Ok, hi, I'm Jarkus Akkinen. I'm a software engineer at Profi, and I used to work for Intel for quite many years, mainly on SCX and all kinds of TE stuff, and I'm also like the maintainer for SCX part of the X863, so I thought that it's now a good time to give like some kind of status of how that work is. It's going since it got into upstream during the Covid period. So, and SCX is different kind of beast than SMP and TDX, because they are like virtual machine based TEs, whereas SCX is kind of in the league of its own, because it's just based on a virtual address range. So what is confinals and computing? I found this article that had like really good definition for it. First of all, it's about isolation, so that anything outside the container cannot tamper or read the data, and on the other hand it needs like to be attested by a third party, usually like the CPU vendor in this case. In SCX case Intel, and how things have been going on is that like in the 90s when web game we had confidential computing because you were running your own server, and when we moved to the cloud we kind of moved away from confidential computing. So, and especially like in the public sector and in government sector and in military, you still need to actually build secure unclays by building like separate data centers because of some requirements to process some data. So I think the confidence of computing was like born from this need that we need something in between building like separate physical data center and putting things straight to the cloud. It's of course not as secure as physical security, but it's still a lot more secure than just trusting to the cloud vendor, and so in lots of cases you could consider it instead of having actual physical security. In SCX, you basically define an address range for the enclave or the container, and it has its own database for page permissions and stuff like that called enclave page cache map. So because confidential container cannot trust the host in anything, so it actually has to have its own database of permissions. With like normal PT permissions you can of course restrict further, but you cannot like any way extend the permissions defined by the enclave page cache map. And during the booth, the firmware research like ranges of physical memory for enclave pages and these pages are encrypted when they leave from the CPU package. And also CPU does access checks for those pages so that if you are inside the enclave, unless you are inside the enclave, you cannot say CPU will draw like general protection fault exception if you try to access any of those pages. And there an enclave has like one page called SCX enclave control structure that defines like all the properties of the enclave such as its address range, it's like measurement checksum and stuff like that. And it has a threat control structure basis that defines the entry points where you can enter the enclave by using eenter instruction. But only through TCS entry points you can enter to the enclave mode and before you can enter the data is measured and the final checksum is used as part of the identity when the enclave is running. And then for East Asia space there's also this like a separate stack called state safe area that is used to store the register state when the CPU leaves from the enclave. And anything basically that can cause a far jump out of enclave, any instruction such as syscall or anything causes a synchronous exit from it and the state is stored to the state safe area. And so in that enclave is like basically cannot do anything except calculations and for anything that requires like a syscall or anything it has to consult like the host operating system. This picture tries to describe the current attestation seam. There's an instruction called e-report that basically creates a cryptographic report with CMAC checksum of the enclave properties. And then the application can ask Intel site quoting enclave to sign that with the attestation key, which is included inside the quoting enclave and is changed for each quoting enclave release. And the quoting enclave asks the provision certificate enclave to sign the code with the provision certificate key that is generated from the fused seed in each CPU. And Intel has their cloud service which has certificate for every single CPU for the PCK so that way we can like build full chain from the enclave to the CPU so that you can prove that application is running inside like genuine Intel CPU. The reason for splitting the provision certificate enclave and quoting enclave to a separate enclave is that you want like a minimum other surface for the functionality that uses the fused data. So if the attestation key is compromised we can just always like revoke and Intel can release like a new quoting enclave. So here's the sequence in practice these all like explode the bunch of protoboof messages. So first thing that application does is to ask the attestation key ID for ECDSA key because the ASMD daemon does have like a super for multiple quote key algorithms but at the moment only ECDSA is used. And then it asks for target info for the quoting enclave which is kind of cryptographic, it cryptographically identifies the quoting enclave and application enclave can pass this to e-report. So that the e-report will assign the base on this target info will assign the report with the report key of the quoting enclave and then the application can pass the attestation key ID and the report back to the quoting enclave and then the quoting enclave can de-group the report with its, sorry, check the, it's not encrypted, it's signed, so check the signal of the report with its report key. So the PCK is, by practical means generated from these two last keys that are generated from fused CPU data and various like enclave specific properties. So only PCE can generate the PCK that is valid for the certificate provided by Intel and this report key is used in that e-report instruction CPU will find the report key for the quoting enclave based on the target info and also internally the quoting enclave will use this e-kit key instruction to check the CMAC, check some. My work with SCX started with Skylake and it was like a complete failure because at Skylake time SCX was like, it didn't have the current attestation scheme yet. It had basically like EBIT based attestation scheme where Intel, if you wanted to build an enclave, Intel had to license, you would have to license, buy a license from Intel for each enclave and it wasn't like a great success in open source community. So Gemini Lake was the first platform that changed how the whole thing work and provide this flexible launch control so that you can have basically like sign your own enclaves and that was also the initiation for the patch series. It took like quite a long time over three years but finally in the end of year 2020 we got the whole thing in the upstream and as of today, even though we gave a lot of time for competitors to catch up, it's still like the only, only confidential computing technology that is fully in the mainline killer, both the guest and host side. Well, it doesn't have guest and host side because it's not based on the VM concept in the first place. And this is the post upstream timeline. The first release was in February 2021 and in June 2021 we got KVM and Numa support in the one profit of using SCX compared both to S&P and TDX is that because it's not based on the VM concept, you can use it also in the nested virtualization so it gives some flexibility in that sense. And in 5.17 the machine check exception recovery was included so that Poissonnet pages are removed from the usable pages for enclaves and also the enclaves using those Poissonnet pages are killed and in 6.0 we will have life for the first sign support for some kind of accounting because internally their SCX has capability to swap enclaves pages to the regular memory and we use like a private shared memory file for that but so far it hasn't been accounted for the processes so in 6.0 we will have the pages reserved from the shared memory for private shared memory will be accounted for the memory control group where the process lives and also 6.0 will have support for SCX2 or enclave dynamic memory management which basically means that before 6.0 you could add pages to the enclave before initialization but there was no capability to dynamically allocate pages after that so it has been kind of a bit limited so far for workloads and the only future feature that I am aware of currently is this AEX Notify which is basically a countermeasure for this vector of attacks where you reprogram the APIC type. It is a programmer to generate inputs and time how long the instruction stage and so you can predict what the enclave is calculating but more on that later so these are the eye-yachtles that you use before you run the enclave I actually started to think that when I saw the SMP presentation that maybe once the SMP is in the upstream and TDX is in the upstream we could possibly have like a common interface just for the part that builds the initial digest for whatever confidential workload we will have the create creates like the SCX enclave control structure internally and the add pages basically like add pages to the enclave memory space and updates to digest and init like puts finalize the digest and after that you can enter to the enclave so it's pretty similar to other technologies and the feature that comes in 6.0 is called in the SDM is called SCX2 but in some other context it's called enclave dynamic memory management and it provides tools to add new pages, change the page type of existing pages and such and so forth so for addition there's this privilege instruction code in CLS that is used for all privilege stuff and it has a leaf function called EAUC that basically adds a new page to the enclave and in the current implementation that's if you dereference an address inside enclave address space that doesn't have a page table entry the page fold handler will call EAUC for you so we don't have like a separate yoctel for that and so for each of these yoctels and EAUC how the game goes is that the enclave they put like a request on and the enclave have to acknowledge the request for each page with either E-accept or E-accept copy instruction so that host cannot make modifications for even like a single page without enclave acknowledging that for E-accept like let's say an EAUC case if the kernel calls EAUC and the enclave calls E-accept the page will receive right permissions with the E-accept copy the enclave will provide some other page inside enclave that will copy the data to the augmented page and also with E-accept copy you can specify permissions for that page for permissions we have there's a privilege instruction for restricting permissions and then there is which is missing from this there is this extent instruction that the enclave can call the extent of permissions the reason why there's not simply like one instruction for like both restricting and extending the permissions is that extending does not extend extending kind of implicit invalidates all the TLB entries for restricting that could kind of leave like invalid TLB entries that would lead to the security issue so when you restrict permissions you have to do first use the E-block instruction which basically denies creating new TLB entries to PTE E-track instruction that kind of starts a new this suit down sequence so that it creates a counter for existing hardware dressed inside the enclave and increases this epoch number the pages that have the E-block called have like the previous epoch number and each time a thread leaves from the CPU this counter is decreased so once the counter is zero we know that it's safe to modify the page property such as restricting permissions or changing the page type so how we do it in the kernel is that we first call E-block and then we call E-track and then we just try if the pages might or the thread might have left by themselves before calling like let's say EMOTP