Indiana SB 483: Regulation of Homeschooling with IAHE Legislative Liaison Kylene Varner

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Indiana SB 483: Regulation of Homeschooling with IAHE Legislative Liaison Kylene Varner

February 12, 2025

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Transcript

Hello, For The King listeners. I am not your host, Rocky Ramsey. My name is Will Jerzymski, a brother in Christ and friend of Raku's, whom he has generously invited onto the show in order to verbally showcase my artwork to you in 50 seconds.

As an artist, I strive to accurately reflect the glory of God and everything that I paint, and through that process, I hope to flood as much of the earth as possible with paintings, which accurately proclaim the undeniable fact that Jesus is Lord and the creation which he made commands us to worship him. So if you would like to join with me in distributing clean, refreshing artwork showcasing the creativity of the God who made us, I would be overjoyed to have your help. I run my own website called Reflected Works, where I showcase the artwork I've done in the past, sell original paintings and prints, and take requests for unique commissions.

Once again, that's ReflectedWorks.com, all one word, and I'm looking forward to helping you further the kingdom of God right now here on this earth by putting some of your free wall space to productive use. Thank you very much for your kind attention, and now, enjoy the show. With a rod of iron! And I'll not apologize for this God of the Bible.

Hello, friends. Welcome to the Fjord King podcast, where we proclaim the edicts of the King, namely and chiefly that Yahweh reigns. I am joined this episode with Mrs. Kylene Varner.

She is an Indiana Association of Home Educators legislative liaison. It's a lot of, you know, mouthful there. I think she'll be able to explain that better, what's going on with that, that title.

But that's who our guest is today, so I'll let her maybe, you know, introduce yourself, Kylene, and, you know, what that term means and what you're doing with IAHE. Yeah, thanks so much. It's really a pleasure to be on the podcast today.

So like Rocky said, my name is Kylene Varner, and I'm the legislative liaison for the IAHE, and we always joke about the amount of vowels that have to come out of your mouth when you say that. For a long time, my husband Brian would kind of make fun of me. He'd be like, you're really, really, like, focusing on your diction there.

But it just all kind of runs together if you don't, right? So as the legislative liaison, my job is to kind of go back and forth between IAHE, which is a 501c3, and our sister organization, IAHE Action, which is a 501c4. So Action serves to influence the legislative process through relationships with legislators. We are not activists in the way of like treating legislators poorly.

We don't believe in that. We believe in establishing biblical style relationships, and just forming relationships with our legislators, right? Let them see who we are and really let us see who they are. So my job is to go between both organizations and keep both sides up to date.

And then also, that extends to going into the statehouse and making connections with legislators as well. And I'll be very open. I mentioned this a little bit before the podcast here.

It's not a role I ever expected myself to be in. So this isn't something I sought out. It is very clear that the Lord has made this the path that I should go.

And so here we are. Awesome. Okay, well, praise God for your work and IAHE being a thing.

Okay, so thank you for introducing yourself. Let's get into the specific reason that I wanted to speak with you is because there's a brand new Senate Bill 483 that is, I don't know if it's like out of committee. I don't know what status it is.

If it's like out of committee, if it's like going to be voted, it's going to be on the floor here. I don't know exactly where it's at. So could you fill us in on what is that bill? What are the worries with that bill? What's the issues with what's the the tell us of it? Where is it pointed? And what's what's the problem? And then maybe like, what's the timeline for when it will be an issue being voted on? And so, you know, let's just start there.

Because you could you detail some of that, please. Absolutely. So I think it's really important that before we jump into this bill, everybody takes a deep breath, because the title of the bill is regulation of homeschooling.

Now I want to be clear, it's not the legislator who comes up with that bill, it's not the bill author who comes up with a title, it's actually LSA, which is the Legal Services Group of the legislature. So an attorney decided that that was the name of the bill. This is the first time in history that we see homeschooling come into the title of a bill.

