Mr. Webb: 0:00

Have you ever wondered how to instill conservative values in middle schoolers without pushing politics in the classroom? Are you curious about how hands-on learning can shape young minds towards conservative values like opportunity and hard work? Parents, how can you combat the liberal indoctrination that's taking place in the media and in some classrooms? Welcome to The Conservative Classroom, where we're teaching the truth and preserving our values. I'm your host, Mr. Webb, and I'm glad you're here.

Mr. Webb: 0:36

This podcast is a haven for conservative educators, parents and patriots like you, who believe in the importance of free speech, traditional values and education without indoctrination. Each week, we dive into issues that are plaguing our education system and keeping you up at night. In each episode, we offer common-sense ideas to improve education in our classrooms and communities. You may feel like you're the last conservative educator or parent, but I want you to know that you are not alone. By the way, if you like what you hear today, please share this podcast with a like-minded educator, parent or patriot. Together, we can teach the truth and preserve our values. In this episode, we'll explore with Tawny Kilpper how Young America's Foundation is creatively engaging middle school students in the journey of conservative thought and leadership development. Now let's get started. Today, I'm excited to welcome a special guest to the conservative classroom, Tawny Kilpper. Tawny is the Middle School Program director at Young America's Foundation and she's here to discuss the middle school program. Tawny, thank you for joining us.

Tawny Kilpper: 1:57

Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Mr. Webb: 2:01

And I see a Young America's Foundation, abbreviated YAF. Do you want me to call it Young America's Foundation every time, or do you guys call it YAF behind the scenes?

Tawny Kilpper: 2:12

We typically call it YAF, some people call it YAF, so YAF is fine if you'd like to get colloquial.

Mr. Webb: 2:24

Well, I'm glad I asked that. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, what led you to the Young America's Foundation?

Tawny Kilpper: 2:35

Sure, I'd be happy to. I think it'd probably be best if I maybe just start with Young America's Foundation. I'm not sure if your listeners are familiar with what we do, but Young America's Foundation, it's a non-profit student outreach organization and we're committed to ensuring that increasing numbers of young Americans understand and are inspired by the ideas of individual freedom, strong national defense, free enterprise and traditional values. We do this in a number of ways through offering student conferences and seminars nationwide. Students join us from all over the country to spend one to five days hearing from important voices in the conservative movement, covering topics of free speech, free enterprise, the sanctity of life, the perils of socialism and lots more. We also have a campus lecture program that brings national leaders, policymakers, intellectuals and media figures to students where they are, primarily on college campuses, but we do actually sometimes bring them to high schools as well. And we reach millions of students through our YouTube channel, gaf TV, where we have more than a million subscribers and you can actually see many of the lectures that we livestream and you can serve up a whole menu of topics that are relevant and important. And our students can start at GAF chapters on their campuses. We lead activism training, leadership training to equip them. We help them raise awareness about important issues that are ignored or silenced on the left. We just do a really great job of training them, offering them intensive studies through we have a Center for Entrepreneurship, we have internships with a National Journalism Center, so basically we're a nuts and bolts world view training that's focused on equipping young students to understand the ideas that are really important, that are foundational to our country, and we've always done this with college students. We've focused for over 60 years. We've been the premier outreach organization for the conservative movement for college students, and then we started reaching out to high school students and now we're expanding our efforts to reach middle school, and so that's where I came on board with the initiative to introduce middle school programs at Young America's Foundation. How I came to be involved is that my husband has actually been a part of the Young America Foundation office on the West Coast. In 1998, young America's Foundation stepped forward to save the Reagan Ranch, which was on the market as potentially a private property, and Young America's Foundation stepped forward to save it and preserve it as the presidential property. And my husband is the associate director of the Reagan Ranch out here and as a part of this project, young America's Foundation sent out a team to establish a West Coast office, and we have a building on Lower State Street which is in Santa Barbara proper, and we offer student programming here and then we take students up to the ranch. The ranch isn't actually open to the public, so he's been doing that for 17 years and it's been a part of our family.

