Lakeland College

Interview with Rollin Binzer

Title: An interview with Rollin Binzer

Project: Lakeland Oral History Project

Interviewee: Rollin Binzer

Interviewer: Carlos Millan

Interview location and date: April 13, 2008

Length of interview: 58 minutes, 11 pages

Name Index: Carlos Millan, Rollin Binzer, Tom Hurvis, Paul Adams, Jennet DeBella

Abstract: An oral history interview with Rollins Binzer. Topics covered include public schools in the United States, problems in the public education system, and Binzer's documentary on high schools in Providence Saint Mel and Providence Inglewood.

Introduction: Rollin Binzer is a director and film maker. He now lives in San Francisco, California but for the last year he has lived in Glenview, IL to produce his movie.

Carlos Millan is a student at Lakeland College studying to be a teacher. He lives on campus during the school year and during the summer goes to Glenview, IL. Millan worked with Rollin Binzer during the summer of 2007 on the Providence St. Mel movie. This interview will become a part of the Lakeland College's Oral History Project.

The transcript of this interview has been edited for easier reading. All verbal hesitations, stutters and false starts have been deleted. Certain questions and answers unrelated to the focus of this interview have also been edited out.

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An Interview With Rollin Binzer about Providence St. Mel

Millan: You're the director of this new movie and it's going to be about Providence St. Mel?
Binzer: Yeah.

Millan: How did you or who told you about this project and why did you just want to jump on it?
Binzer: Well actually, Tom Hurvis and I used to be business partners 35 years ago. And we sort of stayed friends over the years and he called me one day. We were talking and he said, "Do you still make movies?" And, it's something I've been doing for you know 30 years so, I said yeah whenever I can. He said, "Well come out here I want to show you something." So Tom took me to a lunch to meet Paul and Jennet, who are the principal and founder of the school. Then I went over to the school for day or two and looked around. And decided that this was a really great subject to do a documentary on so that's really how it …

Millan: How it started?
Binzer: Yeah.

Millan: And did anything about the school made you decide you wanted to do this project?
Binzer: Well I first spent several weeks in the school and I was just monitoring classes and watching what's going on and trying to be a fly on the wall. I was amazed by what was happening in the classrooms; I've never seen that. I have still never seen that [laughing] any place else. You know were, it seems like everybody in the school, the students, the teachers, everybody were happy to be there. This is not the case in most schools. I just got infected you know by what they were doing in there. And when you look at what's happening to schools across the country it's really a disaster.

Millan: Yeah.
Binzer: This is such a remarkable exception and it seemed like a story that should be told.

Millan: And about the story, what do you want people's reaction to be with this movie? Do you want them to be in anger because of their schools? [Distorted]
Binzer: A little bit, a Little bit yeah. I mean, I don't think people are going to do anything unless they get involved and do it themselves. If we wait for our leaders to change this country we'll wait forever. We're just not going to do it. And I think parents need to get angry and just say that's not acceptable for my child anymore; to be dumb down. The lack of education creates poverty and it isn't the other way around. That poverty creates the lack of education. It's that the education creates poverty. And so you know these kids are dropping out something like half the country drops out of high school. Those people that dropped out unless they have some unusual specific talent like sports or music or acting or some particular skill; their lives are in ruin and they're never going to make any money to raise a family, not going to be able to help their kids and there is really no way out I mean remedial jobs are the only thing left. I think that's a disaster.

Millan: I guess Providence St. Mel does a great job getting the parents involved and making them sign a contract.[distorted] I guess Providence St. Mel is addressing some of those issues.
Binzer: Well they address them in their way which maybe isn't for everybody but it sure works for the people who are there there's no question about that. In that Providence St. Me is not an elite school, people misunderstand that and they often think well you know those are the elite black children, those are the ones who can afford to go to a privet school, or somehow that they only accept people from the top 10 percent of something like many magnet schools do. But the truth is they take average students or below average students from a really poor background neighborhood. These are not the elite and they turn them into fine scholars. I think the senior class of 2007 has only 35 kids and they got a million three hundred thousand dollars' worth of scholarships. That's unheard of! That's really amazing! Virtually every kid that graduates gets some form of scholarship to go to college; some go to MIT and some go to Southern Illinois University and every one of them gets into a college. Every one of them, their lives are changed forever and they're not going to be working at a gas station, not going to grow up and be a janitor. They're going to end up being doctors and lawyers and it a pretty different life. Then their kids' lives will be changed forever. And it will pull a whole family out of poverty; this is a part of town where nearly half the population is living below the poverty line.

