[00:00:15] Jon M: I’m Jon Moscow.
[00:00:16] Amy H-L: And I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Our guest today is Megan Conklin. Ms. Conklin is a National Board Certified public school teacher in Washington Megan who is currently substitute teaching as well as training and supporting substitute teachers. She is the director of Conklin Educational Perspectives. Welcome, Megan.
[00:00:37] Megan C: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.
[00:00:39] Jon M: You’ve had a lot of roles in schools and districts, but you’re choosing to be a substitute teacher. Why?
[00:00:45] Megan C: When I got my teaching degree, I did not sub. It was a shortage, so I went straight into the classroom and I had zero experience subbing. So when I did sub, it was because I was home with my own kids, which is a really, really common story. We have lots of parents who are subs, and it was flexible. And I was a teacher. It made so much sense. But when I got that, I remember so vividly that first week of subbing. I realized two things. I was fortunate to realize that I absolutely loved it. But I also realized right away that it was a completely different job than being a classroom teacher, a completely different skill set. But I loved it. I enjoyed the flexibility. I loved something new every day. But the other thing that I realized right away, you know, having been a classroom teacher, instructional coach, and a district leader, was that subs aren’t treated the same way that classroom teachers are treated. So it was really eye-opening and interesting.
[00:01:45] Amy H-L: Tell us more.
[00:01:45] Megan C: I was just talking to someone about the fact that because I started in education with my master’s in teaching, and I really quickly got my National Board certification, and I did it to avoid something in our state called pro cert. So it was a professional certification they were asking teachers to get. And it was all, I just finished my master’s. I mean, this is that teacher certification conversation that we can have about how sometimes we make it more complicated than it needs to be. But in order to avoid doing that post cert, after just three years of classroom teaching, I did my National Board certification and I had a lot of opportunities open to me.
So I really shot up the ladder of the hierarchy, I guess the ladder of influence in education, if you will, fairly quickly early in my career. I was a classroom teacher. I was treated with respect, offered professional development. I was then offered the opportunity, with my colleague Heather, to start our district’s first ever instructional coaching program, and this was back when everyone was starting an instructional coaching program. And I was in North Thurston Public Schools in Lacey, Washington at the time, which is a very, very forward-thinking and progressive school district. And they sent us away to other districts to look at some examples and, as it turned out, some real non-examples of how to start an instructional coaching program. So we really benefitted from that. And we were successful. We created a mentorship academy within that structure. And it was really, really successful. So, I went up the ladder of influence and education, and I had a really loud voice that was listened to. And I liked it. I enjoyed it. I also have the kind of personality that I’m a bit all-or-nothing.
When I started having kids, I had a partner, my husband, who is also a teacher, a special education teacher, and we co-parented and we both went part-time. I needed that kind of support. And my husband’s a great parent. So we did that for a long time. And when I got pregnant with my fourth kid, my husband, who shares a little bit of my same personality, where we like to try new things, decided to quit being a teacher and become a firefighter. And so he became a firefighter. He’s actually becoming a lieutenant this week. He’s done well as a firefighter. He was a special ed teacher, and now he’s a firefighter. And I decided to just quit everything and be a parent full-time. And that really worked for our family. As a parent, I also taught preschool classes. I was a child-care worker. I taught a mommy-and-me parenting class at my kids’ preschool. I just ended up doing these jobs that were in education. And are really, really undervalued and marginalized. And then I tried substitute teaching and I again absolutely loved it. And realized how this is another one of those pockets of public ed that is really marginalized, underappreciated, underutilized, misunderstood, and not supported. And because of that, my colleague and I decided to create support. There was no support. There was no PD for subs in our area. And so we started creating that.
[00:04:44] Jon M: What are some of the major issues that substitutes face?
