I have 19 months left in this office.

I'm not counting down.

It really is the best job in the world.

I go to work every day to make the place that I love most in the world a little bit better.

And as I think about how best to use the time that I have left, I want to lay out a few more hard things we got to do together.

So let's start with our children.

I believe that every child deserves access to high quality public education from pre-K through post-secondary.

When I took office, we've been under investing in education for decades, and we had wide funding gaps between public schools as high as $400 per student.

For years we had been trying to fix it, and in 2021 we finally closed the funding gap in our public schools.

Since then, we have raised teacher pay, cut retiree taxes.

We expanded on campus, mental health resources, started feeding all 1.4 million Michigan public school students free breakfast and lunch, our graduation rate, our A.P.

class numbers and career and tech education completion rates are at all time highs.

We can do these hard things, but let's be frank, we face a literacy crisis, not just here in Michigan, but across the country.

Just a quarter of our fourth graders can read proficiently.

That's not acceptable.

We all need to work together to tackle the literacy crisis.

The next hard thing we must do is make sure that every kid in Michigan can read.

We must focus every education policy to meet this high level goal until we hit it.

Next.

Let's talk about my favorite subject, the roads.

We need to deliver a sustainable long term solution for local and state roads so folks can get to work, drop off their kids at school, run errands without blowing a tire or cracking the axle.

I'm proud of the Rebuilding Michigan plan.

We fix our most economically critical highways and bridges.

I know, I know.

It's caused a lot of traffic in southeast Michigan.

And yes, I've heard about 696.

I'm sorry.

And you're welcome.

But as I said in my State of the State, rebuilding Michigan was a temporary fix for a long term problem.

We need to fix our local roads, which have been underinvested in for decades.

I'm grateful for the engagement on this issue all year long by members in the legislature of both parties.

We're inching closer to a deal, but we're going to have to compromise to get this done right.

And finally, let's talk about our ongoing efforts to bring more advanced manufacturing to Michigan.

In just the last few years, we've secured projects across the state in several key industries, but I want to focus on semiconductor chips.

We've all seen the devastating consequence of what a global shortage of chips can do.

It forced our automakers to buy up parking lots and fill them with almost-done cars awaiting chips, jacked up prices on phones and computers and appliances.

In the decade ahead.

Being able to on the decades.

I mean, this is a long term play.

Being able to make chips top to bottom in America will allow us to stay on the cutting edge of A.I.. Whoever dominates this technology, from design to production, will win the 21st century.