and that we will be like, that's a terrible term to use, but I'm gonna use it anyway, we'll be the puppet master and we'll use these formulas and we'll distribute all the money versus

You know, Vermont has been doing that since the beginning of time. does it too, town tuitioning from the very beginning to like, we don't have enough people. We're not going to make everybody build a school. if I think what, the 1800s, they've been doing that like a long, long time. And it was done by like the whole town getting together and voting too, right? It was a very democratic process by which they came up with this idea. and, and, and we've so lost sight of the fact that we could be doing things differently.

and we could put the power parents to make these decisions. And then that will be who picks the winners and losers. And it will be the schools that are bringing the best product possible. That will be the so-called winners. It'll be the schools that parents want. everyone wants something different. There are a lot of parents, this, know, through the charter school system, also in the places you've mentioned, there's a lot of parents who...

love outdoor school where their kids call their teacher by their first name and there are parents who like a serious college prep STEM thing and there's outdoor schools. mean, there is language immersion, there's classics. There's so many different things that parents want. So the idea that the government's gonna sort of like take a school building and put enough resources in it to give every parent there exactly what they want, it's a failed approach. It just hasn't worked.

Patrick Tuohey (21:24.99)
And it seems to me, and again, I know because we're talking about schools and education that everybody kind of seems to leave their common sense at the door. But we know this is true. If we were all forced to go to a grocery store based on the neighborhood we lived in or buy a particular car based on the state we were in, we all understand that that grocery store would have no incentive to innovate, would have no incentive to give public

Susan Pendergrass (21:45.934)
or doctor.

Patrick Tuohey (21:54.355)
a better customer service. And we would not be surprised if the manager of that superstore was running up credit card bills like the kind you started off talking about. We understand that for car dealerships. Why we don't get it for schools, I think really just testifies to the fact that we have set up this bureaucracy. It has ossified. You can read all about public choice theory. It has its own reasons for existing, which have

little or nothing to do with educating children. And now when they threaten, when they feel threatened by reform, you know, all the worst examples come out. And again, we hear this all the time when you talk to cities and they say, well, we, you know, we want to reform our tax system. The first thing they say is, my gosh, we're going to have to cut police and fire. Like, no, that's, that's just a reactionary thing. There are probably plenty, if we need to cut, there are probably plenty of other things.

Now again, am not, you know, I did not grow up in education policy, but every time I dip my toe in, I'm amazed and maybe it kind of takes an outsider to appreciate this. I'm amazed at how bad the arguments for the status quo are. You've been hearing them for 20, 25 years. Maybe you've forgotten about how bad they are, but they seem to work. What's most exciting about what's going on in Virginia

Susan Pendergrass (23:18.808)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Tuohey (23:23.574)
and in Missouri and elsewhere in the country is maybe it's the pandemic, maybe it's just years of slow success, but it feels like we're at the beginning of this finally breaking apart of people finally getting to make those basic choices about their children.

Susan Pendergrass (23:43.874)
Well, there's going to be critical mass of states. There's going to be 14 or 15 states. I hope Missouri is one of them. There's a chance the governor has said that he would like to publicly fund at least part of our existing scholarship program that we could be one of them. So, but by the end of the year 2025, we have 15, 16 states where parents can choose any public or private school. Then we're going to know our family's gravitating to these states. And if Missouri doesn't do it, do folks in the North cross the line into Iowa or did they go to Kansas who wants?

probably Kansas has one of the most robust public school open enrollment programs in the country. So you can just move wherever in the Kansas side of Kansas city and still theoretically send your children to Shawnee mission or whatever. But, but, I think we're going to see how families are gravitating. And I've said this a few times in this podcast, you're going to have young parents now who grew up in a system where their parents picked, right?

Patrick Tuohey (24:36.381)
Right, right.

