On the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilho San Antonio is a fast growing, fast moving city with something new happening every day.

That's why each week we go on the record with Randy Beamer and the newsmakers who are driving this change.

Then we gather at the Reporters Roundtable to talk about the latest news stories with the journalist behind those stories.

Joining us now as we go on the Record with Randy Beamer.

Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us for this first edition of On the Record for 2024.

I'm Randi Beamer.

We have a lot to talk about this week.

We are going to look at some new laws that just took effect in Texas.

The changing political landscape as well as introduce you to a young San Antonio man who is a Forbes 30 under 30 who just got a multimillion dollar grant to help his nonprofit.

But first, we're going to start with the latest of what is going on in Brackenridge Park, kind of a reconciliation of some different plans to move to the next step in moving the park forward.

Very historic park.

Joining us to talk about that is the interim CEO of the Brackenridge Park Conservancy, former city manager as well, Terry Brettell.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Happy to be here, Randi.

Now, you say there have been, what, three different kind of plans or reports in the past few years.

And this Monday you're inviting the public to bring some input into what is going on in Brackenridge Park to kind of get those reports together to move on to the next step.

But what happens?

Well, there's been a stakeholder, an advisory committee that's been working over the last six months to reconcile three plans.

There is the Breckenridge Park Master plan that was done in 2017.

The Brackenridge Park Conservancy did a cultural landscape it that follow that.

And there's also a midtown regional plan which has embedded in it funding for the park through the tax increment reinvestment zone.

So if you look through those plans, there's a lot of themes that come out.

But more importantly, there are a lot of projects to be delivered for the park.

There's probably over 100 projects that have been called out through those, those different plans that are existing.

So now we have a community advisory committee that is working, and the advisory committee I think is really important to talk about because the the tense bond opened broader than in the past.

So we've got all the neighborhood associations that surround the park that are part of it.

We've also invited stakeholders who are part of the park, and we would you would notice the first tee program that a big part of the park, the Brackenridge Park Golf course, but importantly, we also have people who represent the history and the culture of the park.

We have Native American representation on the committee.

We have a wildlife advocate on the committee.

So this is a committee that is charged with doing the reconciliation of those projects.

The works beginning by looking at a very high level, what what is important as we evaluate what are our guiding principles that we want to follow as we look at each of the projects that are embedded in those plans and how we're going to evaluate those projects moving forward.

So it's a big task.

And the committee is broken down into four different subcommittees, and they have been working diligently on criteria that will be used moving forward.

And now it's time to get input from the community.

I think it's important to say that we want to invite the public to come to this community workshop.

It's very different than any of the meetings ever held in the past.

Some of the contentious meetings that people have seen in the news about the 2017 bond project involving, you know, taking out some trees and things like that, all that's been on hold for at least a couple of years now.

It has.

And this reconciliation process is is a path forward.

It is the community advisory group is actually going to lead the meeting.

And that's it's not going to be city led.

It's going to be REDD led by this advisory committee.

They're going to be breaking down into subcommittees.

And so the public will have a chance to talk about what's important to them in terms of the river and looking at the criteria that the advisory committee is using and to weigh in to give the community Advisory Committee input so that they can then evaluate a broader public input and bring that forward as they evaluate projects.

They're also going to be looking I think it's important.

I say they're also going to be looking at the land, you know, that's the ecology around the park, like the wilderness trails.

They're all going to be looking at the archeology and the history of the park from an architecture point of view, like the like the 17, 19, 1770s pumphouse.

And they're also be looking at circulation and connectivity in the park.

There's a lot going on in that park and there's a lot of constituencies in that park.

And you can see when you look through those master plan.

So the park's been used by our community for over 1000 years and that history is just fascinating.

That's why I got into it.

I'm still in the process working on a program on the history of the park and how it's going, but it has been overshadowed by these controversies recently.

Is there a timeline that you hope now with the input for some of those projects, you know, ones in the lawsuit now that part of the 2017, do we think this year that that will be resolved and that you'll move on to some of the other projects that have been overshadowed or some of the other work anyway?