Tawny Kilpper: 6:28

I was previously working in film and theater and then took time off to have our family.

Tawny Kilpper: 6:36

We have two girls, and so then I got involved with their school, which is a private Christian school, and through different roles there and the time in Westmont College, which is a small Christian liberal arts college here in Santa Barbara, I just became really enamored of and confounded by the unique challenges of education.

Tawny Kilpper: 7:06

Distinctly Christian, but I've always been real supportive values that come from a military family, and so I ended up working in admissions and marketing in a small private Christian school here in Santa Barbara called Providence School, and it was during COVID when I think we all came to realize that there was something strangely afoot in the public schools. And as the admissions director I encountered story after story of parents being discouraged, disheartened by the CRT DEI and gender politics that their kids were being fed in the public school and there's only so many spots in a small private school and there's only so many resources and private school isn't available to all families. And it became increasingly clear to me that I wanted to help more families combat this agenda that is creeping into our schools. And when the opportunity came to be involved with Young America's Foundation at the middle school level, I jumped and said that's really interesting to me.

Mr. Webb: 8:23

So have you ever heard this question? Conservative Christian educator what are you doing in California?

Tawny Kilpper: 8:36

Well, more even than that. I used to be in Hollywood. I was trying to be a screenwriter, so I tried to be, mainstream content creator with Christian Conservative. It's a battle that you bang your head against daily. I joke that I went from Hollywood to a small Christian university and then I went to a small Christian high school. Well, it was preschool through 12th grade, and I kept looking to be. I was always the most conservative person in the room, and so I had to find a different room.

Mr. Webb: 9:16

And now.

Tawny Kilpper: 9:16

I find myself with great colleagues in a serious conservative organization, so I'm in good, good standing. It is an outpost that we have here in Santa Barbara.

Mr. Webb: 9:30

And I know Young America's Foundation does a lot and actually you and I met at the Teacher Freedom Summit and I had seen Young America's Foundation. I'd run across YouTube videos. I know you guys have some pretty high profile speakers and there's lots of great videos out there. I didn't know you had a middle school program until we met at the Teacher Freedom Summit, so can you tell us about the middle school program that you're involved in?

Tawny Kilpper: 9:58

Yeah, you bet. So it was about two years ago this fall that I was at an event as an attendee for Young America's Foundation, and our new president of the foundation is Governor Scott Walker. He was the two term governor of Wisconsin. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but he's now the president of Young America's Foundation and he was giving an overview of his strategic action plan that he was calling the long game, and he was reviewing different planks of shoring up things we've done well and reaching into new areas. And one of the planks that he mentioned immediately captivated me and it was to reach more students younger, and so I jumped up and there was a Q&A after and said what do you mean by that? And he said well, we think we're going to start with middle school. So so far there's been five, let's see six. There's been six middle school programs that we've offered. The first five were before I came on board, and so we just had our first one that I've had my hand in shaping, and the initial ones were called a middle school retreat, and so we kind of modeled it on our high school model, where we have bring a couple really dynamic speakers and introduce the students to a topic and share it with them, and then take them to the Reagan Ranch and let them walk through the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and share with them the character attributes that were so foundational that made him a great person but also made him a great president, and kind of encourage them about the things that they're able to shape and do in their own lives to be leaders where they are. And so those were met with success.

Tawny Kilpper: 12:00

But part of the key component in terms of feedback that we received was the parents and the grandparents all loved it and knew that they wanted to get their kids involved. And the kids all said what middle school? Where? What are we doing? And so we knew we had to do a better story, tell a better story to engage the interest of middle schoolers. And so I came on. My background, like I said, is theater and film and marketing essentially a storyteller, and so I said we need to tell a better story for these students.

Tawny Kilpper: 12:39

And so we conceptualized what we're calling the middle school expedition, and it's more inspired by the ideas of adventure and expedition and the character of Reagan. So we're not we're not departing from what we initially offered, but we're doing it in a package that's a little bit more suitable to that interest and attention spans of middle schoolers. And when I say middle school we're defining that as grades six through eight. That's not always clear, Some schools have different parameters there, but that seems to be a good age range for us.

