13:43:25 Live captions provided by Rev.com. For 99% accurate post-meeting transcripts and captions, visit Rev.com. 14:02:03 [ captioner standing by ] 14:03:26 >> Laura: I think we've got everyone in the room. I'm going to go ahead and start our recording. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for the relaunch of Raise Your Voice, CTD's advocate connection program. I'm Laura, the communications director. I'm going to give my audio description. I'm a white woman with long light brown 14:03:55 hair, a turquoise sweater and I'm sitting in a pretty much all white room with brightly lit windows behind me. To start us off, I'm going to go over our Zoom functions and accessibility on this call. This meeting is being closed-captioned. I don't know how Zoom has changed things since the last time you logged in, so if you need any assistance 14:04:24 getting the size right, placement, getting the settings the way you need them, just let us know and we'll get that sorted out. We are not going to be using breakout rooms today. We'll be staying all together in the main room. We will be screen sharing and doing one poll. So heads up for that. We'll ask that everyone stay muted unless 14:04:54 they are speaking. We are going to be having time for Q&A at the end of our prepared content today. If you do have a question or a comment, feel free to use the chat box or the raise your hand feature and we'll try to get all of those questions answered. A few of us are going to be sticking around after 3:00 central, if those questions do pile 14:05:07 up and we need to take a little bit of additional time to get to those. So we'll still be available for a little bit after our one-hour time block. 14:05:25 If you have technical or any kinds of questions, feel free to use the chat box to ask those at any point during the session. We'll also be keeping an eye on info@T. 14:05:58 info@TXdisabilities. We will be recording our sessions throughout the interim, throughout 2022, so if you need to reference these or catch up or share them, unlike in the regular legislative session, the information will probably still be current, if you want to share them later on in the week or month or year. We'll see 14:05:59 what happens. 14:06:09 All right. I think that is all I need to say. I will turn it over to Dennis. 14:06:28 >> Dennis: Welcome, everybody. I'm Dennis Borel with the Coalition of Texans With Disabilities. So my audio description is gray hair, gray beard, wearing a gray jacket. That means I'm like aging rapidly right before your eyes. 14:07:02 This is our first kick-off Raise Your Voice. We're figuring about two times a month. Before I talk a little bit about that, I wanted to thank those of you who were with us last year. We did tracking, and believe it or not, over 3600 e-mails were generated by the people on Raise Your Voice round tables. Went to 93 different 14:07:33 legislators on issues that matter. Communicating to our legislators is a reason we do this. Here's another awesome statistic. We would ask people if they took action in the last week when we said to make a phone call or e-mail and we tracked or response. Incredibly enough, 56% of people on our calls actually responded. 14:07:57 That tells us a couple of other good things that maybe we're doing this right, that we're trying to make it pretty easy for you to Raise Your Voice through your legislators and it's getting through. And also that you're taking the time to do it. That's really, really important. Make no mistake about it, communication from people of Texas 14:08:28 does matter, and I guarantee you that Chase or Jolene or Jen or I in the capital when we talk into a legislator's office, they say we got a couple e-mails this morning. That matters so much. Here at CTD, we're planning to work quite a bit this year. It's an interim year, which means no formal legislative session. That doesn't mean they 14:08:53 are not working. They'll be doing some hearings and stuff and we'll be monitoring those and can getting involved in those. We'll be advocating to legislators, state agencies, and staff. It's all about setting the stage. Jolene is going to talk about the interim charges and what opportunities that brings. 14:09:23 So some of the subjects in our future Raise Your Voices this year, attended wages in more a crisis than it has been in the past, state budget issues, Medicaid waiver wait list which is unbelievably long in this state, special education issues, our children with disabilities, are they being fairly treated. Medical cannabis always -- a lot of 14:09:49 interest in that from our folks and many, many more. So with that, what I will do is I am going to turn this back to Laura who is going to run a short poll. I mentioned a few things we're going to be talking about that we have. We have undesignated round tables coming up where we can fit in your particular idea or issue. Laura, if you'll take 14:09:54 this away and run our poll and see what ideas we have from our people today. 