0:00:05.3 Vickie Brett: Welcome to the Inclusive Education Project. I'm Vickie Brett.

0:00:08.9 Amanda Selogie: I'm Amanda Selogie. We're two civil rights lawyers on a mission to change the conversation about education, civil rights, and modern activism.

0:00:19.3 Vickie Brett: Each week, we're gonna explore new topics which are going to educate and empower others and give them a platform to enact change in education and level the playing field.

0:00:33.5 Amanda Selogie: Welcome back, friends.

0:00:34.5 Vickie Brett: Hello.

0:00:36.0 Amanda Selogie: Happy spring break for all of those of you that are on spring break this week. If you are returning from spring break.

0:00:42.7 Vickie Brett: No, 'cause ski week. Some people just had ski week just two weeks ago, three weeks ago, and now it's like spring break is happening.

0:00:50.0 Amanda Selogie: I know. Well, my son's school district doesn't even go on spring break until after Easter. So we're just sitting here, everyone's like, "Happy vacation." And I'm like, "Yeah, we got a couple of it." [laughter] But it's so wild. I think we talked about this on our last episode. It's just wild how it's expanded so much. No one has spring break at the same time anymore.

0:01:09.3 Vickie Brett: Right. And it feels like that kind of era starts from mid-February to mid-April. So for us, it's been very fun to try to schedule things, right? In terms of IEPs and mediations and things like that.

0:01:22.7 Amanda Selogie: For those districts that have spring break early, you most likely started early, which means you're gonna be done with the school year in May, which is right around the corner. It seems weird. I was posting about our last episode where we were talking about all the things to do before the school year ends, and it was wild that it was like... We just started March and we're talking about this, but in reality, it's not that many school days left in the grand scheme of things.

0:01:50.3 Vickie Brett: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is a wonderful time to kind of dig in deep, right? Last week's episode, we were talking about functional behavioral assessments and really trying to get to the function of what they are actually supposed to be looking at. And today we have a wonderfully delightful guest that is going to really get in the mud with us in terms of evaluations and what it is for those students. And it's a particular population, right? Where they're not going to school and the district's response is, "Just bring them to school and then our services are gonna to help it out." So, Dr. Dennis, thank you for coming on and helping us kind of get through this. [laughter]

0:02:32.9 Dr. Dennis: Absolutely. First of all, just thank you for inviting me to participate. And I appreciate it. And yeah, typically that's what you'll get from school staff, unfortunately. "Just get them here and then we'll do something," which oftentimes isn't good enough.

0:02:49.2 Amanda Selogie: Well, not only not good enough, but is sometimes harmful for the student. I've got a kiddo right now that is so dysregulated at school because the program is so inappropriate for him that we're talking for an eight-year-old, hysterical meltdowns to the point of panic attacks. Even the mention of "we're going to school" triggers it. So for that parent to drag that child into the car, buckle them up, get to the school, drag them out of the car, it's so traumatic for that child. And for the team to just say, "Well, just bring them." What? [chuckle]

0:03:31.2 Dr. Dennis: And also, unfortunately, it makes it harder to get to school the very next day.

0:03:35.4 Amanda Selogie: Yes.

0:03:36.5 Dr. Dennis: Yeah. I mean, the list of problems with the school not taking ownership of a young person struggling with school non-attendance is, you know, goes on. It's not only is it hurtful to the student, but it's fundamentally not student-centered. It's not best practices, and in many cases, it's non-compliant. I mean, school has a responsibility to help facilitate getting a student onto campus and into the classroom.

0:04:02.4 Vickie Brett: I just wanted to kind of give him a little bit of time to give us his background 'cause we jumped right, we just dove right in. I know, I know, I know, I mean, [0:04:09.6] ____.

0:04:09.8 Dr. Dennis: Well, you probably knew I'm not very interesting and you didn't... For the sake of good pod, you wanted to avoid just the dead air as I'm trying to think of something to share that might be interesting to your listeners. So, well, one of the reasons why I have a pretty good idea of what goes on in school settings is because until very recently, I was the executive director of Student Support Services in a small, high-performing district here in Southern California. And so I had a front-row seat to the unfolding attendance crisis over the last few years. And I became increasingly frustrated with this lack of ownership, this sense of demarcation between school on the one hand and then on the other hand, home and community. And because, I mean, we're gonna be talking about a new kind of evaluation that I'm piloting right now and I'm hoping it'll help some of this.