[00:04:47] Megan C: What I just mentioned is definitely a big one, the lack of support in Washington state. I subbed before the pandemic, and I subbed after the pandemic, and they were two vastly different experiences. Substitute teaching before the pandemic, I was a typical sub, somebody with background in education. I subbed next door to a lot of retired educators. That was the landscape. After the pandemic, we had 15,000 emergency-certified subs in Washington state. We now have 16,000 that entered our ranks, and that was out of necessity. Retired teachers were not subbing during the pandemic or after the pandemic. And we had teachers who were out on extended leaves. We desperately needed subs. Every state did. I’m sure you experienced that in your states as well. So what did we do? We lowered the gates and we opened the doors and we invited literally everyone to come and sub. And it didn’t matter if they had a background in education. It didn’t matter if they had basic knowledge of child development. We just invited them in. And so then I was out there subbing next door to people who, I tell this story a lot… I was subbing in a fourth-grade classroom and it was buddy day, and in the second-grade classroom, there was another sub, so two subs and approximately 50 children in one classroom. It was chaos. It was noisy. And I did a really quick pattern clap as an attention-getter, the pattern clap that we all know. And all the kids stopped and clapped back at me and everyone lined up and we went out to recess. And as we were walking out, the other substitute leaned down and was tugging on one of the fourth-graders, and said to the girl, why didn’t you tell me you had some kind of clapping thing. And the girl just got [inaudible] and ran off and I was chuckling to myself. But later that evening, I was talking to my husband, you know, a former teacher, and saying, why doesn’t he know about attention-getters? Isn’t he receiving some support or training opportunity to collaborate? And that just wasn’t at all there in Washington state at the time.
We have a wonderful Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction who recognized that and offered money to start supporting our emergency-certified substitute teachers. That’s where I got involved with our union. They gave the money to the union, the union partnered with me. So, yeah, we, we created gatherings for substitutes, and now we’re scaling them across Washington state. We have our first Eastern Washington sub-community gathering April 23rd. I’m really excited. We’re going to talk about navigating challenging behaviors and substitute teachers.
[00:07:19] Amy H-L: Do the substitutes in your program get some sort of subsidy for attending?
[00:07:24] Megan C: They do not get paid. It’s free, obviously. I have talked to many, many different people who have asked me if we charge our substitutes for PD, which some people do, believe it or not, and that doesn’t make any sense to me. Substitutes don’t receive a living wage, and there’s no way I would ever charge a sub, which is why we partnered with the union. So it is free. One of the things we do is we feed them. So when we designed these gatherings, I designed them the way I designed my classroom, which is connection first. Student voice is centered and choice is woven throughout. And equity is the foundation. And so these were very intentionally designed gatherings. And one of the pieces is that the first soft start half hour is we eat a meal together. And we just connect as human beings. Because I partner with the union, we’re able to use local restaurants to cater our events. And so that’s one of the ways we try to intentionally imbue diversity and equity into our community gatherings. We also gather at a local community centers. We gather at senior centers in Vancouver. We meet at the Elks Club. So we intentionally gather at spaces that feel accessible to all different types of people. The thing we learned right away is that the substitute teacher pool is incredibly diverse in a way that our certificated teacher pool is not. And that’s been really interesting and eye opening. I mean, it makes a ton of sense to me and my colleague that I work with. She was born and raised in Sri Lanka, and she moved over here. She and her husband raised their son here. And when she and I talk about our experiences entering into education, they are very, very different. She encountered barriers that I did not encounter. As an immigrant, her degree was not looked at the same way I was, and what she ended up doing was getting into preschool. And so she taught at private preschools because she was not allowed into the K-12 system. There were just too many barriers and she just decided to go this other route. And I see that happen a lot. Because there are unintentional and intentional barriers that are set up. Those barriers aren’t there for substitute teaching in the same way that they’re there for certificated classroom teaching. Therefore, our sub pools are really, really diverse in a variety of ways. Not just racially and ethnically diverse, though that is very true. Age-wise, we see this huge range of ages of substitute teachers. We see a huge range of backgrounds in our substitute teachers. Many of the people who come to our gatherings have PhDs in a variety of things or graduate degrees. They’re really, really smart people and they’re very interested in education. I didn’t plan for this. I planned. We planned for this to be retention.
We were watching subs come in and crash and burn on their first day in front of a bunch of 17-year-old kids and never, ever come back. You don’t come back after that. It’s humiliating. And if you don’t have support and you have nobody telling you how to do it a little bit better, it’s defeating. So, we plan these gatherings as retention. We want to retain these subs. We want them to feel supported so that they come back another day. We want them to feel like professionals because they are professional. What we didn’t realize is we would end up with is these incredibly diverse, amazing, talented recruitment pools. Approximately 30 percent of the subs who come to our gatherings are interested in becoming full-time classroom teachers. So it’s been really interesting, the whole journey and process.
