The Show for Sept. 1, 2026: Fewer students at AZ universities, data collection at hospitals and more

Arizona’s public universities are expecting fewer students this school year than last. Why that is and what it means. And, why the Trump administration is using a small federal agency to collect more data from hospitals.

Full 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, why a southern Arizona school district could be closing as many as 10 schools in the coming years.

LAUREN GILGER: And we meet one local lawmaker who believes a town hall isn't dead.

MARK BRODIE: Arizona’s three public universities are seeing drops in their enrollments.

While the official university census won’t come out for about a month or so, the University of Arizona is expecting a single-digit percentage decline in first-year undergraduate enrollment this semester.

Arizona State University is anticipating about a 1% drop in in-person students, despite saying it’s set a new all-time high in overall enrollment.

Northern Arizona University is expecting about 2,000 fewer students this year than last.

I spoke about this earlier with Chad Sampson, executive director of the Arizona Board of Regents, and he told me there are a number of reasons for the declines in enrollment.

CHAD SAMPSON: As we look at enrollment trends, you want to set a little bit of context. I came to the board 15 years ago, and in that 15 years, we've seen the Arizona public universities more than double their enrollment. So we've actually created in our three universities the equivalent of another University of Arizona and another Northern Arizona University. So we've been growing for a long time.

Across the country, we have started to see the effects of what's called in university land as the enrollment cliff. There are less high school graduates coming out of high school, so there are less traditional 18-year-old students going to college.

So the first aspect is the enrollment cliff, and you couple that with the national dialogue about the value of a four-year degree, and you're starting to see some flattening and even reversing of the enrollment trend.

MARK BRODIE: So it sounds like this is not a surprise to you or to the regents or to the university officials.

CHAD SAMPSON: No, it is not, and indeed the board has been watching this for a long time. Now, if I can say, the most important thing is not enrollment in our institutions, it's the number of degrees, the number of individuals coming out of an Arizona public university with a degree that has value in the marketplace, that makes Arizona stronger, that meets Arizona's economy. So they really focus on that. But one of the inputs is the number of students that are coming.

MARK BRODIE: Is there a sense that this might be a new normal? Is there a sense that this might be sort of a temporary thing, and the schools will continue to grow again at some point in terms of enrollment?

CHAD SAMPSON: So we continually will push new modalities to try and increase enrollment, but this is somewhat of a new normal in that three years ago, the board had the state demographer come and talked about the beginning, roughly this year, that we would see continued fewer students coming out of high school till 2041. So we are seeing that.

Now, Arizona itself has largely missed some of the more impactful effects of this. Back East, the Midwest, even California, you're seeing double digits or triple digits decline in high school student graduates, and that really impacts them there. Now, we do a lot of recruiting out of state. We think that is good for our universities, so that has started to impact us.

MARK BRODIE: So I wanted to ask you about sort of who these students are, because you referenced the universities do a lot of recruiting out of state and internationally as well, both in terms of having a diverse student body, but also, out-of-state tuition, international tuition like that is a pretty big, important thing for the universities' bottom lines.

Is there a sense, or maybe a concern, of if you're going to have fewer students, who those students are that you're losing out on?

CHAD SAMPSON: So first thing to note that we talk about university finances at every board meeting. So six times a year, the universities are presenting on their finances, and I want to let you know that the universities' balance sheets are strong. They are good. We do look at our international enrollment, and we do look at our out-of-state enrollment because they help with the revenue. But it's not just revenue; it also improves the student experience.

MARK BRODIE: How much has the international student issue from the federal government impacted Arizona's universities in terms of whether they can get visas, whether they're allowed in the country, whether they can basically whether they can get here?

CHAD SAMPSON: So it has had an impact. Again, Arizona's public universities have done better than other universities nationally in being able to maintain their students and recruit students, but it has had an impact, and that has to do with federal policy. Our job, we really can't influence that, is to make it as welcoming as we possibly can for all students who want to come to our institutions.

MARK BRODIE: You alluded to sort of the national conversation about the value of a four-year degree, and I wonder what are the conversations among the regents? I would imagine there's a general consensus that there is great value among the regents and the university presidents in getting a four-year degree.

So I guess how do you try to counteract and counterbalance some of the national conversation where there's questions about that?

