The forecast continues to evolve
as an arctic cold front heads toward
the Austin area this weekend.
Temperatures are forecast to remain
below freezing starting Saturday
night here in Central Texas, and
they could stay that way through
Monday.
The latest forecasts and updates
from city officials, that's coming
up on today's show.
The Austin Signal is a production
of KUT News, hosted by
Jerry Quijano.
Austin Community College's free
tuition pilot program ballooned to
nearly 10,000 students this
academic year.
The students who are being impacted
and the things that they're learning
about.
And Huston Tillotson University's
Jazz Orchestra is among the top
bands in the country.
We'll hear about their competition
last weekend in New York.
Plus photojournalism collides with
original songwriting in the new
project, Witness.
We have more about that coming up
on Austin Signal.
Howdy, it's Austin Signal.
Thank you for making us part of
your Friday.
Let's get right into it because we
have a lot to share with you.
A massive Arctic front is bearing
down on central Texas.
The National Weather Service expects
it could bring freezing temperatures
to Austin through maybe Tuesday
with a chance of freezing rain or
sleet. At a news conference today,
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson's message
was simple.
Winter is here.
KUT's Andrew Weber has been covering
the storm And this week he has more
about preparations.
The days-long blast of cold air
is expected to bring some freezing
rain or sleet to Austin sometime
Saturday, likely in the afternoon.
That Arctic blast could coat
Austin's roads in a fine glaze
of ice, and it could weigh
down the city's dense tree canopy,
presenting the risk of power outages
if limbs tumble down onto power
lines like they did in 2023.
Travis County Judge Andy Brown
issued a disaster declaration today
ahead of the front.
At a news conference this morning,
he was joined by Mayor Watson.
Who had a simple request.
If you don't need to be out over
the weekend, please don't
be out, don't be on the streets
and get your home
ready.
Watson Brown and other officials
urged Austinites and Central Texans
to have a plan.
Jason Runyon with the National
Weather Service said this
dangerously cold weather system
could bring up to a quarter inch of
ice accumulation starting Saturday
when freezing rain and sleet are
expected to hit the hill country.
Runyon added that the forecast is
changing.
He urges residents to keep up
to date on the forecast.
This forecast is still evolving,
even over the next 24 to 36 hours.
While our confidence is increasing
on the overall impacts,
fluctuations in the ICE forecast are
still possible and likely.
While ERCOT, the state's electrical
grid operator, says it does not
anticipate large-scale power
outages, the local concern about
Austin Energy's grid is very
real. Ice weighed down tree limbs
across the city in 2023,
causing outages for hundreds of
thousands of Austinites for days.
General Manager Stuart Riley said
the city-owned utility has spent the
years since retooling and improving
its responses to winter weather.
Austin Energy is fully staffed and
is prepared to reach out to other
utilities
need be.
Austin Energy over the past few
years has done a great deal to
prepare for storms,
in particular to prepare for winter
storms like what we're facing right
now. Our crews are ready, our
staffing plans are in place, so we
are the most prepared that we have
ever been for a winter storm.
Watson and others advised Austinites
to have a plan in place in case the
power goes out, check on your
neighbors, and make sure you have
enough food and water ahead of the
front. I'm Andrew Weber in Austin.
As conversations about the costs
of higher education continue,
community colleges have seen a small
percentage increase in enrollment.
Now this is true for Austin
Community College as well,
but another factor is ACC's
free tuition pilot program.
It launched in the fall of 2024 and
a year later saw double
the number of participants.
For more about this story, we're
speaking with KUT's Greta
Diaz-Gonzalez-Vasquez.
Thanks for coming on Austin Signal.
Hi Jerry, thank you for having me.
Yeah, so remind us, what
is this free pilot program?
I'm assuming it's free tuition, but
what is the goal behind this?
Yes, that's right.
So it's free tuition and no fees
for students who graduated
after July 2023
in the ACC service
area or students who got their GED
after that date, also students who
were homeschooled.
And the idea is that more students
can access college education
because we all know that is very
expensive.
And was there a reason why they
wanted to start this program?
It was just, I'm guessing, to
increase enrollment, to increase
education among the community.
What was the reason they wanted to
start it in the first place?
Yeah, so back in 2024, when
the pilot program was approved, ACC
officials said that at least
12,000 Central Texas
high school graduates were not
going into college.