14:10:40 >> Laura: Sure. We just wanted to get a quick idea of your priorities for 2023, how they align with what we'll be working on, and if you're able to scroll down in the poll window and you have other things that we haven't covered in that first question, you can note them there. We'll take that into consideration as we proceed with these sessions. 14:11:11 Hopefully we're able to, in some way, address everyone's concerns. So I'll give everyone a minute or so to fill out that poll. 14:12:02 It looks like about half of y'all have gone ahead and submitted your answers. I'll leave it up for a few minutes in case anyone is still responding, but Jolene, did you want to go ahead and give your audio description and take it away with what's coming up with education. 14:12:06 . 14:12:27 >> Jolene: Sure. Thanks, Laura. I apologize for being late. I was rushing here from a courthouse in Georgetown. I guess, first of all, I'm Jolene Sanders-Foster, I'm a white woman with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, white T-shirt and green rimmed glasses. 14:12:54 Just to kind of piggyback on what Dennis was mentioning, interim charges, we know that interim charges are often predicting what could be the priorities for the next legislative session. So some of those priorities that have been indicated by the speaker of the house as well as the lieutenant governor, some we saw coming. Some we didn't. 14:13:27 Some of those that we see are going to definitely be priorities, juvenile justice and criminal justice. The workforce and specifically the teacher shortages, there are interim charges that are pertinent to COVID, COVID recovery as well as mental health supports for students post-COVID. Is that happening in schools? There are interim 14:14:03 charges around legislation that passed this last session, SB-1716 which had to do with supplemental special education grants. They'll look at the finance bill. There is a commission on school finance that's been meeting. They will be taking public comment. We know special education finance is going to be a priority as well as revisioning disciplinary 14:14:28 alternative education plans or programs. These are often areas where we see a lot of students with disabilities not being supported within the public schools, kind of getting funneled. That's a priority of the lieutenant governor as well as child care. Child care and child safety, there's a select committee looking at child and youth safety. 14:14:52 Finally, the 60 by 30 plan. It's a plan that's established by the Texas higher education coordinating board which doesn't take into consideration graduation and post-secondary success for students with disabilities. We will be working to make sure that those students are also included and considered in that plan. One of the 14:15:18 barriers we will have or challenges, I should say, is that the lieutenant governor has decided to combine senate education and higher education. That's a subcommittee under senate education. There's been shake-up with the chairs and co-chairs. We know that those are two big committees where we often have to elbow our way in to get the voices 14:15:44 of people with disabilities heard. Given the amount of work that those two committees do being combined into one is going to be a challenge for us. But we feel confident that our partners and advocates like you will help us continue to elbow our way in to advocate for children and youth with disabilities. So with that, I think I will go ahead 14:15:49 and kick it over to Jen. 14:16:14 >> Jennifer: Thanks. I'm Jennifer and I'm the mental health policy fellow here at CTD. I will describe myself. I'm a very attractive white woman with glasses. I am in a Taylor Swift hoodie and she's in a poster behind me supervisorring me as always. So this next session the speaker of the house determined that they're going to 14:16:40 be focusing on two major areas, and how fortunate for us. One is health and one is the criminal justice system. CTD, we started last session doing some work in criminal justice realm, and I feel like we've made some strong progress in letting other criminal justice reform advocates know that we're here working on these issues. What I discovered 14:17:04 pretty quickly is the voices of people with disabilities and those with mental health concerns are often left out when we talk about conditions or policing. And, you know, interesting study came out recently that said that almost half of all people killed by police are people with disabilities. That is extremely disturbing and it shows and 14:17:25 highlights the disparities for people with disabilities in the criminal justice system. We're looking at all things related to policing and the courts. We want to work a little bit more on supportive decision making. There was a great bill that didn't get a whole lot of traction that we think is important that people will IDD who go in the 14:17:50 court system that they and their attorneys