Millan: I guess what Paul Adams says that High School isn't supposed [distorted] circle these kids through high school. Getting them out quickly and not to get them through a college. That's something that lost in this country. It's a high school's job to get them to a college not just circle them through.
Binzer: Yes not just to get them through a system which is, unfortunately, I think what happens most of the time. Even Jennet DeBella who is the principal there said that she was in education for seventeen years in public schools before Providence St. Mel. She said that they were just trying to get the kids out of high school. They didn't even think about college. They didn't even think about preparing them to go on in life. I'm afraid that the attitude in so many places in so many schools it's not about the kids. It's about the unions; it's about the bureaucracy. It's about the school boards. There was a great quote I've wanted to put in the movie, we didn't but, Mark Twain said, "At first god made all the idiots. That was for practice. Then, he made the school boards". That's really a tragedy what's going on in this country. We're basically creating a third world population in our country because we have millions and millions of children without educations. Today, a high school degree means nothing. When I was young, there were a lot of guys from high school that didn't go to college, but they could go to work for Safeway or something and make enough money to support a family. Today, you can't do it. You can't even get hired if you don't have a degree. It's tragic. Somebody with just a high school degree, their starting salary is 12,000 dollars or something a year, and if you have a Master's Degree you start at 79,000 dollars or something. The gap is huge. Whose responsibility is it? It's the parents. If the parents don't look out for their own kids, who is going to do it? If the teachers and the principals think that longevity and their pay is more important then their kids, then that's how decisions get made. It's almost like the children in our schools today are not the most important thing; they're just sort of a side show. And that's really sad in international terms. America is down to one in every category. We're doing terrible in education, yet we are number one in education spending money. Our results are pathetic. In math internationally we're tied for 27 with Latvia. This makes no sense; we're supposed to be the world leaders in technology in everything and in fact we're behind in every one of them. Everyone complains. They say my school system is lousy. They don't know how to take control or motivate the kids. You go to the classes and it's like the kids are running the school. I've got some friends that have been teachers for 35 years and they say they could see how their whole full time job is just trying to get kids to listen and quiet down and not throw a chair out the window. It's not about teaching at all, it's about trying to get them to behave. That's nuts.

Millan: Jennet said that, on the numbers, she used to spend 12 minutes in every classroom just trying to get these kids to settle down and telling them to sit down and …
Binzer: Instruction?

Millan: Yeah, instruction.
Binzer: Well, they're really strict about discipline because if the children are not behaving in class, if they are not paying attention, they are not learning. You can't be fooling around and learning too. As we send kids through twelve years of school, they're fooling around. The test scores in this country have been going down every year for thirty years. In 1995, when the SAT scores had been falling steadily, the solution was they dumb down the SAT and that still only worked for a year or two before it started going down again. So, expectations are a key element. If someone expects you to fail, if you as a student expect to fail, you're going to fail. What's in your head is what manifests. Now on the other hand, if the bar is raised, then you're expectations rise to that and you're able to do that. Now everyone knows that if it comes to football or basketball, but it's even truer in education. They want to motivate you to play a good game of football, but why don't they want to motivate you to get a good grade in math or Spanish or whatever the subject is? Basically everyone's waiting for the bell to go home instead. It's hard because you're fighting a whole system and all the inertia is against improving schools. Everybody wants reform without change. They want everything to stay the same but with a different result.

Millan: You can't have that.
Binzer: That's crazy, that's the literal definition of crazy, if you keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. It doesn't work but, there's this national blind spot about it.

Millan: That's what Providence Inglewood is trying to do. I worked with you with the editing work and I saw the video and it said that, the school board wanted the principle out of the school 3 out of the 5 days. The principal was to go to meetings, and then she just didn't want to. She said my job is here with the students and the school board didn't understand.
Binzer: Well even in this state, there's a regulation — well, I don't know about the state, but the city, Chicago — the CPS has a policy that, the principle of the school is only allowed to go into the classrooms 3 or 5 times a year. Well, that's absurd! How can a principle know what's going on in a classroom unless they can go in there? Who's favor is that rule in? Certainly not the students. At Providence Saint Mel, the policy is the principle goes in every class every day. So, otherwise you have these situations where the principle doesn't know what's going on in the class, and a year later you find out that the students didn't learn anything. And it's too late; you've almost ruined this child's life.

