So this is what my house is looking like right now. It is a Monday morning and the house is Absolutely out of control. I have my camera equipment up. My son was here playing yesterday. I have Just stuff everywhere. This is what the living room is looking like It's even messy behind the couch here This brings us into the office, which isn't too bad, but still things need to be put in order um son's rooms an absolute mess Stuff just yeah, so i'm going to my Bedroom because my husband is currently asleep. That's another thing that I have to deal with is All right, you guys so I am starting in our den and what I like to do is one room right room I just um straighten up every room Uh, I throw whatever needs to go into the other room. I just throw in there real quick and just focus on that one room That's the fastest way I found then once i'm done with every room by room meaning straightening it up I go back again and I start to wipe down doing any type of dusting Um, so I that's how you know, that's the way that I clean and I found that that's more the most effective Um taken down my camera equipment. This is typically left up for weeks. Yeah, this is where I film um Even though we live in sunny phoenix our house is actually in the dark in the shade So this is where the most light can come in Everywhere else is pretty dark. So just putting up my background Um, I will leave my lights there because I will still be filming It's just a house with you guys because I do film literally every two days. So Um, I keep the film the excuse me that lights there, but they're out of the way Most people don't even notice it the few people who do come over. Um, so yeah, I just put in everything out of the way I'm a type of person to where I clean as I go meaning throughout the week If I see something after a while if it's bothering me, I'll go ahead and clean it. I don't have designated cleaning days Um, I do try to do laundry only one to two times a week But it could be difficult sometimes so cleaning off the table here I've started working at the table in the morning because our office is in the back of the room Um, and everyone is still asleep because I do get up early early in the morning to work All right, so yeah, just continuing to put things away Ryan little I Another challenge is of having a small child as I'm sure all of you know is twice and JB has his quote-unquote office behind our couch in the living room and I just gave in You know, this is his little office setting where he pretends play he pretends to play And yeah, it is what it is So next I'm going to be in my office just doing a bit of decluttering getting rid of some papers Honey when your child is in school, they literally come home with 400 sheets of paper every day So I try to throw away stuff. Um, and just continuing to organize I just saved the kitchen for last because honestly, I can be in here for quite a bit But I just gave in and started to um wash the dishes and let them dry in the dishwasher You guys I'm one of those people. I don't use my dishwasher that much. I just don't now I'm back in my sheen room my guest bedroom Um putting some things away. I recorded a lot of hair videos. So I have products everywhere. Um, this is where I store my uh beauty products my amazon packages that I don't want my husband to see So I just have a lot of stuff back here. Um, including my hair products Okay, I have filmed back here before but I prefer to film in the living room So yeah, just continuing to organize this back room Ryan little I'm just gonna be really honest with you just to Put all the pillows on the bed. This bed is pretty high one. It's it's almost to my waist. I'm short I'm only five three But enough of that. Um, my husband doesn't get out of bed until 10 So what I'm doing right now I probably do this once a week because by 10 I am knee deep in work. I you know I'm working. I'm doing stuff. It would be totally different if we were on a traditional schedule eight to five And absolutely I would do this every day, but this is just not, you know I'm not gonna front and pretend like I make up my bed like this every day I do ensure that the covers are on it But what I'm referring to is adjusting the pillows and decorating the bed with pillows every day. That's not happening So now that my husband is gone I can now finally wipe everything down Everything is put in this place. Basically. I'm just doing one over look. This is a livable home There are going to be some things out of place. Yeah, so my lights are over there for now. I do have some Stuff on the counter. Excuse me on the End table here that I have to organize later on this week Um And then I will be doing the floors and here the wood floors all over But just sweeping in the kitchen and bathroom now. I tried to use natural Um Cleaning cleaning products because they have been you know a lot better for you overall health-wise and for your home But girl, let's just keep it real. I got my bleach over here and I have my pine saw So Oh, it depends on what I'm using it for so my bleach I use In my kitchen the toilet bowl sometimes I put a little bit Um in my mixture of pine salt for the kitchen and bathroom floors But overall I do try to use vinegar or these uh cleaning sprays by method. I also have this one Toilet cleaner simple truth organic now Let me show you just because it's organic and all natural and all this doesn't mean it's necessarily good for you So let me show you an example. So this is an example. This is mrs. Myers clean day Multi surface everyday cleanser. Okay Um one spray of this lavender scented. All right Once a two sprays of this and I started coughing Uncontrollably coffee. There's something in it that I'm allergic to Um, and again, it's made without parabens, you know, all of that Horrible bad stuff that you're not supposed to clean with but this is trash for me I mean, I shouldn't say it's trash but this is just one of those quote-unquote natural products that I can't use because I had a reaction to Now if I'm not careful, I get the same reaction with this daily Granite so I have to be careful. So I'm just going to go ahead. I have now Another hour to wipe everything down Um and then do the floors the wood floors. Okay now for my wood floors I use a little bit just a little bit. Well, let me let me back up For once a month, I use the murphy oil But overall I do vinegar with a little bit of dawn soap Just a little bit and hot water that is it to keep our floors clean And they're okay. You can see right now. Yeah, I need to clean them But nothing has happened to them and we've had these floors floors for a couple of years All right, you guys now that everything gets in its place. I'm taking the time to wipe down Basically doing some dusting. This is the one task that I stay on top of because my son and I We both have allergies in asthma a couple of years ago. The dusting had got out of hand We had a huge dust bowl out here Um And we weren't living in the house and so when we moved back I could literally taste the dust in the air It was horrible Yeah, we have these huge wood wood blinds also that need to be dusted Which is why I do have a housekeeper who comes in once a month and I hired her just to dust Of course, she does other things but her primary focus is to dust and do the floors So, yeah, I probably does one to two times a week. Okay I'm sweeping my heart with floors which honestly I would not recommend this because Sweeping just aggravates the dust. It lifts it up into the air whereas the vacuuming actually collects it But there is something going on with our vacuum cleaner. I don't know what it is So if you have a suggestion for a good vacuum, let me know I've gone through five or six and ten years I just feel like they don't make appliances like they used to they make you with cheap Um materials and you're forced to buy another one like every three or four years. So anyway Continuing to sweep here and next up you're going to see me wiping down the Bathroom sinks and cleaning the toilets you guys I stay on top of this too. I'll probably wipe down my bathroom like Three or four times a week. I know this is a little bit redundant, but I just have to have a clean like that um Even the mirrors if the mirrors are dirty, I don't wait once a week to clean the eye clean it y'all. That's just how I clean So using a microfiber mop to wipe down my heart with floors I do use two separate mops for my wood floors versus a porcelain floors Just because microfiber tends to be better for heart with floors Okay, because it again it picks up any leftover dust as needed again using the solution of Hot water to distilled vinegar and non soap y'all my back is starting to hurt This is two and a half hours into cleaning and yeah, my body's starting to break down Um, I have tried every type of heart with floor cleaner and this is what's works best for me And of course the murphy's oil at the end of the mop. So this is what my floors look like All right, you guys I am done cleaning it is two hours And this is what my house looks like the floors are done things are in its place overall Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect and I'm not trying to make it look perfect But it is clean and it smells good that all that's all that matters Now, um, probably tomorrow the next day I will do my kitchen floors and the bathroom floors and like I stated in the commentary I should have stated in the video that I did my bathrooms two days ago So they don't really need to be done But yes, you know, I have my computer back over here because I work from the kitchen table sometimes And this is what the den is looking like Here's the office pretty clean I have a bag of shoes there that I'm going to be dropping off at the Goodwill So just have it there as a reminder pretty clean pretty dusted everything Um And we have the bathroom again did the bathroom a couple of days ago So just did a one over wiping down the sink the toilets the mirror And here's the guest bedroom aka my she room everything is in order I do have some things left out because this is just a reminder Hey girl going to church on sunday and I have my products out for what I'm going to be reviewing up next But again overall it's pretty neat and that's all that matters His JB room the bed is made for now Things are in its place and here we are in the master bedroom. The bed has been made the floors have been vacuum I've dust it wipe down the countertops. We have granite countertops Um, I have to stop using that one spray because I started coughing as you heard So there's no way I could use it also in here. So just wipe it down with the um, the other method Bleed the green one and we don't use this jacuzzi that much I've been in this in this jacuzzi like twice. I know that's sad But I do run it um once a month and we have a special cleaner that we run so that the jets remain clean But I wipe that down wipe the glass down again two days ago really did you know got in there wiping out This is a beast to clean because of the hot water, but hey, it is what it is. Um What room in here all that has been wiped down where you're good smells good Yeah, y'all so that is it you guys that is how I keep my house clean This would stay clean for a couple of days, but like I stated I clean as I go throughout the workweek And um, it's not perfect There are some other things that could be put in place and yes, there's some things that I could have cleaned better But it is what it is. So I hope y'all enjoyed this video. Take care