Gotcha. So for anybody who is homeschooling in the state, most of us do so for the aspect of being apart from the government. There are other specs that are added to that, right? Like religious liberties, being able to travel, things like that.

But the majority of it comes down to the parents have chosen to not participate in the government's education system. So when you start to see these things come into the title, I think an oxygen tank isn't even the right phrase, right? Like an oxygen tank isn't going to give you enough O2, you really need a hyperbaric chamber, because you start to feel like your freedoms are going to be stripped away. And what do you get to do about it, right? So the basis of this bill actually comes back to publicly funded schools and information that's coming back to the legislators.

So you have groups like principals and superintendents who are telling our legislators that juniors and seniors in public schools are dropping out and basically they're saying that they're becoming homeschoolers. So not legally a dropout, but their parents are coming in and they're saying, we want to homeschool our children. And Rocky, these are not like families who would typically homeschool a junior or a senior.

These tend to be children who are grade poor, they're credit deficient and they're chronically absent. Gotcha. So you and I, we would identify these as at risk children.

Yeah. All right. So when that starts to happen, the state looks at those students.

And I want to be clear, when your kid is enrolled in a public school, the state is in charge of their education. Like as parents, we don't recognize that. We feel like, well, no, I'm in charge of the education.

I sent you to the public school. That's my decision. But for a lot of parents, that's really where the decision making process ends.

Yeah. So when you send your kid to public school, you can't say, well, I don't like that math book. And you can't force them to choose a different way.

That's not how that works. They're in charge of your child's education. And so when that happens, they're also in charge of making sure that your kid is in school for the number of days that you need to be.

So here in Indiana, that is typically 180. Some schools can get waivers for less. Some schools go a little bit more.

So it's really important for a parent, of course, to know what days they're required to do if they're homeschooling. And so with that, when those children start to kind of fall through the cracks, if you will, the legislature comes in and says, we have to do something. What can we do? And so this bill makes people like me, again, need that hyperbaric chamber.

But when we step back and we look at it, it's really the legislative attempt to fix a problem. But the real problem is that we already have laws in place for this kind of thing. So if we're not upholding our current laws, we have no business creating new laws to make people like me who are really legally homeschooling make our lives harder.

Because creating a new law for laws we already aren't upholding doesn't make somebody suddenly obey the law. Exactly. Yeah.

Right. So when we look at this law, the word homeschooled is all over. I shouldn't say law.

I'm sorry. Strike that. Right.

Not law. No, no. When we look at this bill, the word homeschooling is all over it.

And this really needs to be an indicator to all of us when we're learning to read legislation about hold on a minute, what does this mean? Because the word homeschooled or homeschooling, home hyphen school does not appear at all in the Indiana statutes. Mm hmm. So Indiana homeschoolers are classified as non accredited, non public schools have less than one employee.

Yeah. Okay. That's who we are.

I know it's a lot of words, right? Yeah. It's what we call a functional definition in policy. So we want to stay out of the code as much as humanly possible because the minute you go into the code, they regulate you.

Yeah. Right. So it appears a crazy amount of times in this bill.

So again, break out that hyperbaric chamber. Yeah, you don't want it to be defined because then you can be referenced in another bill. That definition can be absolutely all over the place.

And then you are tied down to whatever they define that they're setting the standard. So I think that's a big issue too. I think that's a good point.

Yeah. And we have to be really careful with that because what seems suitable right now can change in another session. Right.

So things change session into session. It can also change, you know, as it goes to the opposite chamber, stuff like that. So let me kind of dig into the meat of what this bill says and why it's so concerning.

So we've already defined here. Yeah. The children that we're talking about.

So we're talking about high school kiddos, not just limited to that junior or senior mix the state is seeing, but high school. So ninth through 12th grade, they're going to be poor grades, credit deficient. So what that means is that if you look at where they are within their high school education, they will not graduate with their cohort on time.

So that means like, let's say that you're a junior and you've only got maybe 20 credits, you are not going to graduate when you were projected to graduate. All right. And then they're chronically absent.

