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

I'm Randy Beamer.

And this week we are starting with something of a new way to keep track of what our kids are doing online at schools, or at least in emails and that kind of communication between themselves.

Joining us to talk about that new way, at least an essayist, is a chief operations officer, Mike Eaton.

Thanks very much for coming in.

Thanks for having me.

First of all, this is called gaggle, and it it scans what exactly?

So basically, it's a platform that's part of our total security system, total security platform that scans student email, Google drives Microsoft chat.

District level systems or district provided systems that students use on a daily basis to communicate with them.

And it's not Facebook or social media outside because some of them do that.

Some of these systems that are being used across the country do that.

But this isn't.

That's correct.

This is not a social media platform scanning tool.

And what is this scan for?

So basically scans for threats.

It uses an algorithm and it will scan documents that are approved that are provided by students through the district level email.

Other systems are real time are called real time.

Correct.

And what it does is, is that through this algorithm, it will take pull out your keywords such as kill suicide, gun, things like that.

And then we then it notifies us so we can put a mitigation plan in place and help that student in crisis.

And it's not just goes directly to you.

There's a couple of levels of human interaction or a review of this, how this is correct.

What I like about gaggle is that it has two levels of human review because a lot of time something can be taken out of context, something could be misrepresented or we would call false positive.

And so what it does is, is that if those keywords are triggered in their algorithm process, then that is given a human review to actually review the entire content and then make a threat level decision.

And then it goes to you and pretty quickly, right.

They review it real time, 24 hours a day.

Absolutely.

Yes.

They are 24 seven 365.

And basically we can set the notification levels up based upon prioritization, based upon severity.

And it goes then right to the principal or someone directly at the school.

Yeah.

Usually what it will do is like if you have like a student that's just maybe engaged in, you know, inappropriate, you know, conversation, we want to handle that the lowest level.

We want to send that to the school, have a conversation, learning experience for the kid.

What we're really worried about is those more severe items, such as, I'm going to bring a gun to school and hurt someone, I'm going to commit suicide.

I'm taking a lot of drugs.

Those are going to go directly to our police department within NCIC.

So that one, we can get a mitigation plan in place and help that student.

What else does a scan for?

Pictures, things like that?

Absolutely.

So it scans for nudity, sexual sexual images.

It can even you know, we can even gaggles also, you know, identify trafficking issues with our young students because some of that has been shared on some of those communication platform.

And you came from Denver where they use this in the schools there just a few months ago.

How did it work?

Because these companies there's Google, there are some others that are used in school districts here similar to this northside.

Northeast Judson has Google, Edgewood.

What they they really sell this as it can stop things and it's kind of a hard sell it seems like.

What do they actually do in terms of the results?

There was a great article in Adweek where they did surveys of school districts.

They utilized Google in 95% of schools that reported a back that felt safer by using this tool in Denver, where I was the chief of the Department of Safety.

We utilize this where Google scanned over a million document, million items in one year, and we actually stopped suicides from happening.

We actually stopped, you know, an individual bringing a gun to school and doing a shooting because of this technology.

And this has become a national best practice because we have so many students that are utilizing technology to communicate that we have to think differently about how we keep kids safe.

And you said emails some of these other documents, the chat rooms is through the school.

That's a little more open or casual conversations between the kids and they're more open or tend to be.

I understand.

Yeah, Basically, you know, kids are going to communicate, right?

I mean, I have kids and, you know, if I want to get my kid on the line, I send them a text.

You know, it's it's it's the kids are communicating electronically more and more and they're sharing.

And 82% of violent incidents that occur.

Somebody knew about it before it happened.

People talk, people share when they're in crisis.

We just got to get that information, get them help.

But do they know then the kids are going to know this is going to happen and so they're going to maybe stop talking as much on those platforms that maybe Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook or whatever, that you don't monitor.

What was interesting is that we haven't seen that because as we look at our data, at least when I looked at the data when I was in Denver, we continue to see either, you know, a stagnant, stagnated data line or increase in number of threats that were coming in through those systems that Google was monitoring.

Is it not?

I guess not registering with kids that this is a possibility?

I think our kids are extremely smart.