CHAD SAMPSON: So the regents receive a lot of reporting regarding the economic value of the degree, and overwhelmingly these degrees do do better. If you graduate with a four-year degree, you do better over your life by about $1 million than somebody who just graduates from high school and goes right into the workforce.

The value question around higher ed is, OK, the opportunity cost. Am I losing something when I go to college instead of going right into the workforce? There's lots of data and lots of discussion around that.

The regents' responsibility is to make sure that when you do come to ASU or NAU or the U of A, that those degrees really do provide extra value, but not only just with regard to the economics of your life, but in addition to just improving your life. Now, the truth is most of our students are majoring in things that have economic value. The Number 1 degree that we produce in our institutions is a business degree, followed closely by engineers and healthcare specialists.

MARK BRODIE: Does the economic impact of the universities change when their enrollment numbers change, specifically when the enrollment is down a little bit?

CHAD SAMPSON: Yes, it does have an impact. But again, we have sophisticated modeling. They are prepared for it, and they are ready for that. The biggest issue we have is making sure that the state continues to find value in our institutions and continues to fund our institutions.

As I mentioned, Arizona's public universities have grown significantly in enrollment over the last decade or more, decade and a half, while at the same time the state has, for various reasons, continued to divest in four-year degrees.

So we are very focused on doing two things: making sure that the universities are financially stable and strong, which they are, and making sure that we do everything we can to convince policymakers and lawmakers that the impact that these students have when they come out with degrees is a benefit and results in a tremendous ROI for Arizona.

MARK BRODIE: Looking back, I mean, you mentioned that the state has basically added two more full public universities with the enrollment growth. Looking back now with sort of where we are, did the universities grow — was there maybe too much growth at some point?

CHAD SAMPSON: No, I don't think so. The Arizona Board of Regents for 30 years have been very access-focused, and that's not the same in other states. And so I don't think that they have grown too much. We've seen this coming. We didn't wake up this morning and realize that there were less high school students graduating, so we've had time to prepare and right-size the institutions.

MARK BRODIE: How have the universities tried to prepare? What sorts of things have they been doing over the last number of years to get themselves ready for this day?

CHAD SAMPSON: A lot of it, your big expenses are your people and your facilities. So a lot of them are preparing their facilities — what needs to be mothballed, what's old. We have universities that are older than the state, and so those buildings take a lot of maintenance. When is it time to take them offline?

The second is making sure that your faculty, which are the core and the heart of any institution, that they're the size that you need to be able to teach the number of students that are coming in.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Chad Sampson, executive director with the Arizona Board of Regents. Chad, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

CHAD SAMPSON: It's our pleasure, thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: An ongoing dispute between Border Patrol and the Tohono O'odham Nation in Southern Arizona continues to escalate. For the last several weeks, the tribe's police have been escorting federal contractors off of their land as they attempt to keep the Trump administration from building its promised border wall there. They put up no-trespassing signs and fought the administration in court to try to stop construction. But a federal judge said construction could continue, and now it is. Last week, the tribe said armed federal agents escorted contractors onto their land and guarded them while they drilled and did other pre-construction work. Now, a Border Patrol vehicle blockade is preventing tribal police from removing contractors from the land. KJZZ's Alisa Reznick has been covering this story and joins us now with the latest. Good morning, Alisa.

ALISA REZNICK: Good morning, Lauren.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so the tribe says these armed agents are escorting contractors onto their land as they start building this wall. But a judge recently ruled that the strip of land where this wall will be built is not technically their land, right?

ALISA REZNICK: That's correct. So this is, again, 62 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border. It's inside the Tohono O'odham Nation. But the strip of land that the judge is referring to in the preliminary injunction is essentially—it's called the Roosevelt Reservation, and it's this 60-foot stretch of land that runs the length of Arizona, New Mexico, and California right along the border. So this is a long-established section, and it's been used for border wall construction in the past. But the section inside the Tohono O'odham Nation has never had a wall. There's vehicle barriers there. There's roads that have been cut by the U.S. government. There's surveillance towers, but not a wall. So yes, the judge ruled that the Roosevelt Reservation is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government. Now, that is under dispute currently. Chairman Verlon Jose of the Tohono O'odham Nation told me that that's one of the main points of the legal contention here and the subject of their litigation in court.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, so that decision is being appealed by the tribe. So now we have a Border Patrol blockade, like Border Patrol vehicles, Alisa, basically protecting the contractors as they go out and are doing this work so that the tribe's police can't go in and remove them as they had been doing. What's this look like right now?