So in the state of Indiana, you're defined as a habitual truant if you miss 10 or more days. All right. So chronically absent doesn't have a definition yet.

There are definitions floating around the legislature. And there are a few bills that have gone through and they all agree on this idea of what the definition should be. So in this bill, you'll see that reflected that it's 10% of the total days thus far of school missed.

So for example, if you're 10 days in, if you've missed one day, you're going to be chronically absent. If you are at 180 days, and you've missed 10%, you've missed 18 days of school. Now I want to go back to that habitual truancy standard of 10 days.

So with that habitual truancy, parents can be charged for a class B misdemeanor. They're required to make sure that their children attend school. That class B misdemeanor carries with it 180 days in jail, up to 180 days in jail per infraction, and up to $1,000 fine per infraction.

So one of the questions is how do we go from 10 days habitual truant to 18 days chronically absent? So when we look through this bill, we start to see that we see this idea of the chronic absentee being defined as 10%. Then we go on and this part gets really scary rocky, because this bill would make it that the parent could never truly educate their child free of the government. So what it says is that if you want to homeschool a high school student who meets these criteria, so that great or credit deficient chronic absentee, that for the first year, you have to meet with the superintendent of your local public school twice every semester, you have to submit to the principal, essentially a portfolio, a way to show that learning progress is happening, which really comes down to standardized testing.

And the superintendent gets to determine if learning is happening or not, there's no definition in this bill of what that looks like. So who defines what learning looks like? For many of us homeschooling parents, right? Like character is a big part of our education. Exactly.

Yeah. Right. So if you have a kiddo, who has ADHD, and I know that right now we live in a day where we feel like everybody has ADHD, right? Like our kids are overrun with screens, they're overrun with various stimuli.

When we take that, it could be that a parent needs to go through a time of really just kind of screen detoxing, if you will. Yeah. And getting to their kid's heart.

Yeah. Breaking that down, reestablishing the parental child relationship. And Rocky, that can take a lot of work, especially when we're talking about 16 or 17 year olds.

Yeah. And so, you know, a super could very easily say, well, we've not seen any progress in mathematics. You're no longer permitted to homeschool.

Yeah. So we start to see, go ahead, I'm sorry. Well, it's such a just spirit of the age kind of pragmatic way of viewing education.

Like you said, Christians are going to recognize like the goal of education is to make a morally virtuous person, not necessarily just download a bunch of information and make them robots where they can regurgitate whatever mathematical formula that you want them to. Like that's good. That is, you know, and that accords with God's creation.

Like we make God made the world mathematical, but that is scary to think of, you know, reporting to the superintendent or the principal or whatever. And they're the ones that have their metrics that they accept. And it's a completely different worldview of viewing.

They get to define what the human is. And the human is basically a robot that just needs information downloaded and not necessarily moral virtue. So I think that's, that's, I totally agree.

That's kind of where I'm coming from when I'm thinking about it. That is scary to think about. If you get, if you get caught up in this, if it does become a law and you somehow enter into that system, you're trapped.

Yeah. Their standards for like indefinitely, it seems like. Absolutely.

Absolutely. It is very much what we refer to as the statist view versus as Christians, we believe that our rights are God given and that our children are essentially hand selected for us because God knew that we needed them and they needed us, right? Iron sharpens iron. My husband always jokes.

I look across the desk, our desks actually back up to each other. So he often says that like, they know what buttons of ours to push because we installed them on them. Yeah.

Right. It's, it's how it is. So, you know, the other thing that goes on about this bill is that before a parent can actually unenroll their child from the public school and bring them into homeschooling, the parent has to submit a plan to the superintendent, including all the curriculum.

One of the concerning things about this is that as a homeschooling parent, especially if you're brand new, you might be trying to recreate the public school in your house and you pretty quickly learn that that doesn't work. It just doesn't. First of all, we don't have 30 kids sitting around our table.

