By Kelsey Jukam
For Reporting Texas

As Austin has grown and changed in the past few years, so has the stretch of Barton Springs Road between South Lamar Boulevard and Zilker Park. New restaurants, including a microbrewery, have moved in to the popular restaurant row, as well as condominium and apartment developments. Amid this changing landscape, however, is a relic of Austin’s past: the Pecan Grove RV Park.

“It’s a cultural icon,” said resident Jay Thomas of Pecan Grove, which dates back to the 1940s. “It’s the last beacon of a time almost forgotten in Austin.”

Pecan Grove is where actor Matthew McConaughey once kept his Airstream trailer, although residents say he wasn’t actually around much. Word around the park also says that the owner is the family of a Saudi billionaire who attended the University of Texas, and that’s why Pecan Grove survives while other RV parks on the road have been sold for development.

“I have heard anecdotally that the owners aren’t in any hurry to sell because they have plenty of money,” Thomas said. “But I’ve never met or talked to owners personally; I just have stories.”

Thomas’ parents rented a spot in the park for a few years to have a place to stay when they drove in from Bastrop. A few other people also rent spaces to have a vacation pad in the city. When his parents moved to Austin and bought a house, Thomas, who works for the Texas Solar Power Co., decided to take over the RV and the space. He was lured by the park’s central location and cheap rent.

“You never know how long it’s going to be here, so I figured I might as well take advantage of it while it was here,” Thomas said.

There were once three RV parks on Barton Springs. But the Shady Grove park — not to be confused with the restaurant -– was sold to condominium developers in 2008, and Mobile Manor followed last summer.

Most of the 93 spots at Pecan Grove are rented by permanent residents, many who’ve lived there for years. Many of the sites boast elaborate gardens. One RV’s entranceway is an arched trellis, covered in ivy.

Jim Dickson, a professional balloon twister, put 350,000 miles on his last RV, traveling from Key West to off the coast of Washington state. He says no other RV park in the country can compare to Pecan Grove, where he frequently stopped during his travels. When he decided to leave New Orleans after Hurricane Ivan in 2004, he knew he wanted to go to the grove.

Dickson calls Pecan Grove “a real neighborhood … the old-fashioned kind,” where neighbors really know and help each other. Two years ago, he broke his leg in a motorcycle accident. His neighbors came to the rescue, cooking, cleaning and walking his two dogs.

“Without this community I would have ended up in a VA facility,” Dickson said. “I would have lost my trailer, my dogs, but everyone here pitched in. I was just blown away.”

Michael Corcoran, a music writer who has maintained a residence at Pecan Grove for almost eight years, said the park is like a gated community, where residents are expected to keep their spaces in good condition, hold down the noise and pick up after their dogs.

Not everyone appreciated the attention that McConaughey attracted. “When he was here there would be tourists that would drive by,” Corcoran said. “But everybody is kind of edgy here; they really don’t like any notoriety.” 

For $400 a month, RVers can live in a neighborhood where rents on many one-bedroom apartments are twice that. Many residents are retired or on a disability; most are on a fixed income and would be hard-pressed to find another living situation in town, said Dickson.

“Just the way Austin is now, in East Austin, where there are black families that have to move, it’s going to be pretty much upper-middle-class white people living in the whole town,” Corcoran said. “But I think that this park is like a feather in Austin’s cap. I think the city will stay out of its way.” 

The park is owned by Limestone Rost Properties, an Austin limited partnership with no listed phone number. Two years ago, the registered agent for the partnership was changed to Pecan Grove Texas Property Management Co., run by Ibrahim Al-Rashid, Salman Al-Rashid, and Mohammad Al-Rashid, according to Texas corporation and Travis County property records. Residents speculate they are relatives, possibly sons, of the man they say owns the park, Nasser Ibrahim Al-Rashid.

The elder Al-Rashid is worth $8 billion and is an adviser to the Saudi royal court, according to Arabian Business’ 2009 list of the richest Saudis. He earned two degrees from from UT and has donated millions to universities and hospitals in Texas and elsewhere. At UT, there’s even a building named after him.

“The guy who owns Pecan Grove is Saudi Arabian billionaire,” Corcoran said. “We all feel that living here with him as the owner he’s not going to be thinking, ‘if I sell that, oh wow, I could get $10 million.’ But who knows what’s going to happen with his offspring.”

The family keeps a low profile, so little is known about why they would want to own a trailer park near downtown Austin. Some residents speculate that the elder Al-Rashid might simply have a soft spot for the place.

“If you spend any time here you realize that you are in a special place,” said Dickson. “We have a great canopy, you can’t hear the traffic, we’re 10 degrees cooler in the summer.”

He says the towering old pecans which make the natural canopy also seem to absorb stress.

Dickson and Thomas worry about the future of the trees as much as about the future of the park.

“They’re destroying the heart of Austin,” Dickson said. “This pecan grove was here before any of these people were here. It should be respected.”

But residents are hopeful that the park will survive. It is, after all, just the kind of place that helps to keep Austin weird.