Well, your documentary is important because I have to say, this is the 125th anniversary of the Park George Brackenridge dedicated in 1899.

So I think it's time that we start moving forward.

Yes, I think this is the year for the park.

This process that we're working through will prevent us from hopefully having those conflicts that we've had in the past.

And this should be the year that we get that process finished and we get to roll forward with the 2017 bond.

And what are some of the other things that you want to highlight in the park that have been overshadowed by this?

I mean the history of the archeology, the Native American 12,000, ten, 12,000 years of history, how the Whitney Museum was almost built in San Pedro Park until a guy named Woody happened to die that week and give $75,000, all of that kind of thing.

You also want to highlight in signage, you want to have more of an opening.

You want to work on traffic.

What are some of those other things?

I think one of the biggest things we need to work on is interpretation of what has happened in the 12,000 years in that park, right?

People go to the north end of the park where the pumphouse is and the stake is in the raceway.

And they're looking at the structures and they're looking at the raceway and they just don't understand what's happened.

And I think that's going to be really important.

And it's an important role that we can play moving forward is getting the interpretation and getting it done right.

Right.

So that there's a there's a way that people can come to the park and enjoy and understand what's happened.

And long term also, people don't realize that this is projected to be part of an ongoing thing like hike and bike trail that'll go up into the universe University, the Incarnate Word up over literally over the almost Park Dam, the almost dam, and then continue northward basically up to Austin.

Certainly that is in the phase two of the 2017 bomb project getting underneath Hildebrand and going to the Springs and getting that trail connected.

And then the city has plans moving forward to connect off into almost basin and go through to by the quarry and connect up through those trails there.

Thank you very much, Terry Bechtel, interim CEO of the Brackenridge Park Conservancy.

Good luck and best wishes and all.

You're doing.

Thank you.

A young San Antonio math teacher has just gained national attention being named one of Forbes 30 under 30 and he just happened to have a foundation that also has been given a $2.8 million grant by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for what he is doing in the classroom, not just in San Antonio, but for two classrooms now all over the country.

Joining us is this amazing young man, Dashiell Young Saver.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you so much for having me.

You are right now at the idea South Flores School here, a charter school.

But you to me, you just have an amazing story.

Went to Harvard.

You interned at the L.A. Times and other places came from L.A. area.

Wound up in San Antonio teaching for Teach for America at Burbank High School.

And then from there, first of all, what did you want to be growing up?

Because it sounds like you have an unlimited potential.

I don't know about that, but I wanted to be a journalist growing up, and I wrote a column for my high school paper and did more internships doing work for the L.A. Daily News, Los Angeles Times.

And I was kind of the young guy at the L.A. Times.

So for a week they put me on the education because they figured I would know schools.

And I started covering schools up and down the city, west side, east side, north side, south side.

And the disparities between the opportunities that kids were afforded based on their zip code was just mind boggling.

And so I wanted to not just write about it, I wanted to do something about it.

That's why I decided to shift into teaching.

And you had come from a high school that had all the opportunities?

Yes.

I went to a public suburban high school that was in a pretty well-to-do area.

And I was told all my life that there was equal opportunity throughout our country.

And I think the experience of covering schools in various places shattered that that notion.

And I realized that there just wasn't the same for everyone.

So when you got to education or wanted to get an education, also you got into Teach for America, which is the most idealistic, just like the Peace Corps for teachers.

And you wound up in San Antonio from Harvard.

What was that transition like?

I loved it.

I love the city of San Antonio.

I feel like it's a big, small town.

It's very community oriented.

And Teach for America gave me a lot of skills to go into the classroom with a lot of good training, a lot of more than that great mindsets to think about how do we empower the students that we're working with and how do we make sure that we are the ones that are facilitating discussion, not just overpowering discussion in the classroom?

And how are we the ones that can support the students?

And I think the thing that really made me stick in San Antonio was my students, my students who took this guy who was from a faraway place and didn't know a lot about their city, their background, and taught me a lot about that and and taught me what it meant to be an educator that can support them.

