or lowell alumni association, but i'm a graduate of lowell. i was going to talk about the racial injustices of disallowing a population it allow other people into lowell. i'm not going to go there. what i want to talk to you about is as someone mentioned before me about retention and recruitment. and that's the gist of what i want to speak to today. i have a lot of friends who are hispanic and black that flunked out by 10th grade. they had no concept of how to study. the intent was there. they gave maximum effort, but had to travel a long way to get to lowell, which is a lot of them lived in bayview and the mission and i still remember the faces of my friends who didn't graduate with me. they flunked out by 10th or 11th grade. all the cuts, resource cuts at lowell, really impacted the sustainability, viability and it is what is heartbreaking. you let the kids in and then they don't have too many options to succeed because you are going in there, i'm going in there with a certain amount of learning and they're going in there and in the same cla