Our VP of Legal Affairs Leslie Hiner gives an update on the upcoming Carson v. Makin Supreme Court case out of Maine. She also gives us the backstory on why this case is one to really tune into.
Jennifer Wagner: Hello, and welcome to another addition of EdChoice Chat, the Legal Edition. I am your host today, Jennifer Wagner, our VP of Communications. And I am joined by our legal expert, Leslie Hiner, the head of our Legal Defense and Education Center and our VP of Legal Affairs. So, we’ve got a lot to talk about today, but it’s solely focused on one state and one case. So, Leslie, thank you for joining us today.
Leslie Hiner: Thank you, Jen.
Jennifer Wagner: So, tell us about Carson. This is a case out of Maine, we’ve talked a lot about. If you are a frequent listener of this podcast, you’ll know that this is a follow-on podcast to Episode 260, which was way back in August right after the Supreme Court of the United States accepted this case. So, Leslie, if you could take us a little bit through the background, why this case matters. And then, talk about the amazing Amicus brief that you filed recently on behalf of EdChoice in this case.
Leslie Hiner: Thank you, Jen. And we, certainly, hope the U.S. Supreme Court thinks that my Amicus brief is amazing, so thanks for that vote of confidence.
So, let me give our listeners just a quick backstory on Maine. So, first of all, there were two voucher programs that started really early in the country called Town Tuitioning Programs that most people don’t know about, so I want to mention that. The first one was adopted in 1869 by Vermont. The second one happened in 1873 in the state of Maine. And that voucher program, Town Tuitioning Program, has been operating since 1873, is the program that is currently being litigated before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Now, in a nutshell, in these Town Tuitioning Programs, they call them town tuitioning because a town pays the tuition for a child to go to school. But it happens in small towns, in both Vermont and Maine, in rural areas, they’re both very rural states, where the town, maybe they don’t have its own high school. They may have a K through 2 school, or they may have an elementary school, but they may not have the other school. So, they pay tuition for the kids to go either to a neighboring public school, or a private school. And that’s where the interesting part of this story comes in.
So, in the state of Maine in 1873, parents could send their kids to a religious private school, and that was fine. However, in 1980, there was an attorney general in the state of Maine who said, “Oh, you know this might be unconstitutional. And so, maybe we shouldn’t be letting these parents choose private schools that are religiously affiliated.” And so, with that, the state of Maine stopped doing that, and disallowed parents from choosing a religiously affiliated private school. So, over 100 years, parents could choose a religious private school, but then it stopped.
Well, now, fast forward to today and there are some parents who would like to be able to send their kids to a religiously affiliated private school. And, keep in mind, the state of Maine, also it’s a small state, and so their options for education are not particularly diverse, but when you find a school that’s the right fit for your child, as a parent, you want to be able to send your child to that school regardless of the religious affiliation. You just know how important it is for your child to learn. So, that’s the situation that they’re in, in Maine.
Well, everyone believed that… And everyone, I mean people in the legal community, and most school choice advocates too believed that the state of Maine would say, “Okay, now we understand that we need to allow parents to be able to send their kids to religious private schools.” The reason for that being that just last year, we had the decision from the U.S. Supreme Court and a case out of Montana, the Espinoza decision, where the courts said, if you have a school choice program, you cannot prevent parents from choosing a religiously affiliated private school. The U.S. Supreme Court could not have been any clearer in their direction. They simply said, it would be unconsitutional to deny a parent the right to choose a religiously affiliated private school in a school choice program. However, the state of Maine, when pressed with that point, has said, “Oh no, no, no. That certainly doesn’t apply to us.”
Well, that was a big surprise. I have to say, there’s a lot of times that things don’t make much sense in the legal world, but lawyers don’t get really genuinely surprised very often, but that was a great surprise. No one could really understand why they would say a U.S. Supreme Court ruling didn’t apply to them because these rulings do apply to states.
Well, this is their reasoning. Their reasoning is that if the state of Maine gives money to a parent to pay tuition for their child to go to a religiously affiliated school, because the money that they are giving to that parent is state funded, then it would appear to people that the state of Maine was establishing religion by allowing that parent to send their child to a religiously affiliated school, using funds that the parent received from the state. That also touches on the free exercise clause of the First Amendment of the constitution, which is simply that each one of us has the right to freely exercise our own faith, and make choices based on our own faith.
