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The cost of childcare across the country is on the rise, outpacing the price of in-state college tuition in many states. While many local governments are working to figure out a solution, Travis County is ahead of the game.
The pool at Barton Springs was first built around a century ago. But the springs that feed it have been around since long before humans ever arrived in Austin. More from our ATXplained series.
Many Austin Energy customers were left without power after strong winds and heavy rains dropped hail and tree limbs across Central Texas. We’ll have an update and a look ahead at the forecast.
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The full transcript of this episode of Austin Signal is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
Jerry Quijano [00:00:08] The cost of childcare across the country is on the rise, outpacing the price of in-state college tuition in many states. While many local governments are working to figure out a solution, Travis County is ahead of the game. We’re going to hear about the preparations that have been ongoing. And the pool at Barton Springs was first built around a century ago, but the springs that feed it? They’ve been around long since before humans ever arrived in Austin. We’ve got a question about the springs for our ATX Plane project, we’ve got the answer coming up on today’s show.
KUT Announcer: Laurie Gallardo [00:00:39] The Austin Signal is a production of KUT News, hosted by Jerry Kehanel.
Jerry Quijano [00:00:45] Plus, many Austin Energy customers are still without power after strong winds and heavy rains dropped hail and tree limbs across central Texas. We’ll have an update and a look ahead at the forecast that is up next on Austin Signal. Howdy out there, you are listening to Austin Signal. I’m your host Jerry Keconnell. It is Monday, May 11th. Thank you for starting the week off here with us. It was a rainy weekend here in Austin with storms on Saturday and Sunday too and thousands in the Austin area were left without power after a cold front brought strong storms to the area. Wind gusts knocked down some tree limbs and some areas even saw hail. KUT News digital producer Chelsea Zhu has been following the storms all weekend. She is joining us now with an update. Welcome to the show, Chelsea.
Chelsea Zhu [00:01:40] Thank you. Hello.
Jerry Quijano [00:01:41] So, can you give us a recap of last night’s weather, what did we see and what kind of damage are we seeing today?
Chelsea Zhu [00:01:48] Yeah, so like you said, there was a cold front that was moving across Texas, and it brought a line of strong storms through Austin last night. It started northwest of us and moved southeast gradually through the evening hours. The National Weather Service was forecasting that potential severe weather pretty early on in the weekend, and there was severe thunderstorm watch for a lot of central Texas, including Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties. And as the night went on, they sent out a few thunderstorm warnings for different areas around Austin too. The main impacts were rain, lightning, some strong winds, and hail to some areas. That hail was mainly in the Burna and Georgetown areas, and wind became the main threat once the storm moved over Austin. The National Weather Service, I called them for an update this morning and they said that they recorded a 64 mile per hour wind gust at Austin Berkshroom International Airport during the storm. And yeah, the main impacts were downed trees and power outages.
Jerry Quijano [00:02:41] Yeah, I actually live near the airport so my power went out around like 930 and it was out when I went to bed and when I woke up it was back on. I know that Austin Energy saw somewhere like 14, 15,000 customers without power at one point. What does the situation look like now?
Chelsea Zhu [00:02:57] Yeah, so that number has generally fallen overnight and into the morning, but it has fluctuated. The most recent update is around 1600. That was updated around 1 p.m., but it was 3,000, 2,000 earlier today. Austin Energy did say they had crews throughout the night working on repairs, and that’s still happening. And just a reminder that for a utility, one customer represents more than just one person, so the number of people affected is actually higher. But overall, the situation right now is that more than 99% of Austin Energy customers have power.
Jerry Quijano [00:03:28] Okay, well, things got pretty hectic late last night, but I’m looking over your shoulder outside. It’s a beautiful day out on the drag. What does the forecast look like? I know you mentioned speaking to the Weather Service. What does a forecast look for the rest of the week?
Chelsea Zhu [00:03:40] Yeah, it’s going to be pretty sunny and warm, continuing throughout the week with highs reaching the 90s. Yeah, and our next rain chances, it seems to be early next week, is what the National Weather Service said, but it’s still pretty far out.
Jerry Quijano [00:03:54] It is still far out and it is May here in Austin here in Texas and we know that the weather can get volatile and we always instruct people to have multiple ways to stay weather aware. What does that mean? How can people stay weather aware?