By Michelle Chu
For Reporting Texas

On “bottle special” Thursdays, The Library Bar in downtown Austin can go through nearly 80 cases of beer – that’s 1,920 bottles. The bottles are dumped into the trash receptacles behind the East Sixth Street bar, along with half-eaten pizzas, broken plastic cups and other garbage. Like most other downtown bars, The Library recycles only cardboard.

“We break down the boxes that the beer and liquor come in, but we can’t do cans and bottle recycling,” said Richard Baron, a bartender’s assistant there who provided the Thursday night beer sales figure. “The dumpsters in the alley say just cardboard, and we have no option for bottles.”

Austin has an ambitious plan to reduce the amount of trash sent to landfills by 90 percent by 2040. This year, the city has implemented a ban on single-use paper or plastic shopping bags, started a pilot curbside composting program for residents and announced plans to require that restaurants compost food waste by 2017.

But managers and employees at several bars on East Sixth Street, one of downtown’s top bar and music club districts, said it would be too much trouble to separate recyclables from the food waste and other trash their customers generate. Some said they weren’t aware of city initiatives to encourage recycling downtown, which include some alley recycling bins that accept glass, cans, hard plastic containers and mixed paper products – no sorting required and at no additional cost to businesses.

Chat Damle, who manages the Aquarium on 6th, said the bar is 100 percent in support of recycling, if there were an easier way to separate recyclables from other trash, or if the city approached them to help. “If we had the bins with the open tops so only glass bottles can fit, we’d be willing to put tons of them around,” Damle said. “But we aren’t going to spend our own money to do that; the city needs to help us out.”

“Sorting through the broken glass, limes and other trash is just too hard,” said Vincent Le, manager of Buckshots on East Sixth. “There’s no business incentive to recycle. It’s not part of our priorities.”

And the bins would crowd the limited space behind the bars, said Natalie Wright, general manager of Cheers Shot Bar on East Sixth.

Stubb’s, on Red River Street, has been recycling for more than 10 years, general manager Ryan Garrett said. He said the music club and bar provides marked blue barrels for customers to place their recyclables, and trades free show tickets for pickup services by Ecology Action, a public recycling center at East Ninth Street and the Interstate 35 South access road.

Garrett said that he had no idea why other downtown bars didn’t do more recycling but added, “they should and they could.”

“A little coordination with local businesses whose business is recycling is an excellent start,” Garrett said. “It worked for us and we haven’t looked back.”

There are 143 bars and music clubs downtown, according to a 2012 report from the Downtown Austin Alliance business association. That includes more than a dozen that have sprung up in the last four years in the Rainey Street area, at downtown’s eastern edge, plus more in areas where new hotels, apartment or condominium towers have been built.

In central downtown, including East Sixth and the Warehouse District, Waste Management Inc. provides trash pickup and recycling under a contract with the city, said Bill Brice, security and maintenance program director of the alliance. Last year the company switched from limited recycling to single bins that accept more types and don’t require sorting, according to Courtney Black, spokesperson for Austin Resource Recovery, the city department that handles trash and recycling.

The department also offers consulting to help businesses “overcome unique recycling challenges” as well as recycling education and training for executives and posters that outline proper recycling practices on request, according to its website.

Black said the city might expand downtown recycling services. Last year, the City Council passed an ordinance that requires offices larger than 100,000 square feet to recycle. Over the next few years, Black said the ordinance adds more types of businesses, and reduces the size minimums.

By Hannah Shea
For Reporting Texas

Bryant Aburto, an Austin DJ, says he faints at the sight of blood. But after he heard about the explosion at the fertilizer plant in West, he didn’t hesitate to drive to the Blood Center of Central Texas to donate.

Cindy Rowe, public relations manager at the blood center, says the collection goal on an average day is 200 units of blood, or between 1,200 and 1,400 units per week. The day after the April 17 explosion in West, it collected roughly triple that, with an overwhelming number of people coming to donate.

“We saw over 740 donors. Over 1,000 people came to donate, but we had to ask a lot of them to pledge to come back,” said Rowe, who recalls 9/11 being the last time they saw so large a turnout. The blood center sent more than 200 units of blood to use in treatment of West victims.

Rowe says that in the wake of tragedy, it’s human nature for people to want to help, and the first thing they think of is donating blood. The number of people wanting to donate in the initial aftermath of a tragedy is far greater than those wanting to donate blood a month or so down the line. To avoid those spikes, many blood banks encourage donors to pledge to make appointments in the coming weeks, and according to Rowe, more than half of the appointments are honored.

The day after the explosion in West, the center expanded its hours to draw as much blood as possible. It normally closes at 6 p.m. but was still drawing blood at 8 p.m. Rowe reports that in addition to bringing in extra staff, the center also used its mobile donation buses to handle the overflow of donors. It also opened its Round Rock location, which was supposed to be closed that day.

Records from the American Association of Blood Banks show that in times of disaster, donations spike. Its 2005 National Blood and Utilization Survey shows that in 2001, around the time of 9/11, blood donations increased dramatically and decreased just as dramatically in the following years.