Tawny Kilpper: 13:17

So we, instead of having just a speaker talk about a topic, were our last one that we just did. We had a Hillsdale professor come who's staying with Dr Michael Clark great guy, super fun and engaging with the students and was introducing him to some economic concepts. But then he based it in a game and so they spent most of the teaching time on their feet, moving around in groups doing a game. And then the second teaching time was a communism seminar or not seminar simulation. So the idea is to keep them moving, to get them in hands on super engaged material kind of scaffold, what they're learning. Make sure that you're backing up things in ways and breaking it up over the course of the day so that it's being reinforced in a way that is just more conducive to the middle school attention span.

Mr. Webb: 14:18

Yeah, I'm a middle school math teacher, so 100% understand how hard it is to keep attention of middle school students. How many how many? Students are there in a group and do you limit it?

Tawny Kilpper: 14:33

So we kept our this expedition that we did. We did it as an a one day add on for families who were her students were. Well, we didn't have to, but it was an add on to our high school conference, and so it was a Saturday, the last day of the high school conference, and so we were seeing if parents who had students that were at the high school conference, if they had younger kids, they'd be interested in coming, and that was true. But we also just garnered a bunch of students who didn't have siblings in the high school conference. But so we kept it to 50. 50 seems to be a real sizable number for us.

Tawny Kilpper: 15:16

Part of the day is we then do go up to the Reagan ranch and for your viewers who may not be familiar, it's it's actually a remote location and so we have to go and shuttles about 45 minutes out of town on the mountains above Santa Barbara, and so we think 50 is about a critical mass. We actually had a few, a few extra and we had a waitlist, so that was really exciting. I think our target in our, the ones we had offered, had been 50, but we hadn't been filling them. So I think, words getting out, that we're offering a little bit of a plan. We have stuff on our website so people are knowing about it, but I also think that I think it was called the middle school retreat last time and I'd like to think the expedition concept is landing with the students.

Mr. Webb: 16:08

I would think it would. I think that sounds exciting from a middle school standpoint. That sounds more exciting, I think.

Tawny Kilpper: 16:17

Yeah, and we concluded our time at the ranch with Jeep tours, so the students got to go in Humphys and Jeeps and drive through the trails that the President wrote on. He was a beloved horseman and had 20 miles of trails on his ranch. We didn't do 20 miles of trails, but we took the students to some of his favorite spots, which included a tree that was known before the Reagan spot the property as the hanging tree. So that seemed to be a favorite spot of middle schoolers.

Mr. Webb: 16:53

Is this middle schoolers from all across America, or just those?

Tawny Kilpper: 16:58

who live near this ranch, so we did or how does that work?

Tawny Kilpper: 17:02

Yeah, so we do offer these in three locations across the country. So our headquarters is in Reston, virginia, which is outside of DC, so we're offering one program there next year. We offered one this year in Reston which included a behind the scenes tour. At Mount Vernon we also own and preserve the Reagan boyhood home in Dixon, illinois. We just purchased his birthplace, which is also in Illinois, and we are developing the Reagan boyhood home into a beachhead for Yaff in the Midwest to gather and reach students in the Midwest area and then we have them here.

Tawny Kilpper: 17:52

So this one we had a group come down from San Jose and we had some students drive up from San Diego, so we primarily drew from California. We did have a student come in from Florida and student from Oregon For the middle school program. If they're traveling in, they need to be traveling with family. We invited them to a banquet dinner the night before that was part of the high school program where we had a fantastic speaker, daniel DiMartino, who's an economist at Columbia. He's an immigrant from Venezuela and he's 24. He's really youthful and smart and energetic and he speaks so clearly on the perils of socialism and how it destroyed its country.