ALISA REZNICK: That's right. So I talked to Chairman Verlon Jose, who told me essentially that starting early Tuesday morning last week, so actually a week ago today, he started receiving calls from tribal police who said that they were seeing armed Border Patrol agents, armed federal personnel entering the nation alongside contractors. And then he started receiving calls from community members who might have gone to the border that morning or just seen this convoy driving by. They were described as being in these tan fatigues with tactical gear, masks, and some people, Chairman Jose told me, thought that this was the military, maybe the National Guard. So they started realizing these are Border Patrol agents and some Bureau of Indian Affairs officers that were escorting the contractors so that they could do their work and, yes, preventing these escorts from the tribal police from happening by forming this blockade. Picture basically a blockade of these cars that makes it so that these trespassing citations cannot be done.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So Alisa, back up and talk about what the tribe's argument is against this wall. Why do they not want this there?

ALISA REZNICK: Sure. So like I mentioned, this 62-mile stretch of land has not had a wall, and that's pretty unique from other parts of the Arizona-Mexico border and really the U.S.-Mexico border as a whole. But it is because, in the past, this has been regarded as a tribal sovereignty issue. Thinking back just to Trump 1.0, when the first border wall, the first 30-foot steel wall was going in, there was a stretch of land near Yuma that would have gone across the Colorado River stretch of the Cocopah Indian Tribe's land. That actually didn't go through, even though it was just one mile. So back then it was described as a sovereignty issue. In fact, Congressman Raúl Grijalva, who I talked to back then about this, said, "This is a showcase that the federal government does not want to test sovereignty questions with tribes." So a little bit different now, and that is what the chairman is arguing here as well, essentially that this is their land and they've lost so much other ancestral land. So again, this tribe used to stretch deep into the state of Sonora in Mexico as well as further north, closer to Phoenix. And he says these are—there are sacred sites that are in this border wall's path and just tribal land, cemeteries, things like that. He talked a lot about this during a press conference at Quitobaquito. That's another sacred site that's not on the nation, but close to it, in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, just talking about the destruction that the tribe has already seen of some of its sites. Here he is.

VERLON JOSE: I would never go into your church and destroy it. I would never go into your home and destroy it. I would never go into your cemeteries and blow them up. That's exactly what has happened to the O'odham. That's exactly what's going to happen to us again.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So Alisa, you're reporting now that the tribe is essentially assessing its options as this pre-construction work is happening, these armed guards are there, this blockade is there. What are their options at this point? Can they do anything to stop this?

ALISA REZNICK: That's a good question, and it's kind of an open question right now. As we said, the tribe has filed their appeal to the preliminary injunction ruling. The tribe also has these other agreements in place with the federal government, things like forward operating bases that are on the nation, roads that have been cut through, they have the Shadow Wolves program, which is a group of tribal members that work with the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection. So the chairman, he told me that those agreements are in place right now, but there's a lot of things that are up in the air. Right now, nothing about those pre-existing agreements is changing. Here he is again.

VERLON JOSE: Moving forward, what the nation will do is we will exercise all options available in opposition to this wall. At this moment, we do not have any issues with those existing agreements. What we do have an issue with is anything, anyone doing work to build a wall here.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right, we'll have to leave it there for now. That is KJZZ's Alisa Reznick joining us from our Fronteras Desk in Tucson covering this story. Alisa, thank you so much. Appreciate the time.

ALISA REZNICK: Thanks, Lauren.

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

MARK BRODIE: And I'm Mark Brodie. Coming up, scientists have discovered more of the oldest materials in our known universe. We'll hear more from a researcher in Arizona about the hundreds of millions of years old galaxy cores they found.

LAUREN GILGER: But first, it is pretty rare these days that candidates hold town hall-type events where they come face to face with voters. But our next guest thought it was an important thing to do. So last year she held three of them and found that civility is not lost in Arizona. Democratic Representative JANEEN Connolly is a freshman lawmaker from District 8, which covers downtown Tempe and the surrounding areas. It's an historically safe Democratic district, but she wanted to talk to voters who didn't vote for her because she represents them, too. She wrote about it recently for Arizona Talks and came into our studios last week to talk to me more about it, beginning with why she thinks it's so much more rare today for candidates to hold forums like this or debate their opponent.