EMOTP will retune like error code if there's still threads from the previous epoch in the CPU and at that point we like put like API exception to those cores that have still like threads from previous epochs and then we retweet the modification call but yeah for all of this basically if let's say that you want to change the page type from like normal data page to TCS so you want to make like a new hardware thread entry point to the enclave in the E-appset call you specify the page type that you accept the host to provide for you and if it doesn't match to the exception that will cause like a CPU exception so that's why we need this protocol where all of these changes done by the kernel to the enclave are for each page need to be accepted with either E-accept copy or E-accept, the difference between E-accept and E-accept copy is that for E-accept you always assume implicit like read write permissions and you don't get to copy any data for E-accept copy is different in the sense that you can specify the permissions and copy the data when you augment a new page immediately so you don't have to go like through the steps that pages first with the read write permissions and then with the legit permissions. KVM support is based on party discerning, their support to do also over subscribing for virtualization but it's we come in the conclusion that doing over subscribing is just too complicated to be useful so basically what this SCX VEPC device allows is to partition the available EPC between the virtual machines and later on we added this one Yachtal for QMU which basically like keeps the allocations but resets their states for when something bad happens in the QMU, this was like Paolo's record last spring so that they don't have to, if something goes wrong so they don't have to like close the file and open it again so it's just like a performance improvement so there are three ways to execute the enclave, the first one is simply use the ENTER instruction but for which you specify first of all the TCS entry and to easy actually specify this asynchronous exit point that will be used when let's say when you have like a page fault the CPU will put the in enclave resister state to the save state area of the TCS and then it will like generate register states that IRAT will eventually return to the address specified by ECX and that's called asynchronous exit point but there's also when you just want to leave the enclave there's also E-exit instructions and from asynchronous exit point if you want to return to the same location where you started you just call E-resume because when the thread exits through a synchronously the CPU fill the registers already so that the EBX to the TCS entry point so that it will basically fill the registers so that E-resume will work so that EBX will contain the TCS entry point and ECX will contain the asynchronous exit point so the problem with this approach is of course that let's say that you do a syscall you need the only way to catch such things like with this raw instruction is to have a signal handler and that might be like in other use or and that cannot be like you cannot have like a signal handler for each thread or it's not designed for anything like that and there's like million different reasons why there's like a bunch of instruction and mostly like instruction that can cause jump out of the enclave address space that will with the default kernel behavior basically go 6F signal to happen and so for that reason we created a VDS so that will wrap all these E-enter instructions stuff like that and when like let's say you get undefined instruction exception it will fill this data structure called SCX enclave run that will contain all the exception information and it's almost like it's not a function call but for the most part it kind of is compatible with the sysveh calling convention and I will show that the data structure so it will contain the TCS entry point what you know in the case of AEX this function will either contain E-enter or E-resume based on how you entered last time the enclave or if you exit from the enclave it will contain that and then there is basically just standard exception information and specifically for I haven't used this part a lot but specifically for Intel SDK we also provided a way to provide a callback handler but usually you just don't use this last part but instead just take your next action based on what this returns so the callback is completely optional so the way you use it is that you call the VDS also for the TCS entry point and then you just if you get undefined instruction you execute that syscall for the enclave and such and so forth so with this infrastructure you in poor purpose use this let's say a syscall instruction inside the enclave and let the exception happen and with this information you know exactly what happened inside the enclave and then the OS can work as a delegate or the runtime can work as a delegate for the enclave so the problem with the default E-resume behavior is that if you have like AEX handler that is based on E-resume you can fairly accurately time how long its instruction takes inside the enclave by adjusting the AP IC timer rate like a suitable value so the counter measure is a new attribute for enclaves has been added called AEX notify and it changes the E-resume instruction behavior in a way that instead of popping the previous register state from safe state area and returning where the execution bus it will go to the entry point specified inside TCS and then the enclave can use this e-dick cssa instruction return back to the point where the execution bus so that kind of counter measures the timing attacks because then you are just looping in the entry point you don't get like any information but it's going on inside the enclave by that method okay well these are the run times that I'm aware there's probably like a bunch of others but the first is Intel SCX SDK which is very archaic it's there because AM SD and PC CS is this daemon that runs the quoting enclave and provision certification enclave and PC CS is just this daemon that downloads certificate for this provision certification keys from Intel cloud it's it's it's very programmer unfriendly you don't want to use for anything and but I think like the real options are the graphene which is basically like a syscall theme so you can put like any like normal linux executable and it will it will provide the necessary syscall theme that when the when the program calls a syscall it will execute the syscall for the program nrks that we are developing as profian is basically like container or microservice run time based on webassembly so you can compile basically any like program in any language like like even in Java or Python to a webassembly program and host it with nrks and in addition to the SCX it also supports AMD SMP and in future we are planning to add support for ARM v9 realms and possibly some other hardware back as they come but but at the moment at the moment our main targets are SCX and SMP for SMP we basically create like minimal VM to host webassembly run times without any specific operating system oh where is that there should be the one slide is missing but now I switch to Roman he will show the nrks demo thank you Jarko hi my name is Roman I'm an employee at profian and one of the core developers of the nrks open source project I've previously worked at docker and I've also had spent some time building large scale distributed lp1 networks yeah so today I would like to show you how we utilize sgx at the station to secure workload communications and establish trust relationship and just making tees simpler to use for application developers so I'm going to use a demo server which is actually just a web app and it lets us deploy webassembly into real tees real hardware via nrks so I'll deploy a workload from the drawbridge which is essentially a registry of webassembly workloads and yeah so let me just find my cursor so this particular workload is going to be just a web app which inside the web assembly is going to just do plain text tcp communication but the nrks platform is going to provide it with tls so what happened right now actually is that the nrks platform well let me open the link here for now it's just a proof of concept so that's why we have to accept the insecure cert but so what happened here is that when nrks platform started it connected the sgx processor and did the measurement of the firmware of sgx report and also measured the nrks platform itself as well as the workload which is being loaded into itself and then it sent all this data to that station service which then verified the platform, the nrks hash, all the measurements and on successful verification of that it issued a certificate to this workload so it means that the workload itself just does plain text but the nrks platform provides the tls and transparently can upgrade the connection from plain text to tls apart from that the certificate contains data about the identity of the workload so if you had say 2, 3 and workloads they could communicate to each other and establish trust relationships given the data in the certificate and that all is transparent for application developers so I can also show you the cert again for now it's a proof of concept but we can look at it and we are working on adding actual hsm's to improve the situation so you can see here that this certificate was issued by RCA currently and this is the unique certificate issued for this particular workload and this particular CPU and this particular nrks instance so every workload on each different CPU and different machine will get a different certificate so apart from that the last thing I think I'm going to show you here is how we can actually do exactly the same thing on s&p so I'm going to run exactly the same workload, completely unmodified binary, same version, same workload on s&p, sorry that's a different workload but it takes some time of course because it has to send computer reports and to the station service to get it back again I'm going to go over the link except and you will see exactly the same workload so by the way this is free to use for everyone so if you want to try it out feel free and yeah that's a good demo if you have any questions then please let me know


The president of the African Development Bank Group, Dr Akinwumi Adishino, has said Nigeria as a nation shall never be divided, rather it shall stand tall in the midst of other nations. Dr Akinwumi disclosed this in Yola at the Ademawa State Capitol during the 12th commencement ceremony of the Abti American University of Nigeria, our correspondent reports. They have always been calls for Nigeria to remain indivisible only that now the clamor is becoming louder by the day with the turn of events in the country. Dr Akinwumi Adishino is the president of the African Development Bank and not a lone voice towards the unity of the Nigerian entity. Speaking here at the 12th commencement ceremony of the Abti American University of Nigeria, he holds that it is pertinent for well-meaning Nigerians to always stand for the truth and preach for the unity of the nation as the country belongs to all and sundry in Nigeria. He however calls for the leadership of the country to always do the needful by creating policies and programs that will carry everybody along hence the need for the peaceful coexistence of all ethnic groups in Nigeria. The president of Abti American University of Nigeria discloses that by educating the youth the insecurity in the nation will drastically reduce thereby making them self-employed for even more productive engagements. She appeals to citizens of Goodwill to emulate the former vice president Atiku Apubaka by creating more universities where the youth will be busy with studies for adequate equipping as leaders of tomorrow. And if more eminent Nigerians home and abroad keep speaking up for a more formidable Nigeria perhaps our alien nation will come out stronger as a point of reference in the committee of nations.


This video shows one possible solution to lesson 3 practice exercise B, which calculates the number of cities in the data set with at least two park and ride facilities using selections in ArcGIS. It also uses an update cursor to add to update a field indicating whether the city has at least two parking rides. The beginning of this script is very similar to practice exercise A, so I won't spend a lot of time on that. Lines 4 through 8 are pretty familiar from that exercise. In lines 9 and 10, I'm setting up variables to reference some fields that I'm going to use. Part of the exercise is to update a field called has2parkandrides to be either true or false, and so I'm setting up a variable for that. And in line 10, I set up a variable for the cityfips code. We're going to be querying each city one by one, and we need some field with unique values for each city. We might use the city name, but that could be dangerous in the case that you have a data set where two cities happen to have the same name. So we'll use the FIPS code instead. In lines 11 and 12, I'm setting up some counters that will be used to count the number of cities we run into that have at least two parking rides, and then the number of cities total, respectively. In line 15, I'm starting out by making a feature layer of just the park and ride facilities. So this is familiar from the previous exercise where the first parameter I pass in is the path to the park and ride data set. And then the second parameter is a name that I give this feature layer. Just for the purposes of this script, I'll call it park and ride layer. And in line 18, I'm opening an update cursor on all of the city boundaries. So I'm going to loop through each city here and select the number of facilities that occur in each city and count those up. And so I'm going to be working with two fields using this cursor, and I pass those in in a tuple. That's city ID, string field, and park and ride field. And those are the variables that I set up earlier in the script in lines 10 and 11. It might be helpful at this point to take a look at what we're doing conceptually in ArcMap. So the first thing we're going to do is for each city make an attribute query for that city FIPS. And so, for example, if I were to do this for the city of Seattle, I've set up this, the city FIPS code is this long number here. And if I were to query that, I have one city. So I'm going to narrow down my city's feature layer to just have one thing in it. And then I'm going to do the selection by location where I select park and ride facilities that are completely within the layer of city boundaries. So doing that, I would get these points back and then I could count those or I could start looping through them and see if I hit at least two in order to determine if the city has at least two park and ride facilities. Then I would go on to the next city and the next city and so on until I had worked my way through the entire data set. So there is some processing that will occur as you run this script. It might take a few seconds to run. All right. So we are back on line 18 where we set up the update cursor. We call it city rows. And then we could loop through each city in this. So that's what is done in line 19 with a for loop. In line 21, we get the fifths code for the city that's currently being looked at by the cursor. We use zero there because that's the index position of the city ID string field that we put in the tuple in line 18. It was the first thing in the tuple so it has index position zero. And then in line 22, we're setting up a string to query for that city fifths. And so we need the field name equals the city name. And the field name has to be in double quotes. The city name has to be in single quotes. So that involves a lot of string concatenation to get that just right as we set this up. But once we have that string, we can make a feature layer that just has that one city within it. The way we do that is in line 25. And we call it make feature layer. But instead of two parameters, we put in three. The first two parameters are the same as when we made the feature layer for the parking rides. So we put in the same pattern. We put in the path to the data set. We put in a name for that feature layer. We're going to call this current city layer. But then the third parameter is that query string that we just created in line 22. And that causes our feature layer to just have the one city in it that's returned by that query. And so now we're going to do the locational selection in line 30 to select just the parking rides that are contained by that city. The parameters here should be somewhat intuitive if you have that conceptual understanding of how the selection is working. Where just one city boundary is selecting a subset of parking rides. At that point you can call the get count tool and figure out how many parking rides were indeed selected. And if that, so that's what's going on in line 33. And remember with line 34 that you've got to call get output in order to get the result of the get count tool. You got exposed to that in the solution to practice exercise a. So what in the end, what you have in line 34 is this variable called num selected parking ride. That's the number of parking ride facilities that fell within that city. And in line 37 you can do a check to see if that number is greater than or equal to two. If it is, then we're going to set the value to true. So that's where we using our cursor go to the first item in the tuple up here. Actually it's the second item but it has index position one and we set that equal to true. And we don't want to forget to call update row so that that gets applied to the data set. And then in the end we can update our counter of cities that have at least two parking rides. Finally after we're done doing all this looping we delete the feature layer. We clean it up and we increment the number of cities we've counted by one here. And so we do that for every single city in the data set and then we clean up the parking ride layer in line 52. So notice there's some multiple levels of indentation here showing the if thens, the try and finallys, and the loop that runs the cursor. And so we need to manage that carefully. If we go back and stop indenting that means we're going out of the block of code. Either out of the if statement or out of the try catch loop and so on. So after doing the cleanup now we're going to calculate the percentage of cities that have at least two parking rides. Now you can't divide by zero so we're doing a check in line 55 for that. But if everything checks out okay, which it would unless we had a major problem with our data set, we go ahead in line 56 and we run some division to divide the number of cities with two parking rides by the total number of cities. In the video for exercise A I explained why we multiply by 1.0 so we can do some decimal division and then we multiply by 100 to get a nice percentage figure. In line 57 and 58 we have a little bit of error handling which would occur if the input data set was invalid and there were no cities in it. But otherwise we're going to go down to line 60 and print the percentage of cities with at least two parking rides. So give it a try.


The Advocate Development Program, or the ADP, is a 12-month training program for new patient advocates. Our goal is to educate them about the entire drug development process and where they can affect changes as advocates. We start by explaining the diseases of myeloma and alamylidosis, how clinical trials operate, how evidence-based advocacy works, how drugs are approved and reimbursed in Europe, and how decisions are made at the EU level to help care policy. As a non-clinical person, I was intimidated perhaps in the beginning with all of these scientific papers and the evolving area of multiple myeloma research and treatment regimes. But through this program, I feel I've developed a much better understanding and appreciation of the clinical aspects and a more realistic expectation of the journey that it takes from discovering a new drug, the phases that a clinical trial has to go through, these next steps about authorization that takes a long time, and then importantly, there's a big, long journey to take from authorization to reimbursement for patients to actually benefit. I understand that much better now than I would have before I did this course. I wouldn't definitely hesitate once again to go again with the process. Basically, it answers all my expectations of being learning, learning important, learning about the disease, and meeting the field of patients quite important, meeting professionals being in the industry or the physicians, for instance. So this is quite important. And on a personal note, it helped me to better accept the disease and to find a way to go along with my life and helping the other ones who are in the same situation. Apart from the benefits of the learning from the program itself, it's the friends that you make, the networks, the opportunities that I would never have had to go to the European Hematology Association Conference, to go to the European Cancer Conference, and apart from the formal learning from that, it's all of that informal networking and getting ideas from other people and other countries that you can hopefully apply in your own situation. The Advocates Development Program is open to MP members, patients, advocates, and carers from across Europe. We keep the cohort size small between six and eight participants to ensure optimal learning environments, and we recruit at the end of each year and kick off the program in January.


If we can approximate that a human to a monkey to a mouse to a fish to a fruit fly is at least somewhat similar there may be a a pretty serious discovery awaiting us that says something along the lines of if there is a lack of neurotransmission occurring where there is supposed to be when it's supposed to happen for especially when you're doing some sort of a task that usually gets you neurotransmission like a reward like a behavior that usually gets you a reward like in the case of people with depression it's like if you get out of the house and go and exercise or go and read a book or go and do something meet with friends do something that is it drives you closer to your goals if you're not getting the same neurochemical flows that you should be that's a big problem mm-hmm that's it yeah if our memory encoding system is having issues with neurochemical flows then there may be a much better specifically targeted way of doing stimulation to reintroduce those original neurochemical flows to continue people in the direction of when I do something when I'm supposed to get a neurochemical release then I actually get it and brain stimulation is a very interesting field that has a lot of you know ultrasound electrical stimulation magnetic stimulation a lot of interesting very careful stimulation is very important very precise stimulation is very important but healing people is very important healing people bringing people back to their healthiest and most creative flow states of being is very important


At this time, please welcome LPI Senior Researcher Jennifer DePauley for welcoming and introductory remarks. Thank you Nicole. Hello everyone, it's so nice to be here with you today. My name is Jen DePauley and I am a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute. We appreciate you taking the time to attend today's webinar. As you heard a recording of this webinar and the PowerPoint will be available in the coming days. And we encourage you to use the chat if you have any questions during the presentation or panel discussion. This webinar presented in co-sponsorship with AASA, the Superintendent's Association, the National Association of State Boards of Education and the Soul Alliance is the second in our six part series on transforming state education policy through a whole child approach. In our first webinar, we dove into what the science of learning and development tells us about how we can implement whole child design in schools and classrooms. This guidance has been synthesized in the design principles for K-12 schools, which was published by the Learning Policy Institute and Turnaround for Children. For a more thorough discussion of what these principles look like in schools and classrooms, you can access the interactive design principles playbook seen here on the left, as well as a link to the recording of that webinar in the chat now. A companion piece, the whole child policy toolkit, provides a framework for state policy aligned with these design principles. And this is where we will begin to dive in today and in future webinars. To begin, it's necessary to first understand what we mean when we say whole child policy. We define whole child policy as policy that is grounded in the science of learning and development and supportive of students' academic, cognitive, social and emotional and identity development, as well as their mental and physical health and well-being.  It is policy in which all policymakers and stakeholders in child, youth and family serving systems hold collective responsibility for how policy affects children and youth. This includes education, health and human services, juvenile justice, youth development, child welfare, housing and homelessness, agencies and workforce initiatives. It's also policy that creates the enabling conditions for and removes barriers to successful implementation of rich, developmentally appropriate educational experiences within schools, districts and communities. It is policy that ensures funding and resources are distributed efficiently and are equitably based on student need. And from the state level down to the classroom, it's policy that uses data for continuous systemic improvement to detect gaps in resource allocation, assess areas of strength and areas for growth, and inform plans for continuous improvement. So going back to the toolkit that I mentioned earlier, and you can see the front page of it here, and you'll be able to get a link to it in the chat. The toolkit basically lays out a roadmap for whole child policy. Within the toolkit you will find research, policy action states can take, state policy examples, and resources across five key areas, setting a whole child vision, transforming learning environments, redesigning curriculum instruction assessment and accountability systems, building adult capacity and expertise, and investing resources equitably and efficiently. We will cover each of these topics and upcoming webinars, but today we're going to focus on the first element in the toolkit, which is setting a whole child vision. Setting a statewide whole child vision stands in contrast to the piecemeal approach to policy and systems that often currently exists. And it provides a roadmap for building interagency capacity for the coherent adoption and implementation of policies, practices and initiatives that put the needs of children at the center. Setting a whole child vision can also work to broaden the definition of a young person's success. And that vision can prioritize a full range of children's developmental needs and articulate the full range of knowledge and skills that we know helps students thrive. To create a whole child vision states can take three important steps. First, they can convene a representative group of stakeholders to listen and learn from them on what should be in the vision and to create shared ownership of the vision. They can also collect data on the conditions for learning and development in their state to better understand how state systems are working well to serve children and you, and where gaps in service provisions exist. States can also invest in data systems that compiles data on children's well-being and opportunities to learn to better inform the creation of a vision. And state leaders can establish coordinating bodies to institutionalize the vision, set clear expectations on how various child and youth serving systems should be working in alignment to better serve all children in the state and bring key stakeholders together to communicate and achieve a unified vision. In our toolkit, we have documented several states that have begun efforts to create a statewide whole child vision to guide their education systems. I'll provide a few examples here, but also encourage you to visit the toolkit website to discover others. One example comes from Ohio where in 2017 Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction, Paola De Maria, who we are fortunate to have on this webinar, along with the Ohio State Board of Education worked with over 150 state partners, including school districts, local PTAs, institutes of higher education, and community stakeholders to develop the strategic plan that you see on your screen centered around supporting a whole child. Together they saw input from parents and caregivers, teachers and principals, business leaders and employers, community members, post-secondary representatives, and students through various regional meetings. The five-year vision they help craft has one goal, that every year Ohio will increase the number of students enrolling and succeeding in a post-secondary learning experience. And hopefully Paola will have a minute or two while he's moderating our panel to talk a little bit more about it. Similarly, in Kansas, state education officials conducted a statewide listening tour with community and business leaders, parents and educators, and asked them one question. What are the characteristics, qualities, abilities and skills of a successful 24-year-old Kansan? These answers, along with data on academic outcomes and graduation rates, help to define Kansas CAN, an initiative that sets a new vision for a more student-centered system and schools over the next 10 years. That new vision is grounded in a graduate profile that articulates student learning competencies through higher standards for academic and cognitive preparation, social-emotional development, technical and employability skills, and civic engagement. The vision draws on student outcome data from several sources, including kindergarten readiness, social-emotional factors, high school graduation rates, and post-secondary enrollment and completion rates. This vision is also a driving force behind the Kansas CAN school redesign project, which is aimed at supporting schools and districts to create and implement redesign plans in line with the Kansas CAN vision. And many states and localities have established children's cabinets to help them achieve that whole child vision and to take a more collaborative and coordinated approach to decision-making and service provision. Children's cabinets, which are often brought together by the governor, bring together heads of government agencies from education, health and human services, housing, child welfare, transportation, labor, juvenile justice, and other agencies, with the goal of facilitating a comprehensive approach to serving children anew, strengthening partnerships, and assessing and approving overall coordination and efficiency across state and local government agencies. This map shows several states that have children's cabinets in place, but many other states have convened cross-agency bodies to improve service coordination or specific task forces to tackle identified areas in need of improvement. So to better understand how states are working to set a whole child vision, we have an amazing panel with us today. First, our panel moderator, Paolo De Maria. Paolo is president and CEO of the National Association of State Boards of Education. He recently retired as the state superintendent of public instruction in Ohio after five years of service. In that role, his proudest accomplishment was the collaborative development of that each child, our future plan, the strategic plan for education that continues to guide the policy and practice work of the Ohio Department of Education today. In his tenure, De Maria focused on improving literacy outcomes, developing and promoting a whole child framework, supporting and elevating teacher excellence and leadership, and promoting career technical education and stronger business education partnerships. He also advanced the work of equity in Ohio's education system. Before becoming Ohio State Chief, De Maria directed the office or the state's Office of Budget and Management and was Chief Policy Advisor to former Ohio Governor Bob Taff and Executive Vice Chancellor of the Ohio Department of Higher Education. On our panel today, we have Ashley Harris, the Georgia Department of Education's Director of Whole Child Supports and Strategic Partnerships, a role created to cement the department shift toward a common framework of improvement with the whole child at the center. She leads the department's efforts to address students' well-being in the learning process, address the non-academic factors that impact student achievement, and maximize educational opportunities for students. We also have Matt Navel, the current Executive Director of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence. He previously served as a California State Board member and on the Advisory Commission for Special Education, the California Practitioners Advisory Group, and as the CCEE State Superintendent Board Representative. Prior to that, he served as the Superintendent and Sanger Unified School District. And we also have Charlene Russell Tucker, who was appointed by Governor Ned Lamont as Commissioner for the Connecticut State Department of Education in August 2021. Until her appointment, she served as Acting Commissioner from March through August 2021. And prior to serving as Acting Commissioner, she served as the Department's Deputy Commissioner, a role in which she oversaw educational supports and wellness priorities. Previously, she served as Chief Operating Officer and Division Chief for the Department's Office of Student Supports and Organizational Effectiveness. She also served as Associate Commissioner of Education and Bureau Chief within the department, previously overseeing a portfolio of programs and services that included student health, nutrition and safety, family engagement, magnet and charter schools, after-school programs and services, school climate, adult education, and special education. She is a performance-driven and visionary education leader with over 20 years' experience in successfully leveraging the interconnectedness of the social, emotional, physical, and mental health of students and their families as foundations for positive school and life outcomes. And with that, I will pass it over to Paolo. Thank you so much for that great introduction and for inviting me to moderate this exceptional panel. I totally agree with you. We've got some outstanding things happening in these three amazing states in Georgia and Connecticut and in California. And going back to the title of this session, it's about whole-child policy, putting the science of learning and development into practice. And that's ultimately what we want, right? We want changes in adult behaviors at the school and district and community levels that ultimately help meet the needs of the whole child. And I'm so heartened by the fact that you used the Ohio graphic. And there's also a companion report, which is our Ohio's whole-child framework that even elaborates on that vision, even more pronounced. And the interesting part about how that was developed is not that the state agency had this big aha, oh, we need to do this. As we listened to what was happening from all the stakeholders that participated, we saw that it was going on in lots of schools and districts. And we said, okay, we have to elevate that and then help disseminate and encourage that kind of practice across the enterprise. So what I'm going to do is start by asking each of our three panelists to talk a little bit about how their state decided to prioritize a whole-child policy arena. What were the processes they put into place, who they brought together, and what really catalyzed their desire to focus attention on that particular issue. And so in that spirit, I think I'm going to start, Matt, with you to really tell the California story. Sure. Thank you so much. I really appreciate being able to share a little bit about California with regards to the whole-child design framework and the approaches. Our journey with this in California started in 2013 with the adoption of the local control funding formula and the local control plan of the plans that were set forth. And the real impetus to that was to move away from the finite metrics that seem to surround no-child left behind and really codify an idea that the idea of education is student-centered and holistic in the design. We want to move the mindset from finite thinking to infinite-minded thinking as it relates to the trajectory of what we want students and their families and communities to experience in education as their students are in our system. And so through the local control accountability plans, there were eight state priorities that were lined out for districts to map around their improvement efforts in relationship to their goals and their services. And then in 2021-22, we had the California for All Blueprint that was developed. And most recently, a huge investment as it relates to the legislator in our governor around whole-child design incentive initiatives and, for example, community schools, expanded learning opportunities grants, universal meals, universal pre-K, TK, the idea of high-impact tutoring, the way that we support and build capacity within our systems. Not only for the adults within the system and the education, but how we support our communities and our families and ultimately our students. And all of that, you know, really came together most recently in a $4.5 billion investment in community schools, which is one of the largest in the country, if not the largest $4 billion investment in expanded learning opportunities. And so it goes back quite a ways and we've been working our way as a state to this vision of using whole-child design in our thinking, in our plans and how we ground the efforts of our local practitioners as they try and they meet the needs of students in our state. So I'll stop there and if there's something I'm missing, I'm happy to go back. I think that's a fantastic start. I might ask you to expand a little bit on the stakeholders that were involved, maybe at the very front end in terms of conceptualizing the work in California.  You mentioned the legislature, you mentioned the governor, two hugely important partners. Talk a little bit more about how it permeated, you know, other aspects of both the education community as well as beyond to other child-serving organizations. The idea of this, I was serving at the state board and when we largely were involved in gathering community feedback and certainly hearing from our local practitioners around their needs. And it was a wide net in terms of gathering a lot of feedback and a narrow funnel for how we pull those ideas into something that can be used and implemented. And what we heard from a variety of our partners, whether it was families or local educational practitioners, was the idea that whatever we design in the local control formula and the local accountability plan really anchors itself to number one local control. That the people most quickly make the decisions about the needs of their community are those closest to the work in their communities. So those teachers, those administrators, those boards, those communities, those families, those students, they make the informed decisions about the needs. And that the plan curates itself in a continuous improvement mindset, which was very, that's contrary to what we had experienced in our previous iteration of educational design, which was, you know, you measure the effectiveness and the success of a school based on a number. And a number would codify really a large effort and what we realized what people shared with us was there's a lot more in the tender underbelly of a district that goes on to move an initiative. And there's many, it takes many years in some cases, it takes, it takes financial school improvement is expensive school transformation is expensive, you can underscore that. And it requires that it's not done in silos and so when they, when that information began to come our way that we wanted a large body of participation, we knew we needed funding to make sure that this these endeavors state, because our greatest enemy was this to show or we are already doing this, and we wanted to fight against that, that energy and so those educational partners families practitioners that really weighed in help the state board, the legislature shape where we perfect and you're right there sometimes there's a lot of inertia or there's, you know, hesitancy to change hesitancy to take risks. Actually, I'm going to shift over to you tell us tell us the Georgia story. How did the state, you know, what was the process that brought the state to developing what it's doing and, and you know, who were the, who are the key players. All right, well thank you again for the opportunity to share a little bit more about Georgia so in Georgia really starting with the update in the state as a plan that was written in 2015. And really, a lot of conversations took place. So I'm going to interweave and some of the stakeholders as I kind of tell the story as well. But there were lots of different conversations that took place throughout the state and really to understand what was happening and what did we understand about perception of education. What should we be doing and taking really bad step of action the community of exactly what was needed in order for us to move forward. One thing that kept coming up was whole child. So we came to the conversation of what do you actually mean by what you say whole child understanding our definition and also what we thought were the important elements. In our 2015 as a plan we did identify a definition for whole child education, in addition to identifying 17 components that we identified as most important element of what should be happening. Georgia has a system of continuous improvement or what I affectionately call the good donut. When you look at the little circle, you'll actually see why I call it. But you'll notice that in the center of that particular donut, it does say the words whole child and it has the 510 as a whole child education as defined by the wisdom models or the whole school whole community whole child model. So we really anchor those 17 components on the national framework already in place and then begin to build from there. At that point in time that's when the office of whole child support supports, which is the office that I lead at the judge of the Department of Education was created in February of 2019. And it really started with one thing that we heard for sure is that there was a need to address non academic challenges that students were facing. So we immediately started with wraparound services and built from there. Now the office is over mental health, physical health services school based health centers. Our multi-tier system of support wraparound school safety and we have our community school strategy, which we call the child certification. Talking a little bit more about where students came in. We did make sure that we asked students what was it that was impeding their learning opportunity and from them being successful. We did that with our state school superintendent's student advisory council and other mechanisms in order to be able to do that, including the Georgia health survey that has been administered here since 2018. So making sure that we took all of the data points, both qualitative and quantitative really morph into what we're doing now in the state of Georgia. And then with the