A 2002 article in the The New Republic also reported that donor rates crashed several weeks after the initial disaster occurred. Fewer than 10 percent of the donors waiting in line at one Manhattan donation center who were asked to make a follow-up appointment actually returned.

As a result, according to the article, between 100,000 to 300,000 units of blood donated in the initial outpouring went unused. Then, in the crash after 9/11, blood banks had to issue an emergency appeal for donations to bolster the nation’s minimal blood supplies.

According to Rowe, one of the biggest challenges for blood bankers in the aftermath of a tragedy is making sure that they don’t collect too much blood. Blood has a shelf life of about 42 days, she says, while platelets, a blood component, have a shelf life of only five days.

Rowe says the Blood Center of Central Texas periodically experiences shortages, for instance around school vacations. To remedy this, the center occasionally reaches out to the media to plead for more donors. The center also has a donor program set up in which each donation earns points that count toward redemptions from an online store. In times of serious shortage, the center offers double or even triple the points that one would normally earn, in addition to ice cream.

Blood banks generally encourage people to donate quarterly, roughly four times a year, so they can maintain a strong blood supply of all types and respond to tragedies. The Blood Center of Central Texas is the exclusive provider for blood for over 37 facilities in 10 counties.

Aburto, the DJ, grew up in New York City and remembers 9/11.

“The main reason why I wanted to donate was because I’ve seen first person how awful events like these are,” Aburto said. “The amount of destruction and the number of people who lost their lives or were injured is unbelievable, but I was too young to really know what to do to help. I figure now is my chance to do my part to help people in similar situations. I hate blood but I know it can be invaluable to people in need.”

By Hannah Shea
For Reporting Texas

Iris Rush always had an interest in yoga, but when she began taking classes at an Austin studio, she didn’t feel she was getting as much out of them as she had hoped. The problem was simple: Rush was born deaf, and the class had no interpreter.

“There was so little communication I had a hard time keeping up, knowing when to switch positions, and knowing the words for them,” said Rush, a 34-year-old Austin resident. “I felt like there was a huge barrier and I missed out on a lot of the class.”

Rush believes that deaf people are shut out of many opportunities due to the lack of interpreters. “The interest is there. It’s always been there. But not having people to  interpret for us leaves us out,” she said.

Yoga instructor Lori Massad agreed. Owner of Total Wellness Austin, Massad started offering visual yoga for the deaf in 2012.  “My business is to help people, and when I learned that other yoga studios wouldn’t allow deaf yoga, I knew I had to find a way to make it possible here,” she said.

Until recently, yoga wasn’t included in the city’s otherwise ample resources for the deaf community, which include the state-funded Texas School for the Deaf. Some consider Austin to be one of the best places for young deaf people to live. Yet while the city’s popular yoga culture has spawned dozens of studios offering classes from bikram yoga to “doga” — yoga for your dog — it has been difficult to find a studio that offers classes for deaf people.

Lindsay Stillman, who instructs the deaf yoga class at Total Wellness, uses laminated pictures to signal poses and undulating lights that change colors to indicate changes in breathing patterns.

Although Stillman is new to instructing yoga, she is no stranger to deaf communities in Texas. “I have always been a visual learner, so ASL [American Sign Language] came naturally to me,” she said.

Stillman studied film and ASL at the University of Texas at Austin and found a way to incorporate deaf characters or ASL-related visual components into her film work. When she decided to teach yoga, bringing in visual cues was a natural progression.

“Just today, one of my students told me that she’s more comfortable coming to a visual yoga class for the deaf instead of a hearing class. It’s very intimidating participating in something that’s not instructed in your native language,” Stillman said after teaching her first visual yoga class at Total Wellness.

The shifting lights she uses in her classes create a cozy setting where students feel comfortable. Stillman’s mat is placed at the front of the room so she can make eye contact with all of her students.

Stillman and Massad believe that despite the growing deaf population in Austin and the strong interest in yoga, yoga classes for the deaf are rare because instructors believe that they have to be proficient in ASL. “It’s all about being visual. You don’t have to know ASL in order to instruct a class like this,” Stillman said. “Having an interpreter is helpful, but you mostly just have to be a good communicator.”

According to Russel Burns, owner of ASL Yoga, which specializes in yoga for the deaf, the activity isn’t popular with the deaf community partly because classes are not only hard to find but also can be expensive. Yoga classes in Austin vary in cost from $10 to $25 per session, but they’re free at ASL.

Burns said that free classes are  crucial to making yoga more accessible. “We take it back to the basics and we do it for free because the deaf simply can’t afford to pay an excessive amount for yoga classes,” he said. Total Wellness offers a first yoga class for free, and afterward charges $10 per class.

Stillman hopes that her initiatives at Total Wellness will open up the yoga world to the deaf community in Austin. “Deaf, blind, blonde — yoga is a practice and everyone is always learning,” she said. “I just hope to make it expand the community, and I’m excited to see what the future holds.”

By Ian Floyd
For Reporting Texas and the Austin Business Journal

AUSTIN — Cross-breed a family business in Houston with an Austinite’s ethos, and here’s what you get: a bunch of steel plates stacked in a field between Ben White Boulevard and Interstate 35.