Is it borderline personality or me? I'm thinking of antisocial. What is borderline personality? I don't know people diagnosed me with it So I don't know Well my my therapist did tell me to go to these dbt classes So I just okay So maybe he thinks because I asked him I said tell me do I have my bipolar and he's like well Everyone has traits of like personality disorders. He goes you have like traits of borderline person I've never taken medication for any sort of Mental illness. There's nothing wrong with it. Love mental illness talk about all the time Well We love metal do I think Trisha Payness is a bad person No, but when she discusses what she's been through and the symptoms she's been diagnosed with by her therapist I think it explains a lot about what all of us see and there's a lot that we can learn from it What's up everybody? This is Chris from the rewired soul where we talk about the problem But focus on the solution and if you're new to my channel my channel is all about mental health and sometimes what I do is pull Different topics from the YouTube community and try to see what lessons we can learn from it Whether it's people's successes or missteps or whatever it is. There's always something to be learned So if you're into that stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and follow me over on Instagram and Twitter At the rewired soul. All right, so a ton of you Message me and ask me if I saw, you know Trisha Payness on the h3 h3 podcast And I saw a bunch of people talking about Twitter like this is the best h3 podcast whatever so I was like, okay I'll check it out. All right, so we're gonna be talking about What went on in that podcast? We're gonna be talking about borderline personality disorder But listen last week. I made a video and I promised you I made you a promise that any video I make I'm going to be sure To provide you with value. Okay, when I discuss these things and and whether you believe me or not I really don't care But those of you who are rewired soldiers out there who come here to try to learn how to improve your mental and emotional Well-being what I want you to take away from this is how to learn how to deal with people in your life And some of them may struggle with borderline personality disorder and here's one of the main reasons why this guy right here This d-bag of all d-bags right here. His name is Paul Elam Okay, and he makes videos about how people with borderline personality disorder are these evil awful person and he has like this whole like migtail community of People who like just talking about how those with borderline personality disorder are like the devil All right, I made a video about this dude a while back I'm gonna link it down in the description below read through the comments Okay, so part of what I'm doing here is to educate people and hopefully Hopefully people can understand a little bit more. All right, but Here's here's a clip that I want to start out with I go to dbt classes. Where's my camera? It's right here. I go to dbt classes. Okay. I get on the troll I find For borderline for borderline personality disorder a lot of people think I have bbt and I go to dbt for it It's group therapy. I make the skills. I do the lessons been going since May 8th. What's up? Is it borderline personality or me? I'm thinking of antisocial. What is borderline personality disorder? I don't know people diagnosed me with it.  He was you have like traits of borderline person I've never taken medication for any sort of mental illness. There's nothing wrong with it I love mental illness talk about all the time We love mental illness. All right, so check this out. Okay, I Have worked in addiction treatment many many many people who come through treatment Have borderline personality disorder. All right one of the symptoms of borderline personality disorder is substance abuse So it's no wonder that a lot of them end up in a drug and alcohol rehab So this is just my suggestion based off my experience working with thousands of people with borderline personality disorder But it's for people who might have BPD as well as people who know somebody with BPD So one thing right here, okay? And this is just purely my opinion like Trisha Paytas And I don't know if she just wasn't opening up about it fully on the A3 podcast, but she's like, I don't know I don't want to know what BPD is or whatever. I go to these dbt groups or whatever No, okay, so I've been diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder and depression and as well as I'm a recovering drug addict and alcoholic like Something that has helped me more than anything is Educating the hell out of myself about this stuff like it's so important and it's liberating too Like if you have any mental illness, I don't care what you have right Educate yourself about it like it helps you realize like oh, this is what's going on It can explain a lot of the thoughts and feelings and emotions that you're going through but here's the best part You ready you start to find solutions Okay But what I always recommend to people as well like when I was working in the treatments and I worked with a lot of families and everything Like that I highly recommend that if you have a loved one struggling with a mental illness Such as borderline personality disorder or even addiction or depression or anxiety or PTSD Whatever it is educate yourself about them. All right Like if you love that person if this is an important person in your life Educate yourself about it right because it will help you help them more It'll help you help yourself more because I made a video about this the other day about Trisha Paytas We take things so personally. All right, but we when we understand the illness that somebody is struggling with we don't take it as personally, all right, but The other part this clip right here. So should we wrap it up? Is this how you experience everything? It's like 100% this and then oh my god Maybe there's something wrong with me This is one of the main traits of people who struggle with borderline personality disorder But listen listen to the words coming out of my mouth like even like Trisha Paytas said her therapist said a lot of people have Symptoms or traits of personality disorders and what they're talking about right there is black and white Thinking which is sometimes known as splitting now for people with borderline personality disorder. This is to an extreme Okay, you're all good or all bad. All right They will love you one day hate you the next day one of the best books out there If you want to educate yourself about borderline personality disorder is a book called.  Don't leave me Also, if you have a loved one who struggles with BPD get this book. It's called walking on eggshells It was specifically made for loved ones of those who have BPD All right, but you need to understand the black and white thinking of love somebody one minute Hate in the next minute But even if you don't have BPD like I made a video a long long long time ago about I called it like borderline society or something Like you see this happen all the time like look at look online How many public figures everybody loves them one second then one tweet comes out and everybody hates them Right. So a lot of us struggle with black and white thinking and we need to work on that by just being realistic all right, so Again, I don't think Trisha Paytas is a bad person But a lot of these are just part of what she's dealing with. All right, and is that an excuse? Absolutely not like this is my Complete personal opinion on this. Okay, like I was thinking about which direction to go with this video And I'm gonna toss this in here and this is where we're gonna circle back to what I titled this video like this is me personally just me personally and I Have to live my life a certain way because I am a drug addict in recovery and There's there there are certain things that I know will lead me to relapse So I cannot hang out with certain people my my circle of friends is very very small, but Trisha Paytas is not somebody that I could be like Really good friends with right like I would have her as like an acquaintance, right? And some of you might have a friend like this and it's totally up to you So I'm not saying like nobody should be friends with her, but like in the podcast. There were multiple lies In there, you know what I mean? One of them and it might be pure ignorance It might be pure ignorance that she just didn't know about that video. All right, what you do I don't I'm gonna show you I don't I make no money off adsense. Why do you think I do patreon and show my Make no money. Well it supplements your income obviously, but no video has to prove Okay, now what do I do it says get started log in There your hand Now go to that video, how do I do you do it? Anything that's private, but it's all demonized hold on hold on hold on Where is it apology and then it's coming up regarding my I'm transgender three million views green icon Monetized and I'm gonna tell you exactly how much money But yeah, so she made $8,000 off that and this is something that I see a lot of youtubers complain about like oh you get demonetized and demonetized And demonetized and demonetized like you guys all of you who are the audience I just want to let you know like it is it is inflated Way worse than you think it is like is demonetization an issue. Yes, but not everything is being demonetized Here's a great example like they