You might at home listening. Like if you're listening to this and you've got a large family and maybe you've got 70 grandkids, like good on you, but most of us are not homeschooling 30 kids at a time. Yeah.

Right. And life at home is very different than in a classroom. You know, we're not waiting on people to line up in the bathroom.

I mean, maybe you are, maybe the rotavirus hit your family and that's terrible and awful. And you're all waiting for the bathroom. But you're not like taking a class trip to the bathroom.

You know, you're not in transition to the lunch room. You know, many of us do school in the lunch room at our kitchen table, right? So what we do doesn't look like the public school and we might have what we think is a great math curriculum. But the reality is if it's not working for your kid, you're either going to push that round peg through the square hole or you're going to find something that works better.

You're going to stop. You're going to back up. You're going to review some gaps and I want to be clear.

Every education has gaps. I don't care. Public school, private school, homeschool, you're always going to have gaps, right? So this kind of thing really moves that flexibility.

Homeschoolers have the maximum flexibility of any education available. So this removes that. It goes on then that every year afterwards, you're going to continue to meet with the superintendent two times a year.

So once per semester, the parent Rocky, this is super scary here. The parent will never be separated from the public school. Now I want to be really, really upfront about something.

If a parent is neglecting the children, the education of their children, they are violating the law and that needs to be dealt with. We have laws in place for that. The local public school superintendent is not the realm to do that.

It's just not. And I do have concerns about will the superintendent false flag families. You might have a family that's doing an amazing job homeschooling their kids, but it doesn't look like what the super thinks it should.

So that's kind of the nuts and bolts of this bill. So let me give you the update real quick on where we are with this. So Senator Ross is the author of this bill.

He is the chairman of the Senate education and workforce development committee. He's a long time homeschool supporter. Senator Cruz was his predecessor and Senator Ross really understands the importance of protecting homeschooling here in our state.

And I will tell you that he has gone to bat for homeschoolers in the state several times to protect a parent's right to educate their children. And so Senator rats spoke at our IHG homeschool day at the Capitol. And aren't you proud of me? I said all those vowels and like, didn't sound awkward about it.

Right. Right. So in front of nearly 600 homeschoolers in attendance that day, nearly 600, she announced on our stage that this bill would not be heard in committee.

And we are so thankful that the chairman was having conversations and was listening to feedback. And we are expecting some portions of this bill, perhaps to pop up. We have about another three weeks that portions of this language could come into what we call a vehicle bill.

So imagine, right? You're driving your little vehicle down the street and like somebody jumps in, that's called a vehicle bill. It doesn't need to have a title right now. It's just kind of like a placeholder.

So our team is very, very carefully monitoring current bills, but then also any amendments that are coming along to these bills, because again, we do expect some of this language to pop up. There are several bills in the legislature right now discussing chronic absenteeism, both in the Senate and in the House. So this concern is not going away.

Yeah. They could add some of that language, maybe even though the term homeschool into one of those other bills. Absolutely.

Yeah. Right. So that's, yeah, that's like what you guys are doing, right? You're keeping the lookout and alerting the homeschooling population here in Indiana.

That's awesome. I did subscribe to the IHE action. I haven't said it as much as you know, I don't have much practice.

But yeah, the action, the action. The newsletter. Yeah.

Yeah, all set. The newsletter. So I'm looking forward to like, as stuff like this comes down, I can be informed.

So everybody should go there and, you know, if you're a homeschooling parent in Indiana, I think you should definitely get on that newsletter because I think that's going to be a great resource. And then your guys's podcast as well is where I initially heard, heard all this. Okay, so that's good to know about those vehicle bills.

So as of right now, from what you're saying, it's like, we're pretty safe. It's not even going to be heard in committee. But the worry is maybe recycling some of that language.

Is that correct? So during a legislative session, I will never say the word safe. Okay. And the reason why is that oftentimes, there are unintended consequences from well meaning legislators.