They’re the inch-thick plates road crews place over excavations to keep traffic moving.  John Gold III, 36, has built them into a business driven by a mentality that’s part entrepreneur and part slacker. His firm, the Plate Guy, rents about 90 plates, worth around $300,000, to utility companies, construction companies — anyone with a hole in the ground that needs a tough cover. 

“I have never been one for hard work,” says Gold, who opened Plate Guy in 1999 after he graduated from the University of Texas. “I don’t mind it, but I’m not into that ‘work your whole life.’ Everything I do is with the intention of setting up my life to where I have a lot of free time.”

Gold knew the plate business because of his 72-year-old father, John Gold Jr. The elder Gold is a restless entrepreneur who shows no slacker tendencies. He owned businesses in construction, a freight company, a crane brokerage, and finally All States Mat Inc. All States rents wood pallets that construction cranes sit on. In 1992, the company added steel plates to its rental stockpile and found plenty of customers.

With his dad’s financial help, Gold opened an Austin branch and began building his plate inventory. The elder Gold was skeptical, Gold says, but backed him anyhow. Gold says his father embodies the traditional businessman — wining, dining, golfing and looking for the next deal. For Gold, a successful business isn’t about being busy.

“I want to earn business based on demand,” he says. “I’m a good person. I provide a good service and a good price. This is what I have to offer, no more, no less.”

Kevin LeMay, a contractor for piping firm Rangeland Services LLC, has worked with Gold for four years. LeMay says the Plate Guy is simpler and more personal than a chain outlet, but “it still boils down to the price.”

“You can get the same plate for $7 a day that’s costing you $50 a day elsewhere. That’s a no-brainer,” he says in a telephone interview.

Troy Cooley met Gold when Cooley worked for a now-defunct construction company. In 2009, Cooley opened Titus Works LLC, a utilities contracting firm. When Cooley needs steel plates, he calls the Plate Guy, where he says he’s treated less like a number than he is at bigger firms.

“If I call [John] and say I need something this afternoon at 2, it’s not always going to happen, but I know he makes an effort to get me plates when I need it,” says Cooley in a phone interview.

It takes Gold a few hours to load and deliver an order, but a lot of his job is just waiting for the next order. A busy month is 12 jobs, he says, more than enough to cover the $1,000 a month he spends on land rental and operating expenses. He operates a website and does office work at home.

“If I make $5,000 a month, that’s $4,000 in my pocket,” he says. “I am not out there buying sports cars, but I live well within my means.”

Gold credits his father with bringing him into the family business, as well as making him work harder when he was younger.

“He would have me start out just by learning how to operate heavy machinery, learning how to handle all of your basic tools, how to build stuff, how to do whatever and then a lot of cleaning up and grunt work,” Gold says. “I didn’t realize for a long time that he was secretly training me.”

In 2008, the elder Gold gave his son full ownership of the Plate Guy.

“I pretty much left him alone,” John Gold Jr. says. “I don’t try to tell him too much. If he asks me, I’ll tell him my point of view. But he is intelligent and can think on his own two feet. That’s all you need.”

By Matthew Stottlemyre
For Reporting Texas

The road to redemption from a debunked and abandoned study holds at least one more challenge for the University of Texas Energy Institute and its new guard of administrators. A conflict of interest policy that promised to prevent the past from repeating itself has been delayed by the UT System amid protests from faculty, and the institute’s interim director says industry partnerships will remain key to funding its research.

Since UT established it in 2009, EI had been riding high and awash in money aimed at projects to “alter the trajectory of public discourse.” Its first publication, released on Feb. 16, 2012, drew worldwide attention for proclaiming that the controversial drilling process known as fracking doesn’t contaminate groundwater.

And that’s when the trouble started. In July 2012, a watchdog group publicized undisclosed ties between the lead researcher, Charles “Chip” Groat, and the energy industry — namely a $413,900 position on an oil and gas company’s board in 2011. By December, an independent review had found procedural problems with the report, Groat had left the university for a job that he describes as an opportunity and not “an escape clause,” and institute director Raymond Orbach had resigned but remained on campus as tenured faculty.

Today, EI is working hard to make a comeback. Thomas Edgar, who was named interim director in February, said in an interview that the institute is focused on putting its house in order, but the new order will continue to involve industry support for its research.

Edgar said it hasn’t been easy. He’s received push back from researchers, from UT and elsewhere, he has tried to recruit for EI projects. By and large, he has found most people are willing to move forward because they realize the institute is working on new projects and has new people, Edgar said.

“I have a theory about our culture today, which is that most people are actually willing to forget things,” he said.

The Institute plans to publish its next report, which began under the previous leadership, this summer.

On April 1, mechanical engineering professor Michael Webber was named deputy director, replacing Charles E. Cooke, who, according to the university, resigned to rejoin EOP Group, a Washington DC-based energy think tank.