were talking about trish of patiss's 10 inch lady bits on this podcast and It was fully monetized when I watched it like there was like three or four Mineral ads in the first 20 minutes. Okay, so like I love the work that nerd city did on his video But anyways, but when it comes to trish of pain It's like I hope I'm trying to give her the benefit of the doubt that she was just ignorant and didn't understand But I can tell you as a YouTube creator like YouTube when you're uploading a video And if you don't monetize it it like shows you like a little red error, and it's like yo You you might want to monetize this. All right, so I don't truly believe Necessarily that she didn't know it was monetized, but she made $8,000 off of it, and that's the conversation got wacky right there We got a little like uncomfortable and everything but the other thing was too She kept talking about on the podcast as she's been sober since May 8th, and I made a video about this because She also lied when she said this but I did a lot of pills like a lot of like pain pills and stuff for my So that's been my whole life is just pills, which I don't I can't even take I'm like if I have surgery now I don't even like I just I tore my meniscus in September, and I had like I didn't take any pain pills for it I was just like I don't want to do that and here's a clip and why I made a video about that I Should pills miss I obviously was taking pills for the pain of my knee. I only take one Pain pill now a night before I go to bed So I don't feel don't like get worried for me or anything I mean, I was worried for me like I was like I don't want to take any more pain pills But I just take one painful for bet and I'd be profan in the morning to reduce swelling So I do take pills. I feel like I'm in a good headspace enough to not abuse them so That's good because my drug of choice was prescription opioids, okay? So I had a lot of people request me to make a video about this and talk about it from the recovery aspect of it And yeah, she was taking painkillers. She said she added under control what I did with my video was I discussed The the safe ways to do it if you're an addict in recovery Because there is literature in both AA and NA about taking these types of medications in Recovery, but she just lied right there, too, right? But finally one of the last reasons like I wouldn't be able to like Keep somebody like that around as a friend, right? And these are just things I want you to think about is There's no strict moral compass. All right So a lot of you know I've been diving really deep into moral philosophy lately and moral psychology It's absolutely fascinating So what you learn is based on how people were raised and how they grew up and all these other factors People lean more conservative or more liberal, but I think just from my perception I think the majority of people the majority of people that I've encountered and that I witness on the internet and in real life A lot of people don't have a very strict Moral compass, okay? This is very apparent when Trisha with Trisha paid us how you see her inner lawyer We call it the inner lawyer who's rationalizing and arguing her points about what Ethan is and isn't allowed to joke about Right, but then you see her talking about her love of someone like Howard Stern. Okay now This isn't just a Trisha paid us thing you do it I do it and one of the reasons I'm trying to learn so much about moral psychology is Because we need to become more self-aware of this like I made an Instagram Post the other day and I forgot what it said exactly, but that's what I was talking about We're all hypocrites all of us me you everybody. We are all hypocrites Especially when it comes to morality It's just some of us are self-aware about it and sometimes that's the best that we can do and I have a whole series Called morality Mondays where I'm diving into like morality and discussing it if you would like to learn more about it Make sure you subscribe and ring the notification bell and check in on Mondays But there are a lot of reasons for this and like basically what I've just been learning is like I'm starting to develop more empathy Like I understand why people justify the things that they do why people get pissed off about the things they get pissed off about Why people get angry and upset about the things they get angry and upset about Because when you sit back and look at it from a rational perspective rather than an emotional perspective you're like oh It makes sense.  All right. I had a comment the other day I'll put it on the screen if I can find it but It was a great suggestion at the end of the videos just kind of wrap all the solutions up So the first one is if you have BPD Educate yourself about BPD educate yourself about the symptoms. All right If you're the loved one of somebody with BPD Educate yourself about it and get your own help if you need to all right If you have a parent a spouse a child or somebody like that with BPD get therapy if you need to I'm gonna link two books down below one of them is called I hate you don't leave me the other one's called walking on eggshells. All right two solutions right there The other thing I was talking about is just be mindful of who you keep in your life The other day I made a video about the biopsychosocial model of mental health All right in the social model is who you keep in your life My life has gotten a lot better Since I have limited the amount of people that I hang out with all right So those are some solutions for you, baby But anyways, that's all I got for this video if you liked this video Please give it a thumbs up if you're new make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge huge Thank you to everybody who's supporting the channel over on patreon and you know what I got some DMs Like so people been buying the merch giving some hoodies for the winter So I appreciate all of you and I appreciate everybody who gets my mental health books and supports Channel that way all right. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time


Alright, now that we got all the introductions out of the way last month, let's get into the real stuff. This month's sales column is about properly managing your inventory. In its most simple form, it's basically having more of what sells and get rid of what doesn't. So how do you figure that out? By utilizing your data. Not what other opticals are doing, not what you've learned that supposedly other opticals are doing. No, no, no. With your unique data. So many in our industry shout that calculating free intern doesn't do you any good. Okay, that's ridiculous, mainly because it doesn't look at the whole picture. It's like saying that two different stores have the same item. Let's say that one store is promoting that it's 50% off and you're like, we're gonna go to that store because they have the exact same thing at 50% off. Not realizing that this store over here has it for full price at $3.50 and yeah, these guys have it for 50% off, but if you're not looking at the full story, you don't realize that they're selling it for 50% off on an $800 product. So you're actually paying more. That's the same thing as looking at an optical and saying, oh yeah, frame turn doesn't help because you're not looking at the whole picture. When analyzing frame turn, one must look at the whole picture. The turn is a ratio based upon the sales numbers and the board space allotment that you have. Not to mention the pricing and overall profitability in order to get an actual good picture of what is going on and the overall ROI of your inventory. Only with the whole picture can you actually develop a plan to change. I've sat through three CES this past year that gave the most amount of what I will call misinformation when it comes to frame turn. The idea that they can give one number or maybe two numbers on a variable of what all opticals should be turning their inventory at is total bullsh**t. I said bullsh**t. Well it is.  Okay, here's a simple fact. Larger opticals have a dramatically different turn rate than smaller opticals. The opticals that don't have a doctor are only making their cash flow on retail sales where the opticals that do have a doctor are making it on retail sales and on services. All of their ideal turn rate numbers are different. And anyone who had put all of these different types of opticals into one box and say that all of them should have a 2.5 or a three turn rate is ridiculous and completely off base. And not only is it completely incorrect because I've got data from 200 opticals that say something completely different. The sad part is that this misinformation is devastating to an optical's confidence in data. For example, if an optical is taking the time to sit through one of these CES and learn about how they're supposedly supposed to be running their inventory and they sit down and they learn all about it, they take the time to run their numbers, they plug in the data and they think, wow, we are so not even close to that number. Well, you know what? We're not that bad off. I mean, we're not obviously at our peak performance, but I mean, we're not also in the gutter.  No, not at all. This misinformation completely causes opticals to lose faith in making business decision based on analytical data. Now, it is 2022 people and that is no secret that analytics overall in any business are important and they can help you. And unfortunately, an eye care making decisions based upon data is something that's been completely lost in our periphery of running an eye care business. And I will tell you right now, making decisions based upon your unique frame turn data is absolutely something that will transform the success of your optical. And I know because my team is working with opticals every single day that are building their confidence in managing their frame boards and properly calculating their frame turn.


My experience at Griffith has changed me for the positive. It helped me to have a voice. I really see a void in the way that drug and alcohol healing work has done in this country, particularly for us as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sober came about from a few angles. Predominantly, I stopped drinking. That came about just through my boys. And the other part was I was going to be out talking to others about the dangers of unhealthy relationships with drugs and alcohol. And I wanted to be damn sure that I wasn't continuing to have one myself.