[00:11:13] Jon M: What should a substitute do if they’re thrown into a situation without any kind of support? What do you recommend?
[00:11:20] Megan C: I think that asking for help, because I think the first thing is don’t assume that you don’t have support. So you do have resources. Even if you don’t have systematized resources, like what we’re trying to provide here in Washington state, there are still resources available to you. In my experience, the two humans in any school building who really, really care about substitutes are, in this order, the front office professional and the principal. And that is because when we don’t show up, when there is no sub, and this happens all the time, those are the humans that have to figure out how to fill the gap. My sister is an elementary school principal here in Olympia and the year after COVID, she would spend every single morning for one or two hours, reconfiguring the schedule to cover all the gaps for the teachers who were out that didn’t have substitutes. And this still happens regularly. My colleague, Michelle, who is one of the sub community facilitators who works with me, she just told me yesterday that she was subbing in an elementary school, but the specialist was out. There was no sub for the specialist, so they didn’t get any breaks throughout the day. So if you can connect with the front office professional and or the principal and ask for help, those are the two people I would, I would go to.
One of the things that we did as a state is we surveyed those 15,000 emergency-certified substitute teachers and asked them a lot of really good questions about what kind of support they need and what would help. And I have the privilege of going through all of that data, and we pulled it down to our top-10 list that those emergency-certified substitute teachers have said they are facing. And those are the topics for our sub community gap. So, one of our sub community gatherings is about no sub plans. No sub plans, no problem. What to do when there’s nothing to do? Because that’s a really common thing that happens to subs. You walk in, there isn’t a plan. And if you don’t have a background in education and there’s no plan there for you, that is a really, really challenging job. The assumption that the work we do as teachers, like I studied for a really long time to become a teacher, and then I practiced my art for a really, really long time. So the idea that somebody could just walk in and do that job is a bit fantastical. And those people need support. And the other piece besides just that skill-building that we provide with our sub communities is I try to think about my first years in education, what I would have done if I did not have my teacher friends to talk to. And I would not have lasted long without a community around me to support me, to vent to, to troubleshoot with, to problem-solve with. And in my district, in addition to just having that, being part of that community and immediately accepted in as a full-time classroom teacher, which subs are not, we had PLC [professional learning community], we had intentional time set aside, like many, many school districts do to sit and be professionals together, and that is what I modeled the set of community gathering after. It’s a PLC for substitute teachers. And it gives them that community.
[00:14:28] Jon M: So I want to follow up on the situation where you can’t reach the principal or the other front office person and sort of the situation you described before, where the substitute ended up whispering to the students, “why didn’t you tell me you have a clapping procedure?” So you, you walk into this room and everything goes wrong. You have no idea what you’re doing. There’s nobody there to help you. What do you tell the substitute to do then, other than just leave the room and leave the school and never come back?
[00:14:58] Megan C: So, it’s funny that you say that because we always start our sub communities with no sub plans, or we don’t start, but if throughout the gathering, we have, we want to model high yield instructional and social emotional strategies for these subs to take away. So, in our no sub plans, we play four corners. So I sit in four corners is a very replicable high-yield game that you can play in a classroom with a variety of contents and it’s a movement game. So it meets that it scratches that itch that a lot of kids need. So we play four corners. So I say to my group of substitute teachers, when you walk into a class and you encounter no sub plans, do you, and I say: If you. Immediately go next door and ask the next-door-neighbor teacher what to do, I want you to go to corner number one. If you immediately go back to the front office and ask the front office professional or principal what to do, I want you to go to corner number two. If you get really excited because you’re like me and you love it when there’s no sub plans because then you get to make up everything that you want to do, you go to corner number three. And if you see no sub plans and you get back in your car and you drive home, I want you to go to corner number four. And then everybody gets up and they all go to their corners and they start talking and they discuss strategies and they say what they do. And they say, Oh, you know what I do? I always look for a schedule on the wall and they, and so they chat in their corners and then we have a big share out and everybody shares out the strategies. And we walk away with a lot of things. So we walk away being able to vent and say how crazy it is when there’s no sub plan. We walk away with new strategies from our peers, and real life strategies too, not just strategies from books, but real things that work. And we also just walk away feeling seen and heard. And it’s really fun. And you walk away with the strategy of four corners. So the next time I’m subbing and my lesson ends really early, I can play four corners with the students using [inaudible].