But this also touches on the establishment clause of the First Amendment and the question being, so when does it happen? What are the circumstances when a state crosses the line of the establishment clause and, indeed, establishes some kind of state religion? The state of Maine is alleging that by allowing parents to choose a religiously affiliated private school that they would cross that line.
Now, for the record, I think they are dead wrong about that. But I’m not a judge, I’m just a person asking the judges to pay attention to this case. Now, thankfully, the judges are paying attention to this case. And as you said, Jen, back in August, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with those of us asking, please take this case, and they are going to decide the case.
So, what I’d like to explain for people now is what I wrote about in our brief. I’d like people to understand the backstory. When lawyers do briefs, Amicus briefs in particular, there are a couple different ways that we can go. The whole point is, as an Amicus brief, it means this is a brief that is supposed to be beneficial to the court. It’s a friend of the court brief. So, I’m saying to the court, “Look, I have some information that you may not know.” And, in our case, EdChoice now is celebrating our 25th anniversary this year, we have a lot of experience, and a lot of knowledge about educational choice, and education generally. And so, we’d like to share some of that with the court, as the court is trying to learn about the issue, and learn about how Maine is approaching this case, why they think the way they do, why we think the way we do. It helps the court to get a real well rounded view of what’s really happening.
So, we could either go very technical, or we could do what’s typically called a Brandeis brief, which is a brief that tells the story of what’s happening. So, I elected to do that type of brief because, frankly, there’s a story in Maine that will just curl your hair.
Jennifer Wagner: You went out there, right? To research this and, and find out more.
Leslie Hiner: Yes, I did a lot of research in this case. Yeah, it’s pretty fascinating. So, here we go.
Okay, here’s the story. Back in the mid 1800s in Maine, they had public schools, like most states did, and their public schools were like most public schools across the country, which means that those public schools were Protestant schools. Now, let me explain to you why I say that. In the schools, the public schools used the English Bible, which is known as the King James version of the Christian Bible. They used that in schools, in public schools, so every day there were prayers, every day there were Bible readings, every day there were lessons from the Bible that were taught to the students.
Now, the whole idea behind that was so that the students would have some grounding in ethics and morality. And just the language of the Bible also, in the King James version can be a little sophisticated. And so, it was a good training in reading and language for the students. So, all of that is accurate. But make no mistake, as people said publicly back in the day, that the point was to Protestant-ize all of the children. And they said most specifically to Protestantize, sorry, that’s a really hard word to say, the Catholic children.
Now, here’s the backstory with Maine. There were a lot of Catholics, who came over to the country and went to Maine, but they didn’t have many Catholic churches or priests. So, in walks a priest called John Bapst. So, John Bapst was actually from Switzerland, and came over, and he was the kind of guy that everybody loved. He was very friendly and helpful. But he was approached by the Catholic children in local public school where he was working, which was an Ellsworth, Maine. And they were concerned because the Catholic children were being compelled to read from the Protestant Bible, but the Catholics had their own Bible. And, at the time, the children were taught by their parents, and also by their faith that they really needed to follow the Catholic Bible. There are some differences and some differences that really matter in their faith.
So, they approached the school and said, “Well, could the Catholic children read from their Catholic Bible?” They had no problem with the kids reading from the Bible in school. Yeah, but that wasn’t going to happen. The people in the public schools just went crazy and said, “You heathens, you’re terrible! And no, we can’t possibly have that. And the Protestant children will be exposed to such heresy.” It was bad. So, what happened then is the children left the public school. And this priest, then he had no intention at the time of starting his own Catholic school, but he did to help these kids, so they could actually stay in school.
Well, that didn’t go over very well. The result was that this priest was kidnapped from his home, he was taken out to the woods, he was tied to a tree, he was stripped naked. He was covered with hot tar, he was then covered with feathers. They beat him nearly to death. Then, they put him on a rail and they carried him out to the shipyards, and left him there for dead. Now, they did this because he had the audacity to help these children leave a public school that was in opposition to their faith, and he started another school for these children. That is why he was tarred and feathered.
Now, if you fast forward… Let’s take a break just for a minute.