This meeting is now being recorded. Again, welcome to today's webinar. I'm very briefly. I'm Caitlin Howley and I'm for enough to serve as the Associate Director of the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center for the ARC. ARC is one of 15 regional centers that's funded by the U.S. Department of Education to provide capacity building technical assistance to state departments of education and other education stakeholders. We serve Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. I'm really pleased to introduce today's presenters to you. First up is Dr. Holbert Harman. He's one of the nation's leading experts on public education in rural America. He's currently an independent consultant and co-director of the Rural Math Excel Partnership, which is a project funded by a 2012 U.S. Department of Education investing in innovation grant and operated by the Virginia Advanced Study Strategy. He served as an executive assistant to the superintendent of the West Virginia Department of Education, associate director and acting director of the Eric Clearinghouse on Rural Education in Small Schools, and a senior research and development specialist in a regional educational laboratory. His work has been honored by the National Rural Education Association, and he's published wisely in the Rural Educator and the Journal of Research in Rural Education. John Hill also joins us today. He's executive director of the National Rural Education Association and is a professor of education studies at Purdue. He's served as a middle school math teacher, middle and high school principal, assistant superintendent, and superintendent. He's also involved in the Purdue Educational Leadership Initiative for small and rural schools and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program. His interests primarily include the role of instructional leaders at the district and building level, rural education leadership, and rural capacity. And we're very pleased to have them both here today. Very briefly, so you have a sense of where we're going, our objective today is to consider strategies for supporting rural school districts in terms of implementing best and promising practices, increasing fiscal capacity, recruiting and retaining teachers, developing policy and building partnerships, and finally increasing economies of scale. So let's get rolling. I'm going to turn things over to Robert now. Robert, it's all yours. Thanks, Caitlin. It's indeed a pleasure to be able to participate in this webinar, one of the few activities around the country that is focusing on the unique needs of school systems in rural areas. And in this presentation, John Hill and I have taken some of the information from a previous webinar that the ARCC sponsored. And here we attempt to address some of the issues regarding the capacity limitations of small and rural school districts. This is a particular challenge in some places more than others, particularly where the school systems might be located in isolated areas of the country. In the four states, of course, that target this webinar, I think it's surprising to some to know that there are very small school systems. As we learned in the last school system, the person who was participating as a co-presenter had a school system with about 800 students. That's not real common in Virginia because they're countywide consolidated school systems, as they are in the four states that we're addressing. But I know John Hill, the co-presenter in this one, will particularly be referencing some situations that are particularly applicable to the small ones that may exist west of the Mississippi. I'd like to start first by addressing this issue of implementing best practices. And, of course, this webinar is focused on support strategies. How can state departments provide technical assistance in particular, or along with that, arrange, in fact, initiatives that can be expected to be implemented in rural places? And, of course, we're talking about small rural school districts or rural school districts. So some of the very basic issues, of course, in this topic of implementing a best practice, which is a concern almost in any state across the country, there is an initial interest to identify a best practice, a model, a program, something that is believed to be essential for school systems to best serve kids, and therefore an initiative is underway with the hope that school systems will implement it. Some of the very basic concerns, of course, as we've listed here, determine first, of course, if the practice was, in fact, designed for use in a rural context. While that seems like common sense, it is most often the common practice that specific initiatives are developed in urban places with the hope that they will be useful for school systems in rural places. So it's particularly a concern if a practice was, in fact, designed in a rural context, and to if evidence exists regarding the success of that practice from use in a rural place. Technical assistance, of course, is absolutely essential as we learned in the last webinar because of the limitation capacity of many rural systems. And so the focus of the technical assistance coming out of a State Department, while it may be common to focus on a central office as an efficiency strategy, particularly in countywide systems, there may be a need to examine who, in fact, is supposed to implement the practice and be concerned with focusing the technical assistance on that particular level of the school system. So if it's math teachers that's supposed to implement something, assuming that contacting central office people will result in a math teacher receiving the appropriate information could be an erroneous assumption. The issue of avoiding the one model fits all approach, I think all of us are aware of that concern. I think it makes that worse is also than one that's developed in an urban place for which then we have a one model expected for everyone to implement and it may not be possible at all. And another basic concern, of course, is in technical assistance, it's easy to, in providing a generic approach, make an assumption that information enough of it will enable people to implement a best practice, when in fact this could very easily simply overload the person who's wearing a multiple hat in the local school system and therefore achieve the opposite effect. So in essence, the more strategic technical assistance approach focused specifically on the person who's supposed to implement the practice is a better strategy. Some of the things that a Department of Ed can consider when I was in the State Department and then of course frequently talk with people in those capacities still things are changing for the good, I think. For example, we now have web-based kind of practices and so a State Department can very quickly establish a repository and particularly have practical how-to documents on that website such that the people in the rural areas now have access to resources like that that they didn't have in a not-too-distance path. So a web-based repository of best practices with the related how-to documents can be an essential kind of useful assistance item by State Department. Integrated professional development, of course, we know is occurring in most places. In question, however, though, may be whether or not the essential support materials are with that and that was addressed in the first workshop with the co-presenter indicating in the small district he was in oftentimes. No one's available to develop materials and so forth, so you can have professional development, but if the materials are not there to accommodate implementation, you shouldn't expect much to happen. Webinars, of course, presented by a panel of in-state rural practitioners tends to be effective because people want to hear from people like themselves. So any State Department assistance where webinars can involve people who are actually performing the role that's expected to be implemented tend to be successful. Face-to-face conferences with a specific rural strand have success. People still want to be in face-to-face meetings. However, again, having a real focus strand of some sort will be most attractive and beneficial to the people from the small rural school systems. YouTube demonstrations, of course, are becoming more common and they're very effective because they're a just-in-time flexible kind of delivery where people who want to watch it at 7 o'clock at evening can do so. Network of Field-Based Practitioners and Innovators is an excellent strategy for a person in the State Department of Ed to know some key people in the school systems who they can rely upon and ask questions about a particular best practice to see whether or not before rolling it out, it could have the intended effect or whether they're going to be unintended consequences which a person would like to avoid. An evaluation checklist approach is useful. That is, people having information that enables them to quickly gauge progress in the process as well as the impact of a particular best practice. And so with people that are wearing multiple hats, simply having a quick way of examining what they're doing in a checklist format accommodates a capacity limitation of less time available by personnel. Recognition of a school and or individual success is an important item for trying to get best practices implemented because practitioners pay attention to each other's success as does school board members, as do school board members. A partnership with support organizations is almost essential in small rural school district locations whether it's a regional education service agency or a co-op or a center or some university kind of entity. Support kind of partnerships are essential to give the capacity for many small rural school districts to implement a best practice. Including personnel from a rural LEA to serve on state committees can be very helpful to help give insight to the development of a best practice as well as to be an advocate for people in the rural areas who are asking questions about a particular practice. So many states try to do this when implementing a particular best practice. Get input from a committee structure that includes a rural LEA individual. Funding incentives of course are important in some places regarding personnel use of time and particularly where they don't have personnel. So initiatives of best practice that are expected to be implemented by existing personnel with no funds provided to hire an additional person which is an absolutely essential person in a key project will have little chance of implementation. Research development evaluation studies of course the reality in many places when you ask people what do you really know about your rural school districts in the state. It simply causes more questions to be asked than answers. We don't find a lot of evidence of many studies going on that pay particular attention to how particular practices will work in rural areas. So that research development evaluation studies focused on rural specific can be an essential kind of activity to help implement a best practice. I'll spend the next few minutes focusing on supporting strategies for increasing fiscal capacity and I do want to thank everyone for the opportunity to speak and these remarks will be made from a national perspective. But some of the things that the Department of Eds could do in terms of building capacity would be in the area of grant writing assistance and the use of awards funds for professional development specifically. Consider employing full time grant writers for rural districts. They do not have the capacity to write proposals of consistent high quality to be competitive in many instances. And then beyond that point districts may not have the personnel to monitor those grants possibly if they do win. Another example would be flexibility in the use of federal and state funds and be thinking along those lines how can you leverage state dollars to gain federal dollars and think beyond the Department of Education. There are many other federal departments that have monies available for educational purposes. An example it doesn't even come from a department that comes from the FCC as this whole e-rate issue. And some states apply as a state to provide internet service to really drive the cost way down for local school districts. Consider competitive grants for rural LEAs or schools and that would be part