0:05:11.1 Dr. Dennis: But in some ways, the M-DAE is kinda like the nuclear option. It's an intensive data collection process that most students who are struggling with attendance probably don't even need. And why is that? Because I often say little things can make a huge difference in terms of just lowering that threshold enough to get the kid back on campus. And so often I encountered parents who were confused and overwhelmed and frankly just tired, just exhausted, and staff who had a very narrow conception of what their responsibilities within this process are. And so I decided I was going to start an agency. It's called Back at School. And I focused mostly as an educational psychologist in private practice in working with families to help them get their students back on campus.

0:06:04.7 Dr. Dennis: And part of that is a new kind of assessment that I think will help in some of the really, really challenging cases. And I've seen it help. But again, I mean, parents need to know that there are some things that they can do and certainly there are some things that staff can do to essentially avoid even needing that kind of comprehensive evaluation.

0:06:28.7 Vickie Brett: When we are at IEP meetings and we can see the exhaustion in the parents' faces and we kinda sometimes get this deer in the headlights look from the district, right? And I think that that's where we get the repetition of, "Well, just bring them here," right? And I think what is interesting is oftentimes they're either categorizing it as, "Oh, it's teen stuff. All teens do this," right? And so then they start to be very broad and it really takes away from the child that's in front of them, right? Because there's always going to be this root cause and then there's gonna be the things that stem from the root cause that that's what the district at times wants to try to put a band-aid on. And we're about the fidelity of the data.

0:07:21.2 Vickie Brett: And so when we are going in and we say like, "Look, there is a type of evaluation that needs to be completed in here," oftentimes when we want it, it's like, "No, no, we don't have to do it," right? And then we put the pressure on and then when they wanna do it, it almost feels like... And do what is the evaluation. It sometimes feels like a stall tactic, right? I had a potential just where the child, she's in high school, sophomore. She has been hospitalized in the last five months three different times. Has had an IEP since she was seven. We started to see the hospitalization at the end of last year. She stopped going to school at the end of last year. Her accommodations weren't being implemented. And the dad is picking her up from the hospital, having an IEP meeting, saying like, "She needs a residential treatment."

0:08:12.6 Vickie Brett: And the district's like, "Well, you gotta bring her to school. We gotta get data, we gotta get information." And Dad's like, "Is the hospitalization not enough?" [laughter] So it's interesting because we want the fidelity of the data. We want things to be done. We want it to show. But oftentimes, I feel like districts will use it to their advantage. And I think what's interesting here is this is specifically tailored, like, what are the attendance problems? What are we looking at? What is the actual refusal or the avoidance, right? Or is it medically related and that's a part of the absenteeism or what? Is that what you often find when you're going in is they're trying to address these things that aren't really the problem, and then your evaluation is able to bring it to light?

0:08:55.1 Dr. Dennis: Yeah, I see that a lot. Just quick overview on I think what the three of us already know about human nature. In any agency or organization, there's a big group of people in there who are competent and conscientious. And then there's another segment that are just kinda sort of okay. And they're showing up to work every day. And then you've got the group that is maybe not confident selecting and implementing different interventions or are just waiting for summer break. And they're burned out too, just like the parents, maybe for some of the same reasons. So that's a reality. Ideally, the school team or the parent, if there is some school attendance beginning to impact access to the curriculum, will convene a student study team meeting. And at that meeting, this is for students who are still primarily in the general education setting.

0:09:51.9 Dr. Dennis: They're not on a 504 plan or an IEP. If the child is on a 504 plan or an IEP, they should ask for a 30-day parent request 504 or a 30-day parent request IEP, hopefully schedule it more quickly because one of the real truisms of attendance problems is the longer you're out, the harder it is to go back, so. And that right there is one of the issues. School staff are really overworked and it's hard to find time to meet. But you want to call a meeting, and then you want to, whether it's an SST or whether it's a 504 or an IEP, and you want to try to figure out what's already been tried and then based upon that, what might be going on. A lot of times what you've tried that hasn't worked will better inform what the underlying issue is. And typically educators and a lot of savvy parents, I mean, there's this thing called the internet.

0:10:41.7 Dr. Dennis: There's a lot of great information on it. Well, they know that one of the first things you need to figure out in that meeting is this more about internalizing behaviors, which is typically labeled school refusal or school avoidance. Or is this more like kind of good old-fashioned truancy, right? Which typically involves externalizing behaviors. So the shorthand is if the student can't get to school, then it's a skills deficit, right? And that's internalized. If the student can get to school but chooses not to, then that's a performance deficit. And that's not a can't do, that's a won't do. And the interventions for those two underlying issues are gonna be very different. But if you don't understand what the issue is, it's gonna be harder to try to fix the problem.

