Serving Our Community

This is the Truth Network. Kingdom Pursuits, where you hear from ordinary people instilled with an extraordinary passion. Together we explore the stories of men and women who take what they love and let God turn their passion into kingdom pursuits.

Now, live from the Truth Booth, your host, Robbie Dilmore.

Well after that you would think this would be Robbie Dilmore, but you would be wrong. Robbie's in the Holy Lands and he's entrusted the show with me, Bill Mixon. We are so glad that you tuned in and are listening. I have some spectacular guests for our show today. We have our county commissioner, Gray Wilson.

We have two of our school board members, Steve Wood and Susan Miller. And I've got a dear friend of mine who is an emergency room doctor, Dr. Brittany Speed. She's been an emergency room doctor from Alaska all the way to our Outer Banks. And I asked her to come on the show and talk about the need of giving blood with a great shortage that the nation's going through right now.

Dr. Speed, how are you? Oh, I'm sorry, we will get back to her in just a second. Gray, I know that you've got a heart for our community that is dealing with substance abuse problems and that are looking for affordable housing. And I was wondering if you had any suggestions that you'd like to share your thoughts on the subject as our county commissioner.

Well, I'm certainly committed to behavioral health services.

So we've got health and human services. Division. Of course, in the county, and that's very important. Substance use disorder is robbing us of a generation of young people as well as older people. There's no demographic here at all, and certainly not the most important but key here is law enforcement.

We have a great drug task force and involves our Sheriff's Department, our city police here at Kernersville. And others, and they're doing a great job just trying to limit the flow of illicit substances like fentanyl, which don't have again uh any preference it will kill anybody who touches it. Certainly, we have active harm reduction in this community. And that includes not only the needle exchange program, but also Narcan. Naloxone saves lives, and we're trying to make sure that it's distributed throughout the community so it is available when needed.

And obviously, the most important feature of all of this with regard to behavioral health is treatment, and we have a host of programs that are dedicated. To that. And so often, you mentioned the homeless.

So often, when we deal with treatment programs, we have dual diagnoses, and that involves a mental illness or mental disorder of some sort coupled with a substance use problem. And you can't treat one without the other.

So the key is to take care of both and hopefully get these people back on the street as productive citizens. Mm-hmm. Thank you. I I accidentally hung up on my doctor. I hope she uh doesn't get mad at me.

doctor Brittany Speedzone. She's an emergency room doctor, and I wanted her to share a little bit about the importance of giving blood and what the giving entails. Hey, Doc. Hey, how you doing? Wonderful.

Now that I don't hang up on you again. Yes. I'll forgive you. Tell us about giving blood and why it's important. Sure.

Giving blood is very important and people may not realize just how great of a need there is for it. You know, a typical red blood cell pack only lasts 42 days on the shelf, so there's always constant need for blood donation that is fresh. And there are so many different uses for it, not only the trauma patient, as a lot of people may think, but We use it for childbirth, miscarriages, complications for childbirth, sickle cell patients, people with chronic diseases such as dialysis patients or iron deficiency anemia, blood disorders, cancer treatment patients, leukemia patients, and burn patients all require oftentimes treatment with blood and its components. You know, there are all kinds of things you can use as a substitute, like Coca-Cola. Yeah, that would be nice.

But unfortunately, we don't use a lot of red blood cell substitutes. Certainly, we need people to donate because that's the only place we get the blood products from.

So people really need to realize that they can really make a difference by even giving one donation and more so throughout the year, and it does make a huge difference and very much needed.

Now you gotta give up your entire day, right? You gotta go in and be there by 8 a.m. and then stay until about 6 p.m. to be able to squeeze the the blood out. Absolutely, and just wear a t-shirt or something will bloodlet from each arm individually.

You're scared, but What is the process? What do you got to do to to be able to give blood? It is very simple, no bloodletting involved, I assure you. It's a very simple process that involves about an hour of your time. The actual donation is not an hour.

It's about eight to ten minutes, give or take.

So you actually get somewhat of a free health screening with the donation.

So I think that's a huge benefit that a lot of people don't realize. But you go in and they check your blood pressure, your temperature, your pulse, make sure that you're fit to donate. And they do screenings such as the iron level in your blood, the hemoglobin, which is how many red blood cells you have in your blood. And they also do screening for different types of disease processes such as sickle cell trait, HIV, hepatitis, syphilis. And now they're even offering an A1C screening, which will help people understand if they are at risk of being pre-diabetic or could possibly be a diabetic.