Despite the public scrutiny after the Groat study, the UT System has announced it will delay and reconsider its plans for new disclosure policies for all researchers. The policy would have required compensated and uncompensated activity outside the university and any gifts more worth than $250, among other disclosures, to be entered in a publicly searchable database.

Edgar said if anything, private companies will play a more central role in funding the Energy Institute’s research as sources of public funding shrink under political pressure. He said when he meets with industry representatives to discuss projects, he often finds one of his former doctoral students sitting across the table, which makes the process easier.

“You have to have a dialogue with industry,” said Edgar, a chemical engineering professor. He left an oil company to join the UT faculty in 1971 and has disclosed a continuing financial stake in the industry. He has served as an industry consultant, has investments in oil and gas properties and has been active in various trade and professional organizations.

“You develop a relationship based on a certain amount of trust — sharing information, being able to honestly discuss what the key research questions are,” Edgar said. He said the best way for that to happen is to involve experts already on campus.

“One of the things the Energy Institute could do more of is to try to influence policy, but then make sure whatever policy that does get implemented is well informed by science and engineering,” Edgar said. “I think it involves trying to get faculty involved as opposed to my saying ‘Let me just go out and hire a bunch of staff to do these studies.’”

Among the institute’s changes is an effort to improve communication among UT energy researchers — one of the institute’s original goals. Edgar said institute wasn’t able to cast a wide enough net over campus in its first years.

Edgar said the institute had started sending out a monthly newsletter so that the estimated 300 to 400 energy researchers on campus — and others who might be interested in doing related work — can be more aware of each other’s efforts.

“I like this idea about connecting different disciplines together,” he said. “There may be other mechanisms by which we can get people to start getting connected together, and that’s one of the things I hope to think about a lot more in the future.”

The proposed conflict of interest policy would have been a positive step, said Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative — the group that originally published Groat’s oil and gas ties. But Connor said systemic ties between academia and industry still cast doubt on much energy research.

He said a bigger issue than simply disclosing all financial interests is whether people with a stake in the oil and gas industry should conduct oil and gas studies intended to influence policy.

“Why not engage other researchers without a financial stake to conduct this research?” Connor said.

Connor said he doesn’t think industry partnerships should be done away with completely and that they can have mutual benefits. However, he said research institutions do not manage the partnerships closely enough. For instance, his organization recently reported that a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study had also failed to disclose conflicts similar to Groat’s.

According to the report, Ernest J. Moniz, director of MIT’s Energy Initiative and President Barack Obama’s energy secretary appointee, received hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies in the oil and natural gas industry in 2011, when the study was published.

MIT Energy Initiative spokeswoman Vicki Ekstrom said the researchers had followed all university policies and disclosed their outside professional activity internally, but the university does not release this information publicly.

“To my knowledge, the MIT administration is not planning on making any changes,” Ekstrom said. “Nor do I personally see any reason for them to.”

Regardless of whether the UT system adopts more stringent disclosure policies, Edgar said Energy Institute publications will go through a more rigorous internal review process than in the past. He said he is also considering a policy that requires any basic findings to be prominently attributed to individual researchers, with the institute serving more as an outlet for collection of information and publication.

Edgar is hopeful about the future. “Really the research is going on outside of the institute,” Edgar said. “We have a capability of being able to come in and say ‘Hey, let’s get a bunch of folks together and figure out how to work on this.’”

He said with such a broad knowledge base on campus, one former faculty member told him if UT can’t have a successful Energy Institute, then no one probably can.

“I’m making a tacit assumption that ‘I’m sure we have people here who are knowledgeable in this field,’” Edgar said. “We’re big enough. We’ve got enough going on that we can address almost any area. We don’t have a single area of energy not covered on this campus — basically.”

By Hannah Shea
For Reporting Texas

David Schwalm ran as many as 80 miles a week in order to prepare for the 2013 Boston Marathon. He completed the 26.2-mile course in just over three hours, then suddenly found himself in what seemed like a war zone.

“It was pandemonium. … There were helicopters flying, sirens blaring, ambulances speeding down Boylston Street and children crying,” Schwalm recalled in an interview two weeks after the terrorist attack that turned the race into tragedy. Three people were killed and more than 200 were wounded when two homemade bombs exploded near the finish line.

All 180 of the Austin-area residents who ran the marathon came home safely. But Schwalm decided it would be fitting to hold a vigil, both to honor the victims and to come together as a group once again.

Schwalm and other runners created a Facebook event to publicize the vigil, set for April 18, just three days after the bombing. The group decided to hold the event at Lady Bird Lake, where they had spent countless hours training for the race.

At 8 p.m. that night, hundreds of people gathered in the parking lot of Austin High School for a brief ceremony that included comments, a 26.2-second moment of silence, a bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace,” and then a three-mile walk around the lake.

The bagpiper had been Schwalm’s idea. “It was such a great part of the experience,” he said.

Such vigils have become a common way for people to express sympathy with victims of a tragedy, even if they have no connection to the people who were harmed or the place where the event occurred, said Jane Bost, associate director of counseling and mental health services at the University of Texas at Austin.