And so things can pop in at any point in time, anytime an amendment is allowed, things can pop in that can be harmful. So our team hits the ground running from the minute that bills drop. So this past year, bills began dropping on December 17.

I was reading bills on New Year's Eve, and someone said, okay, lean, take a break. And I said, policy takes a break for no one or no holiday. It doesn't matter.

Policy doesn't end. So am I willing to say we're safe? No. Am I willing to say that as of right now, this bill will not progress? Yes.

Do I expect to see parts of the bill pop back up? Absolutely. If they don't Rocky, I'll be very surprised. Our team has been having conversations about this specific bill for about five weeks now.

We've been having almost weekly meetings, we've been talking with different agencies. And, you know, one of the things that we really want to do as an organization is to equipment and encourage parents on their homeschool journeys, we really want to come alongside families. We don't care if you're Christian, if you're secular, we don't care, we want to help you homeschool your family.

And we really want to return the hearts of parents to their children. That's really what. And so we have presented several ideas, you know, we would love to be able to come alongside families who are in the situation where they've got these, you know, grade poor children, credit deficient.

They might have some reason that they're not going to school, Rocky, like they could have severe anxiety. We see it that so much, the increase is really pretty insane in kids and their level of anxiety. This kind of a bill could also apply to a parent that has a chronically ill child.

So think about a family who's going through chemotherapy, right? And so their kid is literally fighting for their life. And now, like the parent doesn't have any choice but to be connected to the public school. So what we really want to do is connect with these families and offer them support if that's what they want.

Wow, that's awesome. Okay, one other question before we kind of start wrapping up here. Yeah.

Was this bill a product of a this last election cycle? Is there a shift in terms of like our representatives and our senators that at the state level, is there like a hostility, a new hostility to homeschooling? Was there a like a liberal kind of like Overton Window shift on homeschooling in Indiana? Like how did this, I guess, how did that even happen? Or is this like going to, is this just kind of usual? There's usually some Indianapolis, you know, kind of more liberal representative that is going to, you know, once a year, we're going to see something like this, this is pretty standard to see this come through, you know, you got to see what I'm getting. Sure. So what's going on? What's going on there? I do.

So I don't believe that it's a shift in legislator. Senator Ross is a longtime legislator. So he's not new to politics.

So I don't believe that it's a shift that way. I do think that it is a result of what we call a summer study committee. So, um, IDOE tracks all kinds of information on children, right? So IDOE is the Indiana Department of Education.

And if your child is in any way enrolled in a publicly funded school, so it would be clear that could be public school, charter school, virtual public school, state accredited, non public school, right? So if they're enrolled in any publicly funded program, the state's going to track your kid. Yeah. They're going to know what their grades look like, what their credit scores look like in terms of how many credits they have.

Um, they're going to be looking at their attendance. And so I think what we're seeing is kind of this culmination of the last five years, if you will, you know, with the COVID mandates, the COVID lockdowns, there was a lot of junk that went on then. Um, you had kids going back to schools and you know, they, they could only see maybe a third of their teacher's face.

Yeah. Right. Um, add to that balance literacy and children not being able to read, there's a whole smattering of things that are, have kind of created this perfect storm.

And so when you look at the anxiety that's coming out of this group of kids, you look at the parents saying, but we understand and we can't force them to get out of the car. What are we going to do? Like they're literally not moving from the car. I can't pull them out.

Um, I think that the schools are saying too, these children have poor attendance and nobody's doing anything about it. So, oh, legislature, won't you do something about it? And the legislature doesn't really have an option and not do something about it. They're, they're in charge of the care and the keeping of the students and their tutelage, just like I am with homeschooling my children.

Uh-huh. And so with that, they have to, they have to do something. Yeah.

They can't do nothing. And I'm not, I'm still not quite sure why we're not utilizing the laws that are already on the books for this kind of thing. Other than to say, um, I think it would be a black eye for the state to start prosecuting parents for their children not being in school, even though we just passed another law in the 2024 session that said that's what we would do.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

So, you know, here we are looking at the second year in a row of dealing with absenteeism and possibly creating yet another bill. Gotcha. Yeah.