However, I don't think kids when they're in crisis are really worried about who's monitoring.

I think they're just putting their feelings out there.

They're putting out their, you know, whatever their intention is.

And we want to capture that.

And again, I want to make clear that this is not a way to, you know, as a punitive measure to hold students accountable for their actions.

It's a measure to keep schools and kids safe and let's get kids the help they need when they're in crisis before something else, because some of the privacy experts or people who say this is a questionable thing about, you know, First Amendment rights say that it is more for discipline area things for schools than it is or as much of that as it is to save the kids.

Yeah, we're not looking at it from a dictionary approach, is there?

Absolutely accountability when a crimes occurred?

Yes.

However, I would much rather get that student help and then worry about the punitive and accountability practices on the back end than to lose students in the process.

And parents are going to know about this.

Can they opt out?

No, there's not an opt out because basically these are systems that are provided by the district.

And this is, you know, not an I gotcha.

This is a true safety tool, just like a camera, just like an access control reader.

This is just a part of our platform.

And I want parents to feel comfortable that Google is not there to sell their students data.

In fact, when I spoke with Google, the individuals that review those possible student situations that come in, they don't even know who's coming in from.

They basically just get the data.

And then that second layer is where it is basically set out based upon our prioritization levels.

What kind of response from parents have you had if you had to, you know, push back in any way?

So, you know, one is we haven't made the full notification of parents yet because we've been waiting on, you know, finalizing some of our internal technical needs.

But we're going to be sending a parent letter home to three schools that we're going to be piloting on this, that we're piloting that Cass Tech, Sam Houston and Javid Academy.

We want to make sure parents are informed when they do, teachers are informed and they understand what these what this system will do.

What's the timeline then for rolling it out to the rest of the district?

So we look to start the pilot program April 4th.

We want to get good data on these three schools through the end of the school year, and then we'll have a discussion internally around it.

This is something we want to invest in for Natalie.

And finally, speaking of investing, how much will this cost?

So gaggle is what these other systems are all done on a per student basis.

The more students you have, the price points come down.

And so, you know, once we make a determination on what we want to do and obviously go through our procurement processes, then we'll be able to provide a more accurate budget number.

All right.

Well, thanks very much.

Mike Eaton, chief operations officer with the San Antonio Independent School District.

Appreciate you coming in.

Thank you.

Joining us now is Congressman Tony Gonzalez, a U.S. representative for the district that just runs out west of San Antonio and along the border.

It includes your valley.

And because of a vote, the congressman on a gun bill after you valley.

One of the things that he has been censured for by the state's Republican Party or the Republican Party Executive Committee.

Thank you for joining us, Congressman.

Appreciate it.

First of all, tell us about this censure and your response to it.

Basically, this is an executive committee that voted strongly 56 to 5 or something like that for censure.

What's your response?

Yeah.

Hey, Randy, Thanks for having me on.

You know what happened in reality nearly ten months ago?

I don't wish that on any community.

21 innocent lives that were taken after that.

Congress passes, say, First Community Act, which I was proud to do.

The reason why I voted for it were two reasons.

One, it would have prevented the Valdez shooting.

Two, it would not have infringed on the Second Amendment.

And so what people don't don't always talk about is since that bill, the SAFE Community Act was passed into law.

There's been at least a dozen similar cases where that were prevented from a school shooting from occurring.

That's saving lives.

So if the state party is going to censure for me, censure me because of it, so be it.

I'll also remind everybody I have six kids, Randy.

I don't scare easy.

Well, now they also in this censure, they recommend or they recognize some other, I guess, issues that they had with you for not being conservative or Republican enough.

And you got a primary challenger two days after this censure.

One of the things they pointed out was that you voted for a bill codifying protections for same sex marriages.

You were against a House rules package in January.

And then you have opposition to Congressman Chip Roy of Austin's Border security Bill.

How do you respond to those?

I guess accusations by people in your own party that you're not Republican enough.

In life, you're never going to please everyone and nor should you try.

I spent 20 years in the Navy as a master chief.

My job is to go over, under, through and ultimately deliver results.

If you look at who I am, I'm very conservative in my values.

You look at my voting record, I've taken over 1400 votes in Congress this year.