of your program at the state level which would give them some capacity to try some things that they ordinarily wouldn't have the facilities nor the personnel to get involved in. Be an advocate for the funding of rural schools and look at the impact that sparsely funding allocations may have in state aid formulas. In fact what we see from our organization around the country is an effort to pull out those indicators for rural schools and general ed funds. And so that needs to be monitored and then look at state transportation aid. For example some states have what's called a linear density index and that is they look at the number of pupils per mile as a factor in calculating funding for transportation so that if students are spread out then rural districts receive more dollars per student per mile in terms of funding those services. Designated funding for facilities, labs, technologies, many rural districts do not have a large tax base. The manufacturing jobs have left. The number of people that are involved in farming due to increased mechanization and the use of technology have decreased. And so there needs to be assistance in terms of updating labs. We just participated in a study I think it was three years ago where the average rural lab was either had been remodeled 14 years ago or had been built 14 years ago. And when we look at labs especially in schools today the use of probes, the use of micro labs, the use of virtual labs. This is a whole different ball game and many rural districts need help in that particular area. Loan forgiveness programs. There are some state programs where if a teacher or administrator moved to a rural school especially in tough to fill positions that their loans are forgiven over a period of time or they receive assistance for loans. And then sharing and collaboration incentives among LEAs and began to think about what are things that you could do that would cause districts to share services, to share personnel perhaps. And again, think beyond schools. We have some interesting things in some states where schools, local government and hospitals create consortiums to purchase products or to provide services. So those are some ideas in terms of increasing fiscal capacity of rural districts. Great. Thanks very much, John. Kim, will you please unmute the participants' phone lines? We'd like to pause and see if there are any questions or comments. All guests have been unmuted. So feel free to speak up if you have any questions. Please feel free to ask questions or make comments in the chat box if you'd like. Okay, it doesn't sound that we have any questions at this point so we'll continue with the rest of the webinar. Kim, will you please mute participants' phone lines at this point? All guests have been muted. You can unmute your line by pressing star six. Thanks very much, Kim. Okay, I'll turn it back over to John and Hopper. Just a couple thoughts here on supporting strategies for teacher recruitment and retention. Be thinking of becoming part of some real transition to teaching programs, especially in the STEM fields. I've personally been involved in one of those programs where we recruit mathematicians and scientists and we found funding to pay their tuition while they're in school and to pay their living expenses and in return for that training and licensing they have to teach in a rural school for a three-year period and obviously if they complete that obligation then they don't have to pay anything back. The other thing that we see in some states, especially in the western part of the United States, is providing housing at a lower cost for teachers, especially in the STEM areas. And in one particular district in Colorado, the Building Trades program has built seven houses and those are made available to teachers and administrators for a rent that is considerably lower than if they were renting some of those in town. Another thing to think about is creating a leadership academy for district and school leaders. These would be persons who are already on the job, but the job is changing radically. Many administrators, especially in rural areas, are isolated. They need to keep up with their craft and they need to be involved in networking and collaboration with others and leadership academies provide them the opportunity to do those three. Holder? Yes, and I believe, unless the slide is different for other people, the one I'm looking at is one slide that's advanced. I believe we need to go back to one slide where it's the Supportive Strategies for Teacher Recruitment and Retention. There we are and we just quickly, a couple items to highlight here. State Departments of Education in most states commonly approve teacher education programs in some fashion, so knowing whether or not those programs have some consideration in them for graduates who might then go to rural areas. So that's something State Departments of Ed might consider as they examine the issue of teacher prep and how then, consequently, people who have the students taught in rural areas and so forth and have been informed of what it might mean to teach in a rural school location might be in a better position to be successful as a teacher and of course that, as we all know, is a positive aspect if you hope to retain a teacher. That first year of experience can be so critical and whether or not there is a mentoring program. Training recognizing co-opting teachers or student teachers in rural schools could be something that could be examined and advocated by the State Department of Education. A web-based depository of job announcements for rural public schools and I think a lot of states are doing this, some are using Ed service agency systems, but making job announcements more available because the pool of candidates is a particular issue in rural places. Examples of effective recruitment strategies for rural schools would be useful to make those available. A few years ago I developed a document for the Southeast Regional Laboratory involving superintendents in the states in the Southeast where that document suggested strategies and so forth for how to recruit teachers in hard to serve places. Subject specific mentoring programs are critical in rural areas and of course we know the problem of why they don't exist. Typically if you've got one algebra teacher in a high school it's kind of hard to give a mentoring experience by someone in that same subject so some programs are evolving now over the web and so forth to help subject specific teachers get the kind of mentoring experience. A generic experience will be adequate for a person understanding the school culture, being able to address policies in the school system and so forth, and that is the subject specific content area that is the one that typically is not addressed. Parent and family, community engagement kinds of issues are important, particularly in working in a rural place where you cannot escape the reality as a teacher of having to meet with parents and family members on the street or of course maybe in school, it's a much different experience where teachers are absolutely absorbed as their personal experiences in the community become essential and information that people know about so how to work in an area becomes important. There are others that people can consider but we want to move on to the area of support strategies for policy development and partnership building. This first one of course is one that may exist in states because you now have a coordinator for the REAP program however that person may also be a multiple hat wearer just like the people in the school systems and they may not have much time for that role except for unique times during the year but it's important if it can happen that in the State Department of Ed someone is knowledgeable about the rural school systems and can share information and of course these are most successful where that person has some access to the Chief State School Officer as when I was in West Virginia the state superintendent access because oftentimes people may or may not have access to that position such that the adequate information about rural schools are able to be there. These pilot periods or longer implementation periods for new state ward policies in the rural school systems they with the inadequate personnel are likely to need some longer implementation periods and of course I think good practice regardless of whether the rural or urban is the pilot initiatives first in some small scale way to determine if the impact will be and the consequences will be what's expected. The issue of collecting credible results of a policies impact in rural LEAs we would like to think occurs however what we see most often happening is a study or some document report will be produced that says a particular initiative is being implemented and what the results are but it's seldom that you see any results specific to the rural school systems. So therefore it's a missed opportunity for sharing the successes and the lessons learned so that the rural school systems can have some knowledge base as well as some hope that that practice is intended for them. Customized reporting requirements someone has often mentioned that we need a short form for the small rural LEAs like we do with the IRS for doing our income tax. The reality is they have to fill out the same information whether you have three schools in your school system or whether you have 30 and of course this becomes an issue where there is very limited personnel. The forming partnerships to address mutually beneficial goals of schools and communities is important and I know here John you would you want to share some particular kinds of activities that are possible. Sure and many of our rural communities access to medical care is very difficult and as time moves forward and new policies are implemented in terms of health care it will become even more difficult to staff offices in rural areas and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is submitting or I think it's $17 million and grants are available right now to implement telemedicine in rural areas specifically using schools as the focal point and these telemedicine centers can be used with many insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIPS programs and so forth. But where departments of Ed can really help out is making local districts aware of these grants and educating how these telemedicine centers can be integrated with local insurance benefits and then helping them come up with a local match and there are companies out there that are willing to make the local matches so that's a big one. Working with Cooperative Extension Service especially in some of their primary initiatives, their popcorn economy initiatives, project-based learning initiatives, again in essence this is another set of educators that can help us in our goals and so I would encourage cooperation between the Department of Ed and the Cooperative Extension Service. As the U.S. Department of Ed is in the process of developing core assessments when you look at those RFPs for the Park Consortium and the Smarter Balanced Consortium they are required to create libraries of resources and in those libraries of resources will be sample lesson plans, formative assessments, professional developments on how to teach each of the standards and language arts and mathematics and so it's going to be critically important for departments of Ed to become familiar with those and really encourage local districts to utilize those resources. Now the fields of occupational therapy, speech therapy and some issues with autism can all be dealt with over the Internet and departments of Ed can be familiar with those services. Again it's hard to find therapists to work in sparser is or districts are paying those individuals from port to port when they travel to provide therapy and when it's done over the Internet you only pay for the time and Bowling Green State University has done some interesting research in this area that has found that especially in the areas of speech therapy that this therapy is as effective or more effective over the Internet than it is face to face and it's more efficient in terms of cost. Finally economic development, look at partnering with other departments within state government and other departments within the federal government to assist local districts in their economic development efforts. Again if we can help a local district build capacity