In two months, I’ll end my term on the school board. These four years have been eventful in our school division, in some ways that are unique to Arlington and in other ways that will feel familiar nearly everywhere.

Over the past four years a lot has happened in my life outside the school board, too. My mother got sick with cancer and died. One member of my close family suffered a significant mental health crisis. Another was diagnosed with early onset dementia. I’ve been laid off twice. I very nearly lost a relationship with someone dear to me. I went through menopause.

It’s been the most difficult time of my life. I’m not sharing this to court pity; I know some of my board colleagues have shouldered their own sorrows and challenges, too. And I’m not suggesting that my school board work has been an additional burden. Actually, it has given me a sense of purpose and community that has been a balm.

I bring it up because these difficult experiences remind me that quite often, we don’t know what’s going on in other people’s lives.

When people seek me out as a school board member, sometimes they are not calm or kind. It’s sometimes tempting to write them off or refuse to engage until they can be more level-headed. I’m uncomfortable, however, with this idea that constituents have to conform to my definition of “level-headed” or “reasonable” or “respectful”. I’m acutely aware that there’s already a power imbalance: I make decisions that feel incredibly consequential when you’re a parent worried about your child or a staff member wanting to do your very best work.
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Outside of the issue at hand, these people are often juggling other worries. I’ve learned that the Department of Government Efficiency eliminated their spouse’s job. Or they’ve lost extended family in a war-torn country halfway around the world. Their son has relapsed after rehab. (All real examples.) They are, like all of us at one time or another, in a dark night of the soul.

​I met Dylan Marron in the first of the two jobs I lost while on the school board. Dylan taught an online course I produced called “How to Connect in a Divided World". He is something of an expert on this subject, having hosted an award-winning podcast called “Conversations With People Who Hate Me”. He reached out to people who had trolled him online, asked if they’d be open to a phone call, and invited them into a conversation. I encourage you to check it out.

Dylan suggests that when you encounter someone who seems like an asshat (my word, not his), you come up with one or two backstories about that person’s day or week or month. What might be fueling their anger or impatience? It’s a great way to move towards curiosity and compassion instead of judgment and retaliatory ill will.

​Dylan also suggests that the rules of engagement shouldn’t center on whether we think the other person is respectful or level-headed. Rather, it’s about whether we feel like we’ll be physically and emotionally safe if we interact.

​These ideas and practices help me through most of the difficult encounters I have, inside and outside my school board life. But sometimes I wonder—and increasingly, lately—how much compassion and understanding I should summon for someone who is not making me feel physically or emotionally unsafe, but whose opinions or actions make life feel unsafe for others.

During the 2018-2019 school year when I led a local education nonprofit, my organization sponsored a monthly series for DC high school students called “Speak Truth”. Students from across DC’s public and private schools gathered to discuss topics they identified were important to them. One month, they talked about belonging and inclusion.

A student at Georgetown Day School shared that he felt like an outsider because he was a political conservative in what he experienced as an overwhelmingly liberal school community. He wondered whether those on the left who championed inclusion could actually include people on the right.

A DACA student from Dunbar High School responded, “There is this idea of inclusion, and there is also a more basic right to exist. I can include anyone until they deny my right to exist.”

Her statement stuck with me. Someone’s right to exist. Their ability to access the same opportunities and protections that are available to others.
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This goes beyond someone having a bad day, or a dark night of the soul, and not being the best version of themselves as they interact with others: it’s about creating the conditions that make others unsafe or define them as less than human. And it’s not exclusively a conservative thing or a liberal thing: it’s a close-minded, power-hoarding thing, an ungenerous and zero-sum view of humanity.

​For a long time, I wasn’t sure what to do with this, what it meant for me in my interactions with other humans. I’m still not entirely sure I know. But I lean towards the idea that engagement is still the answer. (If safety is not at stake.)  In his TED Talk, Dylan said:

At yesterday's annual Organizational Meeting, the School Board elected a new Chair and Vice Chair for the coming school year. I will be very pleased to work with Bethany Zecher Sutton as our new Chair and Miranda Turner as our Vice Chair!

