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The Hays Consolidated School District voted unanimously in favor of more than $12 million dollars in budget cuts ahead of the next school year. It’s the largest such budget slash in more than a decade, and it’s a move other school districts could be facing in coming years.
There’s not much known about the tactics and technology used by Texas state police and ICE agents to detain people. But video from a detention last summer in East Austin is providing a better picture of how enforcement operations unfold.
Around a hundred million years ago, a small baby dinosaur about two years old died amid the harsh landscape. Fast forward a few years, and now that little dinosaur is the center of an exciting new discovery by UT Austin researchers.
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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 Hays Consolidated School District voted unanimously in favor of more than $12 million in budget cuts ahead of the next school year. It’s the largest such budget slash in more than a decade, and it’s a move other school districts could be facing in coming years. And there’s not much known about the tactics and technology used by Texas state police and ICE agents to detain people, but video from a detention last summer in East Austin is providing a better picture of how enforcement operations unfold. More about these stories coming up on today’s show.
KUT Announcer: Laurie Gallardo [00:00:38] The Austin Signal is a production of KUT News, hosted by Jerry Quijano.
Jerry Quijano [00:00:43] Plus, around a hundred million years ago, a small baby dinosaur about two years old died amid the harsh landscape. Fast forward a few years, and now that little dinosaur is at the center of an exciting new discovery. Come hear about it, that’s next on Austin Signal. Howdy out there, thank you for tuning in to Austin Signal. I’m your host, Jerry Keconnell, it is Tuesday, March 31st, the last day of the month. Thanks for spending part of your day here with us. Last night, Hays Consolidated ISD voted to cut 12 and a half million dollars from its school budget for next year. What does that mean and how is that gonna impact the county? Well, for more, we are joined by KUT’s Hays County reporter, Lee Walden. Lee, thanks for joining us on the show.
Leigh Walden [00:01:36] Thanks for having me.
Jerry Quijano [00:01:38] So, let’s start first by talking about a big thing I know is that some educators will be losing their job amidst this job budget slash, excuse me. Can you tell us more about those proposed layoffs?
Leigh Walden [00:01:51] Yeah, yeah. It was a tough meeting to sit through. There’s going to be educator layoffs and reclassifications and job title changes throughout the district. They don’t really have an exact number of the number of instructors that they’re losing or reclassifying. They’re trying to do as best a job as possible to keep people within the district, but we like seven librarians are going to be lost. Teachers are going to be laid off and they’ve been having those conversations slowly and I think more information about that will come out once they have a final number of how many educators are no longer going to have their positions. But yeah, it’s kind of going to be a big transition for the district as they come to terms with their new numbers.
Jerry Quijano [00:02:35] Yeah, there will be a lot of educators who lose their job and there will a lot others who still have their jobs but will be affected in other ways. Tell us about those.
Leigh Walden [00:02:43] Yeah, there’s going to be a change in the stipends that teachers receive. For one thing, there are stipends offered to teachers within Hays CISD for things like professional degrees, so if you’ve got your master’s or your PhD. So folks who have gotten used to and been reliant on that money being in their paycheck are going to have to make substantial adjustments next year because it’s several hundred dollars a month and you know that adds up over the course of a school year. I talked to a teacher and parent within Hays Ruah Gleason, and she told me that this is gonna be felt for folks.
Ruah Gleason [00:03:23] It’s definitely reduces their ability to bring their paycheck up just a tiny bit for their things like their master’s degree, their doctor’s degree which they’ve worked very hard for, probably put their families on the back burner, probably taken student loans out. So it seems really really punitive and unfair.
Jerry Quijano [00:03:45] Okay, Lee, what else do we know about these budget cuts for next school year?
Leigh Walden [00:03:49] Yeah, so another addition to these budget cuts or, you know, within this plan is fees for sports. So they’re going to ask athletes, student athletes to start to pay fees to participate, something that’s been happening for folks who are doing like fine arts extracurriculars for years now. So it’s kind of a question of equity at a certain point, too, but fees for folks in sports, they’re cutting some arts programs. And one of the particular issues… Of interest, and that came up a lot last night, was class sizes being increased. So they’re going to have more students to teachers across the board. So pre-K is going to be 24 to 1. Fifth grade is somewhere around 27, I believe, and then, yeah, 6 through 12 are going to have class sizes of around 30. So it’s a lot of kids in a classroom, and I think teachers and parents alike are concerned about what those numbers are going to look like.
Jerry Quijano [00:04:47] In your reporting you talk about how the way the district is funded is an issue and how many folks or how folks have proposed funding by attendance instead. Can you tell us how it’s currently funded?