0:11:32.4 Amanda Selogie: Well, and I would even say there's kind of a third category where it's not really... And this is where I think school teams get tripped up because they only think about those two and they don't think about maybe the environment, the program. And this is mostly for kids who are already on IEPs or definitely should be, right? That the program itself is actually causing a lot of the root of the problem.

0:11:53.7 Dr. Dennis: Oh, that's a really good point. But I mean, that the actual setting or curriculum can contribute to either of those. Because if, let's say a student is on an IEP and is extremely anxious about taking tests, and he or she is not getting the accommodations that the team agreed to and so that young person is having panic attacks on Thursdays when the biology quizzes are administered. So that's a program that either doesn't match or that's the appropriate program, but without the accommodations that everyone said that student needed to be successful in that program. The other version of that is that the stuff going on in biology class is not very interesting and the material is not delivered in a way that's designed to engage all sorts of different kinds of learners, right?

0:12:50.6 Dr. Dennis: So if you've got a young person who's not anxious about taking the biology quiz, but didn't learn what was on the biology quiz because the method of delivery, whether it was the modality or whether it was lack of sort of caring or empathy on the part of the classroom staff where they could sense that they really needed to kind of move around the classroom and engage all the students and make sure they were on task. That student doesn't show up because that student thinks biology sucks and is not gonna go to school that day because the last thing he wants to be reminded of is getting an F on that biology quiz because he's not really invested in the school experience.

0:13:34.7 Dr. Dennis: The problem with the school refusal versus truancy is that the traditional response by school staff is, well, in one sense it's binary and that's okay because there needs to be a differentiation. But in terms of the actual consequences or interventions or supports, the [chuckle] usual default is that if it's school refusal, you feel sorry for the kid, right? But if it's truancy, you get mad at them, right? We're officially mad at you because you're a truant because you don't like Mrs. Jones or the textbook or...

0:14:10.1 Amanda Selogie: They place the blame on the student.

0:14:12.1 Dr. Dennis: Right. And you'd rather be in art or PE or involved in some other hands-on or gross motor activity because biology is kind of not your favorite thing and no one's really making a concerted effort to kind of try to find out how to make it your thing. And of course, again, there are a lot of great teachers, but also a lot of teachers are overworked. And when they see that, first of all, human nature again, they are kind of offended. "Wait, I'm a biology teacher. I love biology. Why don't you love biology? What's wrong with you?"

0:14:45.1 Vickie Brett: Exactly right. Yeah.

0:14:46.6 Dr. Dennis: But then also, you know what, this leftover sense that school's supposed to be kind of a mortification process like boot camp. So you know what? You're gonna learn biology even if you hate it, and it's gonna build your character.

0:14:59.2 Vickie Brett: Whether you like it or not.

0:14:59.8 Dr. Dennis: Right. And some kids are resilient enough to hang around for that and maybe they even benefit. Maybe they actually do become more resilient, but a lot of kids are just gonna punch out and stay home.

0:15:11.6 Amanda Selogie: Well, and where we often see those kiddos is six months down the line when the team failed to address the underlying issue causing the student not to want to go to biology, usually being an underlying academic skill deficit that's not being addressed, then carries over to other subjects, creates more mental health strain, to then when they come to us, they're not just missing the days where there's a biology test, they're missing every day. They're not wanting to go, they're shutting down, they're withdrawing. And what we get frustrated at is we get the kiddos who haven't been to school in three weeks, four weeks, who are really in the weeds with their mental health challenges. They're needing outpatient treatment or worse, right? And we look through the records and we look through the emails from the parents.

0:16:03.7 Amanda Selogie: We look through if there was an SST meeting or IEP meeting, 504 meeting where the parent's explaining this and nothing happened. And it's like we see those points of like, this is the moment you could have done something. This is the moment you could have intervened. But it spiraled from there, and then it's only gonna get worse and worse.

0:16:21.7 Dr. Dennis: There's a kind of inertia around school attendance in terms of the suite of behavioral challenges that staff may be facing. And if the student grabs a chair and throws it through a glass door, that gets everyone's attention. I've found that [chuckle] the team is much more anxious to schedule a follow-up meeting.