Tawny Kilpper: 18:41

It really was a fantastic introduction for the students to appreciate some of the things they learned about the next day property rights the game that we did with the economics was about property rights and communism and understanding the role Reagan played in bringing down the iron curtain. It turned into a nice, real nice package. But all that to say that we do. Our high school students can fly in and we put them up in hotels and we're just not prepared to be singularly hosting middle school students without parental supervision. But we do offer travel vouchers. So we had a family that was interested in coming from Florida and we helped them accomplish that.

Mr. Webb: 19:35

How do the middle schoolers respond to this? Because I think some of these concepts this may be the first time they've really learned about them.

Tawny Kilpper: 19:45

Well, that was really the question. We've had middle schoolers up to the ranch and we're showing them around Reagan's beloved ranch and he'd signed the tax cut there. Do they know what we mean when we say tax cut? Do they know? What is their knowledge they're walking in with? What do they need to know to have an appreciation for Reagan and what he accomplished? Those are some of the very first questions that I asked. So we were pretty intentional about what we're teaching the students and that's why the very first teaching time was about economics. I think they loved it.

Tawny Kilpper: 20:30

We do surveys. We are super great at getting surveys out of our high school students. We survey them before they leave. They have to do a survey to get out the door. Our middle school students we sent a follow up and so I haven't been able to get high pad about maybe 40% of them respond Overwhelmingly positive, overwhelmingly, giving our both speakers great reviews. And then we do ask did this program overall increase your knowledge of conservative I don't know, it wasn't values, but viewpoints, I think is how it was put or did this make you have a better appreciation for America and did you gain more knowledge about American history? And they all said yes, a couple said maybe about the conservative values, so I'm not sure that they even know what that means. We'll have to think about that question a little bit better.

Mr. Webb: 21:33

That's an interesting question and I was wondering if middle school students that you guys have in your program do they have kind of a sense of what their political values are? Or what have you seen? Maybe they're just open books, maybe not, I don't know.

Tawny Kilpper: 21:57

Well, okay. So I think that's going to be an evolving question as we are able to invite more and more people and the word gets out about what our programs are. But right now, the people who know about these programs know about Young America's Foundation. You know about Young America's Foundation and you support Young America's Foundation. You're likely a conservative, and so the people who are coming to our initial programs have been led here by parents, grandparents, people in their life who want them to be introduced to these ideas and concepts, so that I think they have a fairly good idea, and I think that's somewhat why they've been a little bit reluctant to come when it was called the retreat, because it's like, oh great, grandma and grandpa want me to come to this thing that's going to talk about politics, and it's called a retreat and we're trying to say no, no, we want you to come and explore some ideas with us and have fun along the way. So I do think that most of them understand there's a viewpoint that's being presented and I we're trying to be really intentional about the language we're using, because we're trying to widen the net, and I don't know if you've experienced this, but we've experienced that if you say you're a conservative, then you're already a bad guy, you're already discounted. And students are getting this, and so they're. Just they're not going to be gung-ho about exploring that, and so that's why we're really doubling down on you know there's there's a viewpoint you're not getting.

Tawny Kilpper: 23:39

We just want students to fall in love with America. America is amazing. America and free enterprise and the foundations our country were built upon have created more good, have risen more people out of poverty, have provided more opportunity than any other set of ideas in the history of the world. And we want students to love our country and want them to know that they're, they're being lied to, they're being fed a bill of goods and they're, and it's going to harm their future because it's undermining their ability to self determine, and so we just want them to get excited and whatever it takes to get them here. So we're hoping we get more students. But, to answer your question in a very convoluted way, I think primarily the students that have hit our program so far at this level are coming from families home school, private Christian school, some public school but families that are desperate for their kids to hear the values that they're being taught at home reinforced in a different arena.

Mr. Webb: 24:49

And what they learn at school. Now, homeschool, that's different. Right School, you know, the parents can kind of control what's going on at a public school. However, what I've seen as a conservative teacher, first of all, my students don't have a clue what my politics are, because I feel as a conservative, I feel like we need to keep politics out of the classroom. So I think when, when students are in classrooms of conservative teachers, they don't know the politics of their teacher and when they get into a lot of liberal teachers, they I'm not saying all.