[00:16:53] Amy H-L: So do the teachers who chose the corner to go home, do they come back?
[00:16:59] Megan C: I don’t know, but someone’s always in that corner. And they’re usually laughing, and it’s usually kind of a funny, light-hearted thing. One of the biggest skills, I teach a lot of mindsets for subbing. If you can have a light-hearted mindset as a substitute teacher, everything’s going to be better for you. So even I try to make that lightheartedness or I tell them to hold things lightly. I try to even put that into the activities that we do. So it is a bit tongue in cheek, and we’re not advising that anybody get in their car and go away. But there are people who say, yeah, I tell the, the front office professional I need someone else to do this job. And that’s valid.
[00:17:34] Amy H-L: Have you asked students what they want to see in a substitute teacher?
[00:17:39] Megan C: I certainly have. That’s one of my favorite things to do when I have a lesson that ends early, because of the work I do with substitutes. I will write on the board, what makes an effective substitute teacher. Because I really do think students are the experts about what they need and what works for them in the classroom. I have a whole collection of these that I share. I share subbing tips on my Instagram page. I started doing that right after the pandemic, just little, like, bite-size PD kind of tips, but I share pictures of the whiteboard. So, when I ask students, little kids, I’ll scribe for them and older kids will come up and they’ll write things about what they think makes an effective substitute teacher. The overarching theme that I see connected for all the students across all the grade levels is the idea of strict, but not too strict. They want a sub who can keep order, and they don’t want things to be chaotic. They don’t want things to go crazy. And they want a sub who acknowledges that I’m not your teacher. When I can say, especially to adolescents, so I do a lot of middle and high school subbing because I was a high school teacher. When you can acknowledge to a bunch of adolescents that, hey, I know I’m not the teacher. But I am a teacher, and I do have a plan, and we are going to get through the day. And I acknowledge that you’re the experts about your classrooms, so we’re going to partner together, and I’m going to ask for your help. When you can do that, a lot of the tension goes out of the classroom. And I even do it with little kids. It’s different. It sounds different. So when I’m subbing in kindergarten, I might say, let’s see, do I look like Mr. Brown? And the kids will say, no, or maybe they’ll say, yes, you look just like him, you know, and then I’ll say, do I walk like Mr. Brown? Am I Mr. Brown? And then we’ll have this little conversation about how I’m Miss Conklin, not Mr. Brown. And I’m going to use Mr. Brown’s attention signals today. We’re going to line up the same way that we line up with Mr. Brown. We’re going to, so it’s this tension. I would say that kids want between acknowledging you’re not the real teacher, but keeping order the way a teacher does.
[00:19:47] Amy H-L: And how do things differ when you’re more of a long-term sub?
[00:19:53] Megan C: That’s a great question and such an important question because in Washington state this year we had more and more classrooms starting with long-term subs because of our teacher shortage that we have right now. And I know that that’s true across the country. Long-term substitute teachers. are functioning as the classroom teacher. When I talk about the difference between being a sub and being a classroom teacher, because I was a classroom teacher for years and years and years, the biggest difference is subs do not have two things. They don’t have time and they don’t have relationships. And those are two really big things. Those were the two things that I pretty much relied on in my classroom. So I have to use different strategies. A big example of that would be proximity. Proximity is a strategy I teach to all my substitute teachers because it’s so effective. And proximity is when, let’s say I am trying to read the instructions for the activity, and I’m standing at the front of the class, and there’s a little group of students over here who are talking and they’re on their phones and they’re ignoring me. I might continue reading the instructions, but I’m going to walk over and I’m just going to do it over here. In that corner, and that just the proximity of me giving, and I’m not looking at those kids. I’m not correcting those kids. I’m not talking to those kids, but my body being over there is going to stop them. It’s behavior. That’s not a strategy I used as a classroom teacher very often, because I knew my students, I could motivate them in different ways. I use proximity every day as a substitute because I have to. So, those are those kind of different nuances. When I’m working with long-term subs, I’m teaching them more about relationships because they are going to have the time to get to know their students and they’re going to have the time to establish their own routines and procedures. I would say, because for a long time I mentored new teachers in my district, I would say those are the coaching moves and the mentoring strategies that I use with long-term subs. It’s more like a mentor relationship.