Chelsea Zhu [00:04:07] Yeah, so the main thing that we follow is the National Weather Service, the Austin-San Antonio office. They will always have the latest updates and alerts going out about any severe weather coming up. And as far as power outages go, we talked about Austin Energy’s power outage map, that’s on their website. And if you’re the customer of another energy utility, we’ve got some links to some other outage maps on our website at kut.org.
Jerry Quijano [00:04:29] Alright, sounds good. That is Chelsea Zhu. She is a digital producer here at KUT News. Thank you for the update, Chelsea. The cost of child care is going up nationwide, and in many states it’s outpacing the price of in-state college tuition. Across the country, local governments are trying to figure out how to make it cheaper. New York City recently launched a free daycare program for the children of city workers. Voters in Larimer County, Colorado approved a sales tax increase in November to address its preschool and daycare shortage. But here, in Travis County, they are ahead of the game. A locally funded program for affordable child care has been in the works for more than a year. KUT’s Katy McAfee talked to parents and child care providers to see how it’s going.
Katy McAfee [00:05:27] It’s a busy day at Happy Heart’s Bilingual Learning Center in South Austin. A group of toddlers is hard at work cutting out pictures of various animals for an assignment. Some students are completely absorbed.
Katy McAfee [00:05:43] Others are a little preoccupied.
Child [00:05:46] So what are you working on over here? Um, my mommy and daddy leave me here and then, and then them, and then my dad.
Katy McAfee [00:05:58] All of them are learning. The goal is that by next year, this group will be able to recognize the alphabet and numbers up to 20. More importantly, they’ll pick up on social skills that will help them when kindergarten rolls around. But getting a quality early childhood education like this is expensive. In Austin, it costs more than anywhere else in the state, $13,000 a year according to the most recent data. Price has been a barrier for thousands of families, but the tide might be starting to turn. This year, Happy Hearts enrolled nine kids in its program whose families previously wouldn’t have been able to afford childcare.
Mari Saido [00:06:34] Maybe the number nine doesn’t seem like a huge number, but when you think about nine parents that were not able to afford child care, that may not have been able to go back to the workforce, it’s very significant.
Katy McAfee [00:06:47] Mari Saido is the director at Happy Hearts. She helped get those nine kids enrolled and she’s made other changes. Starting wages for new staff are a little higher. Teachers are getting more paid time off.
Mari Saido [00:06:58] And we were able to hire a curriculum specialist. In past years, we would have never been able to hire curriculum specialists because our budget didn’t allow for that.
Katy McAfee [00:07:07] Her budget is a little bigger this year, thanks to Raising Travis County. It’s a program you might remember voting on in 2024. Child care advocates at the time were ringing alarm bells that the state system for affordable childcare wasn’t working. That program only had enough funding for families with the absolute highest need, like kids who are unhoused or kids with disabilities. Thousands of kids who don’t fall into one of those priority groups were stuck on a wait list that took two years on average to move through. And the subsidies that were provided didn’t cover the full cost of childcare. Daycare centers were often left to pick up the difference. So Travis County decided to try something that had never been done before in Texas, something very few places in the country have even tried.
Jeff Trevillian [00:07:51] The only way that we’re going to get the community that we deserve is if we decide what’s most important to us and build it ourselves.
Katy McAfee [00:08:01] That was Travis County Commissioner Jeff Trevillian in 2024 announcing a ballot measure asking voters to raise property taxes. The money would be used to create the county’s own affordable child care system, including giving child care centers money to boost salaries.
Jeff Trevillian [00:08:15] Let’s build something that our children and our grandchildren will be proud of when they talk about us. Thank you.
Katy McAfee [00:08:25] It passed with 60% of the vote, and Raising Travis County was born. One of the main elements of the program was getting affordable childcare for kids between the ages of zero and three. They signed a $17 million contract with the non-profit Workforce Solutions to make it happen. But they didn’t start from scratch. A few months ago, Workforce solutions began making their way through the list of Travis County kids who were already waiting to receive a scholarship through the state. 6,000 kids were on the list. Some of them have been waiting since 2022.
Marjorie Vasevia-Franco [00:08:56] You can only imagine being on a waitlist since 2022. It’s 2026 when we started in January, finally being able to do the outreaches, right? Just letting families know, hey, do you remember who we are? Do you remember when you signed up for?