JANEEN CONNOLLY: I think that it's really interesting because they are all incredibly bright people. They all have the skill set to be able to sit down and talk to their constituents face to face. I think that as a society we've kind of been rapidly moving away from that kind of communication, not just in politics. And I think that as a society also, we have a little bit of trouble feeling comfortable with sensitive conversations, and it's important for us not to be that way. We have a lot of sensitive issues to manage right now. Our society is under a bit of duress, and talking to each other and being able to bring up sensitive topics, I think, is vitally important in bringing us through this period of time.

LAUREN GILGER: Why did you decide to hold town halls throughout that primary? Meet face-to-face with voters, take on their real questions?

JANEEN CONNOLLY: The main reason I held town halls is because some people that I'm representing did not vote for me. And so I told my staff, or my team, that I really want to have meetings. I want to invite everyone, particularly people who did not vote for me. I want to give them the opportunity to hear me and see who I am, know that I'm approachable, know that I recognize that even though they didn't vote for me or maybe don't support me politically, that I'm here for them if they have issues. It is my job to help them if they have issues. And so we set them up, and we fortunately moved through them in an interesting period of time, October of '25. Yeah, yeah. And early October, people would show up with questions, things were starting to happen. Mid-October, more people were showing up. By the end of October, people with very worried looks on their faces.

LAUREN GILGER: This was right at the beginning of the second Trump administration.

JANEEN CONNOLLY: Yeah, and people were starting to think, "What is going on?" We had a great opening to the meetings. We made a little poster for guidelines for civil dialogue, and the person introducing me was very adept at just saying, "Rep. Connolly doesn't care if you voted for her. She is your representative because she won the election, and she wants you to know that she's here to represent you." That's not just something she says on flyers and on her website.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay, so you must have known from the beginning that this might not go well. You could very well get some tough questions, some difficult moments. Did that happen?

JANEEN CONNOLLY: Not really.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow.

JANEEN CONNOLLY: Yeah, people were incredibly respectful.

LAUREN GILGER: Even when they disagreed with you?

JANEEN CONNOLLY: Even when they disagreed. The greatest moment was halfway through the second town hall, someone yelled from the back, "What party are you with anyway?" And so that was an interesting question to answer when you don't know who's in the room. I still to this day, a lot of people signed in and gave us their addresses and email addresses to be part of my newsletter, and I to this day don't know what parties they're with. And that's the way I want it to be.

LAUREN GILGER: So when that person yelled out from the back, "What party do you even represent?", JANEEN, what'd you say?

JANEEN CONNOLLY: I said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm a Democrat, and I'm more moderate." And then explained to them how I vote and that, "Please watch my voting record. Please determine whether or not I'm representing you the way you want to be represented, and if I'm not, here's my phone number," and gave it out. We've had so many people having issues with SNAP benefits and workers' comp and unemployment, and those are not partisan issues. And walking them through those situations carefully, a woman last night, very worried about her power bill, was she going to be able to pay it, as I helped her find the right resources. Working with state agencies and that kind of critical funding is vital right now. And I don't care what party these people are with at that point in time. At that point in their lives, they just need an advocate.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. We should say your past career kind of prepped you for this, right? It sounds like with your career at SRP had done probably a lot of community meetings and dealing with the public, and maybe on more hostile grounds.

JANEEN CONNOLLY: Yes. Lots of community meetings, lots of elected official briefings, building trust in the community, meeting with community leaders. I sited major infrastructure projects in lots of different parts of the state. And yeah, there would be a lot of opposition.

LAUREN GILGER: I want to ask you though about debates, right? Because one of the other things we're seeing right now as the Clean Elections Commission is carrying out debates for every race across the state is that a lot of candidates, including you, it sounds like, are not debating. And from the governor down, there are various reasons being cited as to why that would be. But why in your case are you not going to debate?

JANEEN CONNOLLY: I had to make a very difficult choice in the last few days because I committed to debate. But something came into my realm that was just really important for me to take a bye on the debate and go to instead. And I hope that my constituents will forgive me for that. I did debate in the primary, and that's out there. Everyone can go and see that, a much more lively debate probably than tomorrow's will be. And I'm happy to answer any of the questions that come up in the debate. People can call me, but I'm planning to put that out also.

LAUREN GILGER: So what do you think the value of not just debating and answering questions from journalists, but of interacting and answering those direct questions from constituents is today? As you say, we're in this world in which we don't have direct face-to-face conversation all that often anymore.