That's a nice marker that you can get done at your primary care doctor's office. But instead of waiting for that appointment, you might as well just go donate blood and it's a win-win.

Now if you're diabetic, you can't give, can you? No, not necessarily. It just depends on that number and how thick your blood is generally overall, but it's not precluding you from donating now.

So the vast majority of people, if they were just willing to go and show up, could give, right? Absolutely. Yeah, it's it's you know, something that can be used for children to the elderly. And you can take an average day and go donate blood an hour of your time, should make you feel really good about what you're doing for the community, your family, or your future self should you need a blood transfusion. Thank you so much for being own.

I appreciate you greatly. Oh, it's a pleasure, Bill. I always love to get together some time and reminisce of our time, so we'll save that for another radio talk. And I hope that the rest of your day goes well. Yes, baby.

If you guys have any questions at all about blood transfusion or donation, I'm happy to answer at any time. Thank you, ma'am. Um school board. We we've got I did some help with the PTA. My mother was on the PTA forever, longer than you were supposed to be.

And I did some tutoring with some kids, and it amazed me. One, that there are an awful lot of kids in our school system that just don't read, and it dawned on me almost all the reading now is done on a little phone screen. And they don't pick up books. They just read these really misspelled things in front of them. And then our calculator is on the phone.

So it used to be the teachers could say, you absolutely have to be able to add a set of numbers, or somebody's not going to give you back the right change. But we won't have a calculator all our lives in front of us, and now we do.

So I'm not real sure how the poor teachers grab hold of a child and to say, Here's some knowledge you really have to have. What are your thoughts about how we get the school system to do a better job with what they've got? Thank you, Bill. Yes, literacy is actually my thing. That's the reason I originally ran for the board.

In 2022 And it's the reason I'm running again this year. Um We need to get our third graders proficient in reading. It is a huge indicator. of their path in life. The success in third grade reading If you follow that trajectory, You will see who drops out of high school that was not proficient.

There's a direct correlation there.

So we need to have awesome leaders, great teachers, and all the resources that these children need. We are still using books. All the classrooms still have personal libraries, so the children can go in and free read.

Some of the instruction, like you said, is online. But but it's it's kind of half and half, I would say, at this point. But that is a critical need. And I will say since I've been in office The scores have continued to trend up. Wonderful.

And so that is what we're counting on. I know when I was tutoring, they had this great big expensive system on the wall. We had this bond that went through so the school superintendent could turn in and look at any classroom anytime he wanted to. Great big old monster. And the teachers brought this other, looked like a $100,000 setup with a big TV screen and a VCR.

And they stuck a CD in, and the entire class sat there and watched somebody else read to them, which sort of blew my mind. I just couldn't figure out why that was the best way to do it. But the teachers were wonderful. I was just absolutely amazed at how much they cared for and looked after the kids and how well most of the kids were doing. Stay with us.

When we come back, we're going to talk more about our community and how to fix it up. You're listening to the Truth Network and TruthNetwork.com. It amazes me the wonderful conversations that we have during the breaks. You folks just miss out, but I'll tell you, I'm with some of the brightest, most caring people I know that have a heart for trying to see our community do better.

Now, why? Anybody in the world would run for office and take all the time, energy, and money it takes to buy all those signs and then serve on something where they've got to give all the time they do, but There are folks that really care from both parties that want to be in a position to make our community better. And I've got three of those that I respect the most here in the office on the studio. Gray is a wonderful fella. He's come and toured City with Dwellings and checked it out.

And I know that he's gone and seen a lot of the other opportunities in our city to make a difference. And I know that he's got a heart for the homeless and the people with low income and people that need housing and folks that have behavioral health problems. And I was wondering if he's thought about some of the solutions, some of the things that our community needs to get into place or do a better job at.

Well, I talked previously about substance abuse issues in this community and You know, when you look at that and you look at the demographics, the extent to which While fentanyl doesn't really care who it kills, it is certainly a plague. On those with limited means in our community and They they're the ones that really need our support in that regard. We've got a homeless problem here. It's not like the problem in Charlotte or Raleigh, but You know, in the city alone, I've heard different numbers, maybe 800.

Some are in structured housing, okay, higher numbers than that, probably.

Some are in structured housing, some in tents, some on park benches, and some in our local detention center. Uh and again, the focus there has to be on Treatment that gets them back on their feet. What do we want? We want them to get a job. We want them to be employed.