Mr. Webb: 25:29

There's a lot of good teachers out there, sure, but I am saying that the majority of the teachers that push a political agenda are liberals who are pushing social agendas that you know good conservative Christian families don't agree with. So the students in public schools, they're seeing one side pushed in their face, while the conservatives are more hands off, like we should keep politics out of the classroom. So I think it's great that you guys are at least for you know a few students, 50 or 100 or how many you guys expand that to. At least they can see, you know what the other side and understand. I started to say the good side, or the bright side. Maybe I shouldn't say it, but I already did, so we'll leave it in there, but I think it's good for them to be exposed to why conservative values are better for America than liberal values.

Tawny Kilpper: 26:37

Yes, yes, and I think really, what we're hoping for the students who are in public school, who have come through our program, we're we're hoping that when they hear nonsense then in the classroom it'll just make them pause and say wait, I remember something else. And sometimes it's all it takes is somebody to show you a bigger picture for you than to not be so open to receiving everything that you're hearing. And even for our homeschool students, to the extent that they maybe a lot of them aren't even in social media. But this has gotten so pervasive. It's not just in the school room, it's these mainstream media, social media, once trusted cultural institutions like the local library, the movies that are being created. They're all influencing our young minds with this agenda to undermine the values that we hold dear. The words like I don't know, hard work, equality, being a patriot these are being co-opted and they're being given as negatives. And to be able to walk into a room and spend an afternoon with a bunch of people who are unabashedly patriotic and love our country there's just something really restorative about it. Our young students may not find it as refreshing because they don't know what they're missing, but constantly our high school students or college students. One of the things they say about every conference they come away from is it's just so powerful to be in a room of like-minded people I thought I was the only one and so that it's more than just the teaching, it's also the providing a group of people who can stand shoulder to shoulder with you. So maybe two of your friends go on a middle school expedition and then the next time somebody's saying something silly on the sidelines of the soccer pitch you're able to say, hey, actually that's not true, right? So we're just looking for some foundational.

Tawny Kilpper: 29:12

There's a Reagan quote that people say all the time that there's a flickering spark in all of us. If captured at just the right time, can become a flame. Kind of butchering, that quote. But you get my drift. We're just trying to either be there to help ignite that little spark or to protect it. And if they love what they hear and see and they wanna come back, and then there's this whole journey that's ahead of them. The Young America Foundation offers that can shape somebody's trajectory. I don't know if you're familiar with Katie Pavlich, but she's a journalist, an author, and she's a Fox contributor. I think she's one of the co-hosts on the five. She started her whole career at a YAAF conference. She says straight up I didn't know what I wanted to do until I went to my first YAAF conference and it set me on a trajectory. And so we just don't know who isn't gonna walk through our walls or ride our expedition trails and come out as a leader for hopefully protecting the freedoms that we hold so dear in our country.

Mr. Webb: 30:34

And I have to mention this while I'm thinking about it you mentioned a Reagan quote, and my favorite Reagan quote is and this may not be word for word, but the trouble with our liberal friends is that they're not is not that they're ignorant, but they know so much. That isn't so. That's pretty close to it. It's been a good second. That's classic.

Tawny Kilpper: 30:54

Reagan, I love that yeah.

Mr. Webb: 30:59

And you mentioned also about the pervasiveness of the liberal values in not just in school but in media, and I couldn't help think but the Disney, disney movies and animated movies, Nickelodeon, what we would say like kid shows and kid movies that used to be safe. Nowadays you have to do research to even watch a movie or a show with your kids and it's aimed at the kid. I mean, that's. The target market is the kids, and I never thought I would see that day, but we're there.