I you know, I consider Jim Jordan to be a pretty conservative guy.

If you look at his voting record and my voting record, we have a 97% similar voting record.

So if somebody wants to complain about two or three votes that I took, you know, let them you know, in politics, there's always somebody that wants to kind of run against you.

I tell folks, you know, if you want to lace them up against me, so be it.

I'll take you to the deep end of the pool every single time.

As far as some of the other things, you know, H.R.

29, the border safety, Border Safety and Security Act, we'll do anything but keep the border safe.

It's a bill that will ban legal asylum claims.

I have an issue with that.

As a Christian.

I think it's important that we offer those that are seeking refuge from religious persecution in the United States as a beacon of hope.

We have to protect that.

As far as a same sex marriage act, you can repeat it all day long, but this wasn't the morality of same sex marriage.

Imagine if a couple traveled from California to Florida and they got in a car accident in Texas.

And then, you know, because Texas doesn't recognize their marriage, let's say one of them was in the ICU.

You know, you wouldn't you wouldn't be allowed to see your your your significant other.

That doesn't make sense to me.

So if these votes were today, I take them the exact same way.

Now, one of the people that you're opposing, his bill on the border security chip, Roy, you were in the same page on the charter proposition in San Antonio called Prop A, the Justice Charter proposition that would basically codify a site and release and expand its use in San Antonio or allow it to be expanded.

What what is your opposition to that?

Yeah, I've been very vocal about being against Proposition eight.

And look, I spent 20 years in the military.

I've only been in politics three years, but I'm five.

I know every race that I run, we we run to win.

And we are running to defeat Prop eight.

The biggest reason is, look, the lawlessness.

You see lawlessness all throughout the country.

Cities like San Francisco, cities like Austin, cities like Seattle, that's not San Antonio.

And this is has nothing to do with politics, has nothing to do with a Republican or a Democrat.

This just has with.

We don't want lawlessness in our city.

What you have is you have these outside groups that parachute in and then try to get these these propositions essentially using our city.

I'm very much against that.

I will do everything in my power to to defeat it.

We've done block walking.

We've got yard signs.

Remind everyone, go to my website Tony Gonzales for Congress dot com.

Reach out to us and I'm happy to connect you on all the reasons why Proposition eight needs to go down in flames.

Well now some of the people would say respond to that, saying it's not people from outside, it's a more progressive San Antonio and San Antonio and the other cities, more Democratic than the Republican statewide and the governor there in other ways, too, trying to limit the authority of cities like San Antonio to exercise the power that they've had.

Do you see it that way or not?

I mean, look, if somebody commits a crime, you want them to be held responsible for the crime.

It's that simple.

And and if you don't guess what that's going to do.

It's just going to encourage more crime.

We see on TV, you know, these folks in and in San Francisco that are walking into Walgreens and walking out with seven, $800 worth of stuff and nobody stops them.

Imagine if that wasn't in San Francisco.

Imagine if that was in San Antonio.

That's what's on the ballot.

And their values.

You do whatever the heck you want to do in other parts of the country.

Just don't bring your your politics to San Antonio.

Yes.

You know, we may be Democrats and Republicans in the different these differences, but we're we're not we don't we're not a city of lawlessness.

We're a city that believes in rule of law.

We're a city that that supports our law enforcement.

And ultimately, we just want to be safe.

Okay.

Moving on to another topic here and talking about the border.

You met with Mexico's president.

That was a group of Congress members.

Tell us about that, what you're trying to do, meeting directly with the president of Mexico.

Yeah, I want to thank Senator Cornyn for putting together this congressional delegation over the weekend.

We visited with our president, Lopez Obrador.

I've met with many different heads of state before.

This was a four hour discussion.

A couple of things that I mentioned in particular, or the fact that there are Americans that are missing in Mexico and there is this sentiment that Mexico is not a safe place.

And and I urged the president to work with us closer on one, finding those Americans and to making sure that future Americans don't get kidnaped or killed or these other instances, these four and that we work together.

What kind of response and did you bring up the kidnapings in Matamoros in that area?

What can they do there?

What did he tell you about this?

I did.

And look, this is how it normally goes in these these high level discussions, like a chicken dance of no, you're great.

