[Zabner]: My name is David Zabner. I'm the treasurer for this Invest in Medford campaign. I'm really excited to be speaking to you all today. I live here in South Medford. I've only lived here now for a little longer than three years, but I absolutely adore Medford. I'm so happy to be here. I'm here because I'm doing a PhD in education at Tufts University. and I grew up in the state of Iowa, which when I was growing up was always number one, number two in the country, the best education system out there. Our state quarter in Iowa still says foundation and education, but over the last 30 years, the years I've been alive, Iowa has gotten worse every year. Statewide, in the cities, in the counties, every year they spend less money on education and it means I'm not ever moving back there. It means my friends from high school, my friends from elementary school whose parents chose to move to Iowa because it was the number one state, number two state for education, they're not moving back there either. And I'm really scared that that same thing could happen in Medford. As an education researcher, I know how important it is to fund teachers, to fund schools. Teachers are so clever. They will make every dollar stretch to cover 10. It's incredible the work they do. They'll spend money out of their own pocket. But all of that only goes so far at the end of the day we need to fund the schools if we expect the schools to succeed I'm gonna finish my PhD soon and I think the the really big reason I care so deeply about these passing is that I cannot imagine staying in Medford if they don't right I have been attending these school committee meetings. I've seen the cuts that are proposed and Nobody wants those cuts, but the reality is it's hard to live in a city where once a week you worry you've popped another tire, where you worry that the kids won't be able to learn in their schools. So we have to do better. We have to do better. We have to give the teachers more. As an education researcher, I see the strides we're making in how we teach. Every year, there's a new idea for how to teach literacy better. They need the literacy coaches, right? They need people to teach them how to teach with these new methods. Every year, there's new ideas for how to do science education, but you need to go and buy the test tubes and the chemicals and the, all of these things are expensive, but they're, I think, really, really the foundation for what makes a strong city and a strong country and a strong state. So I'm really hoping, first of all, that you donate to make this campaign happen. I know all of you who are here are planning to vote yes, so I hopefully don't have to ask you to do that again. But every morning I wake up and the first thing I do is I look at blue and see how much money we've raised and compare that to how much I know we're going to need to raise to send out letters to everybody who lives in Medford and let them know what's going on. In municipal elections, we get 40% turnout. The people who turn out know what's going on in the city. In this election, we're going to get 80% turnout, which means that half of the voters have no idea what's going on in the city. They know a lot maybe about the state, maybe a lot about the national election, but we need to let them know how important it is to vote yes. on these very, very important issues. So I hope that you pull out your phone, you go ahead and donate. We are currently, I think, $350 of the $6,000 that we were hoping to raise tonight. So like, please, please donate, please make that happen. We're gonna, you're gonna get, you're gonna see the the outcome of that in your physical mailbox, hopefully very soon, when you get that information. So thank you so much for being here. And I think, Zach, you're next.