and the judge understand that they're allowed to have a supportive decision maker present to help them make legal decisions. County jails, county juvenile justice centers, making sure those places have all the community and mental health supports and local mental health authorities let us work together 14:18:17 to provide the type of supports that the county jails need in terms of care and also working on a bill that we introduced last session about family liaisons. We've seen a huge problem with county jails and their transparency in terms of medical. Oftentimes a person that's in custody, their family doesn't know that they are at the hospital, that 14:18:36 they have died, that they are not getting the treatment that they need and it's been extremely difficult for advocates and family to get ahold of somebody at the jail and to get information. So we're going to work really hard on that bill again. So much criminal justice, you guys. I know we have limited time. Working about issues within the 14:19:06 Texas department of criminal justice, generally mentioned higher education. I know as a person with lived experience, college programming for women and those with disabilities is very, very sparse and certainly not equitable in terms of what the men receive and able bodied people receive in terms of higher education. We've already started making 14:19:31 plans with TDCJ to have these tough conversations and other organizations to make sure it's implemented in a way that is accessible to everyone. Anything in regards to conditions, the heat, the plumbing, I think you've all heard on the news just how dire the conditions are in our prisons. Looking at medical recommended intensive supervision, 14:19:58 which is compassionate parole. In 2019, 132 people were recommended and these are people with disabilities, severe mental health or physical severe problems. 132 were recommended. 3 were voted on by the board. None were approved by the governor. That was a pattern that continues to be repeated. We want to see people that are eligible and 14:20:23 qualify for that to get home to their loved ones and get home to community care, which is far better than the medical care in TDCJ. Last but not least, the Texas juvenile justice department. This is -- it's -- I don't know any other way to say it, but it's a Dumpster fire. It is an absolute chaos. One of the bills that we worked on last 14:20:49 session that was really important to us and remains important and we're working with the federal coalition on this is that no kids in cuffs which means that, you know, if you were here in our last Raise Your Voice, you remember that children as young as ten can be handcuffed, zip tied, sprayed with mace. We know our kids with disabilities and 14:21:12 mental health issues are disproportionately those kids this is happening to. We're working hard with stakeholders and other groups to get that bill passed where kids aren't handcuffed and also working hard to close five of the state facilities within the Texas juvenile justice department. They lack staffing. It's extremely dangerous. The conditions 14:21:32 are horrible. We want to see those kids in the community at facilities where they can get the care that they need. I hope that wasn't too much info at once. It's so much we're working on within the criminal justice world. And I believe Chase is next. No? Dennis. 14:21:59 >> Dennis: I'm going to be next. I think y'all gather that just from what Jolene is talking about, education, Jen, about criminal justice, everything this state does affects people with disabilities. You know what happens? In almost every case, the disability community is on the shortened of the stick. This 14:22:21 thing about children under ten years old being thrown in handcuffs and sprayed with mace. That ought to piss off anybody, if I may say so. I'm going to talk about the community service. That's my focus. I had the opportunity to attend an interim hearing recently, and one of the nice things about, you know, being around a while like myself 14:22:50 is actually they asked me to come and talk to them. You better believe I'm going to take those opportunities. I talked to them about the wait list on Medicaid waivers, which in the best case scenario, if you put your name on the wait list today, it's 27 years before your name gets to the top of the list. Best case scenario. Okay. I also took 14:23:16 that opportunity to talk about community attendance and basically poverty wages which is crushing our workforce. We're working hard on that. I heard ears open there. You know, one difference I see, I sense a little bit of movement from the capital. This committee agreed to take on an interim charge about wait lists, about community services. 