then that builds the financial capacity to support educational efforts. I think, are we going to break for some questions at this point? I think we're going to finish the rest of the material before we break for questions. Okay, that sounds good. I wanted to mention one thing about the economic development for rural. Of course there's a certain reality here that in many cases may not be reinforced by the concept of what ed reform is. I recall back when I served in the state superintendent's office and served on a state rural development council, the fact of the matter was the only time public school education was ever brought up was when I would bring it up because people in rural areas know it's a better investment of scarce resources to invest in sewer systems and roads and healthcare and those kinds of things than it is to invest in young people that are going to be leaving the rural area. So there's a reality therapy here that we need to be aware of that this partnership of how public schools not being excluded from the real world concerns of local places that relate to bettering communities. And the reason I bring that up is because in too many places, public education has in fact become a separate entity. And John, as you mentioned earlier about the extension service, if you talk to people in the extension service, they will quickly tell you that they've almost been excluded from the public school curriculum because of the, in some measures, no child left behind law or state accountability measures where everything that is to be offered in a public school has to be tied to the state accountability standards. So they have to go and revise all of their programs and so forth in order to get into a public school. I simply bring this up to say that in a state department of education role, being a partner with other agencies in the state helps particularly in also advocating public schools as a solution to the issues of economic development and workforce development in rural places. And it's important to note that because in too many places, it's being considered not a benefit. Simply graduating students from a public school system and indicating that there may have been a good education experience is in and of itself not convincing to people that they need to invest in public education. Particularly if it is only providing evidence of how students end up having to leave the area. So it's a win-win relationship of schools working together, but that has to start at the state level as well of working with other state agencies. Strategies for increasing economies of scale are important as we move to the next one, Caitlin. And this is because of the limited capacity that the school systems have. There's a whole host of things that can be done by the State Department of Education in thinking about how they might support the increasing economies of scale. Let's see, did our slide move to the next one? The slide we're on is the supporting strategies for increasing economies of scale capacity. Yeah, I advanced it to that one. Okay, well, mine hasn't moved yet. There's not real technologies moving slower out here. I'm a victim of reality. So some of the things that can be supported from a State Department of Ed perspective. And again, we're focusing particularly here on the systems of educational service agencies, whether it's RISAs in West Virginia or Cooperatives in Kentucky or centers or some other kind of configuration. And there again, these don't exist in all states, but they do exist in 45 states. So the issue of how we're trying to increase economies of scale as a support structure and then how State Departments, in fact, link with these in ways that it helps deal with some of the capacity limitations of rural school systems is important. For example, the vetting of programs and products is an important one. And John, I think you wanted to say a little something about this one. Right, there are just a ton of people producing online programs. And quite frankly, in many rural areas, rural districts are looking to online programs to maintain a variety of classes or for credit recovery, those kinds of things. But what I can share with you, that much of it is of low quality. And these programs need to be vetted for rigor. They need to be vetted for accuracy. They need to be vetted to see that there are the kinds of things that students will become engaged in. And the programs need to have the ability to hold students accountable, not only throughout the course, in terms of formative assessments and so forth, but in terms of an end product. And so it would really help many rural districts if we were to vet those programs for them and let them know what's out there. And then the synthesis and use of student data at the school level. Our teachers are trained to teach and they're just not data experts. And we need people in the state departments who can explain the use of data. And it must be in terms that are useful for teachers and administrators. And it also has to be done in a way that it can be useful to their clients also. And so finding individuals within the state department that can do that is critical to building capacity at the local level. Over. Another issue with that particular one is the issue that unless the information is presented to the school system and particularly at the school level in a way that a principal and teachers can use it, it's very unlikely that the teachers themselves are going to have time to disaggregate data and present it in ways that we think will be most useful for them. It's simply a timing issue. And in some cases, John, I know you mentioned it's an expertise issue as well. So the whole issue of data use we know is important. There's a belief, of course, that for teachers to take ownership in the problems or deficiencies of a school that they have to be using data. But the point is somebody else has to be crunching the data, putting it into infographics or presentations that teachers can look at and make some determinations. Not all the other assorted kinds of work that typically goes along with data use. Some of the other items, of course, in the economies of scale that's mentioned, you see in the list, the administrative support for new initiatives, trying to get a new initiative off the ground in a real place where there's very little support for planning and so forth can be especially a problem. So an education service agency or some kind of support function on a regional basis where there's the planning effort and the database decision making or a host of other things that you see we've listed that can particularly be available, including grants management. Some school systems do not go after grants and I guess we see a certain criticism here that there's been grant opportunities but rural school systems do not pursue them. In many cases, it's because it's simply looking around in your district and wondering who's the volunteer that has the time to do that and then there's the issue of managing the grant itself and so some support service has to be available in an administrative capacity for that to happen and also reporting services. So in many cases, that service agency might perform some of these that give school systems as a group capacity to be successful with grants. Cost savings and quality purchasing, we know that's occurring in a lot of places and it's absolutely essential in saving money for school systems and consequently making some instructional materials and equipment available that would not be available if it was an individual school system trying to do this. So states can encourage this. Also the encouraging of course offerings on a regional basis. In some places, career and technical education is offered on a regional basis in some places around the country. Dual enrollment, AP, all those kinds of course offerings that too often do not exist in an individual small rural school or school system can be encouraged as we think about that in a state kind of way. Professional development opportunities for educators, of course, are not possible particularly in the subject specific areas where there's small numbers of teachers. So again, thinking about how leveraging a regional approach of some fashion enables that to happen and the concept of a customized technical assistance to educators, whether it's a teacher content coach or other kinds of support. As you notice, most of these we're talking about end up being support kind of people that are available or can be available on a regional basis if school systems will collaborate, share resources, perhaps invest some of their dollars, gives them some opportunity to have a support of personnel or a particular service that they could not have on their own. And one of the items that we see that's evolving around the country is the support of the grow your own programs. The candidate pool for teachers particularly in math and science in some other areas is often small. It can be in special education and in foreign languages. And so the issue of how those kind of programs might be supported at a state level where school systems come together, create some kind of an approach to grow their own particular personnel that are of the caliber that's needed to change schools today is very important because it's well known if someone is from somewhere else, they are likely to go somewhere else. So recruiting somebody into an area from somewhere else is a much less effective strategy than finding people that are committed to the area who are the right kind of people who can be given the support to learn the qualities for implementing key reform initiatives, being objective about making decisions and working with people in the community are much more likely to be a successful school person who stays. Technology access, whether it's Internet or technology services, this was addressed in the first webinar how simply indicating to educators in the rural school systems that all this information is available on the Internet is not viable if they don't have access to a quality Internet service provider and or if they're spending almost all of their money simply to get access to the Internet then there's no dollars left for purchasing technology services. So some of these issues can be addressed on a regional basis, again in the concept of an economy of scale by using an ed service agency to make this possible. Program evaluation services, of course, are almost non-existent yet now one of the most essential services that's needed for people to implement programs that get results and that's where we all are today. Today is about gone although, as John mentioned, we have so many providers of so-called successful programs coming to the school superintendent door or principals door saying we have the answer to your problem, the issue of vetting those in a way that there is evidence that programs work in the context of rural schools is becoming more critical all the time. So program evaluation services are important for implementing best practices for students but they're also important related to that next item of grant seeking that without evidence of programs, and this is the case in states and we know in certain states there is very little information available about the success of their rural schools. So on the one hand on a national basis to compete for a grant on a national scale to have no information collected with credible evidence of the success of the program makes it very difficult to compete for grant money without worthwhile and credible evaluation kinds of information. The grant seeking services in many cases the ed service agencies will provide someone who helps people know about grants and so forth but as John and I have talked in the past and in fact a colleague and I offered a workshop at the National Rural Vet Association a few years ago on how to more successfully organize and develop grants and what we found to our surprise the people in the workshop were people wanting to in essence provide the second income kind of situation for themselves. The reality is most rural places don't have people and so they need someone to help write the grants it's not just enough to give them the information that there's a grant opportunity. Other things listed there of course are school improvement consultant services. A regional approach can help give capacity because they can draw on the expertise that exists in the region and if superintendents