Jennifer Wagner: That’s a lot, by the way, that’s a lot to just even process that. So, listeners out there like this priest literally got tarred and feathered for helping kids get into a school where they could read their own Bible. By the way, people were reading the Bible in the public school, make a note of that too. So, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but like that’s a lot to process that this poor guy, who was just trying to help, was beaten, and tarred and feathered, and run out of town on a rail. That’s the kind of stuff that you actually only hear about happening. You don’t think it actually happens to people. So, sorry about that. Go ahead, Leslie. This is such an amazing story.
Leslie Hiner: Yeah, this is a big story, right? Which is why I wanted to stop for a minute. But let’s stop for a minute and talk just a minute about the Espinoza case.
In the Espinoza case, Mrs. Espinoza, her daughters when they were in the public school at recess, they were bored, you can only swing on swings for so long until you get bored. And so, these girls decided, “Well, okay, let’s start a little Bible study group at recess. And, at least, we could be doing something.” So, her girls did that. And then, as a result, they were bullied terribly for these little girls just having their own little conversation at recess about the Bible, which was reflective of what they would normally talk about when they were at home, or what they’d normally talk about on Sundays. I mean, this was just kind of a fun, normal thing for them to do. And they weren’t bothering anyone. They were just all just having their own conversation. And they were bullied terribly for that. And the school was not particularly interested in protecting them from being bullied because they wanted to talk about Bible stories with each other at recess.
So, even though what I just shared with you, the story about John Bapst, happened in the mid 1800s, we should certainly not believe that that kind of bad behavior, and discrimination against what we do to each other because we believe something different, because we have a faith that some other person doesn’t believe in, that somehow that gives us the right to bully that person, or to deny that person the right to educational benefits. That’s still happening today, which is why this case is so terribly important.
Now, back to Maine. So, John Bapst had to leave town. I would like to tell you that for Father Bapst, there was a nice conclusion to his life. He went on to become the first president of Boston College. He was a very good man.
Now, so what happened in Maine then? After that happened, there was a lot of other dissent, a lot of other violence that happened. It cooled down after a while. It appears the people were really shamed by what happened. Okay, everybody calmed down, so there was a calming. However, toward the end of that century, the 19th century and into the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan became extremely active in the state of Maine. I have pictures of rallies of 40,000 people in the state of Maine, just a really small state today, and a smaller state then. Most everybody in the state participated in some way in the Klan at the time. And they also, of course, picked up this issue.
The Klan didn’t like Catholics either. They didn’t like immigrants. Immigrants were bringing in a lot of different faith ideas, they didn’t like it. But the Klan in Maine collapsed a bit when there was a constitutional amendment proposed to say that none of these town tuitioning dollars could be used at religiously affiliated schools. And the citizens of Maine said, “No, we don’t want that in our constitution.” That was kind of a split decision, but at least there were enough people in the state of Maine to say, “No, it’s okay if kids get an education that the state is paying for at a religiously affiliated school.” So, good for the citizens of Maine.
Now, again, things tended to die down a little bit and, still, in public schools, they were reading from the Protestant Bible, but people could send their kids to a Catholic school, or to any other school that they wanted to until 1980. Now, in 1980, their attorney general said, “Well, this might be unconstitutional, so maybe we shouldn’t do this.” Now, what I’d like to explain to you, and this is an important point, is that the U.S. Supreme Court had really changed its position regarding the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the US constitution.
And what I noticed is their rulings, going back from the early days to 1980, became much more restrictive, much more against religion, and against the rights of people to freely express their faith in public. And so, there was a backdrop of that happening. But also, in the state of Maine, you also found in the 1980s, there were cross burnings. So, there was also an undercurrent of the Klan that was operating there as well, clearly discrimination against anything, or anyone that was not mainstream Protestant public was not favored. So, from 1873 to 1980 parents could send their kids to religious schools in Maine. And then, they suddenly could not.
Now, let’s talk about John Bapst again. After everything that happened, John Bapst in the 1920s, well, people learned that history, and they didn’t like it much, saw it as a stain on their history. And so, they opened a school called the John Bapst High School, and this was a Catholic school. And the John Bapst school became one of the best Catholic high schools in New England, it was just an exceptional school. It honored Father Bapst. It honored the gentle soul that he was. And they drew students from all over Maine. So, this was a school that was very, very diverse. And with the voucher system that they had in Maine, they were able to draw in children, who were from lower income, and who could never have afforded to pay their own way to go to that school. It was just a really great school in the community.