The outgoing Chair is invited to speak about the year just concluded and the work that's ahead. Here is what I said:

It’s been a privilege to serve as School Board Chair over the past year. I’d like to thank the Superintendent for his partnership and his Cabinet members for their leadership and collaboration. I’m grateful to our Vice Chair Bethany Zecher Sutton for her support, our School Board Clerk and Deputy Clerk for their patience and skill, and my School Board colleagues for their commitment to doing the hard work for this school division and our community.

When I began my term as Chair last July, I shared my belief that this board makes its best decisions when it is carefully attuned to the practical wisdom and perspectives of all who value public education. When we are generous in sharing our own ideas, questions, and experiences, we enrich the collective outcome.

​I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished together over the past year, through genuine listening, valuing what we hear, and working together. I’d like to mention some of the progress I believe we’ve made in the areas of community relationship-building, stewardship of resources, valuing staff, and acting in alignment with our values.


Community Relationships
First, I want to say a little bit about community participation and trust-building, with an eye to ensuring that the school board is as well-connected and responsive as possible. As of today, we’ve streamlined our Guidelines for Public Comment and changed our Public Comment sign-up process so that it will be easier for people to participate. During my term as Chair I have taken notes during Public Comment and summarized the concerns brought forward during each meeting as one way of demonstrating that speakers are listened to and their feedback is carefully considered.

In an effort to highlight issues that are top-of-mind for many of our stakeholders, this year we changed the way we presented Monitoring Items. We identified a more specific focus for each monitoring report—for example, chronic absenteeism within the broader category of Student Services. We’ve also made an effort to include school staff as co-presenters of our Monitoring Items to hear directly how the issue being discussed manifests in their classrooms and schools.

We’re reinventing our School Board Advisory Councils so that they are more relevant, better aligned to the APS Strategic Plan, and will make better use of the volunteer time and energy that we’re so lucky to have in Arlington. I am particularly grateful to all those who have participated in the Advisory Council Working Group and we look forward to sharing more about the proposed changes this fall.

In this year’s budget development process, we provided expanded opportunities for public engagement, including drop-in Open Office Hours last summer, meetings with community groups last fall, and multiple meetings that were open to the public from July through February. We posted to the APS website an infographic that explains the budget process start to finish and shared the template that APS department heads use to request changes to their baseline budget.


Good Stewardship
A second area of progress been in good stewardship of the school division’s financial, human, and capital resources. For the first time, we have written guidelines that spell out when and how our reserve funds should be used, in order to get on—and stay on—a more sustainable financial footing. We’re standing up a hotline to report suspected waste and fraud. This past year we’ve conducted rigorous internal audits and publicly shared the results as audit reports are finished. Then, we’re actively monitoring the implementation of recommended improvements from each audit. You can expect to hear about the final audit from this school year, on Information Services device management, next month as soon as it is completed.


Valuing Staff
A third area of progress I see is in the effort we’ve made to ensure that our talented staff members have the resources and support they need to do their best work.

Early in the year, teachers and school leaders shared their concerns about the negative effects of constant access to phones. Through careful listening and collaboration, we created a cell phone policy to create better conditions for teaching, learning, and building positive relationships among students and staff.

The audit of and leadership changes in our Human Resources department aim to make HR the consistently responsive, accurate, and supportive resource all our employees deserve. We closed a projected $49 million budget gap this year without instituting an across-the-board class size increase. In the budget, we were able to expand parental leave and offer a better compensation increase than the year before.

We’ve followed up on last year’s audit of our school activity funds by making changes in our Finance department designed to ensure that school administrators, school treasurers, and other staff members have clear guidance and support about how to manage these funds. We created a Policy Implementation Procedure on administrative leave so that our staff members would have a clear sense of the rules of the road when complaints are made against employees and investigations need to occur.

We’ve launched a more inclusive and transparent process for health insurance procurement—thank you to all employees who completed the recent survey to inform this process. We’re now writing a standard operating procedure that will lay out how new principals are hired to ensure that the staff members and families in those school communities have a solid understanding of how their interests will be represented in panel interviews and by other means.

The School Board has also invested energy in its own improvement. With the help of our School Board office staff, we’ve created a comprehensive shared drive that School Board members can reference and to better preserve institutional knowledge. The School Board is creating a process to conduct a formal, annual self-evaluation, something prescribed in our policy that we haven’t undertaken during my time on the board. Beyond compliance with policy, we want to model a commitment to reflective practice, growth mindset, and continuous improvement, which are important at all levels of our school division.