JANEEN CONNOLLY: So if you don't mind, I'm going to put in a plug for civil dialogue right here because I'm very much a proponent of civil dialogue, and I did plant that seed in the primary debate when we started out. We had a wonderful conversation, the three of us, about all the different questions that came up. And anger didn't get into it, and personal issues didn't come between us. We really had a great conversation. I think that debate is really healthy. I was on the ASU speech and debate team. Since then, I've been the volunteer coach of Tempe High School speech and debate team.

LAUREN GILGER: Oh, so you're a practiced debater.

JANEEN CONNOLLY: I'm practiced at the laws of debate and the approaches of debate, the perspective of debate, and I think that when people can come together, I mean, it's what the Whips should be doing on the floor, it's what should happen all over the Capitol all the time. I do think debate refines any process.

LAUREN GILGER: So you're defending the efficacy of debating, but you're not debating. And I know for other reasons, but I wonder, what do you think that says about how our elections function today? I mean, when we don't have the gubernatorial candidates all debating or the Senate candidates or congressional candidates, do you think that something's lost in that?

JANEEN CONNOLLY: I wouldn't say necessarily lost, and in some cases I think something can be gained. We don't need to see some of the candidates hash it out. We know they're going to sit down and hash it out, right? I don't see the benefit in the public watching that. I think for those specific candidates, it's up to us to go and read about the points of view of the two opposing sides. We don't have to have them have a debate in front of us. We can understand where they differ without that, if it's not going to be civil, if it's not going to be constructive. And we can make up our own minds. We're that bright.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. JANEEN Connolly, a Democrat in the House of Representatives here in Arizona in LD8. JANEEN, thank you so much for coming in. I really appreciate it.

JANEEN CONNOLLY: Thank you, Lauren.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I'm Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I'm Mark Brodie. The Trump administration wants more data from hospitals across the country, and it's having a federal agency that generally tracks injuries from consumer products collect it. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been trying to get hospitals to share information with a third-party contractor. That information includes personally identifiable information about patients. But as my next guest reports, the move is drawing scrutiny. Darius Tahir is a correspondent focusing on technology at KFF Health News. He and some colleagues have written about this. He joins me. Darius, can you describe what this agency is demanding of hospitals?

DARIUS TAHIR: Myself and my two colleagues, Amanda Seitz and Maya Goldman, who are both fantastic, learned that the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is responsible for making sure our everyday products are safe, right? So we don't want kids swallowing batteries from toys, for example. We don't want lead on our toys, to take another example. To do its job, historically it's relied on data from emergency rooms, from a selection of hospitals, such as Henry Ford Health in Detroit or Sanford Health, which is in the Dakotas. And it's had an interest in expanding that sample size to pick up on signals that are outside of this narrow geographic subset of the country.

And in doing that, it's demanded data using legal authority that is a very strong lever they're trying to use. And it's trying to go all across the country to get this data. That in of itself might not necessarily be a problem, but they want to use, apparently, artificial intelligence. They want the data to be de-identified, and they're asking for a huge spectrum of data. They're not necessarily just asking for data that looks like it's connected to some of these problems you might have with everyday devices, but it's also asking for data related to vaccine injuries, for example, or related to suicide attempts. And so this is kind of leading a lot of the hospitals, privacy experts, and former CPSC officials to step back and say, "Hang on. Is this really the way you want to go about this? Is this really a good idea?"

MARK BRODIE: What is the justification for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to need to know about things like vaccines or suicide rates?

DARIUS TAHIR: That's a great question. My colleagues and I uncovered a manual, a handbook about how this program is supposed to be administered. And it sort of said, "We don't necessarily need names. We don't necessarily need birthdays. If we need identifying information, we're going to follow up in certain follow-up investigations, which are a small subset of the overall data we've gotten to." And so that's kind of leading to these questions about why exactly do you need all this data? Why do you need this data in this specific form? Is this data going to be safely kept and maintained and not leaked? So it's occasioning all of these very urgent questions.

MARK BRODIE: You also report that there's a private company that has been contracted to collect this data. How big of a concern is that among folks who maybe are a little skeptical of what's going on here?

DARIUS TAHIR: It's definitely a concern. The agency says that the contract that they have signed with this company is going to protect some of these problems, but they're not making the contract public, excuse me. And so that's also questioning whether things are being handled appropriately.