Leigh Walden [00:04:58] Yeah, it’s a little funky. Texas is one of six states to be funded on what’s called average daily attendance, or ADA, instead of just enrollment. So in most of the country, districts are funded based on the number of students enrolled. But in Texas, they use this equation where it’s the number students enrolled multiplied by that ADA, that average daily attendance, which in Hays, I mean, it took a hit in the pandemic as students I just lost some engagement because of… You know, online schooling and we’re taking time off because they were getting sick. So it’s sitting around 93.7%, but that around 6% is deeply felt. I talked to the HACISD Chief Communications official yesterday and Tim Savoy was telling me that this is something that, you know they’ve been thinking about for years, but it’s especially pertinent as they start to make these budget cuts.
Tim Savoy [00:05:51] Texas still funds on average daily attendance. And like I said, ours is 93.7, but that doesn’t mean we pay the teacher 93. 7% of their salary and we don’t get to pay 93. 7% of the elected bill for the school. All the bills and expenses are 100%, but we’re not funded at 100%.
Jerry Quijano [00:06:15] We have been speaking with Lee Walden. She is KUT’s Hays County reporter. We’re going to have a link to her reporting in today’s show notes and at kut.org slash signal Lee. Thank you.
Leigh Walden [00:06:25] Thanks so much.
Jerry Quijano [00:06:26] And in more education news, Austin Independent School District yesterday decided to close the oldest operating elementary school in Austin. That’s Blackshear Elementary. The plan set for 2028 is to merge the Blacksheer campus community with the more modern Oak Springs Elementary. We’re gonna have more about that in today’s show notes. Texas state police and ICE agents last summer conducted an immigration sweep in East Austin that resulted in the detention of five workers near a construction site. The arrest sparked anger from immigrant rights groups and raised questions about due process and police tactics. Recently, the Texas newsroom obtained police dash and body cam video of the event through an open records request. As the Texas Newsroom’s Moe’s Bouchelle reports, those videos shed light on how police, and federal agents. Use traffic stops to pull people into deportation proceedings, and reveal Department of Public Safety agents breaking state policy on wearing face masks.
Mose Buchele [00:07:38] Early in the morning of July 31st, State Trooper Ricky Cotto was watching traffic on Pleasant Valley Road in East Austin when he spotted Gabriel Martinez Segura driving a white Chevy van to a drywall job. Cotto later said the van’s front license plate looked out of place.
Ricky Cotto [00:07:55] Driver, can you hear me? Can you pull forward? We’re kind of blocking the road.
Mose Buchele [00:07:59] Within about 11 minutes of being stopped, Martinez Segura and the four other occupants of the van were in handcuffs and turned over to ICE. During the time in between, the videos show Cotto treating the encounter like a normal traffic stop with Martinez Segur, well, back in his police car.
Ricky Cotto [00:08:19] I need somebody at my location right away. I got a van with four to five.
Mose Buchele [00:08:24] He was requesting backup and planning how to detain the men over his radio.
Ricky Cotto [00:08:28] So the right side of the vehicle is accessible to the fence that leads into the work site. So when we come up, we’re going to have to block it.
Mose Buchele [00:08:35] When more officers arrive, some wearing ski masks or other face coverings, their vests bear the markings of state DPS agents, ICE and ATF. After the men from the van are taken away, the recordings show officers dealing with paperwork like the traffic citation.
Ricky Cotto [00:08:53] Give ice a copy.
Mose Buchele [00:08:57] Congratulations each other on the operation, at one point Cotto calls it a jackpot and explains how he pulled the men over.
Ricky Cotto [00:09:04] Improperly placed plate and I do it every time better no traffic
Mose Buchele [00:09:11] and interacting with the public. At the very end, a construction worker asked Cotto if he was the one who reported the men to ICE. You call ICE? Yes. You call ICE? Take it?
Mose Buchele [00:09:22] To which the trooper replies, Highway Patrol don’t stop anybody except for traffic violations.
Ricky Cotto [00:09:27] I just want to stop anybody from having traffic violations, that’s it.
Mose Buchele [00:09:30] I got nothing to do, really gotta stop.
Ricky Cotto [00:09:33] That’s it, I’ve got nothing to do with the other stuff.
Mose Buchele [00:09:39] But a statement provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety contradicts that. It says that Cotto was working with a Homeland Security strike team when he pulled the men over and that, quote, During the stop, the trooper was unable to verify the identity of the driver through DPS databases, so they contacted HSI. HSI is Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE.
Kristen Eder [00:10:02] What is so interesting about this particular video is the exact same types of collaboration that we used to see along the border has now moved to the interior.
Mose Buchele [00:10:12] Kristin Eder is policy director for the Texas Immigration Law Council, one of the experts we asked to review the videos. She says they highlight the speed and relative quietness of these operations in states like Texas where local and state police partner with ICE agents.