After 1980, then suddenly those families couldn’t choose the John Bapst school for the had children because it was religious. So, a decision had to be made. And the choices were this, that the John Bapst Catholic School either would remain the Catholic school that they were, and lose almost half of their students. So, all of these children who were benefiting from that school would have to leave because they couldn’t afford it. Or they could give up their faith entirely, and erase it from the school.
Okay, it’s time for another pause. Let’s call this for what it is, this is the state government of Maine telling a religious school that you have a choice to make. You could either continue to educate all these children. And, by the way, you’re doing a really great job, or lose your faith. So, that’s the directive from the state.
Jennifer Wagner: Wow.
Leslie Hiner: Yeah, we’d actually like you to keep educating these kids, because you’re doing a great job, but you can’t say that you’re Catholic. You can’t be Catholic. You can’t have anything that indicates that maybe you think Catholicism is okay. You can’t express any faith in God, or faith in Christ. You need to be completely secular. Well, it’s pretty awful, isn’t it?
Jennifer Wagner: Yeah, it is.
Leslie Hiner: That should never happen here. We should never have the situation with a state is telling anyone you have to give up your faith, or you cannot participate in this public life. That is just wrong on so many levels. So, the school closed. They could not be in a position to just deny their faith, they wouldn’t do it.
Now, another school opened that is strictly secular, and they were allowed to use the John Bapst name. So, that part is good for the memory of John Bapst, and it’s a great school, but it is completely secular. And they are very specific about saying that to anybody who asks, it’s on our website.
Now, here we are today, where here are these parents today who say, “We really need to send our kids to a school of our faith.” And Jen, I’ll tell you I’ve talked to so many people, so many parents over the years. There’s so many parents that I’ve talked to of faith, who regularly talk about their faith just at home, and with family, and friends, and it’s just a natural part of how they live. It’s a natural part of their conversation. And so, for them to send their kids to the public school which, now today, is completely stripped of any form of faith at all, and kids who express their faith, even privately on a playground at recess are bullied for doing that.
Now, this is a tough thing for them. And they realize that it’s very important for their kids to be at a place where they’re comfortable enough to be able to learn, which means they need to be in a school where they’re not bullied because they might say a prayer before they eat at lunch, or because they might get together with a couple friends and talk about Bible stories over recess. Think back to the days when you were a kid, it was hard enough to feel like you fit in, and you wanted people to like you, I guess adults are maybe the same way.
Jennifer Wagner: That doesn’t change. I feel like I want people to like, me and I don’t want to be bullied, or ostracized.
Leslie Hiner: True. That’s true. But for these kids, they live one life at home and then they go to a public school, where that life is derided, and made fun of, and it’s just completely foreign to them. So, if the whole point of education is to make sure the kids can actually be educated, then why in the world would anyone think that we should deny the right of these parents to send their children to a school where they’re going to feel that they fit in, and people won’t make fun of them for their beliefs, and they can be happy there, and they can learn. It just galls me to think that anyone would say we shouldn’t do that.
Jennifer Wagner: And I mean, that’s the whole crux of this case, right? We are at a tipping point in the school choice movement, I think legally speaking. Obviously, we’ve had the year of school choice. It’s only October, but we’ve had the year of school choice. And I think two of the things that you hit on here that I think a lot of our listeners… Our listeners probably do know this, but it’s worth repeating. I think we only go back in our minds to the history that maybe we remember in the last 40 or 50 years, but this idea that the public schools once were religious in nature, they had Bibles in the classroom, the only reason all of this started is because not everybody reads from the same Bible. And I think that’s remarkable, and that the strong anti-Catholic, whether it’s James Blaine or the state of Maine, the strong anti-Catholic sentiment that forced all of this change to happen, and all these kids to have to seek other alternatives back 100 plus years ago is a remarkably lost part of our history.
And I think as we talk a lot about history these days and different perspectives, that’s a really important thing to bring back to the forefront is these schools back in the 1800s were Protestant schools. You could not be Catholic and fit in. And the other thing I would love for you to hit onto, and our listeners know this, everyone who works in the school choice movement knows this, but on the off chance that someone is tuning in here who doesn’t really understand why school choice is constitutional, why it’s legal, the importance of giving that money to the family is to make that choice. And if you could just hit on that briefly, and talk about why that is center to all of these cases from a legal history standpoint and moving forward that we are not establishing a state religion by empowering families to practice school choice.