Katy McAfee [00:09:09] Marjorie Vasevia-Franco has been managing the list for Workforce Solutions. She says some people don’t remember signing up. Others do, but they’re no longer eligible. Families need to meet certain income and employment requirements to qualify, and they have to live in Travis County.
Marjorie Vasevia-Franco [00:09:25] As we hear from some of them, we are also hearing they couldn’t stay in Travis County. And we wonder, right, could this have been one of the reasons that could have helped them keep that stability for their family?
Katy McAfee [00:09:37] For many parents, funding came too late. That’s been the case for most families for decades. Even the longest tenured staff at Workforce Solutions say they can’t remember a time there wasn’t a wait list. But for some families that are just now planting roots, Raising Travis County is coming in right on time. Families like Grace Todd’s. I met Todd at a coffee shop on UT’s campus when she was in between classes. She’s a busy 26-year-old working on getting her PhD in French. A single mom bringing up her baby Clementine.
Grace Todd [00:10:08] She’s crazy, but she’s just like me.
Katy McAfee [00:10:10] Todd found out she was pregnant during her senior year at Texas State University. At the time, she was focused on finishing her last semester and applying for the Ph.D. Program. She didn’t worry about daycare until she realized her grad school classes would all be in person, and she would have to make ends meet with a $35,000 annual stipend.
Grace Todd [00:10:30] Daunting. I also think I didn’t have a realistic picture of how much it would cost. I definitely thought it would be cheaper.
Katy McAfee [00:10:37] Todd got on the state’s list for an Affordable Child Care Scholarship in April 2023. Clementine was less than a year old. While she waited to hear back, she sent Clementine to UT’s Child Development Center. She was paying $940 a month, and that was the cheapest option.
Grace Todd [00:10:53] And I’ve had to pick up an extra job to make ends meet of doing extra online grading for ten more hours a week and with that I still haven’t really been able to save at all.
Katy McAfee [00:11:05] Every few months she called to see if there was any progress on Clementine’s scholarship. She heard the same thing every time.
Grace Todd [00:11:12] They would say, you know, we don’t have any funding right now. So, you know, next time they give us money, we’ll let you know. But right now, like there’s nothing.
Katy McAfee [00:11:21] For now. But last month, she finally got the call. Clementine got a scholarship to go to the same daycare she’s in now, but for $150 a month.
Grace Todd [00:11:31] Which is insane. I feel like I’m getting an $800 a month raise, even though it’s really just $800 that I’m gonna be able to save.
Katy McAfee [00:11:39] Todd says the scholarship will bring her out of the red financially for the first time since she’s been in grad school. And as long as she stays eligible, she can keep the scholarship until Clementine is 13. Workforce Solutions has been reaching out to hundreds of parents over the past few months with the same good news. Almost 300 kids have been placed in daycare through Raising Travis County. Their goal is to get to 1,000 by October. So some parents struggling to afford child care no longer have to put their lives on hold for years. They can go back to school or work, while daycare centers like Happy Hearts prepare the next generation. Maybe some of them will grow up to be public radio reporters.
Child [00:12:16] Wow, who’s that? This is a recorder. Hello, hello, hello!
Katy McAfee [00:12:25] I’m Katy McAfee in Austin.
Jerry Quijano [00:12:29] The Texas softball team earned one seat in this year’s NCAA Championship Tournament as the Longhorns look to defend their 2025 title. Texas will host Baylor, Wagner, and Wisconsin in the Austin Regional that begins at the end of the week. The Horns will start their tourney against Wagner at 3 p.m. On Friday. UT earned their first Southeastern Conference softball championship over the weekend with a victory against Alabama. We’ll be back after a break. This is Austin Signal. This is Austin Signal, welcome back. The pool at Barton Springs was first built around a hundred years ago, but the springs that feed it have been around since long before humans ever arrived here in Austin. The limestone formations that create the natural springs there were formed millions of years ago. So what have human relationships to those springs been like over the thousands of years since people came on the scene? We’ve got a question about that for our ATXplain project. KUT’s Elizabeth McQueen, dove into it.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:13:32] Anyone who knows me knows I love Barton Springs. I love it in a way that I have never loved any other body of water. When I swim in Barton springs, I feel like my whole true self. It feels like the water has magical properties, sacred properties even. So when I was choosing a question for A.T. Explained, I knew it was gonna be Brendan Cavanaugh’s.
Brendan Kavanaugh [00:13:57] Why were the springs sacred before Uncle Billy showed up, and what was the indigenous population’s relationship with them?