14:23:39 Being even willing to talk about it with the idea that it's going to set you up to do something in a regular session is big. It's really big. Some things come up that you can have impact on right away. I'm going to tell you one of those. There was a bunch of federal money, federal COVID relief money that came into this state. Actually, there 14:24:03 were several pieces that came in, but there was one that was actually a set aside, a set aside for home and community-based services. This was Washington recognized in that those community workers and all that were not really addressed as essential workers. There was no hazard pay for them. They couldn't get PPE for the most part. 14:24:24 When I say PPE, I mean masks and all that to protect themselves. So they sent a significant amount of money and said you've got to spend it on home and community-based services. When the decision was made that, well, the best way to do that is give people a bonus. They weren't going to change their ways. Still give them a bonus. We kind of 14:24:57 said, we would rather you gave them a raise, but a bonus will put some dollars in their pocket. We discovered at a hearing in April that the state had overlooked 130,000 community attendants for these bonuses. 130,000. We caught that error. We reached out to legislative offices, the governor's office. Reached out to media 14:25:28 and scored two major media articles questioning the health and community services commission. They corrected that last week and those 130,000 community attendants are going to gets those bonuses. So things happen in the interim immediately but also it's a time to plan. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Chase. 14:25:55 >> Chase: All right. Thank you, Dennis. I'm trying to -- my computer is not wanting to -- there we go. Thank you all again for attending. My name is Chase Bearden. My audio crisp is I'm a while male wearing an aqua green shirt with the photo of the building that we have downtown of CTD in the background, mainly because my current room 14:26:20 I'm in is a mess. So that way you won't have to stare at it. But thank you all for attending and, again, you know, echoing what everyone else said, interim charges are that kind of -- the tea leaves of what we may see next session. Of course, it's not everything. A lot of times the things that we really want in there don't always make it. 14:26:44 But I will say -- and I know Dennis and I and others have talked about this -- is that this go-around on the house interim charges, we see more being focused on health care than we have in a long time. So it's a positive thing for us. It's giving us opportunities ahead of session to really sit down with legislators, try and 14:27:07 bring them up to speed on a lot of the issues that we're facing, and not just wait until, you know, a hearing during session where all you get is three minutes to try and really persuade someone to shift when they are looking at thousands of bills already. So it's a really important time. That's why we wanted to do this because we will be sending 14:27:33 out kind of, you know, electronic notices saying, hey, here comes another interim charge hearing. Please chime in. We'll give you a link. At least on the house side they are allowing you to submit through e-mail any of your remarks. The senate is not. But, you know, at least gives us a voice where we can. I know Dennis, when we did 14:27:59 the attendant care one, we had a lot of people submit information back to them. So, you know, we really thank you all for that. Two of the areas I've been working on is voting and, of course, health care. On voting, they actually had an interim hearing last week. I couldn't make it, and so I've been going back through watching it as I have 14:28:25 time. It's about two and a half hours. It's been archived, and I'll show you how to find that here in a minute. But a big part of that was looking at the election results following an election determined the reasons for any delays in accuracy and initial reporting. I think we all saw this coming. We all knew that that was going to be 14:28:49 looked at, mainly the legislature last session made so many changes to our election law in a very compressed time frame. Typically, everything is done during the regular session. That gives the secretary of state's office time to go forward, create their guidance, send that out to the counties, and then they have time to prepare. There 14:29:21 was a lot of changes made. I mean, tons. And it was dumped on the counties pretty much immediately. As you all saw on the news, there was mix ups between people not signing the envelope correctly or getting a voter registration form that was accurate. This ran from democratic counties to republican counties. I mean, it was a true rollout 14:29:47 nightmare, I think, scenario when it came to getting people's votes counted. We had a historic amount of votes thrown out in this last election. That's something we're trying to make sure doesn't happen when the general election comes around, the next one. So we are continuing to give input. We will send you all opportunities on when you can, 14:30:15 but having your stories and talking about it