So what did you start in class that really made the difference to where you get the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Forbes 30 under 30?

Describe what I guess is called skew the script.

Yeah, so some contexts.

Nationally, when I first started teaching AP stats, 60% of students in the country pass the AP stats exam.

However, in the urban core of San Antonio, that pass rate originally floated around 2%, 2%, 2%, and people wondered why.

And to me it seemed obvious I'd crack open the textbook and start reading out problems about how.

Bob is 58 watermelons or correlating your hand with with the amount of candies you can grab from a jar or all these contrived contexts.

And my students are low income working jobs outside of school supporting their family.

They had real complex adult problems on their shoulders, and the stuff I was giving them from the textbook was contrived, boring and almost infantilizing.

But now in public school, you can't literally throw out the textbook as you can in a charter school.

Did you start that at Burbank?

When did you start really changing that script?

Yeah.

So at Burbank High School, actually in AP, in public schools, you do have a lot of leeway.

You have to teach to the standards and you have to prepare them for the AP exam and you should use the resources you're given.

But also the how in between there, how you teach it, how you make it come alive is given a agency to the teacher, which I think is a beautiful because some teachers, you know, they say, well, we have to teach to the test.

But in teaching to the test, you threw out the script.

Yeah.

And I think the AP exam is a great example.

There are some problems with it.

But ultimately, if you are prepared to do the exam and do well in the exam, you can show that you can determine correlation and causation, you can determine what's a bias and then buy a sample.

You can determine what's a misleading graph and what's transparent.

You have these great skills that show that you're an advanced quantitative thinker.

And so when the first year that it really went all in on making the course relevant, really went in on making every lesson a relevant context, that students cared about the apps and performance soared, went from 2% passing to 42%.

And you came up with the curriculum yourself that that's a lot of work which is basically like writing a textbook.

It wasn't actually myself, really.

It was my students.

My students were the ones who said, Yeah, this is boring and I will learn about gerrymandering and online dating and food desserts and sports and social media stuff that's more serious stuff that's less serious, but all relevant.

So how do you say work in sports and social media into a math lesson like that For sure.

So what's the probability of the Spurs winning the NBA finals and going far less the playoffs?

Yeah, and the years since I was teaching, but we could talk about was there a three point shooting percentage?

What's the expected value?

If you take a bunch of 2.4 to 3 point shots and the probabilities of the shots being different, so you take more three pointers or two pointers online dating, what's your probability of finding the perfect match on social media?

And also if you make a certain profile with, you're probably a swipe in the right direction.

And now how did this evolve not just for your classrooms then, but for this nonprofit you have where you've made this available to thousands of teachers across the country.

So I during the pandemic was kind of sitting on my hands teaching online and wondering what I could do.

And so I decided to take these lessons and make a website, and I called it skew the script dot org.

The name comes from the slogan for my classroom actually at Burbank High School, right?

I told students that there was a script written about them.

The script was that their scores would be a write skew.

And in statistics that means that there's a lot of data on the left, low scores and very few data on the right high scores, and we're going to skew the script the other way.

A lot of high scorers feel low scores, and that's the logo you see on the website now.

And most of the lessons online.

Within a few weeks we had 3000 teachers signed up using the lessons.

Now we have 20,000 teachers across the country and we serve about 400,000 students with the content.

And it blew up on me in a way that I had not envisioned at all.

And it sounds like that's a full time job.

Yeah, it's become that.

And now I teach part time, so I teach twice a week.

AP stats ideas I Flores And I'm very thankful to adhere to making part time available for me to also work on the nonprofit and $2.8 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

How does that figure in now to what you're doing?

Yeah, so we are now have the resources.

Thanks.

That amazing opportunity to build out more curriculum.

So not just AP stats and Algebra one out of Virginia, but also thinking about how we make pre-calculus relevant, how we make calculus relevant, how we make geometry relevant, and keep on making relevant math so that every secondary grade level six through 12 feels genuinely relevant to kids.