[00:21:46] Jon M: You mentioned that substitute pay scales have often been very low. What are they like now, at least in Washington, or what you know about elsewhere?
[00:21:55] Megan C: Yeah, I can tell you what they look like in Eastern and Western Washington, and I will say they vary widely. So anywhere here in Western Washington from $175 a day to about $300 a day in Seattle. It could be upwards of $350 a day. That top of the scale is often an incentivized structure. So, for example, one of the districts I sub in, Tumwater, is the neighboring school district and if you sub 90 days in their district, your pay bumps from 250 to 300. They are rewarding loyalty and repetition. There is competition amongst school districts. My work with WEA has been, I’ve been fortunate to be able to lead some gatherings for the professionals who support substitute teachers. So we have a big missing manager syndrome in the world of substitute teaching. We have school districts that have nobody who’s in charge of the sub. There are a lot of different structures that people have adopted, but because of that, or there’s one human in a big school district that’s in charge of the sub, they call them subposiums, and it’s an opportunity for all those professionals who support substitute teachers to be together in one room and start brainstorming, how can “we better support our sub”?
[00:23:10] Amy H-L: Some schools seem to ask classroom teachers to fill in when their colleagues are absent instead of bringing in subs. What do you think about that technique?
[00:23:19] Megan C: Yeah, and it’s not effective. I think that’s one of the things that’s actually been contributing over the past three years or so to our teacher shortage. Right now we have a teacher shortage and we have teachers leaving the classroom because they are burning out. And one of the reasons they’re burning out is because they are covering their colleagues’ classes. So in a high school, what that looks like is you have a planning period. And remember how I mentioned that principals in the morning, they’re scrambling and they’re creating these new schedules. That schedule is telling a teacher, you don’t get your planning period today. You are going to be going over here and teaching somebody’s class. And so they’re piecing together these schedules. In elementary school, what it looks like is you don’t have your specialist time because there’s no sub for the specialist or you have more kids in your classroom because they don’t have teachers to cover. There are so many dots we need to be connecting about substitute teachers. A district that is lacking substitute teachers and relying on their teachers covering each other’s classes will have a teacher shortage. Guaranteed. Those teachers will burn out and they will quit. They aren’t going to not cover. That’s not what teachers do. In a middle school, if I’m teaching sixth grade and I’m asked to cover my colleague’s class, I’m not going to leave a group of 11-year-olds alone. We don’t do that as teachers. But what we do do is burn out and leave the profession. And we’re seeing that happen again and again.
[00:24:39] Amy H-L: Are there people in other states doing the kind of training of subs that you’re doing?
[00:24:45] Megan C: Not that I know of. Washington is very unique right now. I have talked to people, and we are partnering with an organization in Southern California called Substantial Classrooms. They’re doing some really interesting work supporting substitute teachers. They have an online platform that we offer to ourselves because our union bought a bunch of licenses called Sub School. But as far as the systemic support of subs. I think what Washington is doing is very unique, and and hopefully will be sustained. I don’t know what the plan is. I know they got more money from the legislature for next year to continue this work. But the way I designed these gatherings, because honestly, I designed them with a fellow teacher. And when teachers design stuff, we design it for free because we assume we’re not going to have any money. So I designed this to be very inexpensive, to be embedded in the school district, because I believe in school district-embedded PD, not people coming from outside and doing it. I had the opportunity to create a cadre of substitute teacher-leaders, which I think is a term we need to start using more often, substitute teacher-leaders.
So, I have a cadre of 11 substitute teacher-leaders who facilitate their sub community gatherings in their own local regions. That’s sustainable PD. And the gatherings right now, as I said, because we’re sponsored by the union, we’re holding them in community centers. We’re holding them in in senior centers that can be shifted to school district building. We cater them from, as I said, local restaurants, because I believe in the power of community and those threads that we connect to all these different community resources just makes the entire community stronger. There’s a way the district can maybe absorb that cost. So I’m hopeful that because we designed this to be sustainable, embedded, ongoing and inexpensive, that they will be able to continue.