does make a difference. We are also continuing to work on making sure mail-in ballots are accessible for screen readers. It's an uphill battle that we're fighting. Our hope is we'll get there sooner than later and at least have it in some counties by the next general. That being said, we're also 14:30:41 working towards a hearing coming up on the health select committee that's going to focus on medications and health care. That's coming up, I believe, August 4th. That's an area that we've spent a lot of time working on over the last few years, mainly for people with commercial insurance. Separating those that are on Medicaid when it comes 14:31:01 to prescription medications because that's a different program, but on the commercial side, there are actually less protections than what there is on the Medicaid side. So things we're working on is non-medical switching and making sure that a person who is stable on their medication can continue to be on that medication from year to year without 14:31:27 having changes by the insurance company at the last minute or, you know, put into a higher category that you can't afford. We're also looking at copay accumulators and making sure no matter how you fund paying for your medication, you're able to get that off of your deductible so that way you're not paying double by the end of the year 14:31:53 and the insurance company is making out like a bandit on that. So we're working in those areas along with quite a few others that we'll focus on. As that gets closer, we'll let people know. That way they can submit out. One thing we did want to bring up that we got an e-mail before this started about an interim hearing that was in 2019 14:32:19 or supposed to be. It was supposed to focus on the ADA at the capital, specifically looking at some of the issues like some of the hearings, there is no close the captioning. You have to make requests every time. There is a lot of inaccessibility in the capital. At the end of the day, I don't even know if they ended up meeting. I can't remember 14:32:43 to be honest. But when COVID hit, I think that shut down almost everything then and it probably has not been brought back up. So that's something we will have to go back and speak with the speaker's office and see if that's something they kept working on or if that's something we can start back up. So we'll focus on that and try and get an 14:33:11 answer for y'all on that because I do know that makes a big difference for people that are coming up that need the services. Next we kind of wanted to give you all a brief rundown of -- let me bring up my screen -- of how to use the TLO. So that way y'all can track yourselves. 14:33:12 >> Laura: What's TLO. 14:33:37 >> Chase: I'm sorry. Has a great question. Texas legislative online. It is a website that the state runs that allows people to basically be able to see where bills are, get information on their legislators, and it also is kind of that public forum that lets people know when a committee hearing is coming up. Those are really useful because 14:34:05 you can set it up so that you can actually get alerts. That way you're not having to check every day like we do sometimes. Let me see. Share screen. Bring up TLO. Share. All right. So. 14:34:11 >> Laura: I put the link in the chat for folks, too. 14:34:34 >> Chase: Perfect. They, Jolene. And this is one of those websites that I would definitely put your bookmarks. It's basically the fastest way to finding information or to find legislators or their staff. What we wanted to do is make sure everyone knew how to use it. I know some of y'all that are on here have been using this for years, but 14:34:59 we didn't want to take that for granted and have people who didn't know how to actually use it or didn't know the advantages of having it. So the first thing I would suggest is after you get off today is go ahead and go to the website. Bookmark is into your web browser. It would be to come over to this portion right here where it says 14:35:31 my TLO. You click on it and you can create an account. As you see, I'm already logged in. The benefits to having an account is that you can sign up for alerts. This can be an alert for a bill during the session. So say there's a bill that -- I see S hawn's on -- about medical cannabis. Any time there's a change about that bill, you'll 14:35:54 get an e-mail saying a hearing is coming up in three days or it's moved to the next step. That way you can be prepared to send in testimony or go to the capital or make calls if you need to. During an interim period like we're in now, one of the benefits is clicking on the committee notices. If you go through here, there's about 18 committees 14:36:15 that I kind of keep track of. You'll notice there's a lot that aren't checked. I know Jolene has a lot of those checked. She probably doesn't have a lot of the ones checked that I have checked. And Dennis. So we cover a lot of committees. For me, it's important to know when appropriations on article two where that's talking 14:36:41 about the funds that we need for attendant care, business and industry, the constitutional rights and remedies, county affairs. So you can just go down and click the ones that you want to get information on. It's a really helpful tool just because it keeps you informed on when those meetings are and that way you can participate 14:37:03 at the highest level. If you miss a testimony or you miss a chance, it's always hard to make up for that. It really is. Trying to get people so show up as much as possible because the more they hear it, the more it starts to sink in for them. On the regular page, one of the things that I always find important, if you don't want to sign 14:37:26 up for a whole thing and get e-mails from everything, you can always come to this page, go to committee meetings, and on this top box up here, this is for the Texas house. Down here, you have the Texas senate. It's the same except they have separate everything. Their calendars are different from the house. So you'll want to check 14:37:53 both of them. The first thing I do is go to the committee meetings on the house. I usually look at it by date. So if there's a blue box, that means there is a committee meeting on that date at the capital somewhere. All you have to do is click on it, and tomorrow insurance will be meeting in the building. Let's see. Jolene, I believe you 14:38:02 have one coming up. When is it. 14:38:04 >> Jolene: We have one on May 24th. 14:38:31 >> Chase: On May 24th, in public education, all you have to do is click either one of these and it will pop up. It will give you what they are going to discuss. This is all they can work on during that period. So you can read through it and see if this is something that, you know, affects you or people around you, and if it is, scroll down. 14:38:49 If you're on the house side, you would have the ability to submit electronic comments down here. Jolene do you want to go through what this actual interim hearing is about since y'all are going to participate in it. 14:39:16 >> Jolene: Yeah. Jen and I will be in Washington, D.C., doing work at the federal level, but we are submitting comments on this. These are -- this is -- these are pieces of legislation that have previously passed in prior sessions. So you can see here it indicates 1525 and HB-3, which as I mentioned before, was from the 86th regular 14:39:40 session relating to public school finance. There was some stuff in there that was very specific to special education funding and full day Pre-K as well as bonuses to districts for graduating students with disabilities who are college career or military ready. Another one that I won't go through all of them, but 1716 was another one that I had 14:40:06 previously mentioned. That was the bill that created this supplementary special education services fund that would allow up to $1500 grant per child to access technology or other additional services. Then, of course, you know, which is on everybody's mind and has been talked about since COVID, what is the impact on learning loss and mental 14:40:31 health for students? So as you can see at the bottom, it will give you instructions on how to provide comment electronically. So even if you can't make it -- that's really great. Unfortunately, we don't have the same opportunity on the senate side, but yeah. This is a very timely issue and opportunity. 14:40:42 >> Chase: This is-after clicking that link from the hearing notice. Jolene, I take it y'all have submitted through this instead of just sending it to the clerk. I mean. 14:40:43 >> Jolene: Right. 14:41:09 >> Chase: Basically, you'll be using the same thing we use. You just click that you certify and you fill out your information. It will ask you on what you're wanting to talk about. You click that. Then it allows you an area to type in your comments. Then just hit submit. It takes care of it for you. It's kind of one-stop shop for this 14:41:41 and makes it a lot easier. These are looked at by the committee and by the clerks and the chairs. So it's definitely worth your time to tell your story, to say why you're running into certain issues because if they don't hear it, then, you know, at the end of the day, we're not going to get as far as we could. So going back to the main 14:42:03 screen, a few other little options on here that can help you. If you ever want to watch the video broadcast, so you know the hearing is going to be tomorrow at 10:00. All you have to do is come over here to where it says video broadcast. You have both the house and the senate. If you know it's on the house side, you just click the house. 14:42:28 Usually if there is something that is coming up that is about to start, it will be listed on this page right here. You're able to just click it. The screen will pop up, and you can watch the whole hearing. Since I missed that voting hearing the other week, all I had to do is come over here, scroll to the bottom of this page, and you'll see committees 14:42:58 right here. So you click that, and it will take you to all of the recent committees that have had any kind of meeting. All you have to do is click elections, and you'll be able to watch it from the start to the beginning. You can still, even if you miss your opportunity at that point, you can watch it and still write an e-mail or send an e-mail 14:43:22 to those legislators. It won't be put into the notes of this committee hearing, but it will be addressed. So it's even worth it if you miss that, you know, deadline of when it has to be in. But you can scroll down and see all of the other hearings that have already taken place and be able to go back and watch them if you need to. 14:43:51 That can be a useful tool if you're just wanting to also prepare on remarks that you want to send. It's very similar on the senate side. Unfortunately, like we said, if you want to testify, you actually have to go in to testify on that. Dennis, Jolene, Jen, did I miss anything on here that y'all think would be important for people to look at. 14:44:11 >> Jolene: If you don't know -- I don't know, Chase. I'm sorry. I had to step away to grab water. You might have mentioned this. If you don't know who represents you, you can enter your address. It will need to be specific. Zip codes can have multiple reps or senators. You can find out who represents you just by entering your address there. 14:44:32 >> Chase: And that is at the bottom right corner of this website right here. It will give you all the information you need to know about your district and who represents you. There's a ton of other great information that you can find just scrolling through this. But at the end of the day, it's getting used to -- I think the most important 14:45:03 things is learning how to use those calendars because that lets you be able to participate fully. If y'all ever have questions, you know, I know we rush through this, you can always stop us, give us a call, send us an e-mail, and we would be more than happy to kind of help walk you through how to use it and go from there. All right. Also, Linda, 14:45:06 do you have a question? 14:45:22 >> This is Amy. We just wanted to add that the -- at the select committee on CPS today, the senate did allow virtual testimony. So that may be changing depending on the committee. Virtual comments. 14:45:25 >> Chase: That's great to hear. 14:45:35 >> Jolene: Thank you for sharing that. I know that they previously would leave it to the discretion of the chairs. I wasn't aware of any other committee doing that. That's great. 14:45:42 >> Okay. Just wanted to let everybody know in case that seems to be a pattern for the rest of the interim. 14:46:04 >> Chase: That's good to know because we had not heard that. Usually on the senate side, even though they had the opportunity if they wanted to, none of them were using it in the past. So that's good to know. Maybe it will help change a few things. Other than that, we just wanted to open it up, you know, for a few minutes, if y'all have any 14:46:26 questions on interim charges, where things are heading. Are there things, even that aren't interim charges, that are worrying you right now that you think should come up in this next session? We want to use these as sounding boards to know what's important to you all. It might have been nothing on that poll we did earlier. It might be another 14:46:40 issue you're running into. So we kind of just wanted to take some time to answer any questions or, you know -- and just hear from y'all what y'all are looking at or wanting to work towards. 14:47:13 >> Dennis: One thing I'll mention is Amy's comment is a good example of the interactivity we try to do in Raise Your Voice. None of us knew that here. My guess is until it happened today and Amy was there to see it, nobody else knew about it. So it is really important that when you have something to add to the conversation, please tell us. 14:47:25 Whether it's an issue, we have a certain perspective or maybe you just heard some information or you might have -- just something else, let us know. We rely on you. 14:47:36 >> Chase: And if you do have any questions right now, feel free to unmute and ask away. If we can't answer it, we'll find you an answer. 14:47:39 . 14:47:42 >> This is Ted. Can you hear me. 14:47:43 >> Chase: We can hear you, Ted. Go for it. 14:48:15 >> I was trying to click the link that you put into the chat, and it's -- when I do get to it and click and it goes to the browser, it's not actually pulling anything up, and the address bar is blank. I am a screen reader user. I think there are others in here as well. Can somebody spell what that URL is in its entirety because the JAWS cursor 14:48:21 and others aren't allowing me to spell out the URL. 14:48:23 >> Chase: I can do that for you. 14:48:27 >> I'll memorize it because copy and paste isn't working either. 14:48:40 >> Chase: We can e-mail that to you also. But if you type in capital dot Texas dot Gov. 14:48:45 >> It Texas spelled out? That's what I was wondering actually. 14:48:51 >> Chase: Yes, capital . Texas.gov. 14:48:56 >> Then there was home something. 14:48:59 >> Chase: Slash home period ASPX. 14:49:13 >> Jolene: If you use the capitol, you should be able to get there. I don't know why that link copied weird, but I also put it in the chat. I don't know if that's helpful if you're able to -- 14:49:19 >> That's what I was trying to get it from, the chat, and I was having a terrible time doing that. 14:49:55 >> Chase: We'll also put it in the follow-up e-mail just to make sure. Then let's see. Sean sent a chat saying he's more hopeful than in many years for a real wage increase for community attendants. Dennis said that. Dennis and I have been talking a lot about community attendant wages along with Joanne, who is our new policy 14:50:21 fellow. Maybe it's a great time to let her introduce herself if she's able to. If not, you don't have to. But we've recently hired Joanne to work with us on a lot of these issues around attendant care and wage increases. It's an area we're going to put a lot of attention in this next session. We've actually talked about kind 14:50:51 of narrowing down our field of view of all the areas we work on to put everything we have into making sure we get that up to a competitive wage because let's face it, right now, it's nowhere near it. With that, if none of you all have any questions, you can e-mail us or give us a call. We can move on. I'm just going to thank our sponsors really 14:51:24 quickly that we have for the event to help us keep the doors open and keep us being able to do events like this. United Health Care, Superior Health Plan, Amgen, Astro zen he can a, we're looking for more. If you know any this would be willing to a great event. We couldn't do it without them and be able to do as much as we do 14:51:57 when we get to. Other than that, I just want to end with two of our close friends, our board president and one of our past board members, Larry Johnson and Ken Semien. They are hosting, along with other advocates, one or two informational meetings Tuesday for May 24th and Tuesday, June 2nd, to learn how to approach your Texas State senator 14:52:19 and how to speak with them to get your points across. So if that's something y'all are interested in, we'll go ahead and put that in our follow-up e-mail so you have a link to that. They are both great long-term advocates that have done a lot, and they have a very unique way of approaching how to approach your senator. So I think that's 14:52:46 a great opportunity. We also have our next Raise Your Voice event coming up June 6th. Did I get that right, Laura? On attendant care wages. And our game plan on how to hope to get up to $15 an hour and beyond. So please join us for that, and we would love to have you all. We'll stay on for a little bit longer if any of you have questions. 14:52:49 Dennis, Laura. 14:53:13 >> Laura: I just wanted to add, I think that the sessions that Larry and Kenneth are doing, Linda mentioned TLO screen reader accessibility. I think that if anyone would know how to navigate with a screen reader, it would be those guys. That might be of particular interest if that's how you're accessing that site. 14:53:16 >> Chase: Might be good for them to do a training for everyone. 14:53:18 >> Laura: Yeah. Yeah. 14:53:20 >> Chase: All right. 14:53:28 >> I've been using screen readers for going on 25 years now as well, and I'm pretty well-versed at it also. 14:53:34 >> Chase: I bet it changes with every website, doesn't it? 14:53:37 >> There are standard now. 14:53:47 >> I have, too, but just because we've been using them for 25 years doesn't mean that everything is always right at hand accessible. 14:53:48 >> Chase: Yeah. 14:54:07 >> In fact, I had a lot of years of working with people dealing with screen reader stuff, and so that's why I brought it up. We're not the only ones. If other people join us, they need to know that it's accessible. 14:54:17 >> Chase: Yeah. I do know the website is accessible because of Kenneth and Larry and them using it. 14:54:19 >> Yeah. 14:54:22 . 14:54:33 >> Chase: But that doesn't mean that usability and accessible go hand in hand either. They might have all the right buttons, but if it's not in a logical order. 14:54:36 >> And if it's not labeled properly. 14:54:36 >> Yeah. 14:54:59 >> Chase: So that is stuff we want to also probably, you know, keep bringing to their attention along with some of the other accommodations in making sure that they keep it open and transparent government that everyone can participate with. 14:55:01 All right. 14:55:04 >> I guess you're about to close it out. Right. 14:55:22 >> Chase: Yeah. Today it was kind of a shorter one, but just to bring everybody up to speed on where we are. I think we'll probably return back to our normal way of running these with breakouts starting on the next one. 14:55:26 Well, thank you all for joining us.