Millan: You've lost the year, and …
Binzer: Lost a year of education and in the earlier grades, it's sort of foundational. If they don't learn basic English; and they don't learn basic Math and they don't learn how to study and pay attention, well, when are they going to learn it? No manufacturing company, if you're supervising any kind of effort, how can you do it unless you see what's going on? It doesn't make any sense at all. It's like if you had a worker you were supervising, let's say at the house of worship, and you were doing all this repair, but you didn't pay any attention to what the guy is doing, how crazy is that? But they do it every day in schools. It's like if a guy had a factory making whatever kind of widget, and never went out to see if they were doing the job right.

Millan: Wasting their money and time.
Binzer: You'd get fired for that in any other environment, but in schools it's the rule. It doesn't make any sense. So when people complain that their children aren't getting a decent education, that's why. None of this just happens mysteriously. It's all got a cause. People not caring, not paying attention, not following up, and kids get passed because they grew up a year instead of because they learned anything; teachers are get promoted because they've been there, not because they've particularly done a good job. One of the presidential debates a few months ago, somebody brought up the idea of pay for performance for teachers, and, it was all these democratic candidates. It was before it was dropped down to two. Nobody would even touch it because politically they want the union support and the unions are against that because they don't want to be accountable and be paid for their ability to do the job. They want to be paid because they've been there for seven years. I support unions, and I'm for people getting paid fairly and everything, but if there's no accountability. If you do a bad job and you still get promoted then why should you care about doing a good job? It's human nature to sort of skate through. You just want to do as little as possible and get your paycheck. That's not an attitude that leads to improvement. So, where's it going to start? Our hope is just people seeing what's going on in there and seeing the sheer joy on these kids' faces when they're actually learning and paying attention. This school has very tough discipline, very rigid discipline, but it's not like a prison. These kids are having fun. They're enjoying it. I never saw a kid enjoy school so much. And that is going to reflect throughout their entire life. The attitude that they have about homework and study really helps them in life. It's a tough school. It's not easy to go to Providence St. Mel. But if you do the work, you're guaranteed to get into a decent college, into a good college, and probably on a full scholarship. Well, to a poor family that doesn't have the money to send kids to school and they have three or four children, education is a way out. They don't have to be an athlete, they don't have to be a drug dealer, they don't have to do any of that stuff. I'm not putting down athletes; that's a wonderful thing. Most times in life, if you're not trained, and you don't know how to do it, you never will unless you're trained. People just don't pick up a skill self-taught, rarely. It does happen and there are certainly exceptions.

Millan: And what people see in this movie is that it's not rocket science. What Providence St. Mel is just discipline and teach …
Binzer: It' almost not even new, it's something almost old. The number one difference you see right away is mutual respect. The teachers respect the children, and vice versa. Paul Adams, in one of the interviews, it's not in the films, but one of the interviews with him was saying well. Everybody else has this problem, and how do you get their attention? How do you get their attention on a regular basis like this? And he said, "With respect." That if you really demonstrate respect for the children, they will respect you back. If you show distain for the children right away for any reason, they'll distain you back. It's really simple. You see it in every class that they attend, even though the discipline is strict, that's not their primary relationship between the children and the teachers. They're not prison guards. They really do it with respect and expectations. They expect certain behavior and they expect certain performance in terms of study habits and discipline in that way. I think that kind of discipline, self-discipline is essential to anyone doing anything. If you don't have that you almost can't accomplish anything in your personal life. You have to have some self-discipline to go to college, right? I mean, if you don't want to do it, no one's going to make you do it, right? You have to take that responsibility. And that's true with every form in life. You can't get hired to do a job and not take responsibility for it, although there are people who try to live that way, but you never see anyone succeeding that way ever. Hard work is just a part of life.

Millan: That's what the students say every day, their little preamble with the ability of hard work comes this and …
Binzer: The miracle of hard work. And they say that mission statement every day and it's very long and complicated for a second grader, let alone a high schooler, but that's part of their motivation. Which is key, I think, to everything? If you're going to raise the bar on people you've have to motivate them. And the kids there want to learn. They get it instilled in them from the early age and they say that mission statement every day. Eventually sinks in. And the alumni come back after 20 years or 30 years and they still say the mission statement, they still you know, apply it to their lives even if they don't recite it every morning. It's in their lives and it's part of who they are. It gives them a really positive attitude about challenges in life and about obstacles in life. Nobody has a life without challenges and trouble and suffering. Doesn't exist, but if you have a good education and a good attitude about that, a positive, and the confidence that comes from that school you'll do better. One of the things you notice being around them [the children] is incredible self-confidence which is not that common when you go to an ordinary school.