Tawny Kilpper: 31:42

Well, I have two adults now. Oh, I have an 18 year old and a 22 year old, smart, lovely young women. But it was exhausting and they're so smart and they were both early readers and voracious. They just had such an appetite for learning and it was exhausting to keep up with them or keep in front of them, because all of the content in the library was questionable, and so it's not like you could just go to a trusted place and say I would like 10 books for this week and queue up 10 more books for next week and that you could hope that those would be wholesome, edifying books and from gender ideology, dei, the radical environmentalist narrative, it's just in everything, and it's exhausting for parents, and so that's part of what I'm also working on is hopefully developing resources to share with parents so that they don't feel like they've got to do this all on their own, that there are places to go to. There are some easy answers to some of the predominant prevailing narratives.

Mr. Webb: 33:09

What can parents do if they've listened to this episode and we have piqued their interest and they want to learn more about these middle school programs and what resources you guys offer?

Tawny Kilpper: 33:22

They should go to our website which is yaforg. Yaforg, they can do a backslash middle school programs, I believe but if they just go, they can go under programs and find middle school programs, but they can see what we're offering, what's in the pipeline for 2024. They can sign up to join our mailing list that we're starting to. One is to middle school specific mailing list, but then we're also starting an educators network where teachers can sign up for that and we're hoping to send out just a monthly newsletter that has some actionable, helpful resources and then updates on timely programs coming up that if they identify that they're students at their school. You said you're reluctant to introduce your values or your politics, but you can identify if there's a student that's really excited about something and you could say hey, did you know you could pursue that at a high school conference, I think there's. So we're hoping to gain people on that. But the YAF channel we have a YouTube channel on its YAF TV and you could just really decide I would like to learn more about socialism or entrepreneurship. You could go through and see all these different speakers and listen, and we livestream most of the speakers from the conferences we're offering and you could just really self-serve up some pre-training to explore some of these speakers and ideas that we have Super valuable. We have a pay. I've been really thrilled to be a part of YAF. I've been really proud to be a part of this organization these last month and a half.

Tawny Kilpper: 35:39

The stand that Young America Foundation has taken to support Israel and to equip our students on college campuses to offer alternative activism to the terrible Hamas supporting initiatives that are happening across our campuses, it's been really inspiring to see. So we have an Israel resource page on the YAForg and it has just some common answers to some of the questions that people are saying, like how you respond to somebody suggesting that Israel is colonizers, and there's like these common tropes that people are offering up and it's just, it's really helpful. I know that when you're talking to people who have a different viewpoint, they just sputter off a bunch of things and you feel like you intuitively know that they're not right, but you just don't remember or you don't know what the right response is and so you kind of just stay quiet because it's just exhausting and I love that YAF gives you our students and people who are checking out our content Just like easy answers to some of these really complex questions.

Mr. Webb: 37:01

I'll make sure and put links to YAForg and link to the middle school programs, the YouTube channel. I'll put all that in the show notes. And usually, usually the very last thing that I'll ask is to share to anything you want to plug or promote. But I'll go ahead and ask that now, since we just talked about YAForg and the YouTube channel. So is there anything else you want to share, any upcoming projects or events connected with you on social media? Basically, anything you want to plug or promote that we haven't already mentioned.

Tawny Kilpper: 37:38

Yeah, actually I would love. I am looking for your conservative classroom educators who might be interested in collaborating with me. We're trying to develop a pipeline of speakers people who are uniquely gifted for the middle school audience. We have amazing speakers that we send all over the country, but just because they can speak to a high school or college audience effectively doesn't mean they're suited specifically for a middle school audience, and so we're not sure if that means we're looking for educators to help train them to do that or if we're doing partnerships. But I'm looking for dynamic middle school educators who might be interested in traveling to Santa Barbara or Dickson or Virginia and taking on a middle school expedition with me. So if anybody's interested, I would love for them to reach out and you can give them my email address in the show notes.

Mr. Webb: 38:41

OK, I'll do that. That sounds really exciting.