Vigils were held across the United States, as far away as California, after the Boston bombing. The week after Schwalm’s event, a group of UT students held a candelight vigil in the West Mall to honor the victims of the Boston tragedy and those who were killed or wounded in the April 17 explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, near Waco.

“We all share a common humanity,” Bost said. “For a lot of people, there’s something that resonates about a situation like this. Whether we have a relationship with the event or not, people have a level of empathy for someone in a situation like this.”

Austinite Alexa Romero said she has never been to Boston, but attended the marathon vigil. “I’ve been running half-marathons with my mom every year. I couldn’t imagine this happening to me or my loved ones,” she said. “I just came out to show my respects pay tribute to those who were involved in the tragedy.”

Bost said that such events often trigger emotions in people who have dealt with some type of loss or trauma. “It’s doing something tangible to make something positive out of such a negative situation, such a terrible experience. It can be really healthy for people to try and make meaning out of tragedy,” she said.

Gail Fry stood with her husband Michael during the vigil, wearing her yellow and blue 2013 marathon jacket. In Boston, Fry had met Katherine Switzer, who in 1967 became was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. “She signed my shoe and wrote on my bib, ‘Gail – Be fearless!’” Fry said. “It was such an inspiration, I would look down while I was running and it kept me going.” After the Boston tragedy, she said, “it’s been even more meaningful to be fearless.”

Schwalm said he plans to make the same point next April in Boston:  ”I’ll be at that starting line next year with thousands of other people to prove a point. We’re not scared.”

By Megan Strickland
For Reporting Texas

Beekeepers in Texas are hopeful that a late-blooming wildflower crop will be enough to keep their colonies alive, despite predictions of intensifying drought conditions that have taken a toll on the bee population in recent years.

The local drought is an additional woe that beekeepers in Texas have to deal with on top of a mysterious disorder and parasites that have killed 30 percent of the nation’s bee population in the past few years.

“We are one poor weather event or high winter bee loss away from a pollination disaster,” said national bee researcher Jeffrey Pettis in a report about colony collapse disorder released May 2 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The disorder is characterized by unexplained die-offs of adult honeybees in hives. The USDA report said a combination of malnutrition, genetics, pesticides and parasites could be factors of the disorder but did not definitively name a cause. Although Pettis said the disorder has been less prevalent in the past year, it could cause the number of honeybee colonies stewarded by beekeepers in the U.S. to fall to 1.75 million from 2.5 million.

“People should care, because about one-third of our food sources have to be pollinated by insects,” Pettis said in an interview. “Our diet basically depends on it.”

For beekeepers, the collapse disorder joins a list of constant threats, including parasites and weather.

The disorder “is one more stress beekeepers and honey producers don’t need,” Pettis said. “If you had cattle and lost 30 percent of those every year, you’d be screaming.”

Despite the grim national situation, Mark Bradley and his father-in-law, Raul Vergara, began beekeeping in Austin in 2010 after moving from Illinois. Colony collapse disorder hadn’t been a major problem in Texas, Bradley said, so drought posed the greatest challenge to founding the Austin Honey Co., which sells honey produced by hives in East Austin at local farmer’s markets.

“We weren’t used to drought,” Bradley said. “2011 came around and we realized it hadn’t rained since October of 2010, but we thought maybe it will start raining and this is just how it is in Texas.”

Bradley said the drought that year was so bad he had to feed bees in his 23 hives sugar water all year because the nectar and honey they usually feed on weren’t available, other than scant amounts from native prickly pear cactus and mesquite.

“They quickly absorbed all of that, and we lost 13 beehives, most in the winter time because they had been fed sugar water for months and months,” Bradley said. “It was a terrible loss.”

It cost $1,500 to feed the hives that year, and the company did everything it could to keep the hives from growing their populations, Bradley said.

“More bees would have made the cost higher,” Bradley said. “We had to make the decision to continue feeding the bees all year and hope they lived, or stop feeding them because they were likely to die anyway.”

Bradley said  rains around Thanksgiving 2011 spurred him to increase his hive count to 50.

“In late March of 2012 we were faced with a decision of OK, let’s double down. It can only get better from here,” Bradley said.

The Austin Honey Co. was able to make its first harvest that year, but left much of the honey that could have been harvested in the hives to feed the bees in case nectar wasn’t readily available. The company hopes to increase its hive count to 120, but it’s hard to make plans with the unpredictable rain patterns, Bradley said.

“It’s difficult to run a honey business with so little rain, but that’s true for the agriculture business overall,” Bradley said. “It looks like the drought returned last October, but we’ve had some rains in April, and we hope that will be a sign of things to come.”

The U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook prediction issued April 18 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration isn’t optimistic for drought relief this summer. Drought conditions for the majority of the state are expected to persist, worsen or develop through the end of July. Wildflowers that bloom late in the year require less rain, so the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, which monitors the state’s wildflowers, said in its April update that the season likely would improve.

Dwain Cleveland owns 40 hives in Somervell County, southeast of Fort Worth, and has been beekeeping for more than two decades. He said the health of the wildflower crop has always been a significant factor for his honey production.