So I think it's not a legislature change over. Yeah. I think it's a lot of like funding and stuff too.

Gotcha. So what you would want to see and what I H I H E would want to see is, Hey, just, just enforce what's already on the books. Don't try to drag schooling into this, right? Is that kind of what I'm? Yeah, this is actually, yeah, totally.

So this is not a homeschooling issue at all. Yeah, exactly. This is not a homeschooling issue.

Um, this is really a neglect issue. If you have parents that are taking their children out of school and they're certifying. So when you, when you withdraw a high schooler in Indiana, you actually have to fill out a specific form.

That's a result of the school to prison pipeline. And you can actually read about that on our website, I H E action dot net. And this form is required to be filled out for all high school children being withdrawn to homeschool.

So this is grades nine through 12 only. I want to be clear because some principals are like, no, your kindergarten has to fill it out. There's a note there that says, if you don't like your kid can't get their driver's license, that's a lot of pressure for a five year old.

Yeah, it's a lot of pressure. Yeah. So, you know, like if you're in a situation where it's a parental neglect situation, you, you can't hide behind homeschooling.

Yeah. We have worked so hard to defend our rights to educate our children free of the government. I mean, Indiana, 1904 is the first case law that comes down that says, yeah, you can homeschool.

Awesome. Yeah, you can do that. And so yeah, it's the first day in the whole nation to bring down that kind of verdict.

And so when we look at that, if you've got people breaking the law, the law needs to be the one to step in. It's not a homeschooling issue. People that are homeschooling, we want to educate our children.

We want them to be successful. Right. And you know, some of these parents, Rocky, they may not be the type of people that are interested at all in homeschooling.

If you have a parent who is more interested in doing the drug of the day than they are educating their kids. Yeah, the kid is getting an education. It's an how to be an entrepreneur and a street pharmacist.

Yeah, you and I would agree that is not a quality education. Right. Yeah.

You're always, um, exactly. Yeah. So, and I'm not trying to be flippant about that.

This is the truth of what some kids go through. And so if that's happening, no education is taking place. That is not a matter of homeschooling.

That's a matter of breaking the law. Yeah. That's good.

Sounds like, uh, yeah, you're, you're doing great work and like you understand the stuff really well and can connect the dots, you know, for everybody. So that's, that's great. Um, thank you.

Okay. Well, I think we can, we can kind of wrap up here. I just had one other question.

I, I had a question about what is IHG, but I think we've, we've danced around it so much. I mean, people are kind of just they know what it is. So you can, you can go to, you know, their, their website.

I'll make sure to include it in the show notes and the podcast, um, the homeschool Indiana podcast. Um, I'll make sure to include that as well. So you guys can go check it out and like the Twitter, you know, they have a Twitter page, all that.

So tons of, tons of ways you can get involved, sign up for that newsletter. Um, but I just wanted to finish with, um, I mean, this is my first time ever even talking to you. It's a pleasure to meet you.

Just, you know, what did, um, why do you, you know, how did you guys get involved with homeschooling? Just a real quick, like maybe five minute synopsis of like why you guys like homeschooling? Why did you get into it? Why didn't you think this is the best way to educate your children? You know, what, you know, why, why these things, um, because obviously you're very passionate about it and you love homeschooling. So I just am curious. And then we can kind of wrap it up there.

Yeah, I appreciate that. So we were living in a Pike Township at the time. And when we, when my husband and I first got married, he had a house in Pike Township.

And so, you know, naturally that became my house too. Right. And, uh, when we had children, I thought that we probably had until our kiddos were around like four, before we really had to think about education and our oldest daughter, when she was 18 months old, she looked at something and she goes, mama, that's chartreuse.

Okay. She would say, she would name all these shapes. She'd be like, that's a decagon talking in full sentences.

I mean, yeah. And so I looked at my husband one day and I said, dude, I thought we had until she was like four to worry about this. Right.