and principals and others will share expertise that way some of the best effective consulting services come from the very people in the region who have been successful at implementing a program that the state wants implemented. So it can be an effective strategy as well as of course if there are consultants needed from outside the area usually an agency that is regional in nature such as a co-op or a resa or something of that fashion has more resources to bring someone from the outside that the educators may need to hear from that otherwise they would not and certainly as we see budgets dwindling for travel expenses there's less hope that teachers and administrators can be going to conferences far away. Statewide contracts this can be common in some states where to leverage the most economy of scale out of the available resources that exist a statewide contract can be released such that certain education services or products are available to schools that they obviously would not be able to afford otherwise and obviously students will not get the services or teachers will not get the certain kind of product that they need to best help students in the rural areas. States supported common core of services we see this occurring around the country where as states are looking to make ed service agencies a better partner yet they may not fund them very much and of course we're talking to people I know in this region where in some cases the ed service agency is almost totally entrepreneurial they exist only because they're able to either win a grant or get the resources available from their member school districts but in some states if the state has a certain support system in place that focuses on a common core of services being provided by these regional assistance agencies then this is a better strategy for supporting implementation of ed reform initiatives in the local school systems but because of limited dollars then the issue of a common core becomes important. What is the essential common core services that the state might support that ensures that the school systems and consequently the teachers and ultimately students receive some essential kind of support services for the education. And lastly a state supported center of excellence among ed service agencies we see in places where particularly with limited dollars the old strategy of everyone being equitable in services provided is not the same as saying dollars are very limited therefore we're going to have one entity in a state that's going to be with expertise in a particular area whether it's math or reading or whatever it might be. So the notion of having a concentrated expertise in one part of the regional education system that it then becomes in essence a support system for other ed service agencies in the state for which all of them tap that particular expertise to serve their particular member districts. Obviously not as good as each person having or each ed service agency having all of the services needed but the reality of tight economics means we're trying to find ways where sharing the limited resources and the expertise gets a greater impact at the school level. Okay, thank you very much. It's touched on most of all the things that we had planned. Great, thank you. Please unmute everyone's lines. All guests have been unmuted. Thank you. We'd like to invite you now to make comments or ask questions about what you've heard today or how the ideas might relate to your own state context. So feel free to jump in. Okay. Well the chat box continues to be open so if you'd like to make a comment there. Susan Arred from Kentucky writes in the chat box that the presentation reaffirmed Kentucky's approaches. They've relied heavily on educational cooperatives and collaboration. That really does align with what you all talked about today. Okay, so feel free to jump in if anything occurs to you and again the chat box remains open. Caitlin, this is John. One of the things that people may think about is they need to seriously get involved in these broadband issues. The FCC right now is considering changing rules on e-rate and raising money and the plus to that is is that there'll be a bigger tube going into every school in the nation. But many services are not available through technology because rural schools especially just don't have the bandwidth. The other issue that takes place in some of the states that are represented here is the whole idea of deregulation where the big telephone companies the whole system deregulated so that they can use market value in their pricing or even the offering of services which means that either services may not be there in rural areas or the expense will be a greater. So it would be who it's all to get involved in those issues if we see technology as one of our solutions. Yeah, that's a great point, John. None of curiosity. This is Hobart. Does the COMP Center facilitate or is it the position to facilitate what might be occurring in each of these states in rural school systems regarding best practices? Can the COMP Center facilitate in any way the sharing of those among these four states? We can't directly do the sharing but we can help state departments plan for and implement that kind of sharing. Absolutely. Okay, so for example, if some of the REAP program schools where they're receiving the federal REAP money if it was known what was successful in some of those places there might be a way to get that shared among the region in the four states. Absolutely. Any other comments or questions? So if we prepare to close this webinar, I'm going to sum up real briefly what we've heard today from talking with Hobart and John. A key principle for one is that support for rural districts is best when it's customized to accommodate rural strengths and constraints and is responsive to context, which is something that Susan pointed out earlier today in the chat box. The second theme is that SEA can use very wide range of support strategies to help rural districts with a variety of efforts, including implementing practices, enhancing fiscal capacity, recruiting and retaining teachers, developing policies and partnerships and achieving some economies of scale. And then finally some important support that we heard about today include regional education service agencies, rural targeted resources and programs, designated incredible advocates for rural districts at the state level, and deliberate inclusion of and engagement with rural district and state efforts. We're going to follow up today's discussion with a third webinar scheduled for Friday, August 30th at 3 o'clock. We'll feature Kai Schaft, who's director of the Center on Rural Education and Communities. And the webinar will focus on the socio-cultural dynamics of rural places, how they might manifest in rural districts and in interactions with the State Department. And then finally how states might address any resistance to state initiatives that they encounter from rural districts. We'll be sending you an email invitation shortly. We'd like to invite you to take a very short survey about this webinar. I've added a link to the chat box. You can access it just by clicking on it. And later we'll send you an email with a request for some more information about these events. We take your feedback seriously and your feedback helps us improve these events. And as always, we invite you to connect with us in any way that you'd like. We have a number of mechanisms where you can reach us. On the web is via Twitter, YouTube, and of course the old-fashioned way, you can give us a call. Your goals are ours in lots of ways and these services are intended to help you achieve them. So thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you, Hope, for sharing your insights with us. And we'll be in touch soon with an invitation to the third webinar. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you.


Perfect. So hello everybody. I'm super excited to be here today as the fun and games part of I Love Free Software Day and the Free Software Foundation Europe's event. And this was super awesome that we got reached out to about this because we've been working on this open source game for a few years at this point. And we really like showing it off to people and having people appreciate it. And so super excited for this today. And I'll try to go through my talk part as quickly as possible just because I want to get right into the game side of it. And actually interestingly enough, we have our 0.12 release coming out this Saturday. And so we have a stress test that we're doing today. It started 12 minutes ago. And so we have quite a few people on the server right now trying to break it. But we'll go into details a little bit about that in just a minute. So to get started a little bit about myself, my name is Forrest. I'm a student in Ottawa at Carleton University. I'm in my fourth year, but I've been at the university for like seven years. And so it's been a while, but I'm also a GitHub campus expert. And so this is a program where I took some courses that helped me learn more about like public speaking and running events and stuff like this. I'm a really big advocate of open source. And I'm also a Rustation. And I see some stuff here in chat. We got some Rust love going on. So that's very cool. And I also just want to mention I didn't know what this event would be too much about beforehand, but I was taking a look through some of the chat earlier. And it's super awesome to see the enthusiasm for a lot of different projects, a lot of different open source, a lot of different free software. And so I definitely want to say like, free software is awesome. I mean, that's why we're here today. And a little bit about how I got into it. Like when I was young, my dad taught me a lot about open source. And to me, it was just the way that software should be. We had Linux at home on our dial up internet. My dad would spend all night downloading the newest release of Ubuntu every once in a while. And so for myself, open source development and open source tooling and open source software was always a core way that software was meant to be designed. And I had like a stint where in the university, I would I went back to Windows and I thought that Windows was the only way forward. And I loved all my visual studios and everything. But now I'm back in Linux. I can safely say I'm very much on the other side of everything free. So a little bit about Valorant. It's an open source game. It's made in Rust, and I'll dive into Rust a little bit in this talk. And it's inspired by a game called Cube World that came out in about 2012. And the idea behind Cube World is this game where you can explore this voxel world. And it's focusing a lot on like RPG elements. It focuses a lot on combat. Whereas it does look a lot like Minecraft, both Valorant and Cube World have this voxel feel of just squares that represent, or cubes that represent everything. However, in Minecraft it's a lot more about like the core loop is you building, you mining. Whereas in Valorant it's a lot more about combat and a lot of systems that we've built around this. And so in Valorant, we have a lot that you can do right now. And I don't have as many pictures as I would hope, or as I hope to have just to kind of show some stuff off. But there's a lot of different people working on a lot of different systems in the game. And so there's one thing I wanted to echo from the previous talk that I agree with so much is the idea that when we are building software in the open, we have the leisure to build whatever features we want for however long we want because we want to build those features. Not because we have to, because it's on some task list or because we're running out of funding or we need to have it ready by a certain point. And because of this, we've had a lot of people come in and do amazing things like our world generation system uses very novel erosion systems to build the world, which is why we can have mountains that look so realistic. And sort of testament to this is the fact that all of the rivers in Valorant always flow downhill and into a big basin. And you can't see this in Minecraft and other other procedural generated games similar to this just because without simulating erosion, you can't have, or rather, there's not a trivial known way to have rivers look like this. And so this system was something that someone worked on for such a long time and eventually