So they hadn't enrolled to college
after graduating.
And so they wanted to bring that
number down, make sure that people
had access to
college, but not only that, that
they would be able to enroll and
also stay in college because maybe
you can do the first year, but then,
you know, the budget
changes.
Yeah, right.
It changes, things change as we hear on
the radio, you know, things are
always changing.
Different factors are impacting
people's ability to do anything and
everything here in Austin and across
the country.
So I know that you've spoken with
folks at ACC.
So first off, I wanted to ask you,
what are the kinds, who are the kind
of students that are benefiting from
this program so far.
Right, yeah, I spoke to Jenna
Kulinane-Hagee and she is
the Vice Chancellor of Institutional
Research and Analytics and she
was telling me that they did
interviews with students who have
benefited from this program and she
said there are three main groups
that have benefited from this.
The first is students who thought
they wouldn't go to college because
they couldn't afford to go to
College.
Second is students, who thought well
maybe I can wait a couple of work
a little bit, save money, and then
go to college.
Uh, studies find that those students
rarely go to college.
And the third group was students who
plan on getting a certificate and
then jumping into the workforce.
They now can go to and
get an associate or even a
bachelor's degree.
Now I mentioned at the top that this
program has doubled in size, this
current academic year is featuring
about nearly 10,000 students
who are benefiting from this
program.
What were the numbers in the first
year and how much of that might be
a little bit of a crossover?
Yeah that's right the first year it
was around 5 000 students but then
you know that not all of them will
come back
These are not all unique students,
right?
Right. But then they also realized
that a lot of those students were
coming back.
The rate of students that would come
back every semester would
also increase because students can
stay in college.
And then this year with the two
cohorts is almost 10,000 students.
OK.
What kinds of programs are these
students learning about?
What kind of classes are they
taking?
You know, they said that they are
taking all kinds of classes, but
there were three programs that ACC
saw an increase on enrollment
this year.
And they're mainly workforce-aligned
programs or health-related programs.
And so it was advanced
manufacturing, skilled trades,
and health sciences.
Those three programs saw at least
a 17% increase in
enrollment. And I have to
say ACC saw a 7%
increase, And that would be.
Around 41,000 students.
And out of all these students, out
of that 41,024 are
part of this pilot program according
to our math.
Okay, according to your math, okay,
excellent. Well, we have more about
this story over at KUT.org.
Greta Diaz-Gonzalez Vasquez
is a morning edition producer here
at KUt, but you will be hearing more
of her here on Austin Signal,
KUT's education reporter,
Greta Dias-Gonsalez-Vasquez.
Thanks for coming on the show, we
appreciate you.
Thank you, Jerry.
Huston-Tillotson University's Jazz
Orchestra is among the top
bands in the country after their
finish at the National Collegiate
Jazz Competition in New York last
weekend.
As KUT's Katy McAfee reports,
Huston- Tillotson was the smallest
school selected to perform and
the only all undergraduate
band.
Huston Tillotson's jazz program
didn't exist until about four years
ago.
That's when Jeremy George rolled the
dice and left his job teaching music
at the high school level in Florida
to develop the university's jazz
programs.
Before I moved here and
took this job, I didn't know
anything about Huston-Tillerson
University.
You know, I was over in Florida,
like, working at Huston- Tillerson,
this job opening, where?
Where is it?
George says once he got to Austin,
he realized even people in Austin
haven't heard of Huston Tillotson.
But within four years, his students
were on stage at Austin city limits
and playing next to Wynton Marsalis
at a residency in Virginia.
Still, George felt like his band,
only a few years old and with
limited funding, was kind of an
underdog.
Being selected to perform at the
National Collegiate Jazz Competition
was a stretch.
Until September, when George
got an email.
I looked at it and I closed my
phone. I was like, this can't be
what I read.
Only 10 schools are selected to play
at nationals each year.
That's out of hundreds of programs,
many with 20 plus years of
performances behind them.
Huston Tillotson was one of just two
schools from Texas selected to
perform, the other being UT.
The competition goes like this.
Each band plays three songs.
Two of them have to be from Duke
Ellington's library.
And if you're not familiar,
Ellington is widely considered one
of the greatest American composers
of all time.
The third tune can be a student
arrangement or a piece from the Jazz
at Lincoln Center Library.