Elizabeth McQueen [00:14:05] By Uncle Billy, he means William Barton, the man who laid claim to the springs in 1837. He settled there with his family and the people he enslaved. Now I assumed Brindon’s question came from a place of love for the springs and general curiosity. But then he said this.
Brendan Kavanaugh [00:14:23] I visited the White Shaman mural and I learned that the springs are actually part of that mural, which was astonishing to me.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:14:34] This was the first time I’d ever heard of the White Shaman mural. It’s a piece of rock art that sits in the desert about 220 miles west of here. Archeologists say the White shaman was painted around 400 BC. They call the style it’s painted in the Pecos River style. And it’s really big, 26 feet long and 13 feet high. Archeologist think the mural shows a creation story, but some people think it’s even more than that.
Gary Betez [00:15:02] My name is Gary Bettis. I am known best as the person who deciphered the white shaman mural into a 2,000-year-old map.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:15:12] Gary is the chief of the Qualtecan-Pakawa Nation. Gary saw the White Shaman mural for the first time in 2009. He came to believe that it not only tells a creation story, but that it’s also an ancient map of Central Texas. On the mural is a pictograph. It’s a curved line, think one third of a circle, and coming off the line at regular intervals are four matching. I don’t know exactly what they are, but they kind of look like knives to me, with gray handles and white blades. Gary says that this pictograph represents four sacred springs, San Antonio Springs, San Marcos Springs, Comal Springs, and Barton Springs. All of these springs are connected to the Edwards Aquifer. He even laid out this part of the White Shaman mural on a modern map. He asked a mapping expert to help him out.
Gary Betez [00:16:03] Would you take these four dots in this rock art and pull them off with your computer to see if they fit neatly between Barton Springs and San Antonio? Then they did. And that was it. Then we knew we were looking at a map for sure.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:16:18] And Gary doesn’t think it’s just a map, but also a calendar. Kind of like the Mayan calendar, but for hunter-gatherers.
Gary Betez [00:16:26] These calendars exist everywhere, but this particular one is specific to Central Texas.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:16:34] He sees this calendar as a scientific tool. There are many people who agree with Gary’s interpretation of the White Shaman mural, but there are people who disagree.
Dr. Harry Schaffer [00:16:47] There is no relationship at all to White Shaman and the Springs of Central Texas and especially Barton Springs of Austin.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:16:54] Dr. Harry Schaeffer is a curator of archeology at the Woody Museum, which owns the White Shaman site.
Dr. Harry Schaffer [00:17:00] We have a really good handle on the archeology of the lower Pecos region and Central Texas. And there’s no tie in the lower Pekos to Central Texas
Elizabeth McQueen [00:17:14] So does the white shaman mural depict four springs in central Texas, including Barton Springs? Depends on whose science you believe. Harry Schaeffer’s science says no. Gary Perez’s science, says yes. What we do know for sure is that people have lived around Barton springs for millennia. And they were there way before the white Shaman mural was even painted.
Dr. Michael Collins [00:17:36] The archeological record for the Barton Springs area goes back at least 13,000 years. There were certainly people here long before the early historical records show.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:17:50] This is Dr. Michael Collins. He’s an archeologist who worked in central Texas. He was interviewed at Barton Springs back in 2008 by Karen Kocher, a documentary filmmaker in Austin.
Dr. Michael Collins [00:18:01] Here, with abundant water, game coming to the water, the pecans, all of those things that are concentrated around the spring, and all of the things that are readily accessible, make this an ideal place for people who live off the land.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:18:19] Even in its natural state, long before the springs were dammed up to make a pool, people were drawn to this place. Not for beauty. Well, maybe for beauty—mostly, it was for survival. Like Michael said, it is an abundant place. There was food and water everywhere. Everything people needed was around them. But the people Collins is talking about? They weren’t the same people who lived there by the time European colonists arrived.
Dr. Michael Collins [00:18:45] So we don’t even know the names of those groups whose archeological record fills the 12 or so thousand years before arrival of Europeans.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:18:56] Did these people have a sacred relationship with the Springs? Maybe. We may never know the exact details, but we do know something about the indigenous people who came later. When William Barton arrived at the Springs, we know that there were Comanche, Tunkawa, Cato, Lipan Apache, and Qualtecan people in the area, among others. We know some of these people had a sacred friendship with the springs, but the accounts we have are secondhand from colonists. And remember, these were all very different cultures who spoke different languages and believed different things. By the time William Barton showed up, Europeans had already been in the area for 100 years. The Spanish had missions on Barton Springs in the 1700s and their arrival brought diseases that killed a lot of indigenous people in the era. Barton lived in Austin during the Texas Republic, when many of the tribes that lived here were killed or forcibly removed. And Native Americans were erased in other ways. Here’s Craig Campbell, an anthropology professor at UT.
