Nothing that we do is standardized, so the quality and consistency are standard but the content is very customized to a local community, what's happening there, and what is culturally appropriate and geographically appropriate. It's also reflective of the economic development opportunities in those specific areas.
I think it's essential to recognize that there is a role to be played within the formal school system, absolutely, but it is just as essential to have experiences outside of school. Kids have twice the amount of time available for learning outside of school in terms of hours, if you take out eating and sleeping, that they have inside of school. Experiences outside of school that are educational in nature are often treated as something that is done in response to poor education or failures on the part of formal education, and I want to try to break that link.
If the school system were wonderful and every child were still engaged and achieving at the same rate, we would still want to see extracurricular programming outside of school because the kinds of environments that can be created and the kinds of experiences and how those lead to skills development and resilience are unique and different.
I would say that what we are proposing to the federal government in terms of a federal ask would do two things. It would support what's happening in schools in a bigger way, in terms of teacher training, delivery of content, and availability of good content especially on digital skills, but it would also invest in the programming that happens outside of school that is so essential to engaging youth, their parents, their influencers, and their community as a whole.