Living Our Values
Finally, and most important, I want to note that this year APS remained steadfast in its commitment to providing safe, welcoming, and inclusive environments for all our students, families and staff, in spite of changes being handed down at the federal and state levels.

In the wake of a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education in February, we are defending our policy and practices that protect LGBTQ+ youth and ensure they can access every opportunity available to other students. Although the Virginia Department of Education has limited how it recognizes student gender in its state-level record keeping, in our local record keeping and in our schools we will still affirm all gender identities. Similarly, we remain committed to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion even while those values are under attack—because we want a public education system that works for all our students and prepares them for the diverse, complex, and ever-changing world they’ll inhabit as adults.

This winter we passed a Safe Schools Resolution and we created a new policy that details how we will engage with law enforcement representatives outside of our local police department, including ICE agents. I want to say a special word of thanks here to our in-house legal team, who trained all employees working at schools and on school buses in how to respond if agents come asking for students or staff members.

There are new challenges to grapple with as well—like the Supreme Court’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which casts into doubt our students’ ability to engage with a truly varied, culturally rich, and representative curriculum. The federal spending bill signed into law last week will slash funding for Medicaid, which provides health insurance to 37 million school-age children and is the fourth-largest source of federal revenue for school divisions. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Medicaid to serving students with disabilities, with mental health conditions, and behavioral health needs.

​The new federal law also limits eligibility for SNAP, which provides food assistance to over 13 million children and makes kids automatically eligible for free meals at school. It significantly narrows the ways that students and their parents can access federal financial aid for a college education.


For all of us who care deeply about our youngest community members and want to see them thrive, these are disturbing developments. It feels more important than ever to live out our core values, which are: excellence, equity and inclusion, relationships, integrity, stewardship, valuing staff, and providing a world-class, whole child education to every young person we welcome into our schools. I look forward to doing that work for the rest of my term.

Last week, the School Board meeting included an Information/Action item that recommended a change to the approved school year calendar. I chose to abstain from this vote—something I have not done before as a board member.

Since the meeting, I’ve received questions and comments about my decision to abstain. As an elected official accountable to the community I serve, I believe it’s important to explain any vote I cast--or in this case, my decision not to vote.  (This is why I have maintained a public record of all my votes since taking office, along with my commentary on particularly significant votes, in multiple languages.)
 

As a board member, I have always sought to understand an issue as thoroughly as possible in order to make an informed, responsible decision. This involves asking questions (often I ask a lot of them!); listening carefully to the perspectives of families, staff, and students who will be affected by a vote; studying how other school divisions have handled the same issue; and when necessary and possible, working with my colleagues and APS staff to explore compromises or alternative solutions.

Because of this, I don’t like Information / Action items. Normally, an issue and a related recommendation are presented an Information item and not voted on as an Action item until the subsequent board meeting. This allows board members time to deliberate and it gives the community time to understand what’s being proposed and advocate.

In this case, the School Board learned about the proposed calendar change Tuesday afternoon. It was shared with the community on Wednesday, and the board was to vote on Thursday.

The issue at hand was (is) deeply important to many in our community. It was also divisive: in the space of about 24 hours, the School Board received hundreds of emails. I carve out time to read all incoming emails, but in this case I was not able to because I also have a full-time job.  Additionally, from Thursday morning right up until the time of the meeting, I was receiving new information about the possible consequences of this vote. In the very limited amount of time available, I could not study what other school divisions were doing in response to the same issue, and I could not explore whether there were possible compromises or ways to mitigate the negative impacts of a vote in either direction.

There are completely valid reasons why this was presented as an Information / Action item. It is also true that I was deeply conflicted about the decision (to learn more about that, you can watch the meeting video and listen to my comments beginning at 3:31:20). With the time I’d had to deliberate and the information that was still coming in, I could not cast a responsible, well-informed vote. So my decision was to abstain.

Board members may abstain from a vote for a few different reasons. Abstention is different from recusal: in abstention, the board member participates in the discussion but declines to vote. In recusal, the board member has a conflict of interest and does not participate in the discussion or the vote.

I understand that an elected official’s decision to abstain may be seen as an abdication of decision making responsibility. And I believe that it’s my job to cast votes that are reflective of serious thought, study, and engagement. Last week, those two principles were in conflict.