Millan: But it shows through the video, that confidence.
Binzer: Yeah. It shows that they have confidence and that breeds courage when you have confidence, and high self-esteem .They believe and they're correct, that they can compete with anybody around that world. Well that's, that's a good attitude. You know? So many children in that neighborhood, in that immediate neighborhood, are exactly the opposite. They're hopeless, they have no self-confidence except in a braggadocio way, or being a bully or being a, you know, a gang guy. They take their confidence from really pathetic things like they'll punch you in the face, that kind of confidence. Well, that's pretty, that's kind of lame, you know?

Millan: Like a misconception that Providence St. Mel is a private school, but it's in one of the worst neighborhoods in the Chicago land area.
Binzer: Well, it is a private school. But it's probably the cheapest private school in the country.

Millan: They give a lot of aid to families.
Binzer: They give tremendous aid. Their only rule is that nobody gets a completely free ride. The parents have to pay something. And in some cases it's like twenty dollars a week or something. And it costs — I forget the exact number — but it's over $10,000 each student a year to deliver the education. The tuition is only 5,000, so right off the bat half the education is covered. And if the parents can't afford that, they give other things so that the kids get scholarship or aid. Basically they enable, and they work hard at raising the money, to enable these kids who can't afford it to go there. Now, Providence Inglewood is a public school, and it's consequently free, and the city money pays the school and for each student the same as they do for every other public school. They had a lot of trouble with the city about imposing this discipline code from Providence St. Mel on a public school because there are a lot of rules in public schools. You can't do this and you can't do that; you can't touch a student even to pat them on the back for doing a good job. Can't say the word god in school, pretty sort of ridiculous petty rules that get in the way of …

Millan: Actual learning.
Binzer: Yeah, of actual learning. It's more about protocol than it is about teaching. Some committee makes up the protocol. The old joke about the camel is a racehorse designed by the committee. You know? But at Providence St. Mel and Providence Inglewood, the starting point is the children, and what happens with the children, caring for the children, and making sure they learn what they need to go to learn to go to the next level, that's what's important there. At other schools I've been to, those things don't even come up. The children are not number one. Many places, the teachers consider the children the enemy. The problem, they think the kids are the problem. I don't think that's ever true. I mean, they blame the kids. What about the teachers? If these kids didn't learn anything, whose responsibility is that?

Millan: That comes around to that personal responsibility of your own work, and …
Binzer: And the teacher's and it comes back to accountability, too. I mean, if the students are going be held accountable, then the teachers have to be held accountable. Everyone along the line, the principle, everyone's has to be held accountable for how well they're teaching. How well the students are learning and that's what is paramount. I don't know how they've been able to do that for 35-40 years. The teachers who are there generally love being there even though it's hard work and longer hours and less pay; they get caught up in the excitement of seeing those kids learn.

Millan: That's not very easy to do to well. In my public school experience I really didn't see that excitement from teachers that much. It was pretty much a routine day, dull. I didn't see anything to bring me up and wanting me to learn.
Binzer: Or raising the bar or encouraging you to do better. I mean, to me my notion of school is, you go to the classroom and you're at the end of the day and it's the students and the teachers who are looking at the clock waiting for the bell to ring. Everyone is just waiting to get out of there. And I don't know when you finish public school and went to college did you feel you were really prepared for that or did you have to work really hard?

Millan: Oh well I went for high school to a public school in Chicago, the CPS, for one year and then I went to a suburb and the difference was great. Going into college was much greater, the stuff you were learning, and actually going to a small liberal art college was greater because of the personal attachment you get with your teachers. That's what you get at Providence St. Mel as well; you have to connect with your teachers …
Binzer: The students and the teachers really bond there.

Millan: Something that protocol in the Chicago public school, you can't pat them on the back for doing a good job and that's ridiculous. How are you going to encourage them?
Binzer: That just a simple thing …

Millan: Can do so much, just a little pat
Binzer: They can expel a teacher for that and that's crazy. I understand they have these worries about sexual abuse. God knows what goes I mean, it is amazing what happens in school but to dehumanize the process is not going to make anything better. If anything it needs to be the other way, more humanized and more care. They were able to do that in Providence St. Mel because it's a privet school, they can do anything they want.