Susan Pendergrass (24:36.994)
they were, they picked a high school and they are like, no, I want to go to the performing arts school or the STEM school or whatever it is. Their parents picked their high school. And when you say, need to see your utility bill to find out where your kids are going to school. They're gonna say, what are you talking about? You know, and I have heard anecdotally about some families from Arizona who wouldn't, who wanted to move to Missouri, but then decided not to because they found out you are assigned to a school. This idea of school assignment is gonna start to feel weird and you know,

people are not going to like it. Once you've given them more choice, they're not gonna say like, okay, you can take all those choices away. I don't think that's gonna happen. It's just gonna be like, who's the last state to do this? Probably California.

Patrick Tuohey (25:19.696)
I, you know, some of the things that Missouri is struggling with that you talked about, which is not true in Virginia, because Virginia just being next to the national capital and getting all this influx from Amazon jobs and things like that, they are doing fine. Improving education would be great. But in Missouri, as you know, we are relatively shrinking. We gave up a congressional seat a few years ago.

because our population was not growing fast enough compared to the rest of the country. Our contribution to national GDP is smaller than it was 20 years ago. And where are people moving? They're moving to Florida and Texas. They're moving to Tennessee. You can make the case that, know, Missouri can't legislate a better climate, but we have got to be more competitive. And if a company or a family is looking to move,

I don't know what we've got on the board right now to lure them. Our two biggest cities, which are the engines of our economy, are known for not being able to get control of crime. We tried, we dabbled in right to work, which didn't last. Our income tax does not make us a competitive place to live and our education system doesn't make us a place to live.

I talk about loving Missouri and loving Kansas City, but I am aware that it feels sometimes like the only people who live on the Missouri side in Kansas City just do it because we're suckers and we like old houses. But if you want... Right. And it's because the schools. Right, exactly.

Susan Pendergrass (27:02.222)
You can get a really nice one for not very much money, right?

It's like, property values are great. It's like, yeah, I mean, it's so affordable. Yes, because people don't want to live there. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's right. Just to put some, I'll try not to put too many numbers behind this, Missouri had their largest high school graduating class a year ago. So for at least the next 12 or 13 years, the number of high school seniors will be smaller. We know this because of the kindergarten started to shrink.

Patrick Tuohey (27:16.188)
If you don't have children, Kansas City is the place to live.

Susan Pendergrass (27:37.646)
in 2013. So at least another 12 or 13 years, we will have fewer high school graduates. And we know from recent test scores that just came out, they know less. Okay, so we used to have, let's say 70 to 75,000 high school graduates were down to like 67. We're heading towards 62. We had I think we had 61,000 kindergartners last year. So we're heading down to the low 60s, thousands of high school graduates, and they know less. So they are less numerate, less literate.

Now our potential workforce or our potential higher education entering classes are going to be smaller and they're going to be less well educated. Now, if I'm a company, I'm not sure that I want to move to Missouri because there's a shrinking workforce and you can see it coming a decade out.

Those are the kind of things that we need to convince folks to move into the state. And we need to convince folks who do live in the state and have small children to stay and raise their families there, right? Because we have a real, a real issue. Now, declining enrollment is a nationwide problem and it's a birth rate problem as much as anything, but it's a real problem. And if we just keep sitting back and pretending it doesn't exist in defending district lines, these imaginary district lines, we...

will be on the losing end of it.

Patrick Tuohey (28:59.378)
Well, Charles Murray observed years ago that one of the drivers of socioeconomic division in this country is that educated, college educated men and women are meeting each other at school. They are getting married. They are starting off raising children who go to college and their incomes and their socioeconomic level reflect that.

the mix of boil of socioeconomic and marriages that was true maybe 50, 70 years ago isn't anymore. If we are graduating children who can't meet the standards that businesses require, we are adding gasoline to the fire of kind of creating an underclass because technology is not slowing down. Requirement to understand technology is at an all time high and not just to understand it, but

to able to understand it and sometimes be skeptical of it. it is, you can see now a situation where because we segregate these kids based on neighborhood into poor performing schools, we are creating or in the process of creating an underclass that will last generations. And it's heartbreaking. It's absolutely heartbreaking because education is upstream of every public policy.

everything.