[00:26:34] Amy H-L: Do subs in poor or more marginalized districts get that same sort of support that you’re providing?
[00:26:42] Megan C: So right now, I wouldn’t say… That’s a great question. So, yes, they are, some of them are getting it. I would say it’s more of a regional disparity right now. So, we are offering these sub communities in Western Washington. In the more rural Eastern Washington, we’re just getting started. And we’re trying to figure out what that looks like because my gatherings are in person. They’re designed to be in person. We teach in person, so it’s really important to me that we can model these strategies and be with other humans. And that community aspect is really important. That puts rural communities at a disadvantage because some people will have to drive four hours to get to the gathering. We are considering adapting them to be more of a hybrid for that equity piece. I think what I see as far as an equity issue around substitute teachers in poorer districts and richer districts is more we have these subbing apps now and some private companies who are coming in and creating apps for substitutes and for districts that districts are buying where subs can swipe through and look to see which district pays the most. They can look to see which district looks good to them or, you know, I mean, there’s a variety of, I think, biases that creep into those kind of systems, and the private companies are capitalizing on that. They’re selling that. So they’re saying, no, you should come to this district. They pay more and it’s cleaner and this and that and yes, I see that equity issue even within my own school district. There are certain schools that struggle to get subs for a variety of issues and then there are other schools that have parents who are really stepping in to fill the gap because those parents aren’t working, maybe. And so there are definitely a lot of equity issues in substitute teaching.
[00:28:27] Jon M: You also work with paraprofessionals, and as you put it, other marginalized groups in education. Is your work with paraprofessionals similar, and what are some of these other marginalized groups that you’re talking about?
[00:28:41] Megan C: So, as far as the paraprofessionals, we are working with them because so many paras are subs, and because they’re just coming to our gatherings, because there isn’t something for them, and we’re not checking anybody’s ID when they come in, we’re not, you know, making sure that you are this kind of sub or this kind of, so we end up with mixed groups of paraprofessionals and subs. There’s a lot of similarities, and then there’s a lot of very big differences. When I talk to substitute teachers about paraprofessionals, I always instruct them to defer to the paraprofessional. The paraprofessional or any full-time staff in that building is going to be more the expert about those students and about those systems and about that culture and that community. Always. So, even if I’m the, you know, the certificated human in the room, if I have a para who’s there every day and knows those kids and knows the routines, I’m always going to defer to that para. So I think a lot of the power of having paras and subs in the same room together is just learning from one another and becoming partners instead of adversaries, because sometimes there can be power struggles that show up.
And again, it goes back to what I was talking about about my finally recognizing that we don’t treat every person, every staff member the same way. We treat people differently based on their role, on their title, and that’s a problem.
[00:30:13] Jon M: When you refer to other marginalized groups, who are they?
[00:30:17] Megan C: They are the other groups who are under supported in education, under supported and under, and yeah, under compensated. I think about bus drivers. I think about cafeteria workers. I think about custodians. I definitely think about substitutes and paraprofessionals. I think about school nurses. I think about social workers and counselors. Those kind of isolated individuals who see so much trauma and have such a need to gather together with their colleagues and process that and learn together and learn from their collective wisdom. So, I think there’s a lot and more than just them being marginalized, I like to think about them as under appreciated and underutilized. We have all of these huge groups of untapped resources and honestly groups of future teachers. I can’t tell you how many bus drivers I’ve talked to who are interested in becoming full-time, certificated teachers, these people are working in education because they’re interested in education. And so I think we should really be looking at these groups, not just as marginalized but as untapped, amazing resources.
[00:31:21] Amy H-L: Thank you so much, Megan Conklin of Conklin Educational Perspectives.
[00:31:24] Megan C: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:31:25] Jon M: And thank you, listeners. Check out our new video series, “What Would YOU Do?”, a collaboration with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and EdEthics. Go to our website, ethicalschools.org, and click video. The goal of the series is not to provide right answers, but to illustrate a variety of ethical viewpoints.
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