0:16:41.0 Vickie Brett: 100%.

0:16:41.8 Dr. Dennis: Right. Than if a somewhat recalcitrant adolescent who always seems to be in a bad mood and will never take off his hoodie disappears for three weeks. That's not, not really... That's not motivating very many school personnel. They're like, okay, well... And even if the student's already on a 504 or an IEP and we know either the school counselor or the case manager should be scheduling a meeting to take a look at whether... First of all, whether or not there's even any behavioral goals related to attendance. And if there are, why aren't they working? But oftentimes you'll find that that student... Forget about a BIP, or... And by the way, I heard your show about FBAs and BIPs and you guys are really smart.

0:17:30.2 Vickie Brett: Oh, thank you.

0:17:31.5 Amanda Selogie: Well, thank you. [laughter]

0:17:32.4 Vickie Brett: That's so kind.

0:17:33.0 Dr. Dennis: Well, it takes someone really smart to recognize other people who are bright, so...

0:17:36.5 Vickie Brett: Obviously, obviously.

0:17:38.3 Dr. Dennis: I needed that. I so needed that. I needed that feedback. I'm feeling really good now. [laughter]

0:17:41.8 Amanda Selogie: We appreciate that. Nine times out of 10 when we do see an attendance goal or a behavior goal surrounding attendance or work completion, if we haven't been involved in developing that goal, that goal reads, "Johnny will complete his homework or attend school eight out of 10 opportunities." And it's like, that's bullshit. This isn't gonna help anyone. It's in the meeting saying, "Well, if Johnny would just..." fill in the blank. We're putting 100% of the burden on the student, completely ignoring that there's other problems.

0:18:16.0 Dr. Dennis: Well, I mean, yeah. What's kind of scary... I try not to come from a place of [chuckle] fear, but what's kind of scary is that just like little things can make the situation a lot better, so it can be relatively easy to get kids to school, the opposite is true in that it's pretty easy to lose a kid. And then because of the kind of lack of behavioral momentum that we've talked about already, it becomes much easier to stay home than walk to school or get in the car.

0:18:49.8 Vickie Brett: And as you had pointed out when you had initially reached out, since the pandemic, some of these bigger school districts and LEAs and SELPAs realized, "All right, some people want a virtual academy. Okay, let's do it. Let's set it up." And these, I mean, they barely work for neurotypical kiddos. But then you have a neurodiverse kiddo or a kiddo with anxiety, depression, and the parents are like, "He doesn't want to go." And oftentimes we see our girls internalize, boys may be external, sometimes it flips and that's fine. But generally speaking, we see the girl be put on this type of virtual, but then it's like there's no modifications, no accommodations. The parent essentially becomes the teacher, but the parent is not a teacher. And then we see that fail again, right?

0:19:41.2 Vickie Brett: And the district goes, "Well, we did... She doesn't have to come to school, so what more do you want?" And that's what is so disappointing in that they're not realizing what the root cause of the situation is, right? Like they, like I said, want to just put band-aids on it. And that's why we were really, really interested to kind of learn, okay, if they want data, how can we make this data that they will swallow, for lack of a better term, right? And provide the correct accommodations, placement, support that this child needs.

0:20:16.8 Dr. Dennis: Yeah, I mean, I'm glad you brought up virtual instruction because, I mean, so the numbers are bad. I mean, current data right now indicates that anywhere between 19% and 25% of all US students remain chronically absent coming out of COVID. And so that's nearly double the pre-pandemic rates, pre-pandemic rates. And then it disproportionately affects students with disabilities. Absenteeism rates among students on 504s and IEPs is generally about three times higher than for their non-disabled peers. So it's a big problem for all students, and it's especially a big problem for students with additional needs. And this decision by many larger districts to retain their AB 130, Assembly Bill 130, long-term independent study, which was put in place during the COVID closure, is kind of masking the problem because those kids get to be counted as going to school, even though that's not school, that's the kitchen.

0:21:15.3 Dr. Dennis: And that's not really teaching, that's just staring at a screen. And we know there's a ton of research that screens make us sick, they make us more anxious, and they make us more depressed. It's more likely to negatively affect children and adolescents than adults. And the other issue is that most of the districts have policies where you don't actually... I know this sounds hypocritical, but I'll get to it. You don't actually have to spend that much time in front of the screen to get full credit for that day. So that means that the district is able to collect their full ADA, which is very important to schools because that's how they pay for everything. You don't actually have to be on the screen for very long to have it count like you went to school that day. And if you're actually on the screen for six hours, you're gonna be anxious and depressed, and you're... And so it's kind of a no-win. And you can tell that I'm not a super fan of distance learning.