when the code was merged, it was like a 30,000 line diff to get the erosion in. So super cool stuff there. And we've been able to really explore a lot of like some different stuff with what the game can contain them. A little bit of an overview of Rust. And so I mean, everybody always has their favorite languages. And we love being one of the sort of flagship projects of Game Development Rust, because we can really make use of a lot of features that the language gives that we can say, or we can quite conclusively say, we wouldn't have been able to do this, like make this project as well in different languages. And so there's a lot of different reasons that it comes down to. But since this isn't a Rust talk, what I'll leave it at is like the idea that the compiler is really what helps us out with a lot of things. And so if you know very much about Rust, the big promise is memory safety. And what this means is that when you're doing stuff with data, whether it be in just a single thread or on multiple threads or just in any way, you can know that you're not overwriting data, you can know that you're not going to make a mistake that causes your program to crash in a lot of ways that we've seen in C++ in the past. And Rust is fast, it's compiled. So it's about the same speed as C++. But we also get the saying in Rust, this idea of fighting the compiler. And so we're not able to compile our code until all the rules are followed. But then the second, like we have a second saying, if it compiles, it probably works. And what this means is that we can have an idea of a contract with the compiler, where as long as we can get our code to compile, it'll probably work with the code that other people write, regardless of where it is on the project. And so this comes into play a lot in game development, just because there's so many unique systems working all simultaneously to make the game happen 60 frames, 60 times per second on a client on a server. And having this guarantee that the compiler will watch out for us helps alleviate a lot of pains when we go to merge code from people every week, and when we have new developers come on. And so let me see here. A few other details that I wanted to mention, just because there are questions from the last talk. We have, so our game is like an MMO in a way, where we can have a server with a lot of players playing on it. At the peak we've had our last release party, it was 183 players on the server at the same time. And so for our servers, I'll show you some graphs in a little bit, but the last presenter talked about the idea of not taking up too much bandwidth, and you're doing message passing. Unfortunately, in Valorant, we don't have that luxury, and we're sending out like six megabytes of data per second consistently, like with like 30 players on a server. So a lot to improve there. I mean, even during our release parties, we come close to like half a gig of it out per second. And so a lot of work to do there. Those are pretty big numbers if you've heard of them. Now, to finance our project, we do donations through Open Collective. And so this has been an opportunity for people to subscribe monthly and donate $5 or $10. And we make all of our finances public. And so I have like a spreadsheet that shows off all of the costs of everything. So anybody can go take a look at how much we spend on servers. I was really inspired by Lee Chess's document that they have on all their server prices. They pay like $100,000 per year or something like that. We pay like $1,000 or something, maybe a bit more. But we'd love to get up to that level eventually. And then also another thing, a dimension of copyright. Copyright for open source products is hard. We're at a point where some people have started taking the game that we have that's licensed in the GPL3 and taken the code, rebuilt it, changed it without making the source open, which is something you have to do with the GPL3, and then selling it off for what like, not selling it, but using it as trying to make it look like their company or whatever is doing more than they're doing it. So no fun stuff there. We're working on making a nonprofit that we can use to hopefully circumvent a lot of these issues and navigate the legal world a little bit better. Now, I think I've about five minutes left. And I want to talk a little bit about community. And so community is why a lot of us are here today. Free Software is awesome, being able to just install something on your computer and have it work and do everything nicely. But if you've ever kind of went below the surface and been interested in how a project is working, you're much more likely to be able to find out how a project's heartbeat is doing in an open source project than with some proprietary closed source software. And so for us, with Valoran, we're here because we wanted to make a game that reminded us, or that was inspired by Cube World. We wanted to find all the things that we liked about the game, being able to play co-op, being able to play in this box world, having cute characters, and really take it to the next level where we can have more players on the server, do really amazing things with the tech that we have access to, and just play with these ideas of design that maybe we want to see going a bit of a different direction. And so for Valoran, we are a team of over the last three years, since the product started in 2018, over 200 contributors, and probably more. I haven't actually sat down and looked at how to have people come in and say, I've done this work, I've done this work. Instead, I just looked at the get commits we've had, over 200 people contribute to the project on our main repo in GitLab. But I do also want to note, we have a lot of people behind the scenes that might not have made it into this list. And so, for example, we have a lot of really amazing artists and composers and designers, and this is made up of students from all around the world, professionals, people who do research and are going for their masters and PhD, and it's really awesome being able to work with these people from different time zones, different cultures, just different upbringings. And one thing that I think we do really, really well is show off the work that people are doing. And so I've been writing or editing this dev blog for over 150 weeks in a row. And so when I started on the project at the beginning of 2019, I saw that the blog wasn't really too active and I decided I wanted to do it every single week. And so I've used this as an opportunity to go and show off who has been contributing to the game in the past week to see what types of stuff has been happening from the developer standpoint. And so developers can write sections about what they've been working on. It will get included in here. Here's some issues about world gen, some entity config, so describing how different characters in the game and PCs in the game can work. And anybody can go and take a look at all of these really awesome things that describe a lot of lower systems in the game and see that there is a massive heartbeat to this project. And so I think that this is great for showing off where the project is, but it's also really great for encouraging new contributors who have come through the project to work on a lot of different things. And so I've got one minute left. Let's speed through this. And so we're going to be doing a, not really a play test, just kind of everybody hop on the server. And I've been asked like, what kind of thing, or we were thinking, we don't have that much of a tutorial. And so what would I recommend to players who are just trying the game for the first time? And so first off is just explore. There's a lot to do in like you just kind of go look around, view the map, see what's going on. One of the really interesting things that one of the developers suggested is on the assumption that there are a lot of new players coming in, they might be able to just manage a dungeon through sheer numbers.  And so to get started, we're going to be downloading the game from Valorant.net. Then you can create an account on this page as well. And then once you boot the game, you can join the main server. And so pretty nice and easy steps. I do want to have a little bit of a call to action here where the amount of players that we have online. So I just restarted the server right here so that we could have our more beefy server for the stress test. If we take a look at the game server right now, so this is Grafana. You can go check it out yourself, grafana.volorant.net. We can see right now that there's like 60 players online. And this is pretty solid for a stress test. We can also see like the server is doing all right, networking. Oh yeah, as I was saying, like right now, 10 megabytes per second, not so great. We have like a server in Hetzner right now that is like a 48 core server that we normally we run on like a 16 core server. But yeah, for right now, we beef it up just in case just in case we bring in too many people. So we're at the end of my talk here. So thank you so much for inviting me to talk here. This is all really awesome to have so many people interested in free software and free games. And so I hope to see you on the server and I do have I won't be on too too much myself. I'll be there in chat, but I'm teaching a tutorial at my university in just a few minutes. So I won't be there too much myself. But yeah, thank you very much. Thank you for the talk and the quick intro into the game. Yeah, we will let you go and do a tutorial. Yeah, tutorial. I'm sorry. I think Marcel is also here. So if there may be any questions, he might also be able to help. Yeah, so Marcel is one of the other get our Valorant developers. And so maybe Xmax or Xmax their username, if he could unmute and then maybe answer some questions, would that be all right? Hello. Yep, I didn't want to interrupt you, but I can also answer questions if you come up with some trip. Okay, very nice. Yeah, thank you for the talk. I don't know if there are any questions from the chat or the project, then it would be a great opportunity to do them now. I do have some what are the like how many people are usually on the server? Any question? People are on the server? Usually, it really depends during the time of the day. So we are currently quite happy that we have at least like 10 people playing it all the time. But during the evening hours, it often goes up to 30 or 40 people. Oh, very solid. Yeah, we were quite happy the first time we had like at least one person on the server for over 24 hours. It was a long way to get it that far. Oh my gosh. Okay, thank you very much. There's another question, like two others. And then I would say we are heading straight into the gaming part because otherwise the time will run out. How do you lower the graphics resolution? Okay, let me find out. So if you press escape in the settings, there's a graphic settings. And if you scroll down, there's a resolution button. You can set it to some preset resolutions. People are saying they are using flat pack. Maybe that's the problem. I'm not, it's a bit difficult to maintain different packaging and versioning, especially under Linux. That's why we mostly recommend to install airshipper. And this is our own launcher. And with airshipper, then you will get the most current Veloan update. I think it's also possible to use airshipper via flat pack that would work. But if you install airshipper directly, if you install the airshipper, if you install the Veloan flat pack, it might cause problems. Sorry for that. And last one. How do you coordinate open collaborative game design? So we have a Discord. I don't know if Angel has shared our Discord server, but maybe this is also something we could share here. Let me quickly get an invite link. I know Discord is not the standard for free software. And we also had a big discussion about that. But it worked quite well for us. So we stayed with that. And we have multiple talents regarding where you're most interested in. So for arts, for coding, for network coding, word generation coding, etc. Thank you very much. I will stop the recording now.  And yeah, thank you for providing some answers there. And thank you for staying on and helping us with technical issues. No problem. Thank you for the interesting event today. Yeah, also thank you to all the other speakers that have been here today. And thank you to all of you who joined our small event today.