“It’s always been about the wildflowers,” Cleveland said. “We just have to see how many we have.”

In addition to uncertainty about the drought, there’s no time frame for finding a solution to colony collapse disorder, Pettis said. It’s taken more than two decades for scientists studying bees to identify ways to manage a non-native bee parasite, the varroa mite. Despite advancement in pesticides and management, the parasite still kills 10 percent of U.S. bees annually, Pettis said, although the disorder doesn’t get much attention.

“It’s just not as sexy as colony collapse disorder in a story,” Pettis said.  “Beekeepers just kind of have to watch the studies and adjust their management practices to whatever comes their way.”

By Hannah Jones
For Reporting Texas

One of the state’s worst droughts in decades has been particularly hard on its iconic ranching business, with the barren land leading to increased costs to feed cattle. In Starr County, at the southern tip of the state, Texas Agrilife Extension agent Omar Montemayor can’t give the ranchers money or rain, but he is teaching them ways to keep their herds healthy.

“Ranchers are very frustrated right now, and many of them don’t think there is anything to help them but just rain,” said Montemayor, who runs workshops for ranchers and farmers to help them get through their crisis. “Some have attitudes and will not attend, but the majority of them do.”

Montemayor said that  ranchers in Starr County are making the best of harsh circumstances. He said that his programs have had good turnouts recently because ranchers see the benefit. One May workshop will be about testing the nutrition levels of cattle.

Montemayor said the drought is one of the worst that he’s seen in the 19 years he’s been an agent, and it has forced ranchers to make some tough decisions. Cattle prices have risen about 20 percent since 2010. Prices have increased because the state’s cattle inventory has fallen to 4 million, the lowest figure since 1959 and a 12 percent drop over the past two years, according to the Texas Department of Agriculture. Montemayor speculates that the drought has contributed to the low inventory. But ranchers who sell now are likely to have a tough time restocking their herds later because cattle prices are not expected to drop soon.

Ranchers who want to remain in business struggle to feed their cattle. A bale of hay, which can feed 30 cattle for four days, cost $100, more than double the cost in 2009. One of the biggest expenses for ranchers is transporting water to their land. Because many ponds and stock tanks on ranches are dry, Starr County ranchers must purchase and haul water from Rio Grande City.  Water costs about $10 for 500 gallons, and the daily trips add labor and diesel costs, and wear and tear on their vehicles.

“If you have to haul water, you might as well put wheels on the cows,” rancher Bill Barfield said.

Barfield, whose ranch is about 150 miles northeast of McAllen in the Wild Horse Desert, said he had 1,000 cattle before the drought. His herd has dwindled to 300.

Like some other ranchers, Barfield has resorted to last-ditch efforts to feed his herd, including chamuscando, a technique that Mexican ranchers have used since the late 1700s, according to Montemayor.  Chamuscando, Spanish for “scorching,” involves burning off the needles from prickly pear cactus, so cattle can feed in cactus patches. The cactus pads are low in protein but as long as they aren’t dried up, they are high in vitamins and minerals.

Barfield supplements chamuscando with molasses-based feed. Other ranchers are feeding their cattle with citrus pulp pellets made from oranges from the Rio Grande Valley.

The drought means that ranchers also have to be more diligent about watching their herds. “I used to check on the cattle once a week, but in today’s environment, I’m checking on them every day or every other day to burn pear, doubling or tripling my gas {costs},” Barfield said. “They’re weak, and there’s not much left to them.”

Barfield, 63, said his situation is similar to his father’s back in the 1950s. Barfield, who comes from a family of ranchers who have lived in South Texas for more than 150 years, said that he could remember his father dealing with drought on their ranch in Jim Hogg County. As a child of 3 or 4, Barfield would ride alongside his father around the ranch and watch him work, including burning prickly pear cactus.

He said that if it doesn’t rain soon, he will have to decide what to do with the cattle he has left. “It’s fast becoming back to the Dust Bowl,” he added, referring to the famous drought of the 1930s that parched the Great Plains region.

Montemayor, for one, is looking forward to summer tropical storm season.

“We’re always optimistic,” he said. “We may get the rain here in May and if not, in September.”

Editor’s note: This story is part of a special report on resegregation and disparity in Texas public schools. The rest of the report includes stories on charter schools, magnet schools, Hispanic students, state funding, and crime in schools. The report is also available at The Dallas Morning News.

By Caitlin Perrone and Bryce Bencivengo
For InvestigaTexas and The Dallas Morning News

Thousands of Texas public schools are nearly as segregated as they were almost 60 years ago when a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision sought to end racial divisions in education.

An extraordinary spike in the number of Hispanic students and white flight are now the driving forces that have reshaped the racial makeup of schools.

The split continues to widen as school districts and the Legislature battle over funding to keep up with a diverse and growing population.

And if demographic trends continue, the districts may be filled mostly with low-income Hispanic and black students.

An analysis by InvestigaTexas, a project coordinated by the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism and The Dallas Morning News, found that almost half of the public school students attend a campus that’s at least 80 percent minority or 80 percent white. That’s 2.4 million students, more than the populations of Dallas and Fort Worth combined.