0:22:13.2 Vickie Brett: And I think that that is why having an evaluation of this type with the MDA, right, and getting together all the different types... And they're familiar, it's just like that's the umbrella term. And then can you talk about the specifics of it? I know we...

0:22:30.0 Dr. Dennis: So I've spent more than 30 years in education. I know I don't look that old.

0:22:35.4 Vickie Brett: I know. Wow.

0:22:37.1 Dr. Dennis: I wish our listeners could see how young I [laughter] actually look. It's red light mask therapy.

0:22:41.8 Vickie Brett: Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:22:43.3 Dr. Dennis: I probably need that.

0:22:44.4 Vickie Brett: And under-eye patches. Yeah, yeah.

0:22:46.7 Dr. Dennis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I use... I'm old school. I still use the cucumbers.

0:22:49.7 Vickie Brett: Oh, there you go. Okay. Yeah.

0:22:52.0 Dr. Dennis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Typically I have an appetite late at night, though, so I end up just eating them. But they're not even on my eyelids very long.

0:22:58.2 Vickie Brett: Right, right, right. That makes sense. Yeah.

0:22:59.9 Dr. Dennis: So I started as a paraprofessional, as a teaching assistant in a non-public school for kids who are emotionally and behaviorally disordered. And I kind of just worked my way up. I became a lead teacher, and then I became a transition coordinator, and then became an administrator, and then took some time off because both of my sons were born quite prematurely, so I wanted to stay home for each of them and kind of maximize their potential during that critical developmental period. And eventually went back to work as a resource specialist after being a special day class teacher. I had done some work as an educational therapist, so I kind of knew how that worked. And after a few years of being incredibly frustrated by every school psychologist I ever worked with, [chuckle] I decided to go back to school, and...

0:23:45.1 Vickie Brett: There you go. Yeah.

0:23:47.0 Dr. Dennis: And become first a school psychologist, and then I went back for the doctorate and became an educational psychologist. And along the way, I got a BCBA so I could have a better understanding of what that function of the behavior thing was. So then I finished out, as I said before, as a district-level administrator. And so I've been in a lot of IEPs. I guess that's kind of a long way to get to... I've been in a lot of IEPs. And that moment where there's someone who's presenting behavioral data, oftentimes it's a BCBA from that very narrow perspective. Okay? So that's happening. And then all of a sudden there's this jarring move where there's a school psychologist talking about processing issues, or perhaps an outside neuropsychologist has been brought in to do an independent evaluation, and they're talking about all these processing issues and executive function and all that.

0:24:39.6 Dr. Dennis: And then if the student's presenting with some emotional issues, someone was tasked... Sometimes it's a clinical social worker, sometimes it's just another school psychologist, tasked with doing an ERMS or an ERICS evaluation to collect data around social-emotional and behavioral functioning that's based more on a cognitive model. So you have this behavioral stuff and you have this neuropsych stuff, and then you had this cognitive mental health stuff, and it really was like there were these three different parts to the meeting, but no one ever really had the time or the inclination to kind of put them together to what I always believe would have to better inform whatever decisions come out of all that massive data collection. So that's when I cooked up the M-DAE, and it stands for Multi-Domain Attendance Evaluation.

0:25:29.8 Dr. Dennis: And it's essentially a new kind of independent educational evaluation that a parent can request or an LEA, a local educational agency, can reach out to me and ask me to do it and contract with me directly. And it's just basically that. It's collecting a bunch of information within that one paradigm, behaviorism. So essentially an FBA related to what are the functions of the non-attendance. And then it's a neuropsych component where I'm looking at things like processing and executive functioning and social skills and things like that. And then it's a cognitive component, so kind of like a mini ERICS or ERMS evaluation, where I'm trying to figure out if this is about internalized behaviors or is this about externalized behaviors or perhaps it's a combination of both.

0:26:22.2 Dr. Dennis: So that we've got the information we need as a team to first of all make that differentiation between school refusal and truancy and then actually put some follow-up interventions in place that will move the needle, that will actually make a difference.