No, you're great.

And you never talk about the things that kind of ruffled feathers.

That's not my style, as you can tell, right?

My style is to go, What's the issue?

Let's get to the root of the issue and let's have some some serious dialog.

So it took him a while to acknowledge it, but he did acknowledge it.

And part of what I'm saying is I wanted to visit Mexico.

I want a lot of us that live along the border.

We travel every single day.

We just want to be safe about it.

The fact that he acknowledged it, I think is important, but it can't just be words, right?

Congress has a role to play.

The White House has a role to play in it, making sure that we we we have this dialog between the two countries of the United States and Mexico.

All right.

Well, thank you very much, Congresswoman.

We appreciate your time.

This is Congressman U.S. Representative Tony Gonzalez of the district just west of San Antonio, along the border.

Thanks for talking with us today.

Thanks, Randi.

A lot of reporters roundtable this week.

Andrea Rush of the San Antonio Report joins us.

Thank you for coming in.

We're talking about a story you had about a bill in Austin that would strip cities of some authority.

Obviously, the cities had people testifying against them.

What's the latest on this push and what's behind it?

So I think we're talking about HB 2127, which is from Representative Burroughs out of Lubbock, and it is a very wide ranging approach to keep cities from regulating a long list of industries that got longer at the hearing earlier this month.

And you saw officials from Austin, from San Antonio, from no, not from Austin, sorry, from San Antonio, from Houston, from Dallas up there testifying against this.

The bill's author said recently this is mostly aimed at the urban centers in Texas, primarily at the labor changes that they've tried to make, like paid sick leave and mandating workers schedules.

Which the Jeff Coyle, assistant city manager, testified, is not something that San Antonio has tried to do or has been on their agenda.

Right.

He was up there.

Assistant city Manager Jeff Coyle was up there saying these didn't originate from us.

These were citizen led initiatives that never went into effect.

The state was able to stop them, and that is how things should naturally move through.

What's the problem?

Things are working as they should.

This is a much broader approach to to ending the authority of cities that they think the cities think right now would make them go through line by line of their city ordinances and say which ones they need to strip.

And it has the backing of business groups who think that the ordinances cities are passing right now are make business too onerous by creating different rules in different areas.

The cities are obviously super freaked out about this because they can be sued by any business owner who says that they've been wronged by a city ordinance.

And one of the stranger pieces of this is that they can also it explicitly says they can be sued in another adjacent county to avoid a hostile audience.

That was weird.

So if San Antonio is sued for something they can't be or they the trial for that could be moved to a more conservative county and then they would have to defend something in different areas.

Yes.

And then you also pointed out some of the unintended consequences that there in the article that you did about what could happen and how the authors of the bill say, we'll just have to see what.

We'll look at, case law that will inform us and I thought city, the assistant city attorney from Houston made a good point up there.

She said, gosh, if business hates anything, it's uncertainty.

Do they want to have to guess which rules they should be following and which rules are going to be enforced?

And so coming out of that, what's your guess as to how this is going to go in the legislature?

I don't know.

There were some pretty strong voices for and against asking a wide range of questions.

There were probably that hearing went on for hours.

There were people all over the spectrum business owners and labor groups coming up there to talk about what this meant for them.

There was an activist group from San Antonio talking about how they built a political movement around these ballot initiatives and there was a Representative Rafael and Shira from Dallas who was asking some tough questions and really, I think helping to foil explain the side of cities and what this might do to them.

But but the Republicans are in control in Austin.

And the governor also have over the years, tried to cut down on city's authority to do different things.

Governor years ago was talking about how he didn't like tree ordinances and things like that.

And Greg Abbott has explicitly said that he supports this piece of legislation.

So what seems like a really wide ranging option seems, I think, maybe hypothetically going into this session, people are skeptical that this would go anywhere as it has the backing of business groups, it has the backing of the governor.

It's getting a hearing.

We'll see.

And another related bill, I guess, or maybe unrelated, is stripping cities of the ability to have their water system contribute money to their budget, which would really hurt San Antonio.

Yeah, all municipally own electric electric companies, communities.

So CPS.

Yeah, San Antonio gets maybe a quarter of its revenue from CPS energy.