We want them to have structured housing. And, you know, I am a county official. We'd like for them at some point maybe to pay taxes. But the important thing is to. um bring them back to life.

Uh literally and figuratively. And in that regard, there are programs like City with Dwellings that Bill just mentioned. And if you want to know, you know where the rubber meets the road, go over to that facility on a weekend and talk to some of the homeless that are there outside. And listen to what they have to say with regard to their problems and issues. They're people, too, they're all God's children.

And we have a responsibility to try to take care of them. with love, but also with instruction. to the extent that's uh indicated and uh appropriate. In the 1970s, the ACLU won some Supreme Court cases that made it impossible to keep the mentally ill in mental hospitals if they demanded to be let go. and the mental hospitals just evacuated.

And we had huge numbers of people that got arrested. Our jail numbers went through the roof. Our prison numbers went through the roof. The people that needed homeless help went through the roof. A lot of the people that are wandering around, they call it flying a flag when they're standing on the side of the road saying, I need help, a lot of these people have mental issues that just make it almost impossible to be hired.

Now some of the folks have really great days and you'd think, boy, you should have absolutely no trouble. But then their bed days are so bad, you can't imagine how in the world they could stay hired. It's not as simple as telling people that they need to get a job. And some of those folks have kids. And a lot of the kids that we have in the school system have some challenging mental issues that need to be dealt with.

Now I gotta say, the the poor teachers The teacher can have a room full of really great, wonderful kids, and then they have two or three or four problem children that just eat up all their time. We've got an educator here that's actually been in the classroom. What do you think about the solutions? How do we fix this?

Well, to piggyback on Gray Wilson. Yeah. I like to focus on the young child, particularly before and at the third grade level. I have a favorite scripture I'd like to insert here that I think applies to this. Luke 18, Jesus said, Bless the children.

Let them come to me.

So to me, as an educator and now serving on the school board, Let the children come to me and bless them means to stand up for them. to fight for them. to seek justice for them. to be their voice, and that means in any and every way that we can.

So, I'm going to repeat what I said a little bit earlier about reading proficiency at the third grade level. It is a huge indicator. of the success of that child as an adult. If they are proficient at third grade, that is our secret. If we can get them reading, That will take care of most of these problems we're talking about because a lot of this is the inability.

to be able To read.

Now I would think if you're a third grader and you can't read, that's going to make fourth grade unbelievably difficult. And every year after that, you're going to either be trying to catch up or you're not going to be trying to catch up. In my mind, A lot of it's solved by parents that are doing everything they can to help those children.

Now, granted, there's some parents that don't know how to read, there's some parents that don't know how to read well, there's some parents with three kids that just don't have the time, energy, or ability to help that fourth kid. There are communities where I've been in them where the kids and the parents are walking around worried about whether or not they're safe. And if you're worried about whether you're safe, the idea of becoming a better reader just is not on the scale. Um There are things that we need to do in our community to help the kids feel safer and the parents feel safer. Before COVID, we had a number of churches that would adopt a low-income community and was teaching, tutoring, had gardens in there.

I would love to see ways for our community to come together and get some of the churches to work together to help lift up some of these poor sections of our town. My church actually does do that, Mount Tabor United Methodist Church. We have an after-school care program, and we have just purchased a van because the district stopped providing transportation due to some funding issues. But we go to the schools and bring them to our church, and they can be there for the children. after-school snack, homework assistance.

Parents je generally pick them up about six o'clock. But that's one of the ways we're helping. We also have. completely pretty much funded North Hills Elementary with supplies and different things necessary. If all the churches could start doing like adopting a church, adopting a school, that could be one of our answers, I think.

I I remember that after we bought our first home, and I wasn't paying any attention to the schools that my children would go to, we found out we were going to be going to Bolton Elementary School. And Bolton was like the number two from the bottom. And I was getting ready to move. I just didn't know what else to do. And every time I prayed about it, my mother popped in my mind and that she had been vice president or president of the PTA for the four years I was there and then the four years my sister was there.

And I finally sort of put my head down and walked over there and said, How can I help? And a wonderful educator, Dr. Short, had been in the number two spot in the school district and had said she was going to take over the elementary school. She went to all the different big corporations in town and she talked them into not only letting employees come and work. During the day she got him to let him work own the clock.

So we had over 120 volunteers at the end of the first year that she was there with all those. Tutors coming in just made an astronomical difference in that school in like two years. Then we had a number of churches that did something called Kids' Cafe, and they would come in and the kids would walk over and they'd spend an hour playing and getting to know the tutors, and then they'd get a meal, and then they'd have an hour's worth of study help with their homework. And it was amazing. the difference that made.

And then the school system said, well, you're doing so good. We're going to bust all these kids over from East Winston all the way across town, and you've got to figure out how to process them, which we did pretty good. And then we took all the Hispanic kids and we went to a third of kids that couldn't speak any English. And that sort of just, I. I understand they wanted to try to make the system work, but it just.

didn't. The teachers and the volunteers just couldn't cope with it. I wonder If it would be better to have one school that worked for the kids that don't speak English well. And you had teachers there and they all And another school where the the kid says, I know I want to be a plumber when I graduate. I don't want to go to college.

And you had one high school where the kids went and they knew that they were there with a a goal at the end. Because a lot of the kids don't try because they f The kids I worked with in East Winston, they were great till the day they got it in their head, I'm not going to be 22. I'll never make it to 22. I might as well have fun. The other thing that always got me is the poor kids in those communities don't have a way to make any money.

And all of the successful people I know, we found ways to make money in elementary school, in middle school, high school, and those kids don't have a way to take their energy and turn it into a way to have some extra cash. Steve, you got any suggestions on how we get the community turned around?

Well You want the short version or the long version, Bill? You can go to the music year music.

Well, I admire parents who are involved in their children's lives. Gray Wilson. Six kids. Gray? Yes.

Six children sent through the school. You've got the energy to come to the radio. Yeah, I've still got energy to do that. Susan, you had two children through the school. Two children, yes.

My mother My father was a third grade dropper. If one can imagine that, my children, when they were kids, when I told them how I tried to tell them how important education was. Um They could not believe that my father was a third grade dropout. And so that's why I'm so involved in education and have been and will be for a long, long time.

Well, everybody listening has the opportunity to pick up the phone and call their local elementary or middle school and say, do you have an opportunity for me to tutor? Is there a way that I can help? You can help with the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts and say, I want to work with a program. There are ways that you can find to get involved and make a difference. You're listening to The Truth Network and TruthNetwork.com.

Well, once again, we had just wonderful conversations while you folks were listening to wonderful commercials. And I just wish we could go back and pick up some of those conversations. Susan has many years teaching in the school system. That's one of the reasons that the professional school teachers lifted her up as their candidate in the last election. Steve actually served in the House of Representatives and served on the Education Committee and has had a heart for education in our community for how many decades?

Well, I'm looking at number 77 here this year, so about seven decades, I guess. You'd think he would be in a wheelchair, but he's rather spry. Thank you, sir. Yeah, there are a lot of folks that hold a lot of different elected offices that really want good. Things for our community, and they chose to run and to serve because they want to see the community do better.

But in my mind, until all of us decide to give a little bit of our time, energy, and money as individuals, whether we got children in the system or not, until the individuals are giving their time to help solve some of these problems. We give license to having great big federal and state governments that really accomplished next to nothing. Um I'm going to encourage you to pray about volunteering. How can you and your Sunday school group and your church make a difference in your community? If you pray about that, I'm sure God will give you an answer of how you can get involved.

But until you get the answer, you can go tour these places. You can go and check out the closest school to you and say, I just want to tour the school and see what opportunities there are. Even if you don't plan to take them, you can share those experiences with other people that you talk to. The community college in our area has a wonderful program where at one of the Goodwills you can go in and in three months you can come out as a practical nurse. You can come out with a degree in a Heating and air conditioning, in being an electrical engineer, well, electrical technician, forklift operator, long-haul trucker.

I remember talking to one fella who came out and said, You know, when you were in the jail, you told us to go look, and I went down and talked to him, and six months after, I'm making $50,000 a year driving a truck. There are opportunities in your community that a lot of people don't know about. And if you don't know about them, I encourage you to find out. Go to your public library and ask them what programs are around and see if there's a way that you can reach in and make a difference. There's only so much for our county commissioners to do with the money that they're given.

And I want them to be really good stewards, which amazed me that they were able, I call them cup rattlers, they went out and they got a whole lot of businesses and nonprofits to kick in a whole lot of extra money to make our school system work better. Thank you. Who was the genius that came up with the idea of getting that money? I don't know to what extent that is still a secret process, but I blundered into a meeting of them at a restaurant one afternoon. And there were members of the community like Don Flo, Paul Fulton.