0:26:38.7 Vickie Brett: I mean, I heard you say very rarely do we have someone with the level of expertise, right? To connect or to even see. And I know that our better IEPs are where the OT and the speech are actually communicating, right? About the child and collaborating. And this is, I mean, it hits everything that, I mean, I feel like we often do with our IEEs, right? And sometimes it works if it's one agency, right? And so then they're all collaborative anyway. What makes this unique is that you have all of that expertise., So you have all of...

0:27:16.9 Dr. Dennis: I do. I'm pretty special.

0:27:18.4 Vickie Brett: Yeah, yeah, you're pretty special. You have the doctorate. Look at that. We have a Juris Doctorate, so it's kind of, but you don't have to call it doctor, but...

0:27:24.4 Dr. Dennis: That's right. You guys are doctors too. You're [0:27:26.0] ____.

0:27:26.2 Vickie Brett: Yeah, you can call us Esquire.

0:27:28.2 Dr. Dennis: Can I call you doctors for the rest of the podcast?

0:27:30.9 Vickie Brett: Well, yeah, of course. Of course. Of course. Yeah. Yeah, no, but yeah, so for us, even though this completely makes sense, right? It seems, and you're not bringing these far-out kind of things, 'cause sometimes, I mean, gosh, even us just requesting a neuropsych, sometimes it's kind of like, "Oh, well, we have to do educational," and it's like, you guys, calm down. It's not fringe science.

0:27:53.8 Amanda Selogie: I think teams tend to get stuck in the, "this is how we've always done it." Like my kiddo I mentioned earlier, it's, we know a big part of the school refusal is based on the program he's in and it not being appropriate. Everyone agrees the program's not appropriate. But the team is so stuck on, "Well, we need to do an FBA. We need to do an FBA in the classroom." And if he's not in school, how are we gonna do the FBA? How are we gonna know what to recommend? And I'm like, well, and in this case, it's so severe that we're requesting home hospital instruction while we work on figuring out where he's gonna go next and all of this. But the focus has been so on, "We can't basically give you an answer unless we do an FBA in this classroom." A classroom that...

0:28:38.3 Dr. Dennis: Right. Again, that goes back to sort of your self-concept about what your responsibilities are as a professional. And listen, we all have limited bandwidth and there's... Everyone has a point where our cognitive load is exceeded. But also they're kind of like excuses. We talked earlier about using emerging adolescence as an excuse for maladaptive behavior. That's kind of the rap that adolescents get out in the media too, which is that, oh, they don't have any executive function, they can't be expected to do anything. And so maybe the parents buy into that, maybe the principals buy into that. And so...

0:29:15.2 Amanda Selogie: Or they're just moody teenagers going through puberty.

0:29:18.8 Dr. Dennis: So immediately we get into a situation where low expectations are gonna make this problem much, much more difficult to solve. And then, again, all those IEP meetings, back to bandwidth, sometimes you'll see an OT just stop paying attention when it's someone else's turn to report out. I've probably done that myself. I mean, it's hard not to because you're thinking, "That's not my job."

0:29:42.7 Amanda Selogie: Well, and the teams that say, "Is it okay if this person is excused after they report?" And I'm always like, especially if there's a behavioral component, everyone needs to be discussing this together because it's not just one thing. It's one thing if we're in an annual IEP where everything's been going great and everything's fine and everything's working okay, maybe. But generally speaking, it's not just a matter of listening, but really having a conversation about what everyone is seeing. And I think what's lost often is the OT will think, "Well, my sessions are not... It's not the same thing." right? Or the team will say, "What's happening in OT is similar to what happens at home." right? Well, that's not a learning environment. I'm sorry, everything for a child can be considered a learning environment. We should be looking at how are they receiving information, how are they providing information, how are they processing information? This is all learning. It needs to be part of it.

0:30:44.1 Vickie Brett: And I want to jump in there. And listeners, you're very lucky 'cause we knew we would get into it with Dr. Dennis, so we are gonna have him back for a part two. And as my daughter has been learning and saying, that's what's called a cliffhanger. How the evaluation is actually going to be, that data, what are we gonna do with that data, and how are we gonna use it, and what plans are we gonna provide is gonna be in part two. So look out for that dropping, as always, two weeks from this podcast. And yeah, if you have any questions, please let us know. You can always send them to us, and we will continue this conversation with Dr. Dennis in two weeks. Talk to you later.

[music]

0:31:26.9 Dr. Dennis: Well, this was a pleasure. I look forward to coming back.

0:31:29.5 Vickie Brett: Thank you. Bye, listeners.