That adds up to a performance that
lasts about 18 minutes.
George and the band practiced those
18 minutes for more than four
months.
Dorian Verner is a third year
percussion student.
He says he had his eye on this
competition for years and
rehearsing for it felt like getting
ready for battle.
That was my mindset going into it
the whole time, because
we were about to be in front of
the biggest jazz schools in
the nation,
and coming from Austin, Texas all
the way to New York, like one of
the big jazz cities in the world.
But when competition day came,
George says he told his students to
focus, not on the audience,
not about the fact that they're
playing in New York, focus
on the music.
We blocked the world out, and
it was all about us in
that moment.
As soon as I say it, one, two,
three, four.
I didn't even think about the
fact that you know thousands
of people were watching online and
you know there were hundreds of
people in the audience.
Not at all.
I just, I was with my students.
Joshua Saffold plays trumpet in the
band. He says the whole performance
was a blur.
I walked on and then I walked off.
Like, everything happened so
fast.
Verner said this, too.
The gravity of their performance
didn't hit him until the next day.
Sitting and watching and listening
to the performance that we had on
Sunday, that was probably
the best we have ever sounded.
Huston Tillotson came in third
place.
Michigan State University finished
second, and Temple University
came out on top.
With the third place win, I asked
George, is the Huston Tillotson
Jazz Orchestra still an underdog?
We are no longer the underdogs.
Technically, we
are the third best jazz program
in the world.
Think of that.
I'm Katy McAfee in Austin.
The Huston Tillotson University Jazz
Orchestra will be back on the big
stage in April.
They open for Parliament Funkadelic
at the Austin Blues Festival at
Waterloo Park.
Follow more KUT Art Beat coverage
at KUT.org and
we've got more Austin signal for
you after this break.
This is Austin Signal.
Austin-based photojournalist Tamir
Khalifa has covered numerous stories
over his career, from Hurricane
Harvey to the aftermath for victims
of mass shootings in El Paso in 2019
and Robb Elementary in Uvalde in
2022.
But along with the images that he's
made, Khalifa also penned lyrics and
music inspired by the events in
a project that he calls Witness,
which is debuting tonight out at the
Long Center.
He brought this new project to
Studio 1A here at KUT and
spoke about it with Texas Standards'
Laura Rice.
Absolutely. Well, it's actually your
second time on our program and the
last time we spoke, almost a year
ago exactly, you had just
been awarded the American Mosaic
Journalism Prize for your
photography in Uvalde.
And I understand you actually took
that prize money and put it toward
this new project, which explores
Uvalda and beyond.
What do you want people to know
about witness?
So, Witness is a combination
of my photographs and
music that has been inspired by
my reporting and experiences behind
the camera.
So, Uvalde, the songs I wrote
about Uvalade, three of them, are
the emotional center of the piece,
but this project is really
career spanning.
It covers my
time documenting the
Texas-Mexico border, the Walmart
shooting in El Paso, the
pandemic, Hurricane Harvey.
And covering the Kilauea Volcano
eruption in Hawaii in 2018.
And so throughout all of
my experiences in all of these
places, the theme
that kept emerging
was that when people are pushed to
their limits and to their extremes,
they can reveal an extraordinary
resilience.
And music has always been an
important method for me to process
some of what I've experienced and
some of I've witnessed.
And starting in 2018, I started
writing music about it and trying to
make sense of it while also trying
to appreciate some
of the people I've met along the
way. And so this project is rooted
in a sense of care and
compassion for these people and
these issues, but it's also an
attempt to prolong some
of, the lifespan and the relevance
of some of this work, which
some of it's years old.
And as we know, the
pace of the news cycle moves.
Extremely quickly and some
of the work that we do tends to get
looked past very quickly as it's
eclipsed by whatever else is
happening and so this is this
project is an attempt to
Slow down a little bit to linger
and it's grounded in the humanity
that made these stories urgent in
the first place
You mentioned some of the topics
there, also COVID,
immigration, the El Paso
shooting.
These are really heavy stories.
You were writing along the way, but
were you also re-exploring as you
entered into this project?
Yeah, absolutely, I found that the
writing process actually sort of
seeped into the songs
in their totality and sometimes when
I was thinking of, when I writing
one piece, say
about Uvaldi, I was actually
thinking about something in
Hurricane Harvey and vice versa.