So this is a bill from a Republican out of Georgetown and primarily we think aimed at or the city thinks aimed at Austin utility.

He's saying if you are going to increase your rates and you have a surplus that you're contributing to the city budget, why not not have a rate increase?

San Antonio is saying this would radically change how we fund our government.

Please tread carefully.

It's also Republicans don't like the progressive blue cities.

And so it would cut down, especially on Austin's more progressive policies and their ability, their money to implement those.

Yeah, I'm not sure that if Republican controlled legislature knew that it was going to wipe out a quarter of San Antonio's budget, if that would be a compelling reason not to do it.

But I think.

And so this is early on in the hearing, so we'll just have to see where it goes.

Yeah, it got a hearing yesterday.

I know San Antonio, the city manager and city chief operating officer, cleared their schedules and ran up to Austin to talk to the San Antonio delegation as soon as they heard about it.

And now Proposition A, the charter Justice Charter amendment.

We're just talking about that with Tony Gonzalez.

Obviously, he got his take.

And you said you've been at meetings on both sides of this and it's as if they're in different worlds talking about different proposals.

Yeah.

So to go back a little bit, we learned Friday that this will be on the ballot in May.

It had been facing some legal challenges.

Opponents had said this is too wide ranging.

It tries to do too many things.

And in Texas, we have a law that says you can't have a multi subject charter amendment.

And the Supreme Court said perhaps, but that needs to be decided after voters have a chance to vote on this.

So it will be on the ballot and it does a wide range of things.

It seeks to decriminalize abortion.

It seeks to decriminalize marijuana, it seeks to ban police chokeholds and the use of no knock warrants and expand the existing site and release policies which mean that you have to issue a ticket instead of arresting somebody for crimes under a certain under a certain value.

But if you go to these pro and against movements, you will really hear different things.

You would hear from the Republican side and the anti Prop eight movement, all about the police reforms.

On the other side, Wendy Davis and Representative Greg Cassar, where they're talking about the abortion and the marijuana pieces of it to the Prop eight support.

Now you also get a hold of some polling by those who are against Proposition A and what did you find there?

Yeah, let me show you.

I think this is really telling.

Early voting starts April 24th.

We're now in the end of March.

And the type of questions that they're asking this came up at the Republican Party of our county representative, John Lu and State Representative John Lujan was talking about we're going to need more than just Republicans in a blue city to defeat something like this now that we know it's on the ballot.

So the types of questions that they're asking are trying to figure out what might be motivating to different people and why.

Democrats might go for.

It.

Here's an example.

Prop eight will lead to increased homelessness and drug use because it will deprive police of the tools they need to compel people to enter counseling and rehabilitation programs.

Which is arresting them and then forcing them.

So kind of a stretch of what this is doing, but they're testing out all the options.

And there's going to be some money spent on both sides here.

How much more do you think we're going to hear about this?

Oh, gosh.

Before that May election?

I mean, selfishly, I'm excited that we have this exciting thing to talk about this election.

But I do think there's going to be a lot of money spent, even though Dany Diaz, the police union president, was talking to the Bear County Republicans earlier this month and said a lot of the stuff already exists, we don't we're not allowed to use chokeholds.

The PC was most concerned about was the creation of a justice director.

That's a city position that would get some say over how police are allowed to operate and how spending related to law enforcement works.

So I think.

Although policies and decriminalizing, if it opposes a law already, that can't be that can't happen.

I guess it's hard to say what the actual impact of this will be.

But you're right, a lot will be spent regardless by Greg Cassar that he was a former Austin councilman before he was in Congress.

He was here last week talking about how Austin used to have a lot of marijuana arrests and now they don't have any.

You can simply choose not to spend money on the machines that test it, like there are ways to defund it from inside the city.

So but that is a piece that you really don't hear the other side talking about.

You don't hear the opponents talking about, oh, yeah, we need to stop that.

Marijuana decriminalization.

I don't think you're going to hear that.

Well, thank you very much.

It is going to be selfishly interesting to cover all this.

Andrea Drusch San Antonio report.

You can check out more at the San Antonio Report San Antonio report dot org.

Dot org.

Thank you for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

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