Millan: Inglewood too they fought long and hard to get their discipline in.
Binzer: They're still fighting. And they're incredible. They open that school and they raised the score of in that school 400% in one year and instead of the Chicago Public School praising. That's like a remarkable performance and their [CPS] only conversation they had is, we don't want you saying God every day. No more fining the parents if their students you know or if the parents don't go to what they have is parent enrichment classes, that really involves the parents. They are mandatory and they fine their parents twenty dollars if they don't come to these meetings. Well they're still fighting about that. You think about a school board and would be you think everybody; every parent in America would be trilled if their school scores went up 400%. Everyone would be happy right? They would stop complaining but what you got with Chicago Public School is ignore it. They don't even talk about it. They don't say you guys are doing a great job. They don't say what are you doing that we can import to our other schools? What are we doing that we can copy to make you a better job? They complain about the fining the parents and they're still fighting that. They have rules that say you can only go in three times a year instead three times a day. And their complains about those things are not saying anything about the students that would have benefitted them.

Millan: Most of the stuff they are complaining about doesn't involve the students. The fining of the teacher and the protocol.
Binzer: Right, it has nothing to do with the kids. That's what Paul Adams said you know, children are the last on the list. You go to a school board meeting and they talk about test scores and they talk about teachers complains but they don't talk about the kids. It's almost like their concerns about the test scores is that the teachers look bad. They're not talking about the kids. They've been really deprive. It's really criminal what they are doing to these children. It's not like these children are going to get a second chance; they're not going to grow up again. If they get a poor education its permanent.

Millan: That's why you're making this movie.
Binzer: That's why I'm making the movie. There is not a model of a school that works that people know about to point to. They don't have any because pretty much across the country the schools are a mess. And the schools aren't delivering and whenever they are delivering it's an exception. It's one school out of a hundred or out of a thousand and it's because some people there make some special effort. But like Providence St. Mel they build their own culture of learning.

Millan: And it's been going for 30 years.
Binzer: It's been doing it for 30 years. The scores have never dropped in 30 years and they have always gone up every year.

Millan: That's the expectation factor.
Binzer: And the expectation will be the case. That it will get higher grades every year. That the students will perform better every year and it works. They were able to instill that to a remarkable degree and Inglewood. Their success was meet with criticism and it blows my mind that they don't get accolades. They don't get compliments; they don't get anything for their victory. They get criticize for all this petty stuff.

Millan: And it's not like they get to pick which students go in it's a public school.
Binzer: It's a public school. They came in the 9th percentile. That's almost like you can't write your name on paper.

Millan: To raise it 400%.
Binzer: In one year, on the first year it's remarkable. And it shows it can be done. It shows it's not impossible. It shows that really anyone can do it if they have their priorities right.

Millan: And your movie shows this; like I said it's not rocket science, it's simple.
Binzer: It's simple stuff. It's really simple stuff. They don't do anything that isn't already been out there. There have been two different universities that did research studies about what they do. What's going on in the classroom? That was their main thrust of the research. How did they accomplish it? And it's got to be what happens in the classroom every day. It's the only answer, when they go in the classroom, they find the teachers are being instructed, the teachers are being trained. They don't just hire somebody. They hire them and then re-train them how to teach but what they teach them is what all the education researcher call best practices. They're not inventing anything new. They're doing what proven over the years to be affective. They have this rule where if you correct or criticize a student for misspelling or behavior or whatever you have to give that same student three positive praises. You can't be negative towards a student. You have to be positive and not fake praise. You have to pay enough attention to the kid because praise encourages people. It's very simple. If you tell someone, hey you're doing a great job their instinct is that they want to do a better job. If you always telling somebody you're no good, you're lazy, you just did that wrong, you did that wrong and that's the nature of your relationship. That becomes your reality. That's like a rule buy it's not a rule in any other school that I know of. It is been research over and over again. What motivates students and motivates them to do better. It's like the simple old thing you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. It's really that simple thing and we know it's true in human affairs of every kind. If you're shitty to people they're usually shitty back. And if you nice to people they're usually nice back. I mean it's not rocket science. It's really elementary but that elementary thing is missing in 90% of our public schools.