That trend — along with disparities in resources among school districts — puts minority students at greater risk of being mired in poverty, or dropping out and entering what has been dubbed a “school-to-prison pipeline,” some experts say.

They also worry that the state’s economic foundations could crumble if large numbers of Texans, especially low-income Hispanics and blacks, don’t get the education they need. It’s a potential crisis that could hit every taxpayer, regardless of color, said Lloyd Potter, the state demographer and director of the Texas State Data Center.

“It is something that we don’t have a lot of time on,” he said. “Every year there is another class graduating.”

The Legislature, with less than a month left in its session, is looking to restore some of the billions in funding cut two years ago from local schools. Meanwhile, some school districts are pressing ahead with a suit against the state to overhaul how it pays for public education.

Republican Gov. Rick Perry has argued that funding is on the right track — enough to get the job done but also within the state’s economic means.

Other state officials say educators must do what they can to help students reach their potential, especially Hispanic and black students who, on average, have higher dropout rates and lower test scores than white students.

Schools that have a large number of poor and minority students, especially in Dallas and other urban areas, have struggled to improve their state academic ratings.

Closing the “racial achievement gap,” said Texas Commissioner of Education Michael Williams, “is our challenge.”

“If we don’t … then those people who believe demographics is destiny will be right,” he said. “But we’re not going to allow them to be right. We can still be a state that is going to be more Hispanic, more African-American and still outperform every other state in the country.”

He said “great teachers” and technology to accelerate learning will be the keys to success.

Self-segregation

Despite Brown vs. Board of Education, the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared unconstitutional separate public schools for students of different races, some districts moved slowly on integration. Also, a pattern among white families to “self-segregate” has lingered over the years.

The trend now is a form of “resegregation”: Minority children increasingly make up the bulk of public school populations, while many white children end up outside the system, in private schools and other alternatives.

Those are highlights of the InvestigaTexas analysis of data from the Texas Education Agency and local school districts. Among other findings:

Fifteen years ago, about 1 in 5 Texas public schools had a student population that was 90 percent or more minority. Now it’s 1 in 3.

Less than 5 percent of students in the Dallas Independent School District are white. When civil rights advocates sued the DISD in 1970 over allegations that it had failed to desegregate, its enrollment was about 60 percent white.

On more than a third of its campuses, whites are mostly absent, accounting for 1 percent or less of the students. Overall, since the 1997 school year, the number of white students has gone from 16,019 to 7,417.

In all but two of the school districts contiguous to DISD — Highland Park and Crandall — the number of white students has dropped as minority enrollment climbed.

In many districts in the outlying suburbs, white enrollment continues to rise. In fast-growing Frisco ISD, for example, the number of white students has soared from 2,873 to 22,973. But the overall percentage of white students, now at 58 percent, has dropped over that period because of more minority students.

Dallas school board President Lew Blackburn said he’s concerned that students face a multiracial world they don’t experience in classrooms. It’s better for them, he said, to “interact with each other and learn how to live with each other.”

As for the dwindling number of white students, he said that may be rooted in “some racial overtones” and to some extent “a perception that Dallas ISD is not doing as great a job with educating all of our students.”

Overall, the number of white Texans ages 5 to 18 has dropped by 7.3 percent in the past 15 years, according to federal estimates.

But the number of white students in public schools has declined by more than 13 percent over roughly the same time period.

Suburbs not immune

The Dallas suburbs, where many white families first moved after court-ordered desegregation, have seen their minority populations continue to grow. As that has happened, the percentage of white students has plummeted.

In the 1997-98 school year, for example, more than 68 percent of the students in Mesquite ISD were white. They accounted for 20.8 percent of the students most recently. In DeSoto, the percentage of white students went from 47 percent to just under 4 percent over that same period.

Richardson has flipped from mostly white to a majority-minority district. The percentage of white students in Richardson ISD has dropped from 55.2 percent to 28.4 percent in the past 15 years, according to TEA data.

In some Dallas-Fort Worth suburban school districts — DeSoto, Cedar Hill, Crowley, Mansfield and Lancaster — the number of black students has increased more than any other race or ethnicity over the past 15 years. In DeSoto, as the number of white students plummeted, the number of blacks more than doubled as they became the largest ethnic or racial group.

Meanwhile, Hispanics have passed whites as the largest ethnic group in Texas public schools. They account for almost 51 percent, up from almost 38 percent 15 years ago. White students make up 30.5 percent, down from 45 percent over that time.

Almost 70 percent of the Dallas district’s student population is now Hispanic.

Williams, the state education commissioner, said the self-segregation from white flight is distinctly different from the court-mandated segregation of the past.

“Obviously, that was the government saying, ‘Thou cannot come to this school.’ … That’s very, very different than when people are making choices about, individual choices about where they want their family to reside,” he said.

And reversing the demographic trends in public schools may be very difficult.

“It’s hard to legislate, and it’s hard to dictate desegregation,” Blackburn said.

The entire report is also available at The Dallas Morning News.