And it became pretty clear that we needed to worry about it much sooner. When I say worry, I don't mean like fretting, biting your fingernails, but you know, like really expensive. Yeah.

Yeah. Like spending your mental energy on it. And so I looked at our local public school and, um, 40% of the children were literate based on the scores that the children had.

That means that six out of 10 of them were not. Yeah. That's a massive issue.

Your 18 month old was speaking better, you know, whatever, you know, able to think really well. It was, it was a bit intense. So then I started looking at our local private schools and the cost was insane.

I mean, for kindergarten at the time, it was five and a half thousand dollars, first grade, seven and a half thousand dollars, middle school, 13 and a half thousand dollars. And we have three children that are all in very close age. So your wife can attest to this.

She's seen them since they were very little. So our kids are a total of two and a half years apart. So I just came out of 13, 14, 15.

I now have 13, 15, 16. So in order for us to put all of our kids in private school, I would have to return to work full time and turn over my entire paycheck. Yeah.

That's what was going to happen. And so we looked at around at our friends who were homeschooling and we had some friends that we thought were doing a great job. And we had other friends that we thought were not doing such a great job.

And we wanted to talk to both of them to find out what they were doing, talk to us, what are you doing? And so we spent some time investigating. And when our oldest was four, we joined a homeschool co-op. We actually helped create the homeschool co-op in our neighborhood where we lived.

And we've been doing that for 12 years now. And by the way, that's super weird to say that we've been homeschooling for 12 years, but it's true. And I often say that I was homeschooling before I even knew I was homeschooling.

I was the mom on the floor playing with the shapes puzzles and the colored puzzles and all the things. Cause that's what you do with your kiddos who are kids, right? Like curious or not, that's what they do. And so actually we were homeschooling for quite a while and I didn't even know about the IHG.

I had no idea. And a friend of ours said, Hey, you need to come to conference. I was like, what conference? There's a conference.

And as you know, the IHG has been around since 1983. We were actually started by a Marion County judge. She was a homeschool dad.

He started and he and some other families helped to start the IHG. And so from there I became involved on the action side of things, just doing some social media work with them. And then in 2020, I became aware of a massive case of educational fraud here in the state.

And I felt like that doesn't feel right, but why, why doesn't that feel right? So for the first time in my whole life, I started looking at the Indiana statutes. I had never looked at law before. And there's just something about the education code that makes sense to me.

It just makes sense. Don't ask me to look at tax code. Don't ask me to look at real estate law, but education code just looks like, okay, I can handle that.

And so I started talking with a friend of mine about what I was finding. And she was like, Hey, would you be interested in joining our government affairs team? And so I came on board and spent a good amount of time under her tutelage, learning from her. She had worked on Capitol Hill and local and state government for several years.

And my husband said, again, I'm looking behind because he's at his desk. Our pastor at the time said, you know, Brian, if your wife finds this interesting, you should probably find it interesting too. If your wife is like, this is really impacting me, you should really learn why.

And so when I came on board as the legislative liaison, about a year later, Brian said, Hey, what do you think about me becoming a bill reader? And I said, I think that's a great idea, right? Like get your feet wet. We can have different nerdy conversations. We have lots of nerdy conversations, but this is like a whole new level of Yeah, there's a whole new level of that.

And so now Brian is our lead bill reader. And actually he has designed this really beautiful bill reading legislative software for us. It is state of the art.

There's nothing like it on the market. So we're really lucky to have him and really thankful to have him. So that's where we are.

I hope I answered your questions. No, that's perfect. Yeah, that's great.

Well, I think we can just wrap it up there. So thank you, Mrs. Turner for giving me some time. And I hope this edifies everybody that's listening, you know, how you can get involved.

And you know, I'm pretty sure a majority of everybody that listens is homeschooling. I know that. So thanks so much for listening.

And thank you, Mrs. Marner. It's my pleasure. Yeah.

We always end with noxology. Yeah.