Craig Campbell [00:19:58] So under the Texas Republic, at one point, there was a law that was passed that essentially arbitrarily turned a number of indigenous groups into Mexicans, is what they said. They were like, you’re no longer indigenous, you’re Mexicans.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:20:12] And this genocidal campaign worked, at least in our collective imagination as a state.
Craig Campbell [00:20:18] In Texas, there’s this sort of assumption there’s no more Indians here, when in fact, we have this absolutely huge population of indigenous people that rarely gets recognized.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:20:30] Texas actually has the fifth largest population of Indigenous people in the country. According to the U.S. Census, there are over 700,000 people in Texas who identify, at least in part, as Indigenous. Yet, we don’t think of ourselves as Indian country. Indigenous people have been whitewashed from our collective story of Texas. But like I said, there a lot of Indigenous living in Texas right now, and some of them have a sacred relationship with these springs. There’s a video of Maria Rocha, of the Mike and Garza band, sharing an abbreviated version of the Qualtecan creation story.
Maria Rocha [00:21:08] Time ago. There was an upper world and a lower world. And in the upper world were all the things of Mother Earth, the trees, the hills, the animals, the birds, everything except the people. At that time, the people were spirits in the underworld.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:21:27] The first humans needed to get from the lower world to the upper world. So they prayed, and a deer appeared to lead them to the Upper World. The deer led them through rock and dirt until they could see a portal above. A portal full of water.
Maria Rocha [00:21:42] And so the deer started swimming up through the portal, so the people grabbed onto the deer and the deer grabbed onto to the people and they were swimming and swimming up through that portal. At the same time, there was a water bird flying over on Mother Earth, flying over these springs. So the water bird dove into the water and grabbed the deer and grabbed the people and pulled them up onto the shores of Mother Earth. And that’s how the people first came to be on Mother earth.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:22:11] It’s not a story specifically about Barton Springs. It’s actually about Comal Springs. But again, all these springs are connected. They’re all on the Edwards Aquifer. And there are indigenous people today who hold these springs sacred. Every August, a group of mostly women make a pilgrimage to the four sacred springs. At each site, they commune with the water and offer prayers.
Diana Dos Santos [00:22:34] I’m alive because of the water. So in a way it’s that giving back, that offering, that love, like I’m here, I see you, thank you, and that’s all I can offer is me.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:22:48] That was Diana Dos Santos. She’s gone on the pilgrimage for the last three years. Seba has gone for the two.
Diana Dos Santos [00:22:54] I think about all the ways that force brings, connects me to my lineage, to my spirituality. To me, I think of them as wombs.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:23:07] Where life is born. They start at San Antonio Springs at dawn and end up at Barton Springs in the afternoon. Diana told me it’s a long day, but it doesn’t really feel long.
Diana Dos Santos [00:23:18] The whole day feels like it just merges into a short moment, because when you’re in the water, when you are praying with all these women is, yeah, it’s like the whole world, the past, the present, everything just mergers into one moment and when you present there with your prayer, with your medicine, with the other sisters, it is incredible. It’s magical.
Elizabeth McQueen [00:23:50] These days, most of us think of Barton Springs as a really cold swimming pool. But maybe you’re like me, and when you’re swimming, you feel something else. You feel connected. Connected to yourself, to the people around you, to the animals swimming with you, to the plants grazing you as you swim by, to the trees overhead and the sky above you. Now you know that human beings have been in a relationship with Barton springs for thousands of years. Sometimes a sacred relationship. And you know that there are still people who see these springs as a holy place. So maybe now you’ll think about your own relationship to the springs. Even if you never thought to pray or give offerings to those cold waters, do you think Barton Springs is sacred? I’m Elizabeth McQueen in Austin.
Jerry Quijano [00:24:49] And that is it for today’s show. Austin Signal will be back tomorrow at one o’clock. I’m your host Jerry Quijano. Have a great day!
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