stakeholders, we did internal and external. So is I think when we talk about operating as silos, we have to look from the end and also outside of us. So our internal teams included like our curriculum and instruction, our school improvement, federal programs, special education and legal services. But then on the other side, we talked about community members, other state agencies, including our department of behavioral health and developmental disabilities, our legislators. We also talked again those students and then several nonprofit organizations. So it was definitely something that was done in a collaborative manner that everyone was able to be at the table to create better buy-in as well. Yeah, I always say meeting the needs of the whole child is everybody's business. It's not the out there that doesn't it can't play a role and you capture that you capture that idea beautifully. Commissioner Russell Tucker let's shift to Connecticut. Again, a very different state from California, very different state from Georgia. Talk to us about what what catalyzed and precipitated Connecticut's ventures into the whole child. So thank you very much for the invitation to be here and very different states but you'll hear a unifying theme, I believe as we talk about this. We were doing the work of our coordinated school health with CDC a while ago. We were having those conversations. Then as Ashley mentioned, then we started working our ESR plans and our state board of education was also working on its comprehensive plan for education. So all of that came together and not to be lost is the research that, you know, some years ago we're beginning to really make that link between health and education where they were not disconnected. And more of the research and the study showing that if we address the health or whole child, then you'll be addressing issues around attendance. You can address issues around classroom behavior, and all of those improve performance, better prepare students to be productive members of society but productive citizens. And so our state board started working on its five year comprehensive plan for education. All the stakeholders that we've talked about here very robust process to engage all stakeholders but what we ended up with in 2016 was a state board of education state plan titled equity and excellence. This is 2016 equity and excellence for all Connecticut students and that plan made four promises to our students. One of those promises is ensuring their non-academic needs are met so that they're healthy, happy and ready to learn. And in parentheses we talked about mental health and we talked about nutrition. But all of those really, when we talk about social determinants to health, all of those things that we need to talk about. And in further states, and I quote, great school support, the academic, social, emotional, and physical health needs of students so they can thrive. I go back to the year, right, this was before a pandemic, right, that got us in the space. So really, that's really where we were in that effort and continue to build that. We've that throughout all the work that we're doing so fast forward to 2020 2021 and everyone's now talking about what we need to address the traumas that students and their educators of all undergone how do we make sure that this is solidified. I know that there's a lot of resources that coming to our state and so we continue to prioritize the issue of the social, emotional, mental, physical health, behavioral health needs of our students. But having a state board really as a leader in this space in saying this is how we want education to be addressed in the state is really important. And if other states are on here and listening, it's really important that this collaboration and leadership is happening in all spaces. And so when you have a state board in the State Department, of course, we still don't do that alone. And so all the cross sector collaborators needs to be in that state other state agencies, higher education, all of these actors and I'm so pleased that Ashley mentioned students, because their voices are critically important, it's not about them without them. And work that we've done here in the state of students who are telling us that's what they need as well. No, that's perfect. That's perfect. I love the way, because it very much like in Ohio, it sounds like your whole child work was derivative from your strategic planning process, right?  Right. You know, a child that's hungry isn't a learning posture.  And to the extent that if we want really to create a robust learning environment, we have to address those challenges that each child might face. Okay, so we talked about each of your states now kind of creating that that commitment that that policy, you know, anchor point. Now I want to transition a little bit into, okay, what are the support structures that are necessary to drive a good implementation because when we talk about practice. That means people actually doing things differently and doing things in a way that accommodate this this ideal that your states of cholesterol. Before I go there though I want to hear, did any of you use any particular data to inform your, you know, your policy design work at the front end what were you looking at, and what what drove, what drove the direction that you that you took, or are you collecting data now that might help you gauge the extent to which you're making an impact. Matt, I don't know if you want to, you want to start. We can stay in that order. So our in California we, we have a dashboard that we use and I think there's links to that in the chat that provide districts and their communities a transparent way to see what what areas are working well what areas are in need of improvement, what areas are really in an academic social emotional behavioral distress, and asking the districts with their communities through the local control accountability plan to assess those in a transparent way those indicators, and then to write to those indicators around what they are going to do, and what strategies they're going to implement, and what resources are they going to provide to help bridge that gap so in relationship to your data question. It's a long term collection of data over time and then in more real time collection around what's happening and what we're seeing right now with our largely I would say, probably across the country, certainly where districts are challenged with chronic absenteeism, the social emotional supports that resources that teachers need to help bridge the gap and to help create an environment where communities can get what they need, particularly in California where you're, you have over 10,000, you know, LEAs that 10,000 schools and over 2000 LEAs and you have an LEA that has 650,000 students, and you have an LEA that has two. We just run the gamut on the variation and the differentiation that is required to help those in rule in urban settings, conceptualize the vision, and then in some cases they're limited resources when you have an urban or in some cases rule that sits 30 to 45 minutes away from most community resources. It's really helping them think and use data in such a way that they can, they can navigate and get the resources that they need in real time and in a time that families can use them. Great, great. Ashley, do you want to weigh in on the data issue? I would say in order to get started, there was several different data points. One of the biggest ones that I talked about was really a lot of those communal conversations in order to really identify kind of the health in the room that everyone was identifying. I would say the problem to use more data was to identify where to start. So we started looking at our community health data and cross-reference that with lots of different academic data points, including some census tract data in order to really identify where our highest prevalence was happening. I think also once we identify what we meant by healthy, it became something that was a lot more clear again, identifying those by those seven health barriers to learning and development. And we started looking and drilling down of where do we have these bright spots of need and realizing that more than half of the state of Georgia did not have a physical doctor within these particular counties. So starting to really drive there and start from there, helping students, schools understand that it may be a health issue that's impeding you on a student's actual academic health. So have you actually thought and looked back and kind of looked at exactly when did the child have a last year doctor appointment or a vision appointment? So we use data in those types of matters really to drive more of what we were doing and how we were doing. But yes, we did also use several data points at the beginning. And what we're doing now is also creating new data points for students in schools to go to use to include in their processing. Because one thing that we identified as a challenge is that most school districts has lots of academic data, but not very much non-academic data in order to drive the expendable uses of lots of the federal dollars, which they need the actual data for. So that's kind of what we started doing in the data space here. Yeah, and that really, it really amplifies this idea of collaboration between the state education agency and the Department of Health or the Medicaid agency and the mental health agency. All those entities collect data, some of them are doing it through like use behavioral risk survey tools, Medicaid created, we saw some Medicaid data that showed how many students had been diagnosed with mental health needs, but had not received treatment or were not receiving services. I mean, I think all those kinds of things help to shape some of those pictures at the district and school level that then ultimately led to these, you know, these aha moments and hey, we really have to find ways to get at some of this information. Commissioner Russell Tucker, talk a little bit about that. And then I'm going to ask you all to pivot into, okay, now what are you doing to support and maybe Commissioner Russell Tucker, maybe you can already get us into that space. What does the Connecticut support infrastructure look like for your schools and districts, and maybe, you know, weave in the data piece into that because I think a lot of the data is really meant to say to those lower levels of the, of the, of the governance structures, you know, here's some stuff that can help you understand what's happening and the kinds of things you need to do. It's great conversation that we're having some truly enjoying this and the way that these are interconnect, because not at the time when we were doing it but at you know right at this moment we're having conversations about emergency department visits. You know, the students going there and what's going on what's not happening in school what's not happening communities. So to your point of bringing all players together to answer those questions, and to look at what their areas of responsibilities are in here so we talk about schools not really have