Um and um Hal Kaplan. And of course, Don Martin, I think, was instrumental in getting that group together. But they did an amazing job. I know when we agreed that, you know, dollar for dollar we would reduce the $5 plus million dollar debt that was still owed to the county by the school system. You know, there was some thought that, well, that's not going to really amount to much when $30,000 comes dribbling in.

And then you see that millions now have rolled in, which I think is a testament to the quality and the caring of this community where our school system is concerned.

So we will survive. We will come out of this and we will be better and we'll be stronger. And I know these other two. School people that are here with us today, you know, will sing the praises of our incoming superintendent. Yeah.

I understand that the budget process for the county is a rather interesting thing to look at. And what really gets me is the school system's one of the largest parts of the budget.

Well, yes, about a third of the budget, in fact. You know, we have a funding formula, which I believe last year was for $180 million. That's not chump change. And that's for facilities and programs. It doesn't pay teacher salaries.

That has to come from the state. Um But uh yeah. Yes, it's a significant portion of our budget, but it should be because education should be the keystone of county government.

Well, I'm all you know, a third of my sales tax and a third of my property tax is going to education on top of half of the state revenues that how much is it now, Steve? It's more than half. It's probably approaching late high 60s, almost 70%, when you include public school system. Higher education, both private and public. It's probably close to 70 cents out of every taxpayer dollar.

Now, yeah, I really don't mind paying my taxes if I think it's being spent wisely. But I tell you I hate the idea if I think that millions and millions and millions is not being spent properly. And these are some of the folks that are responsible going forward to make sure the money gets spent properly. What do we do on the county level to make sure that the money's going in the right place and that the right people supervising it on that lower level?

Well, there's an annual budget process which is extensive, and I have found that the learning curve for that is extreme. But it starts with our county manager, Chantel Robinson. We could not have anyone. more superb in that position. But it's a long and detailed process.

I think the first document I was given was the proposed budget the year previously, and it's three or four hundred pages long. It's a lot of fun reading. But department by department they drill down on the numbers and then they're monitored during the year. And there are times when there are cutbacks. in funding uh that people don't hear about.

Because our budget gets tighter, or there are monies that are shifted to areas where the need is greater. And there has to be that flexibility, but there has to be competent financial management to make the system work, which is why our county is healthy financially. We have a fund balance. We're not bankrupt. We're not in the hole.

And we are very studious about not raising property taxes unless it's absolutely necessary. And I think they've been very good stewards of that before I was elected and hopefully will continue to be. We have a lunch group that meets Monday at Golden Corral. And that group invites in our government officials, and we grill them and we ask them whether they're doing the right thing or they're not doing the right thing. And some of them catch a lot of heat, and some of them are patted on the back.

I encourage you in your community to find a group of people, have lunch, and ask your elected officials to come in and talk to you. Keep them accountable. Go to some of the Gods.

Some of those meetings are just unbelievably boring. I don't know how in the world you folks do it, even if they're broadcast on TV. But if you've got a group of people that get together, maybe you can assign somebody to go report on what's going on. We've got to be involved. I think as Christians, we're called to be involved.

We've got a stewardship responsibility for not only our family and our neighbors and our community, but the government that we've elected. They need help. They need encouragement. They need to be told: boy, you screwed up, but we are oppressed to how you're getting out of it. But more importantly, we need to find ways that we can give a little bit of our time, energy, and money to make our own community better.

The better we do that, the less we need giant federal and state governments. who I really think do an unbelievably bad job, but that's just me.

Well, um I'm trying to pull a couple of things together here. What a few. You mentioned prayer a few minutes ago. Um Earlier in um This session, these four years of our school board. Um Activities and obligations, trying to meet our obligations.

We received a letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. A lot of our listeners here are probably familiar with it. But the concern was that we didn't need prayer anymore. I'd like for us to talk about that when we come back a little more about the vote by which we kicked God off the dais in the school board meetings. That discussion in the school board requires a whole lot of people sitting in those chairs so that that discussion goes the right way.

If that room's full of the wrong folks, then the vote goes the wrong way. We've got to get involved. And we've got to cover these. You're listening to the Truth Network and TruthNetwork.com. Well, I am so grateful that this is a Christian network and we've got a Christian Audience because the topic that just came up from the school board was that this.

Group that I'm not a fan of came in and told everybody that it was inappropriate and against the law to have a prayer before the school board meeting. Steve, tell the audience about what happened after that fiasco.