And so it's really been an
experience that has combined all of
these different elements and
different experiences, but I've
tried to make the music as
accessible as can be.
Well, you talk about combining music
and your photojournalism.
What does that look like in
practice? This is really an
experiential project that you've put
together.
Yeah, so I'm still figuring
it out myself, but this
project really is an
experience or at least I want it to
be.
And so I've developed a
performance where as
we play the songs and as I
sing them, I screen the
photographs that inspired the songs
and I've timed it so that when
you hear a certain lyric, you see an
image that actually in some cases
inspired that exact line.
And during the performance I
try to tie it all together
with stories about
some of my experiences that
in some ways pulls the, draws the
curtain from behind journalism
and helps just give a little bit
more insight into the humanity
that underlies it all.
They woke up
on America's
doorstep
What's another day,
what's another hour?
Bottle for a shower,
they woke up
Above the Rio Grande,
when past the razor wire
They could see the
texas skies for
three days
And three nights
The bridge was a bedroom with
headlights for nightlights And now
they're
waiting at the
border
Is this something you always wanted
to do, or did it kind of come up as
a dream that was made possible
in part by winning this prize?
I mean, how did this come about?
So I played in Austin
bands for many years, one of them
was Mother Falcon and I'm grateful
to be joined by some of the members
of that band, but we played in
Austin for many years and
I always, part of me wanted to make
music about photography
because as I was in the band I was
also starting to take on
assignments and more ambitious
projects and I wanted to do
something that combined all of these
things, I just didn't quite know
how.
I've long felt that
the whole can be greater than the
sum of its parts.
And so by combining music
and photography, I can
try to present an experience
that I hope is more powerful than
the two of them independently.
You've mentioned this wonderful
group of musicians with you.
There's really someone especially I
want you to introduce first.
Could you talk to me about
your co-vocalist here?
Yeah, so I'm actually getting chills
just out of gratitude.
But I'm joined here by Jasmine
Casades.
And she is truly one
of the most extraordinary young
women I've ever had the privilege of
meeting. And I feel immensely
grateful that she's joined us
here. And I'd like her to
just introduce herself.
Well, yes, I'm Jasmine Casades.
I'm from Ivaldi, Texas.
I'm the eldest sister of Jackie
Gossetis, who lost her life at Robb
Elementary.
So tell me why you get involved in
this project.
Tamir asked me to.
Well, it was one of the first
songs that Tamir
showed us was Jackie's song
and just
to participate in a project like
this that memorializes
my sister in such a
different and unique way.
I'm just very, very honored and
very grateful to keep
sharing my sister's story.
There's a rock
from Uvalde
on a ledge by
the banks of the Seine
It's tucked in the roots
of an ivy
bush Jackie's name
is written in white
She'd always dreamed
of Sien, the
city of light
I met the Kastas family early on,
covering the aftermath of the New
York Times.
And Jasmine had recognized me from
some of the time I had spent in the
square, and we just really forged a
meaningful connection and bond.
And I found out Jasmine was an
amazing singer, and I brought my
guitar, and we started singing all
sorts of different songs.
And then I just brought them a song
one day that I had written about
them. And then it's sort of been
this amazing, it's been just
an amazing journey since then.
All of the
All of the things
that'll check me
After such a tragedy, like the
one that happened in New Valdi, the
relationship between media and the
people that these stories are being
told about is such a complicated
one, and the way
that Tamir is telling these stories
so beautifully and so respectfully,
I just, just props
to Tamir.
Tamir Khalifa is a musician
and photojournalist based in
Austin. His latest project is
Witness.
We'll share videos of these
performances and links to more at
TexasStandard.org and on the Texas
Standard 82 page.
Tamir, Jasmine, all of you,
thank you so much.
All of the things
that'll check you
And you can find more about this
story and this Studio 1A performance
over at kut.org.
That is it for today here on
Austin Signal and for this week here
on the Austin Signal.
Remember, you need to have multiple
ways to stay weather aware as we
head into this weekend.
We're gonna be doing our best to
keep you updated on the latest at
kut.org, on the
KUT app and the Kut social
media channels.
So be sure to follow us there.
Thank you to Andrew Weber, Greta
Diaz-Gonzalez-Vasquez, Katy McAfee,
and Laura Rice for their help with
today's episode.
Have a great weekend, stay safe.
This is Austin Signal.