Leslie Hiner: Yes. Thank you, Jen. That’s a really critical point.
Let me just state at the offset in Maine, when Maine allowed parents to choose another religious school that happened for over 100 years. And I don’t think that there is a single person who ever believed that the state of Maine was establishing religion because parents could choose a religiously affiliated school for their kids to go to K12 classes it really stretches. You have to stretch a lot to think that a state is establishing religion by allowing parents to exercise their free exercise rights under the constitution.
But let’s stop and think about this for just a minute. Let’s go back to the 1800s in Maine and the public schools were reading from the English Bible, Protestant Bible. Now, those were the public schools, that was your choice, if you needed education funding for your child. You didn’t have a choice otherwise, prior to the voucher program, that’s what it was. And, of course, in Maine, if you wanted to send your kids to the Catholic school that John Bapst started, well, that wasn’t going to happen. You were compelled to send your kids to the public school, where they were Protestant-izing the children.
Now, today, parents complain about the same sort of thing, but in the opposite. That if their only choice that is funded is the public schools then, it’s the polar opposite. Instead of the public schools being a place where only one religion is being taught, now the public schools are a place where no religion is being taught. But, even more importantly, where kids get bullied and really feel like outcasts if they are, in fact, children of faith. They can’t talk about it, where they go to school.
Now, in both cases, you have people today who are living in states that do not have school choice, where their only funded option is to send their kids to a public school. And if they are people of faith, that that becomes a problem for them. And in the 1800s, it was the opposite. Now, what is common to both of those scenarios, what is common is the choice of parents. In Maine, the parents could get funding to send their kids to a Protestant public school. Today, parents in non-school choice states can get funding to go to a strictly secular public school. And that’s your choice.
Now, people will say, “Well, these parents, well, they could choose any other school. They just have to pay for it.” Okay, that language is deeply rooted in the animus from the 1800s. I caution anyone today who says, “Well, parents can just pay to send their goods to a Catholic school.” Yeah, that’s very, very discriminatory. That was used to say, “Oh, well, if want those Catholic teachers, then you just pay for your Catholic teachers. Or you just ask the Pope to pay for those Catholic teachers.” We’re hearing the same garbage language today and it’s just wrong.
Now, in 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Zelman case. And the Zelman case was about Cleveland vouchers. Now, this case was extremely important and on point to this question. The court said that when the parent receives voucher funding, at the point when the parent receives that funding, the state’s out of it. And it’s the parent who is actually choosing where to use that funding to send the child to go to school. Now, that’s a very significant issue. Consider that back in the 1800s in Maine, parents didn’t have a choice. They had an ultimatum, send your kid to this Protestant school, or you’re on your own. Parents in non-school choice states today, have the same ultimatum, send your kids to the secular public school, or you’re on your own.
So, in both cases, parents didn’t have a choice. That’s not a choice. Those are ultimatums. But in school choice states, where parents can freely choose where to send their children to school, and that that choice belongs not to the state, but that choice belongs to the parent, as the U.S. Supreme Court said in the Zelman case, that’s constitutional. That’s the basis of the First Amendment. The First Amendment gives us the right to freely express our faith publicly. It gives us the right to speak our minds publicly. Those are very personal rights. They’re very important to our freedom. They should never be abridged.
And in school choice states, those rights are not abridged. Those rights are protected. A parent can choose a religious school, or any religious school, if that’s what they want. And they can receive the state funding for their child’s education, so that they can access other schools. If that’s not what they want, they can choose from a variety of other educational options. But the choice, that freedom, that is so precious to us under the First Amendment of the constitution, is guaranteed under school choice programs.
School choice is very important for a lot of different reasons. If you’re a parent listening right now, and you have a child that is just fighting you every morning because your child doesn’t want to go to school, things are not working. You know you need some other kind of option for your child, but you don’t know where to go, or who to talk to, or how you could make it happen, you understand very clearly, every morning, why school choice is something that you really need. And you understand the personal nature of this. For a parent, it’s not about the parent getting money to send their kids to school. For the parent, it’s about being able to provide a learning environment for your child, where your child will be happy, and comfortable, and will be able to learn. Again, that’s a very personal kind of freedom, and it’s guaranteed to us under the First Amendment of the constitution. And this is what we are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to say now.