Tawny Kilpper: 38:46

I think it's so fun. My colleagues have all said we're so glad you're here, we don't know what to do about middle school and you're so enthusiastic and everyone's kind of like, oh no, the middle school program and my goal is to make it so much fun, both in the expedition for the students but also behind the scenes as we put this together, that everybody wants to participate.

Mr. Webb: 39:11

So you're looking for conservative teacher speakers and you may have mentioned this, but I don't think we talked about it. So are these expeditions? Do they happen mainly in the summer, when teachers are off and students are off?

Tawny Kilpper: 39:28

Yeah, so that's what right now we are our whole slate of conferences. Summer is quite full with high school and college, and so most of the middle school stuff is being offered. Let's see in May, in April, we have one in June, and then September and October. So I'm thinking we're going to move towards the 2025 year, having more summer, but I'll have to build out my team more because, yeah, it's hard, we do serve a lot of students. We've got a pretty robust conference schedule in the middle school expedition.

Mr. Webb: 40:18

That's a one day event.

Tawny Kilpper: 40:21

Yeah, so the ones in? Yes, they're all it's. They usually start with a Friday evening dinner, banquet and then banquet makes it sound very stuffy. I'd like it to be icebreakers, something fun for the middle schoolers. But we start with a Friday evening and then a Saturday, so you could could see quickly get away.

Mr. Webb: 40:47

So yeah, and that's that's kind of where I was headed with that. Yeah, if any teachers are listening, they're interested. You could probably carve out a weekend, even if your school is maybe still going on when one of these events occur. But yeah, we've talked about a lot and I feel like there's a lot we could we can still talk about. But yeah, before we kind of end things for at least for this episode, what's the one thing you want the listener to remember, if they don't remember anything else about this episode?

Tawny Kilpper: 41:21

I would love for them to remember that middle school is a really unique time, that I think a lot of people underestimate middle schoolers and I think a lot of parents are in the no man's land between the elementary years and just waiting for high school, and I think that we miss an opportunity. And I think that Young America Foundation is stepping really boldly into this space and that we could really capture the hearts and imaginations of a really unique group of students who have they're just idealistic and energetic and not fully formed or jaded yet. So I want the listener to take away that middle school is an inspiring time and that there are people who are really willing to invest in this age group, and we would love to find people to join us.

Mr. Webb: 42:22

That sounds great and thank you so much for joining us today. Tawny, it's been a pleasure having you on The Conservative Classroom and I know our listeners will appreciate your teaching us about YAF's middle school program. I know I learned a lot. Thank you so much, thank you so much.

Tawny Kilpper: 42:41

I really appreciate the opportunity to just share it. Thank you.

Mr. Webb: 42:44

No problem, thank you. That's it for today's episode of The Conservative Classroom. Thank you for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed it and learned something. If you liked what you heard, please don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. That would really help the podcast out. Most importantly, share this podcast with a like-minded educator, parent or patriot. You can also connect with us on social media and Share your thoughts on today's topic by sending me an email at TheC onservativeC lassroom@ gmail. com.

Mr. Webb: 43:22

We'd love to hear from you if you feel that education without indoctrination and Teaching the truth is important to preserve traditional values and support my efforts to keep the conservative classroom running. I'm a full-time teacher and dad and part-time Podcaster. I invest a lot of hours and my own hard-earned money each week to bring you quality content, but I need your help. Check out the links in the show notes and on the website to support the podcast with a one-time or recurring monthly donations. Every little bit helps.

Mr. Webb: 44:00

You can also visit our merch store to get your own clothing, coffee mug, stickers, backpacks, book bags and more With The Conservative Classroom logo or one of our many other conservative slogans, such as age appropriate does not equal banning books, define the teachers unions, keep politics out of the classroom and more. If you want to support common sense and education Without pushing your politics, check out our products with the Red Schoolhouse logo on it. We know it's hard to be openly conservative in some school districts, but your silent show of support will let you know that you are doing the right thing. Until next time. This is Mr. Webb, reminding you that you are not alone. See you next time on The Conservative Classroom. Teaching the truth. Preserving our values.