Kristen Eder [00:10:29] So one out of every four immigration apprehensions in the country is happening in Texas. So while we might not have the big kind of occupations that we see in Minneapolis, Chicago, LA, we are doing that type of disappearance at a much larger scale in a very quiet way.
Mose Buchele [00:10:52] Ian Adams, a former police officer and professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, said the videos show an almost textbook example of cross-agency partnerships, including the close communication between agencies, the speedy arrival of backup, the preoccupation with paperwork, and even the officer’s celebratory tone after the arrest.
Ian Adams [00:11:12] What comes to mind is, for example, fugitive task forces
Mose Buchele [00:11:16] Both Adams and Etter said some of the police tactics on display might surprise the general public, but are actually pretty standard practice from the use of what’s called pretextual traffic stops.
Ian Adams [00:11:28] Pretextual stops just means I’m going to stop somebody for a violation I’ve actually observed. And maybe I’ll also keep my eyes out for, you know, other suspicious or possibly criminal activities.
Mose Buchele [00:11:44] An officer allowing a suspect to believe the stop was about one thing when it’s really about something else.
Kristen Eder [00:11:51] All law enforcement, including state and federal law enforcement officers, are allowed to use trickery, lies, and deceit to gain cooperation, confession.
Mose Buchele [00:12:02] Admissions. In response to email questions, Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Sheridan Nolan wrote that the operation last year was part of a state and federal partnership that is making our state safer. Though Kristen Eder notes, none of the men arrested were charged with criminal offenses. The DPS declined an interview request with state trooper Ricky Cotto. Cotto did not wear a mask during the operation, but some state police agents did. When emailed about the agent’s face masks, Nolan replied that it is not DPS practice to conceal identities, and the use of face-concealing masks by criminal investigations division’s special agents, as shown in the video, is specifically prohibited. He wrote that each agent will be counseled and their chain of command will be making it clear face coverings should not be worn on duty unless for reasons outlined in policy. Again, Ian Adams.
Ian Adams [00:12:56] When the police start believing that policing needs to be hidden, that sort of attacks the trust that the community can have. I think professionally a lot of officers themselves have concerns about it because
Mose Buchele [00:13:12] The operation documented in these videos did not involve the City of Austin police department, but the videos are coming out as Austin announces new policies over how to manage city officers’ interactions with ICE, and Austin City Council considers new rules banning all law enforcement from using face coverings while in the city. For Austinites and other Texans in cities that oppose the ICE surge, these videos are a reminder that regardless of local policy state police have been in power to enforce immigration law anywhere in Texas. In fact, in the months since these arrests, they’ve been given greater powers to make immigration apprehensions. Again, Kristin Eder.
Kristen Eder [00:13:52] It’s safe to assume that any time law enforcement is involved, there is a risk of immigration detention.
Mose Buchele [00:13:58] One unanswered question is what happened to the men detained that day. Where nationality was included in the arrest records, the men were listed as being from Mexico. ICE did not respond to repeated requests for information. Austin Immigrant Advocacy Groups and the Mexican Consulate in Austin said they had no information. But there is some indication the men may have been removed from the country. Federal records made available by the Deportation Data Project show that five men with Mexican citizenship were booked into an ice holding room in Austin at 10 a.m. On the same morning that the East Austin operation took place. While the records do not include names, they indicate that all five of them were ultimately deported. For the Texas Newsroom, I’m Mose Buchele.
Jerry Quijano [00:14:45] And we’re gonna have a link to Mose’s story in today’s show notes and at kut.org slash signal. This is Austin Signal. We will be back after a break. This is Austin Signal, welcome back. Around a hundred million years ago, a small, possibly fuzzy baby dinosaur, about two years old, died amid its harsh landscape. Fast forward a few hundred years or so, and that little dinosaur is now the center of an exciting new discovery in Korea involving researchers from the University of Texas at Austin. It’s called the Doolysaurus and it’s being held as a new species of baby dinosaur. Two of the researchers among those who made this discovery spoke with Texas Standard recently, Jongyun Jung, a visiting postdoctoral researcher at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences, and Julia Clark, a professor at the Jackson School. They spoke with the Texas Standard host, Angela Kocherga.
Angela Kocherga [00:15:46] So when did you realize you had a new species and how did you feel at that moment?
Jongyun Jung [00:15:51] Yeah, actually my research background was the fossil footprint and concept of their footprints and tracks. But yeah, I’m always dreaming to finding new dinosaur species by my hands. So after we excavated these dinosaur fossils and scanning this specimen, we figured out very different character with other dinosaur species. And yeah, this is the one of the very important moments in my life.