Millan: What this movie does, it tells people that it's doable because it's not rocket science and because it's nothing new and spectacular, it's doable.
Binzer: It's doable for ordinary students, average, below average students that you could just if you just follow the way they do it at PST it works. It's that simple so we there is like over a hundred thousand schools in this country public privet up to you know up to high school and only two of them do this. That makes no sense.

Millan: It's not like their model is very changeable. Just stick to the big three which is discipline, which is raising expectation and accountability. If you do that I believe … those are the basics. And in Inglewood it's not exactly the same in Providence St. Mel but they do the basics. And the models aren't the same but they are similar.
Binzer: Their similar enough to be affective. I mean the consequences at Providence Inglewood were so dramatic. Everybody wants to solve the educational problem and they're trying all sorts of things but they are not trying this, which worked for 30 years. That doesn't make any sense so that why we wanted to show people that it exists. It can be done and it's not rocket science and it's just paying attention to the basics and being consistence. There should be 10,000 schools like this instead of two you know. That alone would change the future of this whole country. Just by educating our children and you can never recover from it if you don't. We have half the kids in the country dropping out of high school. Well what's going to happen to those kids? What is going to happen to the country? We have kids dropping out of high school and they grow up and they can't read a bus schedule. They can't read a newspaper to get a job. They can't read the want ads, what going to happen to these kids. What's going to happen to their children? I mean being stupid never stopped anyone from having kids. And you know what are we what are we doing here? You know people talk about national security education is national security. Not bombing peasants in some country half a world away. It's what are we are doing about our own children that are going to become the leaders of our country. They're going to become the adults. And they are going to be ignorant. Well this can't be a good outcome, it just doesn't. Cause and effect is very strict and unforgiving. And we're just damming our whole future to poverty and ignorance. Paul [Adams] said you look around the world today where all the conflicts are, where all the fighting is going on and you look at the educational level of the people involved in the conflict and it's very low. How many I mean Iraq is in many ways is an educated country for the Middle East but basically they're not. They're peasants and most of them haven't gone to school, very low percentage of people. And not that they caused this war but they're involved in the conflict. You look all around Africa, Sudan, where ever these conflicts are and you have uneducated populations. To the uneducated war and violence is their reality and that's what rules them. It's true in our poor parts in this country, it's true in poor parts in every country in the world that's where the violence and where the conflicts is.

Millan: For the lack of education.
Binzer: In the lack of education they go together just like that you know. And there is no exception. People who can't solve problems with their head solve them with violence. History repeats itself you know. So you look at what we are preparing for the future and hopefully this film can just ignite …

Millan: Some spark
Binzer: Yeah, can spark some reaction and give people a model to look at that works. It doesn't mean that every school would be you know Providence St. Mel exactly but the influence that works is clear. If you encourage kids instead of just discipline them. If you inspire kids to learn instead of just inspiring them to pay no attention. I think people in this country, parents, don't see schools that work and they think they have to live with it because they don't have an example of a school that does work. Here's two schools that work.

Millan: With this movie hopefully it'll be out there

Binzer: Hopefully it'll inspire people. To think they could expect something better for their kids you know. It's really all about the children

Millan: Yeah, that's Providence St. Mel's number one rule is the kids first.
Binzer: Every decision there is based on the children not anything else.

Millan: That's how it should be.
Binzer: That's how it should be. But that's how it isn't, in hardly any school. So that's the hope that people will see. This is something to emulate and that is something that can be done because I think pretty much the whole country feels like everyone knows the schools are in disaster. Nobody has any answer. They keep trying to throw money at it. They throw you know Providence St. Mel spends less money per student to educate these kids than the public schools and they get a totally different result. It's really not money that's the problem; we spend a fortune on education. We spend more than everyone; it's more per student than every country in the world. It's not that we need to spend more money. We need to spend it smarter and we need to pay more attention to the kids. We need to have accountability.

Millan: Yeah hopefully with this movie, with this model
Binzer: Hopefully it will make a difference. And even if it only makes a difference to a few people; then they're able to take that strategy, the way St. Mel operates, and bring it in to their own neighborhood. If we don't take care of the children, and if we don't educate our children, the future is very grim. How do you climb out of a hole without a shovel or how do you dig you way out? We're sending kids in to the world unprepared to do anything you know? So anyway my hope is it'll matter.

Millan: Well thank you Rollin.

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