We're also building out new teacher training opportunities so teachers can go all in on making math relevant, and we're building out something different sustainable revenue streams to make sure that our nonprofit can stay afloat long term.

And I know a lot of people out there, kids, teachers, parents are interested in this and skew the script because it's where they can find out more about it.

Yep.

Excuse your board and all the materials free, open access you have to make an account.

Well, it's great to see a young man in San Antonio making a difference.

Thank you very much for coming in.

That is a dash young to save or skew the script dot org and idea sounds Flores thanks for having me on Reporters Roundtable this week.

There are some brand new laws that just took effect in Texas as of January 1st and the political landscape, well, there's going to be a whole lot of developments on that front.

Joining us to talk about all of that and much more is the guy who knows everything there is to know about all of that.

That is Patrick's high tech, the primary political correspondent for the Texas Tribune.

Thanks very much for.

Thanks for having me.

First of all, some of these new laws, I guess about 30 of them took effect, some getting a lot more attention than others.

And I guess the biggest one is the the anti diversity, equity and inclusion law.

And some see it as anti some.

How would you describe it?

What does it mean?

Yeah.

So this law which went into effect on January 1st, you know restricts the ability of public colleges, universities in Texas to have D-I offices in kind of institutional efforts on campus to try to foster more.

I'll just use the acronym Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

This law was a priority of Republicans in Austin earlier in 2023, during the regular session, they went into that session determined to crack down on what they called wokeness on college campuses, which they consider to be college students and administrators being overly sensitive to societal problems.

And this law was a big outgrowth of that push in 2023.

You know, it should be noted, the law does not apply to, you know, classroom instruction in student groups.

And so there are still spaces on these college campuses where you could have efforts, you know, at diversity, equity and inclusion.

It's more geared at cracking it down institutionally.

All that being said, some of these university leaders have said that laws like this one are making it harder to bring faculty into the state and, you know, to recruit people, qualified people to teach students.

The law was passed back in whatever May, June.

And so everybody saw it coming.

So they had started to ramp down these places, getting rid of them, some of them already.

Yeah.

I think the January 1st effective date of this law gave some of these colleges enough runway or at least some runway to wind down these programs.

You know, in the months before January 1st and to try to figure out how to still foster diversity, equity, inclusion on campus within the confines of this coming law.

So you have seen at some of the major public schools in Texas, you know, as far back as months ago, efforts to begin winding down these programs and find new ways to at least fulfill maybe the intent of these programs, but within the confines of this law that everyone knew was going to be going into effect on January 1st.

But everyone doesn't know yet the effects of it.

And as you said, some are concerned the recruiting of new faculty and even the retention of faculty and staff, that kind of thing, could be a big story this year.

Absolutely.

I mean, at the Tribune, I know we're going to continue to cover how this law may affect or not affect the ability of these universities to recruit faculty.

You know, we've seen surveys of different faculty or faculty applicants, you know, nationwide that show they want to work at schools that have these kinds of programs, that have these offices.

And so obviously, the Texas law for those kind of potential faculty, you know, is a is a is a big obstacle to overcome.

Now, that was a big law that just took effect or one getting a lot of attention and one that didn't is not a law.

But the governor really wanted was the school voucher push that died after the special session after session.

What's going to happen there?

Put your your crystal ball down in front of you.

Right.

And your thinking cap, what's what's going to happen as you see it covering this all year.

So legislatively, the issue is dead for the time being.

As you noted, we had with the lawmakers fought over it in the regular legislative session last year and then for it extended to four special sessions.

And they still cannot come up with a compromise that could pass the House.

That's the main place where the resistance has been.

The governor has not ruled out calling another special session on it, but for the time being, he's clearly turned his focus more to politics and to the primary season.

He's begun endorsing primary challengers to House Republicans who thwarted his agenda on this.

Now, he's going to be, I expect, him to get even more active in the primaries, make more endorsements, campaign in person in districts.

Maybe you'll see him in TV ads in local markets in these state House races.