been the responsibility of doing this alone. However, in the in the school space in terms of data. Back in 2014 15, our system redesigned a broad set of 12 indicators. That's our accountability system so I'm going back there everybody probably remembers when we were doing that to help tell the story of how schools are doing in preparing a student for success in college career and life. And so it for us it was a new day with our 12 indicators and what we call our next generation accountability system. We have chronic absence and so we back before essa really we're looking at chronic absence recognizing that we needed to pay attention not just about everyday attendance, but really to get to the level of chronic absenteeism and we started collecting data and reporting out and doing work then also post secondary graduation so we went post secondary preparation. Access to the arts and physical fitness is also a part of our accountability system so we really probably think of it as an holistic, you know, approach to talking about outcomes for systems. And it's amazing we're getting ready tomorrow to release our data for accountability or accountability for this year and you know take it a look I can tell you without giving anything away here that we recognize the impact now of the pandemic on students beyond test scores. And so we can talk about the physical fitness of our students and what we're seeing there and so it really is important but that allowed us to really start having conversations beyond test score to whole chat, even in our accountability system. We talk about moving from just achievement we're now talking about growth in your system and who owns this from a few people owning this to the entire organization. We really needed to be about this and as we are modeling this for districts. It's also about what we're doing at our state agency and I use using the power of organizing and bringing folks together leading by convenience sometimes which we have the power at the state to get all my state commissioners and colleagues together are focused on these issues and so it's really how and that's how we're working on some of the supports that we're providing, because it's not just one agency in Connecticut or behavioral health agency, Children's Behavioral Health Agency is the Department of Children and Families, so you better believe that there has to be really great communication conversation, and that is indeed occurring. And then we talk about resources, we can all use our pool of resources in a really aligned effort to support our districts, and we've done that and certainly the benefit of the COVID relief dollars have given us that opportunity and I can go there, more on that but that's allowing us to say we have our supports, and let's remember that our schools they've got a lot of things on their plates, but they don't have to do this alone, when we have the school the family and the community working together for the benefit of our students. Right, right. Yeah, it's you actually raise a great point because on the one hand we're not in on the loan, but I think the other thing I always tell people to try to avoid us to say, Okay, well, you know, oh well those people deal with mental health and these people over here, because that is the more siloization we sort of have to all collectively own the whole child, and do our part in the interest of, you know, all the varying elements knowing that there are those trained professionals that have to, you know, they have to weigh in when addressing certain of those whole child needs so it's finding that, you know, sort of that balance between how do you weave it into all the day to day activities while at the same time respecting the differentiation between the various, you know, practice practices and so on that I think is, is at the end of the day, what while it may appear complicated I think people want to work together, because ultimately their goal is to how do we help these children to be as successful as they can be in the various places where they're, where they're, you know, living learning and and being part of our community. And I'm just going to add one thing because I saw something come through the chat. It's a great way to engage families, right so the family and community engagement is really important. And we have a lot of data, like a lot of states do, and frankly, we plan is how is my child school doing how to make sure that families and communities can even use the education data that we're working on to help inform the efforts that they're doing really at a singular level or really as a group together on knowing what's happening so that we can all be really working together in this space. Yeah, and at the local level you know people are bringing in their local governments their church communities, their, you know, urban leagues and other you know sort of community chest and United Way organizations and so forth and so on. And, you know, because again, all of those entities own a piece of children, you know, having children as part of their mission and how do we leverage that, and yet align ourselves and coordinate the work that we do so that we're really making a tremendous impact. Ashley I'm going to go back to Georgia, talk to me about your implementation. You've got, you've got a great policy framework in place what are you doing to help get the attention of people and actually help support changes in adult behavior and practices at the school level to make the difference. Well, there's actually been several different things. So one of them is one bringing school climate over into the office of co-child supports. So it's not just only the support services, but also the support environment. So making sure that all of those things together under one umbrella on one leadership really is going to streamline things in a way that is both collaborative and also cross agency because of bringing the notch from other areas within the agency. So that's one way that we're doing at the state level. But what we're also doing is what we created as a whole child model school certification, which is really that community strategy and helping the school help themselves. So to speak, by way through technical assistance, redirection of strategic planning, and also some leadership development and narrative to make sure that the principal, the district leaders and also some individuals within the building understand what community school strategy is. We follow the policy institutes pillar models to make sure that we are addressing all areas of the student and then also bringing in lots of different technical assistance from other community school organizations throughout the nation. We're really making sure that there's a deep group calls analysis of understanding what is happening in this community, what is happening with students, what is happening with their families to make sure that you're having those pieces. But even as we think about after they do that, then what really making sure that they understand a true map of who is in their community. If they're talking about working with their churches or their local family and certain children services departments, what those supports do they have. I know here in the state of Georgia, we talk about the department of family and children, and a lot of people associate defects with neglect cases. However, the department of family and children and children services has an entire wing that's preventative care to help families to be able to get signed up for 10 benefits. So making sure that people really understand what it means to be collaborative, doing a meeting. I love what you mentioned that because we talk about leaving by competing or doing the more of the collective impact. So it's not necessarily going out and helping identify your own challenges and problems. They already know that it really is going out and helping them. Okay, now that you know your challenges and problems. What are you going to do to solve them because it's really the problem solving strategies that really get in the way of things. And then also with the staffing and the capacity because everyone is tapping. Extremely thin, especially in our, I guess I could call it post COVID right now on reality. So as we're looking through this, how else can we support staff. So in Georgia, what we do is we also have a part time coordinator is 16 regions of the state that will actually go out and provide technical assistance on the ground to districts and schools that really are looking at what do we do now in creating those appropriate great referral systems, making sure that they're talking to students and families. So we really are looking for a system of support rather than actions because the actions are really locally controlled and locally driven. Yeah, no, I love the way you characterize that because I mean we have to acknowledge just there's no one size fits all every community is going to be different every the context is are going to be different and we have to embrace that and allow for the sort of flexibility that is necessary to you know sort of accommodate that reality. And also this idea you touch on sort of issues of change management right you can have people that I understand the research and I really know that this could be powerful, but I really don't know how to start I don't know what first step to take. And just a little bit of a hand holding and and sort of illustrating, you know, other exemplars in your, in your state that have done it and say hey, you know, here's how you start you make people to bring these people together, you look at this data you start having these conversations. And the next thing you know it'll it'll make sense and people say oh yeah we had some great conversations, you know, once we got started and then you create that momentum and that excitement that brings more and more people on board. Matt, talk about the California experience you guys are handling this a little bit differently so share with us about that implementation infrastructure and and work that you and your organization are doing. Yeah, sorry, our organization is organization is uniquely positioned where we're state agency and non state agency so as maybe some of the listeners to paint a visual of how we interact with the system. So let's say in a triangle you have the State Board, the Department of Ed, and then the CC, and then the middle of that is the governor and Department of Finance, and we work in cadence with those agencies to make sure that we're helping bridge the gap between vision and implementation so we sit in a really unique space and we're composed, largely of practitioners from the field, compose the body of our organization, so that we're making the connections and we have a sense of understanding and what we noticed in this particular endeavor, one of the endeavors that I think I'll just focus on for this, for this purpose is our community engagement initiative. And we recognize that there were three barriers in relationship to the gap between vision and implementation one was conceptual understanding. In other words, going back to this to show pass