Susan Pendergrass (30:22.446)
That's right. So what's your recommendation for Missouri based on your research on root genes?

Patrick Tuohey (30:27.056)
I am hope that, know, Missouri, think needs to get rid of boundaries, have open enrollment, let people go to schools wherever they think their children's needs are met, encourage homeschooling, encourage pod schools, all the different approaches. Now listen, not every approach is going to work for every child. And there may be some approaches that work for no children.

Susan Pendergrass (30:52.824)
Yes.

Patrick Tuohey (30:52.946)
But as long as parents have the power to exit the system they're in and go into something else, we will learn what's good and bad, just like we learn the grocery stores that aren't good, where the produce is rotting. And you can say, well, Patrick, that's great, but do we really want to subject our children to untested experiments in education and all that type of stuff? We need a robust.

you know, oversight and administration that only public school systems can provide. I'm like, all right, that's a fair argument, but where are those robust public school systems that are churning out the kids we want? There are two, there are just too few of them. And so again, it's not to say that this is the way, well, you know, our former colleague and still friend, Mike McShane made a great point to me that,

Susan Pendergrass (31:31.202)
You can't hear my eyes rolling, but they were rolling.

Patrick Tuohey (31:45.875)
that is great for school reformers as well. He said, oftentimes what school reformers do is they find something that works somewhere and then advocate that it be done everywhere. And just because something works in Minneapolis doesn't mean it's going to work in St. Louis. So we need to constantly challenge the status quo. And if a reform that you and I think is great now isn't working in five or 10 years, we need to be able to change gears.

But what we have now is a system that hasn't served us for decades, likely won't serve us going forward. these kids and these families can't do anything to escape it. And that's not good for anyone.

Susan Pendergrass (32:27.672)
Yeah, is the system of parental choice perfect for accountability? Of course not. But if 25 % of Missouri eighth graders can do math on grade level, which is true, and we opened it up so that every parent could choose any school, I firmly believe, I've said this on the podcast before, that 75 % of parents won't just shrug their shoulders and be like, my kids still can't do math. I'm picking where they go to school. I'm looking at the alternatives.

I've chosen this school. They blew it. They didn't learn math. I feel like that is more accountability than whatever Desi's doing when they're like, used to be 30%, then it was 27%, now it's 25%. We gotta get more money and work harder. I feel like parents will be more accountable than that. And that is something.

Patrick Tuohey (33:16.848)
And one other point, which I know your way ahead of me on, the brilliance of some of the education research that I've read and that you're familiar with is that even if you keep your kids in the school they're at, even if as a parent, you don't give a damn about the quality of your child's education, when everyone else has choice and the teachers at that school have to react to parents' free choice, they deliver a better product because they see

everyone's going to the school down the street, the private school or the charter school or the Lutheran school. When they see that, they get their act together. They provide a better product. And so ironically perhaps, or counter-intuitively, even the parent that does not.

make a choice or does not know to make a choice ends up with a better education system for that child. And that is, I mean, that's everybody wins there. And so it's like, this works for the active parents who give a damn and it works for the parents that don't.

Susan Pendergrass (34:13.486)
Loads of evidence for that. Loads and loads of evidence. That's right.

Susan Pendergrass (34:24.654)
That's right. Win-win. All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on and explaining it to us. I think it's fascinating. I hope, sounds like the governor has his head right about this. Sounds like a lot of the legislators are working to bring more choice to Missouri families. And I hope that they stick with it till May and get it to the governor's desk. You know, like stick with it. Don't let your foot off the gas and get it to the governor's desk so that we can be one of those states that trust parents. So, but thanks for coming and talking about it. Appreciate it.

Patrick Tuohey (34:52.958)
Well, it's my pleasure and yeah, I am hopeful, but you know, the Missouri legislature has been breaking my heart for 20 years.

Susan Pendergrass (35:00.076)
Come on, stop it. Stop. Don't say it. That's right. Okay. Thanks so much, Patrick.

Patrick Tuohey (35:06.089)
Take care.