PACE’s 2023 conference marks many important milestones: our first in-person annual conference since the start of the pandemic, the 10-year anniversary of the implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula, and the 40-year anniversary of PACE’s founding. As we mark these milestones, our public education system is facing a troubling set of challenges, including declining enrollment, staffing shortages, and polarized communities, along with devastating setbacks to student learning and well-being that have exposed long-standing systemic inequities in education and have revealed new gaps in