Well, again, Bill, you want the long version? You got till the music stop starts. It's about nine minutes.

Okay.

Well, we had we got this letter from this Infamous group called the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

So you can imagine what their agenda is. Their agenda is to divorce. uh human activity from any kind of divine interference or involvement. To my way of thinking, I come from the other side of the room, and to my way of thinking. Um The scripture says in Luke 2:52 that Jesus grew in stature and in wisdom and in favor with God and man.

That's the whole, that's all of life. You know, you grow physically, you want to go intellectually, you want to grow in favor with God and in favor. With Man. But it says in favor with God.

So why in the world do we seek to divorce God from the deliberations, public deliberations? How did that vote go? That vote went six. To three in favor of kicking God off the dais, if I may say it that way. Would I guess right if I said the three that voted the proper way were all Republicans?

Well, you would be right to say that two of those people are in this studio this morning. And the other one was a Republican, too.

Now, yes, some strange things happened in our school district not long after that. You want to get into that?

Well, just briefly, let's do the short version of it because we've got. Maybe I asked the wrong person.

Now, I'll try to abbreviate it.

Well, we learned first of all that we were several the system was several million dollars in debt. First it was three million, then eight million, then ten million, and then eventually it ballooned to. Do you folks ever think about hiring one person that was sort of over all the finances? Maybe you could call him a chief. To be in charge of that?

Well, we had a chief financial officer. Yes, we did. Uh and so we depended upon him, but that uh Uh perhaps that person He sort of disappeared if I could. Yeah, he did. He didn't show up for work after all.

He did. He did. So, my view was that, Bill, to tie the prayer issue and the spiritual issue for us and for the board and for this interview and for our community and for the world, really, and that is. Why do we want to divorce God from public proceedings? I mean, it just makes no sense to me, especially in a world where people seek inclusivity.

How do you achieve inclusivity by excluding certain people or certain groups? If there's someone genuinely interested in inclusivity, you don't exclude somebody. You include people.

So um Not long after we kicked God off the dais, as we may phrase it, we found that the debt ballooned to $46 and nearly $50 million.

Now, we've fortunately, and thank the good Lord that that's happened, community response is just amazing. I heard another board member say, it's a miracle. It's a miracle that it's happened this way.

So we're now, we've now whittled that thing down with the assistance of a fantastic interim superintendent. And now with our new A superintendent who I think is going to do a great job. I mean, here in this system for Scythe County. We have The superintendents we've that we've had in the last uh six months is the su our new superintendent. Dr.

Don Phipps. He was the Superintendent of the Year. He's also President of the Superintendents Association for the State. And the lady who came in and did a great job during the last six months, Katie Moore. She Was second in that voting.

So here we are as a district that's had that sort of thing.

So we're within, just in the broad picture, we're within maybe. I can't reveal any secrets of that sort of thing because I don't know any secrets. But we're within, and then I'll let Susan talk about this a bit. We're within probably three million of of being totally debt-free. Susan.

Yes, I want to go back to the prayer. Just to kind of set it set the tone here. Um W as far as we know, one Anonymous person. wrote to religious freedom. It was one person We don't know who they were.

He was that president of the organization. I actually think I do know who it was, but we won't go there. But we were opening the meetings with a prayer that I was actually writing. They were beautiful, I thought. And that really set everybody's heart.

And tone for that meeting. And I think since we were made to stop. It just feels so chaotic. And like Steve just said, things started really going downhill after we took our prayer away.

So I want to say here and now that I'm going to fight very hard. And I know Steve has said the same thing to get our prayer back into our school board meetings.

Now, my understanding is the majority party controlled. the board and the majority party had the top two people The chair and the co-chair, and there was very little that the party out of power could do anything to turn anything around.

So, my point is: we need the right people running for the school board. We need you to think about, pray about, helping the right people run for the school board. In every area that your listening audience covers, we need people that are right thinking, that want to be in charge of the education of their children. We need smart people, we need educators, but we need people that are going to fight For God and fight for Their children and fight for their community. And then we need to get in there and volunteer.

Bill, I want to make this point, if I might. Um And I said this during the process of the debate over the prairie issue, I said, I asked the question to those that were on the board and the people that were there in the room in the meeting and those that were watching on TV. I said, What parent? Does not Take their child to the school bus. In the morning.

or drive their kid to the school. Building. What parent does not say a prayer that their child will be safe