I’m not a career politician and I don’t have a degree in any related field; I made a judgment call. It’s entirely possible that I should have made a different call, and if you believe I should have done so, I welcome your constructive feedback.

Dear friends,

I’ll be voting for June Prakash in the Arlington Democrats’ School Board Endorsement Vote, and I hope you will join me. For information about how to vote in person or online, please see  HERE. Please note that voting concludes on May 10!

​I support June because I believe she will provide the kind of oversight and leadership that we need right now for Arlington Public Schools. When I think about some of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing APS right now, these are top of mind:

Deep Knowledge of, and Experience with, APS Operations. As a board member for the past four years, I’ve seen firsthand the need for APS to strengthen various areas of its operation. And while there has been some good progress, it will require sustained effort.

June brings firsthand experience with APS operations, a deep understanding of the complexities involved, and a recognition of the significant impact that operational success or failure can have on APS’s ability to ensure that every student in our community learns, thrives, and excels.
 
These are among the most timely and urgent needs I see in APS today:

• Finance: How can APS employ sustainable budgeting practices, gauge the impact of its investments, diversify its revenue sources, and ensure that the budget is shared in a transparent and accessible way?
• Facilities: How can APS ensure that it is spending every capital dollar as wisely as possible so that it can attend to as many facilities as possible that are in need of improvement? Last year’s Facilities Condition Assessment provided an array of data about what needs to be done—now the School Board and APS leadership have to determine how it will get done. How will APS manage its debt service responsibly so that it does not place extra strain on the annual operating budget, as the second largest area of expense? How are facilities decisions informed by enrollment projections, which indicate that we will have a significant number of vacant seats in our elementary schools over the next decade?
• Staff recruiting and retention: Is APS doing everything it can to attract and keep great staff members, its most valuable asset? APS must recruit and hire in ways that keep it competitive with other local school divisions. Once hired, staff need resources, professional learning, time, and supportive leadership to do their best work. The recent audit of the APS Human Resources department points out many ways that employees’ needs are not being met—including the needs of HR staff themselves. This is a longstanding issue that requires ongoing attention.
• Operating procedures: How can APS increase its efficiency and ensure that it is handling operational issues in a consistent way? Multiple recent internal audits underscore the need for clear, well-documented standard operating procedures in the areas of finance, human resources, and more. Absent these procedures, there is increased risk for error, needless delays, loss of institutional knowledge, and inconsistent response to staff, family, and student concerns. 

Educator Perspective and Experience. It is not an easy time to be a teacher. Public education is under attack. Policymakers and the general public are asking schools to meet an increasing number of societal needs. Teachers often lack the time to learn about and apply new strategies that will improve teaching and learning. Many teachers cannot afford to live in the communities they serve.

These issues are not unique to APS, but they certainly apply here. On top of those universal needs, I see the following local challenges:

• Many educators in APS were adversely impacted by the shift in health insurance last year. From my vantage point, this was a significant blow to morale and carried very real consequences for many staff members who had to find new providers or even change or forego medical treatments.
• Many report difficulty in getting the information and services they need from Human Resources.
• There has been progress, but still work to do, in order to ensure that staff members have meaningful input into decisions that affect their work and the students they teach.
• APS should be proud that it is engaging in collective bargaining. It is still early days and there is much to learn and improve as the school division works to bargain in good faith and align that work with other areas of its operation.

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The School Board makes its best decisions when it is keenly listening to the perspectives and experiences of students, families, community members, and the staff members who are the lifeblood of the system. June has worked in APS as a kindergarten instructional assistant—she has firsthand APS educator experience. During her tenure as president of AEA, she has listened attentively to the needs of staff members in myriad roles and advocated constructively on their behalf with APS leadership. The School Board needs a member who will make decisions that are grounded in the goal of valuing, retaining, and developing a truly excellent staff. June brings that experience and orientation.
 
 
 I have deep respect for the other candidate in this race and I believe she is a tremendous asset to this community. I believe she brings strengths, experience, and perspectives that would also add value to the School Board. I wish a little bit that there were two seats open, because I think these two candidates would complement each other very well.

But when I ask myself, “What do the School Board and APS need most urgently right now?”, in my experience the highest-priority needs are in operational improvements and in the way APS values, supports, and learns from its staff members. I am confident that June Prakash will do great work in these areas, and in others, if elected to the Arlington School Board. I hope you’ll join me in voting for June.

Last night, the School Board approved its FY26 Proposed Budget, which now goes through a period of public discussion and refinement before the board approves a final budget in May. 

Below, I'm sharing the remarks I made at last night's meeting about our proposed budget and the process we've undertaken to develop it.

Later today, the School Board and the County Board will gather in a joint public work session to share and discuss each organization's FY26 proposed budget; I encourage you to watch via video stream or join us in the County Board Meeting Room at 1 pm.


​I want to thank the Superintendent and members of his leadership team for their partnership and willingness to work together a little differently this year. In particular, I am grateful for the conscientious work of Andy Hawkins, Tameka Lovett-Miller, and John Mayo.

When we began our budget work in July, we knew we would have a considerable gap to cover. In the initial scenarios we looked at, the gap ranged from an estimated 35 million dollars on the low end, if we built in just a step increase for our employees with no cost of living adjustment, to 55 million dollars if we wanted to give a step and a 3% COLA.

We also knew we would not have reserves to plug that gap as we’d done in years past, nor did we want to keep using reserves, which are one-time money, to fund ongoing costs.

Back in the summer, we agreed we wanted to align our financial resources to our strategic plan and data about changing student needs. We wanted to free up resources for priorities and needs that are currently unfunded. We had the goal of ensuring that we can recruit and retain skilled, talented, and effective staff. And we wanted to do all of this in a way that would increase our financial stability and reduce our structural deficit.

These were our goals at the outset, which I hope you saw reflected in the budget direction the School Board approved last October.

In my School Board life, whenever we’re wrestling with a mighty problem, I like to remember that we are not the only school division in the universe. I ask myself, “What have other school divisions done when they faced similar problems?” So my work began with a lot of study of what other divisions have done to close budget gaps and realign resources. This study of other districts factored into our work over the summer, and it also is reflected in the analysis we commissioned from an outside company that has worked with many other school systems on issues just like ours.

Tonight in the budget presentation, you heard about things that are being proposed as potential reductions. What you didn’t hear about are the things that we did NOT include, and that we saw in other school divisions. I think this is useful context for what is being presented, so I want to talk just a bit about things we rejected, for a variety of reasons.

We did not increase class sizes, which is admittedly the easiest lever to pull when a school division wants to reduce costs. In our public meetings, we regularly hear from APS educators during public comment who talk about the impact of class size increases on their workload and their ability to know and support each one of their students.

We did not eliminate retiree health benefits as other divisions have done, because we know that these benefits are significant to our retirees, who devoted so many years to our community, and because we know they are an important reason why many educators choose to stay with APS.

We did not outsource and privatize parts of our operation like Extended Day, transportation, or custodial and maintenance services, as is the case in many other school divisions. These employees are members of our APS family and they form valuable relationships with our students, staff, and families that enrich our school communities. Many students begin and end their days with our bus drivers and Extended Day staff, who get to know them and provide positive support.

We did not scale back or eliminate our program for court-involved young people, or our program for older students that enables them to complete credits for a high school diploma while holding down one, and sometimes more than one, job.

We did not close a neighborhood school, which many school divisions have done as enrollment flatlines or decreases and the cost of building upkeep and renovation increases.

These are just a few of the measures that we determined weren’t a good idea for Arlington Public Schools.

There are other ideas we decided have promise, but will require more study and may take more than one year to implement. An example of this is converting more, or all, of our schools to renewable energy sources. At a net zero school like Discovery, this saves hundreds of thousands of dollars in utility costs each year.

I also want to say a few words about our process, which has been different this year in that the School Board and Superintendent are presenting this budget together. This year’s budget in my estimation required a different approach, where the board in its governance role and the Superintendent in his leadership and operational role had the opportunity for extended deliberation, discussion, and reflection.

Now we are bringing you the work we’ve done to date as a result of our deliberation, but our work is not done. The work sessions, hearing, and community engagement over the next several weeks are a crucial part of getting to the best possible result.

If you know anything about me from my time thus far on the board, I hope you know and trust my sincere belief that each of us has unique knowledge and perspective to share, and it’s only when we are genuinely curious and listening to each other that our own understanding and decision making can be enriched. You see things in your classrooms, in your homes and school communities, and in your team’s work here at Syphax, that I can’t see or know nearly as well as you do. When you share those ideas and considerations with me, I make better decisions.

It’s in that spirit of transparency and collaboration that we have posted, along with the proposed budget, a number of other documents that provide a window into our work to date. We’re showing you our work, and asking you to help us elaborate and improve it.

Finally, I want to note that in this particularly difficult budget season, and at a time of economic and job uncertainty for many in our community, we are necessarily having to make decisions that have a very human impact on many people. I want to say to those of you directly impacted by the proposed reductions that I am aware this is difficult and emotional. For me, that’s why it’s even more important that we use the time between now and May to be absolutely sure that we are making the most careful and strategic decisions possible. I thank all of you in advance for the contributions I know you will make.

 

​Dear Friend,

It has been my joy to serve on the school board for the last three years. This is the most purposeful, fulfilling work I have ever had. I have loved meeting new people, learning new things, stretching myself, and feeling like I am contributing to important, positive changes in our schools. 

I genuinely believe I would be happy doing this work forever. I say this despite its demands and challenges, some of which I would never have chosen for myself or made public in the way that happened for me last year. If I didn’t love the work so much, then the toxicity aimed at me, personally, from some of my former colleagues would have driven me out the door already.

It is no secret that I have concerns about the Arlington Dems Caucus process connected to school board elections. I am grateful to the Dems for opening a forum on this topic in 2022 and making some reforms based on what they heard.

Here's some additional feedback on the Caucus: If I have done my research correctly, I would be the first candidate standing for re-election who has a 9 to 5 full time job, the school board job, the extra work of being Chair, and a partner and school-age children at home. That is indeed a lot. Holding the Caucus means that someone like me needs to figure out how to do all that and add several months of extra campaigning in the spring, before the state’s June filing deadline, which would otherwise be when a campaign could launch.

This spring, I will also be leading the school board and the community through some serious and overdue budget work. 

I love a good challenge–and until very recently, I believed I was up for the challenge of campaigning for a second term. But added to all of this, I am now navigating a serious family situation that needs my time and energy for the foreseeable future. I am struggling with it, and I need to acknowledge my limits. I can’t run a campaign and take care of myself and my husband and family in this moment, all at the same time. 

I will repeat–I love this work. I hope that sometime in my life I will have the opportunity to do it again. But in this campaign cycle, I will not be seeking a second term.

In choosing your next school board member, I urge you to prioritize certain habits of mind over specific domain knowledge. APS knowledge can be learned. What can’t be learned, in my experience, are the dispositions of curiosity, humility, open-mindedness, and self-scrutiny. 

My work on the School Board has never been about me, and it has never been about being part of an elite group that believes rigidly and narrowly in its own insular correctness and expertise. My work on the School Board has been about listening to you, learning from you, and exercising my best judgment on your behalf. 

I encourage you to listen closely to discern if candidates hold a genuine belief that good ideas and valuable perspectives can come from all parts of our community, and if their sense of accountability to the community they serve will extend beyond Election Day.  I will be listening closely, too, and I plan to make an endorsement and support the best candidate in any way I can.

Thank you for placing your trust in me and giving me this amazing opportunity to serve. I indeed have been blessed.

Being part of a choir is beautifully human. It says something about our need for connection and the amazing things humans  create together. We can all name people with extraordinary voices--soloists whose talents we could never hope to match--but singing in a choir is different. 40 or 70 or 400 ordinary voices join together and make something none of them could do alone. The sum is truly greater than all its parts.

I feel that way about our country, too, even though our bonds seem increasingly fragile. It's evident that no matter who wins the election, we'll be sorely tested in the days and weeks ahead. "Heroes", especially when sung by a group of everyday, un-heroic strangers joined by shared affection and purpose, seems like a good song for these times.

If you're not a Bowie/Byrne fan, maybe the song below will be more your style. (And if you want something that's more purely fun, you might like the Choir! Choir! Choir! performances with Rick Astley or Colin Hay--the latter I think is remarkably good!) 

​This one is "We Belong," written by Lowen & Navarro but made famous by Pat Benatar. It also makes me think of this moment in America: "Whatever we deny or embrace / For worse or for better / We belong, we belong together." ​