That's going to be one of the main driving forces in this coming primary season.

Maybe you'll get to this, but another driving force in these primaries is going to be Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The House voted to impeach him in May on abuse of office charges.

The Senate held a trial in September and acquitted him at the end of that.

And so now he's on, you know, kind of what we've deemed a political revenge tour.

And he's trying to unseat the dozens of House Republicans who voted to impeach him.

He's got his work cut out for him.

There were 60 House Republicans who voted to impeach him and now is is that going to be the big story of this year, the split in the Texas Republican Party, not just rural versus urban, because rural people didn't want to have the school voucher plan in place.

But hard, right, Ken Paxton versus moderate, They'd feel it.

Yeah, I think all of the above.

And it's going to be interesting to see whether these these primaries are driven more by personalities than ideology, because by all accounts, the Texas House, which is the main institution that's under fire here, has gotten more conservative over the past few years.

If you just look at the bills that they're cranking out.

But this impeachment issue really, you know, added a new dynamic to it and, you know, to people, you know, who support Ken Paxton, they would say voting to impeach him was not the conservative thing to do.

And so I think you're going to have some really interesting dynamics in these primaries about whether the disagreements are about ideology or really just about kind of personalities and which faction of the party you align with, whether you're with Paxton or not with Paxton, whether you're with Abbott or not with Abbott.

So you're going to have a lot of interesting ideological, political, tribal crosscurrents happening in these primaries.

And in all that.

I know you're going to be following the money because money, the millions poured into the voucher push, the millions that was given to Dan Patrick for, I guess you would say, supporting Ken Paxton or at least that's the effect some people saw.

How about the oil millionaires and giving to the the hard right?

Is that going to continue?

Do we expect any any big money on the other side to come in?

Sure, I think so, if only because for these, you know, super hard right donors over the years in Texas, people like Tim Don in Midland, the Wilks family also in that part of the state.

You know, they've been spending millions, you know, over the past several years to try to push the state farther to the right to try to create a more religious public space in Texas as well.

And this is really kind of a critical juncture for them.

They finally have the you know, in some of these races, they finally have the governor on their side.

For example, the governor doesn't necessarily like them or hasn't aligned with them in the past, but they're finally on the same page with some of the most powerful players in the state in some of these primaries.

And they have the impeachment issue animating voters.

They have the school voucher issue animating voters.

And so it is a really critical juncture for them, for these these moneyed forces on the far right.

And I expect them to continue spending big in these primaries.

But given that amount of money and then is the pendulum going to swing back?

I mean, from the time we had Joe Strauss here as a moderate, now, they'd fill in and the and the split there.

Is it going to swing back as you see it?

Maybe, Tony, a little more moderate?

Are some of these primary challengers going to get beaten back and some of the hard right people going to get going to lose in those primaries?

Well, look, I mean, the hard right's not going to be under you know, it's not going to go undefeated and have a perfect record in these primaries.

They're probably going to suffer a number of losses.

It's very hard, you know, despite all the money and momentum we just describe for the hard right, it's still very hard to beat an incumbent in Texas.

A lot of these, especially in rural areas, these House Republicans who are under fire right now, they've been serving for a while.

They've built independent local brands that can withstand the statewide political climate in some cases.

And so it's still very hard.

You know, last cycle, there was only one House Republican who ran for reelection who lost reelection.

So, you know, and there were still a number of hard right forces last cycle as well.

So that's just to say it's hard to be an incumbent still.

Well, thanks for using your crystal ball.

I know it's hard, especially given that we're in a presidential year and it's going to be absolutely you're going to be busy.

We all are.

Yes.

All right.

Well, thanks.

You can check out Patrick Smyth, work as the primary political correspondent in The Texas Tribune.

The Texas Tribune dot org.

Appreciate you coming in.

Thanks.

Thank you.

And thank you for watching this edition of On the Record.

As always, you can check out this edition or any past show at KLRN.org Or you can also download the podcast.

I'm Randy Beamer, and we'll see you next time on the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilho