The Show for Aug. 17, 2026: Minors facing deportation alone, Teacher of the Year and more

Thousands of unaccompanied minors in the U.S with no legal status could soon have no legal representation either. It could mean more of them will be deported back to dangerous situations. Plus, we’ll meet the 2027 Arizona Teacher of the Year.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ's original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona's largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, Nonprofit for Arizona. bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I'm Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here's today's episode.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I'm Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I'm Mark Brodie. Coming up, Arizona's new Teacher of the Year talks about what she learned after coming back to the classroom following a major health issue.

LAUREN GILGER: And Liz Lerman is a legend in the dance world. What we can learn from her life in motion.

MARK BRODIE: But first, there are still a number of pending legal challenges that will determine which ballot measures Arizonans vote on this fall, and how those measures are described on the ballot. But we should get some more clarity on all of that this week with a pending deadline. With me now to explain is Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services. Good morning, Howie.

HOWARD FISCHER: Good morning. Yes, so the lawyers are in court and everyone is confused.

MARK BRODIE: So what is this deadline coming up this week that may force people to make decisions?

HOWARD FISCHER: Well, this comes down to the ballots having to be printed. Now, yes, it's true that the election isn't until November, but the ballots need to be designed. And remember that you have to come up with a design for each precinct. So it's not simply a question of having one ballot, Maricopa County, because you've got different school districts, you have different legislative districts, and each of these have to be designed. Plus, you also need to put the wording on there, which is supposedly coming from the secretary of state. So that's one deadline. There's another deadline for a brochure that gets mailed to all 4.3 million registered voters. That's a little more leeway on that, but still coming up rapidly.

MARK BRODIE: OK, so let's talk about some of the questions that we still have about which questions we'll be deciding. And one of them is still at the trial court phase, sort of the initial stage. And this is over Prop. 212, which has to do with empowerment scholarship accounts. And the question here is whether or not there are enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. Where are we with that?

HOWARD FISCHER: Well, the judge issued a preliminary ruling last week saying that it appears that they've got more than the 255,949 that are needed to qualify for the ballot. But here's the thing. He didn't have the numbers back from Maricopa and Apache counties.

Now, what makes that important is that each county gets a random sample of 5% of the signatures from that county, and then they use that to extrapolate out statewide how many of the signatures that did come in are in fact valid. So that still needs to be worked out and and these not expected to have those maybe until tomorrow.

Yet at the same time, given the preliminary rulings he's issued, there have already been appeals filed to the state Supreme Court. For example, the question of if somebody has their correct residential address on when they register with the secretary of state, but the address they put on the petitions as a circulator is different because they're afraid, for example, of being stalked, is that in compliance? The judge said no, there's an argument about yes.

Then there are a lot of other technical requirements. And this is really going to come down to how close we get and how quickly it needs to be done. But like I said, they've already filed the appeal with the Supreme Court, both sides, because they recognize this deadline coming up.

MARK BRODIE: Well, Howie, safe to say that however the judge rules on the signatures issue will also likely get appealed to the Supreme Court?

HOWARD FISCHER: Oh, the whole thing is being already being put together the package, and that's why the attorneys are pre-filing. Now, there are two other issues related to this. One of them is, as I talked about, this brochure that goes out to all of the the registered voters. And this is prepared by the Legislative Council, which are lawmakers, which, by definition, is controlled by Republicans. And they crafted a definition that the trial court judge said was argumentative, speculative and non-neutral. And the trial court judge said, "No, you can't use that in terms of what you're sending out to all the voters." ... That's been one that's going to have to get a final ruling, although I think the Supreme Court has pretty much said, "No, they did it wrong and they're going to have to do it over."

Now, there's a separate measure, the separate issue that goes right on the ballot. So when you get your ballot, you're going to see a short title and then you're going to see the effect of a yes vote, the effect of a no vote. ... That is prepared by the secretary of state, who happens to be a Democrat. And a trial judge said, "No, he's wrong in calling it a voucher."

Now, this is one of those arguments we've had ever since we've had the first legal vouchers. And then they — the Supreme Court said, "Well, vouchers in that form are illegal, but an empowerment scholarship account is different because of how the money is handled." Now, most people know them as vouchers. I don't know how much difference that makes in terms of what people think, but that's going to end up at the Supreme Court. And that's just one of the ballot measures that's still pending out there.

MARK BRODIE: Right. So let's talk about one of the other ones. This has — this also has to do with empowerment scholarship accounts, but it's ostensibly about military families, but also has another provision that critics call a "poison pill," which would nullify Prop. 212 if voters approve this other one.

HOWARD FISCHER: That's exactly it. And it was clearly designed that way. What they've done is recognize that one of the things in Prop. 212 says you can't hang on to money you haven't used from a voucher year after year after year and then use it to pay for college. They say that's not the purpose of what ESAs, vouchers, whatever you want to call them, is for.

What the Republicans have done is they said, "Let's take the most popular group out of this. It's a very small group. These are the children of military families, and we will put something on the ballot constitutionally to say you cannot take away any of this money for military families." That part of it is fine. But it was, as you point out, this poison pill that says, "And if this, and if in fact this passes, anything else that deals with military families and their ability to bank money also is voided." And that, of course, would void Prop. 212.

Again, it's not just it would void that part of Prop. 212, it would void everything, the income cap on parents, the fact you can't buy lingerie and jewelry with voucher money, and things like that. And at this point, the the trial judge threw it off the ballot, said you can't combine those two issues. That's on appeal.

Yet at the same time, the trial judge said that Adrian Fontes had to reword his explanation of what it did because of the fact that he pointed out it tied the two of them together. Again, different judges, different ideas.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah. Well, Supreme Court's going to be busy over the next few days. We'll be excited to talk to you, Howie, about the results of all these cases. That is Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services. Thank you, sir, as always.

HOWARD FISCHER: Have a great morning.

LAUREN GILGER: There are 24,000 kids in the US who don't have a parent or legal guardian and who don't have any legal status in the country. They're the so-called unaccompanied minors we've heard so much about. And now, they could have no legal representation. About 1,800 of them are currently in federal custody. The move comes after the Trump administration's contract with groups like the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project here in Arizona lapsed because lawyers have refused to turn over confidential information about the children they represented to the feds. Now, the Florence Project says it will continue to represent the migrant children as long as they can. And the groups that could be getting those contracts instead are raising some eyebrows. NPR reports that the Trump administration has awarded a $158 million no-bid contract to a group called Our Rescue, a controversial anti-trafficking organization with QAnon ties and questionable experience in the area. Roxana Avila-Campano is Deputy Director with the Florence Project. I spoke with her more about all of this, and she told me the process these kids have normally gone through is protected by law.

ROXANA AVILA-CIMPEANU: Under that law, they must be transferred to an Office of Refugee Resettlement shelter within 72 hours. And what should happen is that once children arrive into that government facility, the Office of Refugee Resettlement should be working to reunify them with sponsors who are able to take care of them in a very culturally appropriate manner and ensure that they continue their immigration cases and allow for the child to find an attorney in a setting that is much more conducive to them talking about the worst days of their lives.

What we're seeing since pretty much Day 1 of this administration is a series of concerted attacks that make it harder for children to find safety. Kids are being forced to stay in detention much longer. We have some clients who have been in detention for over a year, and they are being called to court more frequently.

And so while children are staying in detention longer and going to court more frequently, getting closer and closer to removal, they're also losing trusted, qualified legal representation across the country.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And that's to do with what also happened at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, right, which is that they've stopped paying for legal services like yours because many lawyers, I'm sure including you, declined to provide that agency with confidential information they had requested about the children, like what?

ROXANA AVILA-CIMPEANU: Exactly. Yes, this is a contract that has been, you know, decades in the works and that we have been working under for decades. It was allowed to lapse on July 31. For the Florence Project, we could not comply morally or within the bounds of legal ethics with some of the terms in that contract.

Some of those terms included things like sharing specific case information about children, including what types of relief we're filing for, the status of hearings and what happened at those hearings, what kind of legal advice we gave them. So essentially, things that any attorney with basic knowledge of legal ethics should understand are confidential and cannot be shared without permission of the children.

And we certainly are not in a position to break that confidence, either legally or ethically or morally. But we certainly aren't looking to share that information with an administration who has shown that their Number 1 priority is to remove these children as quickly as possible.

LAUREN GILGER: What might happen to these 24,000 children and their cases at this point, Roxana?

ROXANA AVILA-CIMPEANU: Yes, we are extremely worried. As you mentioned, there is a network of seasoned, child-centered, experienced, both technically and, you know, psychosocially, being able to work with children who have suffered trauma.

And I think it's important, you know, we're talking about a contract, but what we're really talking about is children. And these are children who, for some reason or another, have arrived alone in a foreign country and who our government has an obligation to protect. Part of that protection is ensuring that children have independent legal counsel, not only to explain their rights to them, but also to represent them and help them apply for relief that they likely qualify for.

And so what we're very concerned about is that with the lapsing of the contract and with no clear picture about what's happening next, except for some cobbled-together agreements that don't seem to be nearly adequate enough to represent these children, what we're going to see is children losing the ability to find a court, you know, mandated attorney to help them with their case.

We're going to see children getting pushed through this mass deportation rocket docket situation that we've been seeing for several months now, and we're going to be seeing children who are eligible for relief, such as Special Immigrant Juvenile Status or asylum, being deported to countries where they could they could face further harm or where they could even be killed.

LAUREN GILGER: Many, I know, organizations like yours who represented these children around the country are, and have not been paid for those services, are reducing staff, taking fewer cases, showing up to court anyway often because they feel an ethical obligation to. What is the status there at Florence Project?

ROXANA AVILA-CIMPEANU: We plan to do whatever we can for as long as we can do it. We've been doing this work for over two decades. And you're right, the last seven months of uncertainty and the lapsing of this program has already had negative impacts on children.

So for example, children in detention across the country today are not receiving the services that they normally would have because organizations across the country are being forced to close their unaccompanied children program, to reduce staffing, or to furlough.

And this also extends to when children are actually able to be reunified with family in other states, what we would typically do is refer them to other organizations in the network. And now there are fewer and fewer options for children who are able to get out of detention.

And so at the Florence Project, and I know across the network, we feel we have an obligation to continue to stand by these children and do whatever we can for them for as long as we can and as long as we have the resources to do so.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so you talked about your concerns about what could happen to these children. I mean, tell us a story of one of them that you know that that kind of encompasses this for us. When we talk about unaccompanied minors, why are they coming here?

ROXANA AVILA-CIMPEANU: Yeah, I think that is really the most important thing about this situation that I really want people to hear, which is that we're talking about children who need our help. Unaccompanied children are by definition children who are here without a parent or guardian willing or able to take care of them.

Now, I will say that sometimes the reason they're unaccompanied minors is because our government is separating families, so we're still seeing that happen. We have several children we're assisting right now who have been separated from their parents here in the United States.

But in the end, none of them have a parent or guardian willing or able to care for them at this time. They're coming here for many reasons. So it could be because they're fleeing harm, they're fleeing abuse, they're fleeing war conditions, or fleeing environmental conditions.

I will tell you the story of one of the clients that we represented who her father was murdered, and she was living with her mother, and when the man who murdered her father got out of jail, he started looking for her. And so she escaped and went to live with her aunt. But while she was living with her aunt, she was abused.

And so having tried to find safety in multiple places, she made the difficult decision of coming to the United States and found herself alone here, where we were able to assist her and help her file for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, and she is now a green card holder. And this client, were she to come today, would have a much harder time finding a legal service organization to help her go through that process.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, well we'll have to leave it there for now. Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu joining us, deputy director at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. Roxana, thank you for coming on The Show. Thanks for explaining this to us.

ROXANA AVILA-CIMPEANU: Thanks, Lauren.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it's The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I'm LAUREN GILGER.

MARK BRODIE: And I'm MARK BRODIE. Coming up, Lisa Scott had been teaching science and social studies to middle schoolers for years before she got sick and had to have her hands and feet amputated.

LISA SCOTT: Finding out what my future was going to look like in the hospital as information was kind of relayed to me about what had happened and what I was looking at in my future with amputations, my in my mind immediately went to that classroom. It wasn't the instructional piece. That wasn't the thing that popped in my mind. It was it was the relationship with those students and that thought that they were going to come back from winter break and I wasn't going to be there.

MARK BRODIE: We'll hear from Arizona's 2027 Teacher of the Year.

LAUREN GILGER: But first, a nationwide outbreak of cyclosporiasis has a lot of us avoiding lettuce at all costs and looking skeptically at our berries this summer.

But it's also exposing weaknesses in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's foodborne disease active surveillance network — changes made under President Donald Trump's massive cutbacks of staff and funding at the CDC.

Well, for our next guest this morning, it all goes back to Mexican food. Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times whose latest column tackles Trump, RFK Jr., and the Crunchwrap Supreme all at once, and he's on the line now to tell us more. Good morning, Gustavo.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: ¡Hola!

LAUREN GILGER: All right, so this cyclosporiasis outbreak was traced back to several places, including Taco Bell. That company responded quickly, but Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the criticisms were invalid. You report he says the outbreak is under control?

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: No one in this administration ever wants to take responsibility whenever something bad happens. So when there’s — look, foodborne outbreaks, sadly, it is a part of American life when so much of our produce is grown hundreds, if not thousands of miles away.

But under the Trump second Trump term, there has been massive cutbacks to the very programs that are supposed to monitor this. So specifically for that little bug, cyclospora or whatever, it is no longer. If state inspectors note it, they are no longer required to report it to the CDC like it was under many, many previous administrations, especially the first Trump administration.

So the first outbreak, sadly, it was really caught in Taco Bell. So look, I’m no fan of Taco Bell, but they should not deserve the blame to like spread this around the United States, you know?

LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. You also write about another foodborne illness outbreak at another Mexican food chain, Gustavo — at Chipotle, right? Like the FDA recently revealed a Salmonella outbreak that was traced back to contaminated jalapeños that Chipotle, it sounds like, had already removed before this announcement came.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: Chipotle last decade got hit really bad with foodborne outbreaks that caused illnesses. Hundreds of Americans sickened. And to their credit, Chipotle implemented in-house systems to monitor like the moment outbreak happens.

So this is actually what happened: They got a bad batch of jalapeños, immediately they were able to — I believe it was Bloomberg that reported this — they were able to trace it back within like a couple of days and they shut it down.

It was only until two weeks later that the FDA said, “Oh yeah, by the way, there’s this Salmonella outbreak among jalapeños, so, you know, watch out, American public.” So leave it to — again, another chain that I don’t particularly care for. I’m not saying Chipotle is not good, but, you know, I’d rather get other burritos or burros elsewhere. But leave it to them to do far better than what the federal government under Trump has done when it comes to, you know, sicknesses attributed to food.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So you mentioned burritos there, so we have to go to another kind of thread that you’re tying in in this column, which is that Mexican food is more dependent on this kind of exported produce, right? Produce coming from Mexico or other places that has been impacted by tariffs in a more extreme way. You argue here basically that the cost of a burrito may be like the cost of a gallon of milk, is is our gauge of cost of living, right?

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: It is my barometer wherever I go. And look, to tie to tie it in to you folks out in Phoenix, what was it, last year I stopped by Carolina’s, which is of course legendary spot.

LAUREN GILGER: So good.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: I needed one of their big, humongous burros. And I hadn’t been to the Phoenix area in a couple of years and I, I mean, the price was, geez. Let’s just say I had sticker shock. And I’m like, “I do not remember it being this expensive.”

And similarly out here in Southern California, like my place for a breakfast burrito. If any of you are ever in the Southland, Athenian Burgers #3 in Buena Park near Knott’s Berry Farm, it’s now — the breakfast burritos amazing, now costs $13.

Even at Del Taco, which I know it’s the classic chain of the American Southwest, my favorite fast food of all time is just a half-pound bean and cheese burrito. Now, at least at my local one, it’s going for like $2.31, where maybe just five, before the pandemic, it was just about a buck and change.

And burritos at this point, I don’t even order them that much anymore because they’re cost prohibitive. Yes, they’re still more affordable than a three-course dinner somewhere or other, even going to an In-N-Out, which is overrated. The burritos are just such a perfect exemplar of how prices go up and down. And under the Trump administration, everything has been going up and up and up.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I mean, let’s bring all these things together, right? You’ve got Taco Bell, Chipotle, the the way that these companies dealt with these outbreaks of foodborne illness differently than the administration did. You’ve got the cost of living tied in here with the cost of the burrito. What do you think all of this, you know, all of these kind of Mexican food examples says about the fate of the Trump administration right now, especially among Mexican American voters?

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: I mean, we all know that Latinos voted for Trump in bigger numbers than any Republican presidential candidate ever. They proved the crucial swing vote in swing states like Arizona and Nevada. And we also know that support among Latinos for Trump has plummeted, partly because of the immigration raids that have gotten so much attention, but really — and look, I’m guilty of this as well — we try to essentialize Latino into a certain type of voter. But no, they are the classic blue collar voters.

And when carne asada — I mean my dad, we held a carne asada for one set of cousins from his side of the family, and we had the carne asada, the chorizo and the chicken, and the total price — and then you get the tortillas — the total price was over $200. Two hundred dollars just to host about 15 people when we’re supposed to be relaxing.

No, that’s going out for a banquet type of prices. And not that my family ever voted for Trump, but now more so than ever, they’re not. And I keep hearing this again and again from people, the same criticisms I heard under Biden. The cost of gas is too much, the cost of tortillas is too much, we need to take out the incumbent.

And right now it just happens to be the Republican Party who is in charge of the House and the Senate, and of course, Trump is not up for re-election, but the midterms is definitely going to be a referendum on what he has wrought so far in these two years.

LAUREN GILGER: So were you surprised a couple of years ago, Gustavo, when we saw Mexican Americans, Latino voters in in record numbers vote for Trump? Or did these kind of economic bellwether issues, you know, make it seem clear to you that that would might happen?

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: Oh no, I have been calling this since 2016, and I hate to be a Cassandra, but that’s exactly who I was. I would keep telling my Democratic friends, especially those who are involved in politics, “You got to watch out for those working-class Latinos. They are getting annoyed and outraged by the economy, by trans women in sports, especially in in high school sports, but especially even the issue of immigration.”

And the Democratic Party just paid no attention to it. So most people were surprised in 2024. Me, I’m like, “Well, this is why people don’t ...”

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, but but you see that shifting at this moment and and because of these kind of economic issues, you think?

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: Yeah. Latinos have never really been a single, definitely not a single-issue voter, and definitely in more recent years, they have gone away from the Democrats, especially as prices started going up. And look, under the Biden administration the last year, let’s call it what it was, it was inflation.

And even though Democrats said it wasn’t happening, again, you tell that to the working-class people who are driving a Ford F-150, and now they have to pay upwards of $100 just to do daily trips around their neighborhoods, let alone going off to the construction sites.

So price of course has gone even higher for gas because of the Iran War, so it’s just a perfect confluence to see these Trump voters, especially from Latinos, not necessarily going for the Democrats but rejecting Trump. Of course, though, we’re only in August, we’re still a couple of months away from the midterms. Let’s see what happens in a couple of months.

LAUREN GILGER: See what happens. It all goes back to the burrito. Gustavo Arellano with the Los Angeles Times joining us. Gustavo, thanks as always for coming on. Appreciate it.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: Gracias.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It's The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I'm MARK BRODIE.

LAUREN GILGER: And I'm LAUREN GILGER. Liz Lerman is a visionary in the dance world. The choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, and speaker has spent decades exploring the world and our own minds through movement. Her choreography and artistic research has pushed the boundaries of dance and where it exists in society. And now, in her newest book, she's asking a central question: How do we hold both form and change at once? The book is called "Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac's Guide for a World in Constant Motion." And in it, Lerman looks at creativity as a way of life, a practice. And she told me her viewpoint from a lifetime of movement might be helpful for other people.

LIZ LERMAN: My hope is that people who use their bodies in life for work, for profession, and out of, you know, pure joy, have experienced a lot around mobility and motion and the surprise of losing your balance and all kinds of things like that. And that, yes, there's some information in there that may be fruitful for other people.

LAUREN GILGER: When you talk about the world kind of being in constant motion, do you mean like literally, like everything's moving all the time in some sort of cellular fashion? Or is this more like metaphysical to you?

LIZ LERMAN: Well, actually, Lauren, thank you, and it's actually all those things. And that's kind of the surprise, isn't it? I mean, really and truly, the ground is moving under our feet, our bodies are busy changing, and, you know, we know that there are large changes going on institutionally, culturally, and even with, you know, the air we breathe. So it's I think an interesting way to consider that as much as we try to stabilize, maybe being able to manage all that movement would also be a useful, well stance in the world.

LAUREN GILGER: Stance is a good way to put it. But it's also about maintaining form, right, within that. And you and I'm guessing you also mean form in kind of multiple senses of the word, right?

LIZ LERMAN: I do. And I think this is the thing that why we want to be able to hold both ideas, that we want to be able to be flexible and and adaptable and changeable, but at the same time, if that's all we do, people can't find you. You can't be seen. Even ideas, sometimes ideas are so mobile people can't grab them and talk about the same thing at the same time. So having a shape is really critical, but so is being able to move into motion and then be able to do both, just not at the same time except in rare instances.

LAUREN GILGER: There is a subtitle here as well. This is "An Insomniac's Guide for a World in Constant Motion." So I have to ask you about that part of it. I'm guessing you are the insomniac here?

LIZ LERMAN: Yeah, I am an insomniac. I will say we played around with a lot of other title Choreographer's Guide, A Mother's Guide, A Dancer's Guide. But the thing I like about insomniac, well, first of all, I am one, and a lot of people are. And I think those of us who are have different ideas about it. Some people suffer, and I I feel for them who suffer. But I've come around to accepting my insomnia and actually harnessing and harvesting it. And there is a certain like exciting restlessness in it. And I think that restlessness kind of is almost an undercurrent of curiosity and sort of a constant inquiring mind at work. And so maybe a mobility exists there, too, that I'm curious about.

LAUREN GILGER: That's very interesting. So, yeah, cuz I think the the word insomnia comes with such a negative connotation. But it sounds like you do not think of it that way. Do you feel like a pressure, do you feel like like a little bit of a craze when you're in insomnia, or is this like a creative moment to you?

LIZ LERMAN: You're asking such wonderful ways of looking at it, Lauren, because I mean, actually, maybe it depends a little bit where in life's cycles you are. But I will say right now at this age, it's a surprise to me how alive it feels, but it is kind of like a burning, almost like a burning from the inside. And maybe that's, you know, those of us who are able to reach this age, I'm in my 70s, and just see how much ahead there is to do and how much incredible life is around us, that you kind of want to be in that, and that is underlying my insomnia anyway.

LAUREN GILGER: That's very interesting. So, I mean, you you bring up the idea of aging, and if we're talking about the world being in constant motion, our bodies constantly changing, aging is definitely what we're doing all the time, right? I mean, how do you think about aging? And is it is it maybe a little different than the rest of us think about it and this thing that like we want to fight, we want to do anti-aging in every way we can, right?

LIZ LERMAN: Well, I'm not sure who who wants to do the anti-aging thing. It it it's interesting to look at the actual individuals involved in that. But in my case, you know, I started dancing with older people when I was young. I was in my 20s. My mother died suddenly. It was a horrible thing, and getting out of that experience and finding some old people to be in a dance because I wanted them to welcome her into whatever had happened to her got me into this whole world of what is now called creative aging. So I've been interested in in older bodies and older people on stage and the expressions that people who've lived long lives and the knowledge that they have can give. So that's always been part of it. But now that I am old, it's a little bit different. I don't love I don't love every aspect of it by any means, and I'm caring for my my partner, my husband, who's who's sick, and and what that is like and watching So, you know, one of the things I write about in the book is as much as the book extols the knowledge that our bodies hold and how much if we paid attention to our own experience, I don't just mean with our bodies, but our experiences in general, how much we could harvest for for information. I also want to acknowledge that, you know, our bodies things happen, and like I say in the book, climate change is not just the weather.

LAUREN GILGER: What what is it beyond the weather? Explain that for us.

LIZ LERMAN: Well, if your loved one is sick, you're dealing in a whole new world where you're taking care of someone who used to be so strong and independent, and then you're taking care of all the things that that person used to do for you, and you're watching, of course, the decline of a brilliant mind and a funny human being. And so living with that is I compare it to what it's like when you're raising a child, because, you know, in some ways caretaking is caretaking, but it's so different at the beginning and endings of life.

LAUREN GILGER: That's fascinating, yeah. I want to ask about the structure of the book because this is I think unlike some of the other books that you've written, a guide essentially for folks, right? Like it's almost a how-to. Talk about how you structured this.

LIZ LERMAN: Well, I would say it's a how-to, but it's a little bit of of a a scavenger hunt for for the reader. In some cases, there are actual essays. This is information. Here's some notes. This will tell you, you know, what to do. In other cases, that information is embedded in stories, things that happened to me or to the people around me that I write about and try to get people to to sort of be in the moment with me and to understand the incredible information that's being shared in that moment. It's structured, though, in four major sections: allowing people first to think about this idea of lived experience and how we harvest it, and then the second we've addressed a little bit about shape and momentum and ideas of creativity. The third section, though, is about rejection and reflection. And having been rejected so many times in my life and also even, you know, sometimes I think rehearsals are nothing but constant rejection, you're constantly in mistake-land and fixing, and a lot of the book is trying to get people just to adjust in a way. Maybe they think making mistakes in public is bad. I'm posing, "Hold on a second. There's a lot of ways to look at this. Try it like this." That's kind of the way it's a guide. And then the last section actually has real tools in it that you can actually try out.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. Well, I want to ask you about that because you're calling it the Atlas of Creative Tools, which is a a great title to begin with. How How does one use this atlas? And why an atlas as opposed to like a, you know, set of, you know, directions?

LIZ LERMAN: Right. Well, you know, the wonderful thing about atlases, well, is they're beautiful. And over time and over history, you know, they they include a lot of well, how people viewed the world. Because the early atlases had dragons where we now understand to be an ocean or something like that. So I'm interested in that in the actual what it says, but the metaphoric that can live inside it that might be interesting to your spirit. A lot of the tools in the actual atlas tell you how to, but they're also filled with the origin story, trying to acknowledge where they came from, how they can be used, their multiple applications. And in this book, the idea was to try to give people a a paper version or a the digital version of some of that without actually going to an online setting.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, I have to end this interview soon, which is a shame, because I want to ask you more. But I'm going to ask you about one last thing before I let you go, which is so the idea here, right, you're you're looking at dance, education, politics, and and you write, spiritual practice. And I wonder, cuz you you view your work in that lens often, and I would love for you to articulate what that means to you. How is this in particular, this idea of constant motion and form within it, a spiritual practice for you?

LIZ LERMAN: Well, this is probably maybe at the most deepest place I'm I'm wondering and worrying and wandering in, and that is having had my own good fortune to be in relationship, say, to my rabbi for so many decades and observing this incredible person and so many people I know involved in religious seeking, that that act of trying to seek, research, understand what's not almost quite nameable, and yet we keep trying to look for names for that, as I grew in my life as an artist, Lauren, and as a choreographer and a writer, I began to wonder if creativity isn't another form of that, that my own investigation, trying to understand as much as I can say to you, "I can teach you how to be creative, I can show you how to do it," and I can, I still can't explain the moments when something happens that neither of us understood to be possible. And that feels to me spiritual, really.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, I bet it is. All right, we'll leave it there. Liz Lerman, a choreographer, writer, educator, speaker, Institute Professor at ASU's Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, as well as author of the new book, "Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac's Guide for a World in Constant Motion." Liz, thank you so much for coming on The Show, I really appreciate it.

LIZ LERMAN: Oh, thank you for having me. Wonderful conversation.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I'm LAUREN GILGER.

MARK BRODIE: And I'm MARK BRODIE. The Arizona Educational Foundation has named its 2027 Arizona Teacher of the Year Lisa Scott, an eighth grade science and social studies teacher at Esmond Station K-8 School in the Vail School District. Scott has been teaching for more than two decades, but during her school's winter break in 2022, she was diagnosed with sepsis and ultimately had her hands and feet amputated. Being a quadruple amputee, though, did not keep her from returning to the classroom. I caught up with Scott earlier during a break in her class schedule, and we talked about the grade she teaches. Not everyone remembers middle school all that fondly, and I asked, what is it that she enjoys about teaching eighth graders?