or we're already doing this not fully grasping the idea that the whole child design framework has a myriad of things that the district can jump into. It can they can, it can meet them where they are, and it forces them to think more deeply about the practices structures and processes that they have. The second was capacity building, you know, building capacity the pandemic did a did a number on on our schools as it did with many and the the bandwidth of education the education system to take on what they see as another initiative that is stacked. And we have to change that and we had to work to say no this is, this can be woven into the practices that you already have, and it can strengthen many of the endeavors that you already seek to achieve. And then third was challenges with continuous improvement. And with the turnover that that is occurred, most rapidly related to the pandemic, in relation to the school leadership and superintendents and just the exhaustion that seems to plague the system. The idea of starting and stopping was, was very difficult and so several years ago we started the community engagement initiative I'll put that in the chat. And the community engagement we realized we had to improve the system not from the top down if we're going to really muster this it has to come from the inside out. That means we have to tap into those individuals and those entities that are going to be there after the legacy of many leaders and teachers lead they're still going to live in those communities and they're going to own the journey of those schools and districts for good or for worse, whatever path those district leaders and teachers and educators at that point in time put the district on and so we invested a huge amount and there was another 100 million from the legislature to invest. And these are communities teaching each other, there's over 40 LA is involved right now but teaching each other how to bridge the gap between trust that occurs within a district and to how to, how to bridge the gap between understanding the concept of what needs to happen, and what you what you aspire to achieve. And you have 250 people on zoom and you have a parent who's a second language learner leading that discussion from a district, leading by convening as my other colleagues have said, learning from each other, learning from their mistakes, it creates an energy that has really helped us push a whole child design through the community engagement initiative, which is largely targeted to our communities of poverty, and communities that don't always have access to many of the resources that maybe some have have access to on a regular basis. No that's a great that's a great story and I think the other thing that we found in Ohio sometimes people look at this, you know the framework and they think look at all these elements my gosh it's so much. You know, and I tell you, you can start small pick, pick one thing, pick one thing that you're going to try to do a little bit more, because maybe you have a willing partner in the, in the mental health organization or, or even you know with your local hospital system or a group of pediatric doctors or something like that pick something small and, and just get started because then the more you do the more people understand, oh this isn't, this isn't that complicated or we can get through this. The other thing we try to do is demystify some of the other hangouts people had right, you know what does this mean for data sharing and, and you know HIPAA and FERPA do they really work together, and, and we had model you know data sharing agreements and model you know security, you know protocols things like that that we said look this is all people have done this already they fought through all the, all the hiccups in the bumps in the road, don't reinvent the wheel learn about it and, and, and, and move forward. I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah, Thomas hatches a new book, the educating for a future we can't predict goes right to that. And he says that the more complex the initiative, the greater energy there is and likelihood that people will give up and starting in niches smaller and giving people success is exactly what you just said and I think that's what we're trying to achieve in California. Yeah, yeah. So, so again you're each doing good work. And, and, you know, we're at about 10 minutes to the top of the hour. This is where I would usually pause for questions. I think we've been trying to answer questions in the chat as we go. So I'm going to keep talking, unless Jen tells me to stop and we'll do this quick. You all are each making progress. What are some of the key barriers that exist to making even more progress. And you all are released Ashley talked about we've got we've got some money and, and, and, and, and Charlie raised this too and I think one of the things that it's been easy for states if you already have a plan to then amplify that plan with some of these infusions of resources so some of the states that we're already doing some things are really making good use of their ARP funds because they, they know that okay we were working in eight districts now we can work in you know 30 districts or that kind of thing. What are some of the barriers you see to to catalyzing and and accelerating some of this work. And I'll let anybody chime in that wants to you know take a crack that. So I'll jump in a little bit here about barriers and in a very interesting way you talked about money, got over a billion dollars here in Connecticut and what we did when the funds came into the state. We developed at the state agency level five investment priorities that we were holding ourselves to and our districts, in terms of how this these resources should be spent one of them of course is social emotional mental health supports of not just for students but for staff, family and community engagement and healthy, safe, healthy and safe schools, strategic strategic use of technology and of course learn and acceleration, etc. And so we've we've done that our legislature, we're great bipartisan support, you know, also putting like $28 million so that our districts can hire mental health staff. There is a lot of resources around this issue of health and mental health and hotel support. And I, the caution is that if we're not aligned. And if we really don't clearly have a good roadmap that at the end of the day we'll have a lot of activity, and maybe not as much impact, you know, if there were coherence and we are working together. So finding a way to make sure that we all know what we're all doing and working together so that we can amplify the impact and the outcome. I think you know, so we have the good news and the bad news in this particular case but something that I think we need to pay close attention to. Yeah, unfortunately this is one of those places where maybe the politics isn't a bear. I mean, we're actually seeing Republicans and Democrats coming together both at the federal level and at state levels and coalescing around, hey, you know mental health is a is a real thing. Our students are hurting many of them. And, and, you know, and we have an obligation, and it will will support and help the future of our communities in our state and of these individuals. So how do we work together to get that done. Ashley or Matt do either of you want to weigh in on you know what are some of the key barriers that that exists before we wrap things up. Yeah, I'll jump in one of the key barriers that we was again something that I mentioned before was just the lack of data that was supporting what was needed. First, what they actually have been tracking before. So that was probably one of our largest barriers, but then we've used some of our. COVID relief dollars in order to support creation is data dashboards this emphasizing some of the data that has historically been out at the fingertips of educators and administrators. We've also hired additional conditions and expanded our school based health centers. And then also just what Charlene was talking about providing mental health reports, not only to the students and our stats. But also to our staff members families that may not have access to those particular supports as well. So we're definitely looking at that and then also being able to provide some support to families and also the communities that our students live with the Great, great. Matt anything to offer. I'll just capitalize on what Ashley said it the data infrastructure is a really big barrier, how, how are all our all of our lea is getting access to real time data in such a way that they can react to it in real time and make decisions. But I think largely in some cases. It's, it's a mindset approach around how you approach this particular initiative we're really good about putting the responsibility of things like this in silos your responsible MTSS you're responsible for special education, your responsibility. And we do that unintentionally creating silos of implementation that occur in the district, when really this particular framework is everybody's responsibility. And if it's not everybody's responsibility and that message isn't really clear. It's a big barrier, regardless of the, regardless of the funding that you have whole child design becomes one person's responsibility in the district, and it loses the ability to actually permeate and penetrate a system. I think that's the biggest risk we have. Yeah, great. I'm going to turn it back over to Jen but I would be remiss if I didn't say a great big thank you to Ashley, Charlie and Matt for this great conversation and all the wonderful things that are happening in the active states, keep up the good work and go forth and do great things. Jen back to you. Thank you so much Palo and I just wanted to say it really quickly I saw Nancy's question and about targeting the educational professional development continue and I just wanted to say to Ashley or excuse me to Nancy that we will have another webinar coming up soon about the building adult capacity and the teacher prep all the way to professional development and I hope you'll join us for that. In the meantime I wanted to once again say thank you so much to Palo, Ashley, Matt and Charlene for that insightful and inspiring conversation. Thank you to all of our wonderful co-sponsors, AASA, NASBE and the Soul Alliance. As I said earlier today's webinar is the second in a six part series on transforming state education policy through a whole child approach. A recording of this webinar, the PowerPoint slides and all resources featured in the chat will be made available shortly. Our next webinar on January 18th will explore how the science of learning and development can guide a whole child transformation of learning environments and how states are working to support these shifts. In the chat you'll find a link to learn more about the entire series and register for the next webinar. And before you leave we would appreciate if you could take a minute to complete the survey that you might see in the chat. I just wanted to say once again thank you all for attending and we hope to see you in January.