Julia Clark [00:16:18] I would, you know, I’m going to add to that, I’ll just say that figuring out whether you have a new species, it might be interesting to know, is not an easy process because you have to compare the attributes of the new specimen, the new skeleton, to all other known dinosaurs. And there are different datasets that help you do that, but it’s like You have to look at every bump on every bone, at the characteristics of every part of the skull to make sure that you don’t have another representative of a previously described species. So when we finally had that evidence and we could clearly say that this was a new species. Yeah, it was a very exciting moment. I mean, given this is the first a new dinosaur species described from Korea in how many years is it Jung-Yoon?
Jongyun Jung [00:17:17] After 15 years.
Julia Clark [00:17:19] In 15 years.
Angela Kocherga [00:17:19] Years. So it’s pretty remarkable. Well, I know much of the research around this fossil was done there at UT Austin. Dr. Clark, can you share a bit about the role of the geosciences department there and what it did in undertaking this study? Yeah, it’s
Julia Clark [00:17:37] It’s been a really fun collaboration and I’ll go back a little bit further in time. I was visiting Korea to give a seminar at the home university of the Korean Dinosaur Center and Jongyun and his colleagues showed me the fossil in the block and I was like, wow, that’s very cool, but I can’t tell what it is. And I could see that this rock was really, really hard and the bones actually softer than the surrounding rock. And so I was like, this is a great candidate for CAT scanning or CT scanning, using X-rays to see inside the block. And so, I invited Dr. Jung and his colleagues to come to UT and we would CT scan the fossil. And I think that’s where we had like the totally crazy aha moment where you know, Dr. Jung and colleagues were looking inside the block and they’re like, we have a skull. And that was just very cool.
Angela Kocherga [00:18:41] Dr. Clark, since, as we mentioned, this is being hailed as a new species of baby dinosaur, tell us about what this discovery means to our evolving understanding of the dinosaur world.
Julia Clark [00:18:54] Yeah, it’s very cool. You have, essentially, in the Korean Peninsula, a chance to sample Far East Asian dinosaurs from this really key time interval, which is this mid-Cretaceous time. And this is a time period where there’s a lot of exchange between what we now, you know, Eurasia and North America. And so what is really neat about the new species is it samples part of a lineage that has representatives both in North America during this time period and Asia, but it fills in kind of another piece of that story. It tells us more about the connections between those species on these two, what are today, you know, very distant continents.
Angela Kocherga [00:19:42] Tell us what this dinosaur looks like. You mentioned it’s a baby, but what some of the characteristics are?
Julia Clark [00:19:50] Well, the first thing I’d mention is that this dinosaur would fit on your desk. It’s a desk-sized dinosaur. You know, it’s comfortably, you know, maybe the size of a small dog or a large cat, you know. So it’s not a particularly large animal. Of course, dinosaurs are not closely related to mammals. They are, you know, birds are living dinosaurs. Other parts of the group of dinosaurs that this, that Doolysaurus is a part of, were fuzzy. And so we don’t have fuzz preserved in the actual fossil in this case, but we know that relatives of Dulis was fuzzy.
Angela Kocherga [00:20:34] And Jung Yoon, what do you hope to learn more about when it comes to this dinosaur?
Jongyun Jung [00:20:40] Actually, this site, we also find many dinosaur egg fossils, including bird eggs also. So we’re expecting much more diverse dinosaurs will live in this site. And maybe we’re also we’re expecting finding new dinosaur fossils in this side.
Angela Kocherga [00:20:57] So, Dr. Jung, we’re calling it Doolysaurus, but tell us about the species.
Jongyun Jung [00:21:01] This species’ name is Doolysaurus hominae and is named after Professor Minha from Korea who excavated the first dinosaur nest fossil in this site and also worked on various paleontological projects of Korea over 30 years.
Julia Clark [00:21:19] Yeah, to add to Dr. Jung’s comments, the full name of this dinosaur is Doolysaurus homini, as he mentioned. And what it references, what I’d like to call out as a key contribution, another key contribution of Dr. Homin, is working to preserve fossil sites in Korea. So, he’s been very active in… The UNESCO mission to preserve geoparks and those include a lot of the sites in Korea with these amazing trackways and egg fossils and it’s just been really wonderful to see that effort to conserve paleontological sites.
Angela Kocherga [00:22:05] Well, this is all so fascinating and all so fun, and I’m a huge dinosaur fan, like so many people, so we really appreciate all of your research. We’ve been speaking with Julia Clark, a professor at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, and Jongyun Jung, a post-doctoral researcher at the school, about the discovery of the Doolysaurus, a brand new baby dinosaur species. Julia, Jongyun, thank you again for joining us on The Texas Standard.
Jerry Quijano [00:22:34] Pleasure. And you can have a peek at the Dualisaurus yourself. There’s a link in the show notes for today’s podcast and at kut.org slash signal. That is it for today’s show. Rayna Sevilla is our technical director, Kristen Cabrera is our managing producer, and I’m your host Jerry Quijano. We will be back with you tomorrow. 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.