LISA SCOTT: I hated middle school myself as a student. It was probably the hardest time in my entire schooling career. So when I figured out that I wanted to be a teacher, I actually started in elementary school, and my husband and I had moved back east and kind of fell into a middle school position, was pretty scared in the beginning. And pretty quickly within, I would say, the first week of school, I just knew that it was the place for me. I really, really enjoyed it. And interestingly enough, I think some of the things that I hated about it as a student are are some of the reasons that I love teaching it. It is a really tough time in in adolescents' lives. You know, they're changing and they're figuring out who they are and kind of leaving that that little kid world and getting into that teenage world. And, you know, being able to kind of be there for them and help guide them through that and and talk them through some of the challenges they're having with peers and, you know, academically and with, you know, their parents because they're starting to want more independence. So I I really enjoy being able to kind of help them and and be that guide for them and, you know, build their trust and then maybe be able to guide them in ways when I know they won't listen to their parents about some of the lessons that that are really important. Sometimes they'll listen to somebody who's not a parent.

MARK BRODIE: How do you go about trying to gain the trust of, you know, 14-year-olds?

LISA SCOTT: That's a, you know, that's a that's a really important part of what we do. And when I when I work with new teachers, especially to middle school, that that's one of the first things that that I work with them on and that I tell them is those first few weeks, it's it is that. It's building the relationships and letting them know that you are invested in them and that you see them as people and where they are. So it a lot of it is just initiating those conversations with them, getting them to open up about what what they like. And when when you know that that child's favorite thing to do in the world is soccer, you can start having some of those, you know, more pointed conversations with them. And when they see that you see them and that you value them, they really start to open up, and then they start to trust you. And once that trust is built, they will, as I say, they'll run for run through a wall for you.

MARK BRODIE: Did you find that that was in your mind as you were contemplating whether and how to come back to the classroom after you became a quadruple amputee?

LISA SCOTT: Yeah. In fact, when something like that happens, you know, something life changing like that and and finding out what my future was going to look like in the hospital as information was kind of relayed to me about what had happened and and what I was looking looking at in my future with amputations, my in my mind immediately went to that classroom. It wasn't It wasn't the instructional piece. I love teaching science. I I think that science literacy is important, but that wasn't the thing that popped in my mind. It was It was the relationship with those students and that thought that they were going to come back from winter break and I wasn't going to be there. And, you know, those kids that were were coming to me before and after lunch, "Oh, I have this I have this problem. So and so's, you know, they're not inviting me to their get-together on the weekend. I feel left out." And those students that you had kind of been there for, that's what I thought about is, "I'm not going to be there." It's that relationship piece and the the people that you're working with, both my students and my colleagues, my friends, it's the that human factor that that makes you want to come back. And that that was the first thing in my mind about returning to my job. It was, "I got to get back to my people."

MARK BRODIE: Did it help you at all as you were kind of thinking about who you were at that point and maybe how your life had changed, to think about, you know, some of the lessons that you'd been talking to other newer teachers about in terms of building trust, and maybe thinking, "Okay, I maybe I can trust my students to be okay with this and to sort of make a con- any accommodations that need to be made so that I can continue to do this?"

LISA SCOTT: Definitely. When I was in the hospital talking to nurses and doctors and all the different amazing medical professionals that were taking care of me and helping me bounce back, that was a the takeaway for a lot of people that that don't work with middle schoolers, it was, "Well, I hope you're ready," you know? I had a I had a a doctor that I worked with that was kind of trying to get me prepared and and said, "You know, you have to prepare for that first moment that a kid kind of makes fun of your disability or points it out, you know? That that student that student's mad at you for some reason, and and now they're going to retaliate, and they're going to say something about you, or, you know, they're going to send a text message to their friends." And I remember in that moment mentally preparing a little bit, but also thinking, "I don't think that's going to be that big of an issue." And it goes back to what what I said before with once you build that trust for them, they they've got your back. And I feel like in the beginning my my students were a little cautious around me as far as like, "Do you need help with that?" You know, if I dropped something, they they'd all want to rush and pick it up. And then as we spent more time together and they kind of figured out what I was capable of, even that dropped off, and it was they weren't treating me any differently than they had the year before I got sick. That was unexpected for me. I I figured they would probably be accepting. I didn't realize how much their acceptance would do for me just across across the, you know, the board. You know, I was thinking of the lessons I could still bring to my students. I didn't anticipate the depth of the lessons that they would give back to me.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is LISA SCOTT, an eighth grade social studies and science teacher at Esmond Station K-8 School in the Vail Unified School District. She's also the new Arizona Teacher of the Year. Lisa, thank you so much and congratulations on the award.

LISA SCOTT: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show's podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban and our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram at @kjzztheshow.