They have, since the 1980s, when it seemed that the court was getting a little off track was infringing on some of those freedoms. Frankly, and the court’s decisions were not particularly clear. They’ve been litigated a lot over the years because they weren’t as clear as they should have been maybe. I just think that the court couldn’t really come to grips with it well enough. But now, the U.S. Supreme Court has really made it their task to clarify the First Amendment to the US constitution, to speak with great clarity about these very important rights of freedom that are so important to each one of us. And I fully expect that the U.S. Supreme Court, in this case, Carson versus Makin, I fully expect them to be very clear on exactly what the First Amendment guarantees for each one of us, respecting our rights to free exercise of faith and speech.
Jennifer Wagner: Yeah, and it only took 150 years, right?
Leslie Hiner: Right. Yeah. Not a minute too soon.
Jennifer Wagner: Yeah, no, I think this has been really, really insightful, Leslie, and a great overview. I know we don’t usually do these deep dives, and we should probably do them more often into these really, really important cases that are coming at us very quickly here, which I want to touch on, as we kind of wrap things up. We will just for our regular listeners, in our podcast, we will dive into some of the other ongoing litigation that’s happening at the state level in Kentucky, West Virginia, potentially Ohio, and Tennessee. But we wanted to set aside this chunk of time to really give you the backstory on Carson and why it is so important.
And with that, I’ll kind of let you talk about next steps, and where, and when this case will be heard. And then, when people can next expect to hear from you with an update on what happened.
Leslie Hiner: Okay so yes, thanks for everyone who is hanging in there with us to learn the backstory of this case, which I, obviously, think is quite important for all of us. On December 8th, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case. And again, it’s Carson versus Makin. I’d like everyone to know that if you go to the U.S. Supreme Court’s main website, you can look up the case. It’s a docket search, and just type in Carson V Makin, it’s M-A-K-I-N. And then, you’ll find a long list of documents that have been filed in the case, but you should also find there how you could listen to oral arguments, which will be on December 8th. They will be partially in-person. The people arguing will be in the court, and the justices will be in the court, but nobody else. But they will make the audio available, so we can all listen.
As in terms of when people can expect another update, after oral arguments are done in this case, then we plan to do another podcast. So, for those of you who can’t take time out of the middle of your day to listen to an oral at the U.S. Supreme Court we’ll give you the summary of the arguments, and our view on how the justices responded, and the questions that they asked.
Now also, I will add, that we have a new person who is part of LDEC, our Legal Defense and Education Center, and she will be joining us in a podcast here that we will be setting up soon here before the end of the year. And hopefully, at that time, we may have some more information to share with you. We’re still looking for decisions in cases out of the state of Tennessee, out of Nevada. In Ohio, there’s still a threat of litigation. In West Virginia, there’s a threat of litigation. In Kentucky, litigation is getting there, we’ll give an update on that. So, we’ll just bring you up to date on everything. And we’ll invite our newest person, Lauren Hodges, to share so you can get to know her as well.
Jennifer Wagner: Yes. And you will love her just as much as you love Leslie, I’m sure of it, the ladies of LDEC. Lauren is moving over from our estate team. So, she is not new to EdChoice, but she is new to the legal world of school choice. So, it’s really, really exciting to add her to the team. And, yeah, we’ll wrap this one up today, but there’s a lot going on. Never a dull moment in the world of legal challenges to school choice and legal cases that could affect the future of school choice.
So, on behalf of all of us here, at EdChoice, I’m Jennifer Wagner, our VP of communications. And I just want to thank Leslie for really not just for spending this time with us today, but for doing the hard work of going out, and really telling that story. I think the Brandeis style of brief, I would say this because I’m a storyteller for a living, but I think it’s so cool to get that backstory, and to really not just have a whole bunch of case law. And I’m a lawyer, we’ve all read those briefs, and they are boring.
So if you have a chance, go to our website, go to the Supreme Court, I check out the EdChoice Amicus brief in this case. And yeah, thank you Leslie for your time today. And we’ll be back soon.
Leslie Hiner: Thank you, Jen.