MARK BRODIE: You mentioned that the federal agency will be using AI in this project. Do we know in what ways they'll be using AI?

DARIUS TAHIR: They haven't been entirely clear. One of the officials affiliated with the agency went to a toy industry conference in February and said that "these AI-enabled workflows are going to help us to improve the quality and quantity of injury surveillance data, while also building up a digital infrastructure to handle a massive new volume of electronic health records." So it's not entirely clear exactly what that will entail or exactly what the current plans are, but they've kind of touted this idea as something that might be helpful to them.

MARK BRODIE: Do we know what the CPSC plans to do with all this additional data that it wants?

DARIUS TAHIR: So they are, in general, positioning this as part of their traditional responsibilities of making sure the consumer products we all use in our daily lives are safe to use, right? And there are often lots and lots of recalls of various products ranging from LED lights to the batteries in off-road motorcycles, right? There are all sorts of these products that we use that we just kind of plug in or turn on and don't necessarily think like, "Oh, this could be defective," or "This could be a problem," right? So it is an important public health role that they play. The question is, how exactly do they administer that? Is the administration kind of consistent with privacy and other imperatives? And how much data are they asking for that's consistent with that job, right? Do you necessarily need vaccine or suicide data to be able to tell that, for example, a pool drain is safely assembled?

MARK BRODIE: What has been the response of hospitals and other healthcare providers to trying to, as you say, expand maybe the geographical network, but also the types of data that this agency is collecting?

DARIUS TAHIR: So that's gathering steam, and we hope to have a report on that. But our reporting is that they're not happy to be shipping off this data to the federal government without these protections.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Darius Tahir, a correspondent with KFF Health News. Darius, thanks so much.

DARIUS TAHIR: Great. Thank you, and have a great morning.

MARK BRODIE: The Tucson Unified School District is considering closing up to 10 schools in the coming years. The district has hired a consultant to help it figure out the next steps. A final decision is expected later this year. Gabriel Trujillo is TUSD superintendent, and he's on the line now to talk more about this. Gabriel, good morning. Thanks for being here.

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Yeah, good morning, Mark. Thanks for having me. Give me an opportunity to talk about this very difficult moment for us.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, I would imagine this is not the easiest thing. So are you witnessing and experiencing the same kinds of things that districts elsewhere around Arizona are in terms of just fewer students to have seats in these schools?

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Yes, it actually is a confluence of events and factors and variables that really combine to make a really, really ugly cocktail for those of us in the K-12 business. First, you have historically low birth rates here in Pima County affecting much of the Tucson Unified School District attendance boundaries. Then you have a shrinking population of K-12 students inside of our attendance zones. The Tucson Unified School District, we span 225 square miles. And five years ago, within this border, we had about 56,000 available K-12 age students zoned to our schools, and now that number has dipped to 52,500. So economic flight and immigration are two very, very big factors as folks either fear the recent immigration crackdowns or look for a cheaper cost of living outside of the district's boundaries. So we also have folks that waiting longer to have kids, older homeowners in a lot of sectors of our district where kids are grown. Really these factors have brought us to this point.

MARK BRODIE: It's interesting, the immigration issue, I wonder if that is maybe more acute in a district like yours than it might be in some districts up in the Phoenix area.

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Well, we're the state's largest border district. We're 45 minutes from the international border. The Tucson Unified School District, we've historically had the largest population of refugee and migrant students in the state, definitely here in Pima County. We've seen reductions in those student counts over the last couple of years. We've also seen very high levels of absenteeism for families as they deal with the fear and anxiety of not being sure that their children would be safe coming to school. That's been a tremendous challenge for us.

MARK BRODIE: So what are you going to be looking at? How will you decide how many and which schools will be closing? Because it seems as though some number of them will be closing.

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Yes. So we've got a really strong community advisory committee representative of all kinds of families and representative of all kinds of stakeholders, variety of perspectives, parents, teachers, some of our union leadership. We have representatives from some of the elected offices here in the city of Tucson. And they're really going to be looking at each particular school's enrollment history over the last five years. We're going to be looking at the percentage of students that each particular school captures within its attendance boundary, the percentage of students that it might be losing to charters and privates. We also will be looking at just the availability of K-12 age students in each particular neighborhood. We'll also look at spatial capacity, the percentage of each building that is going unused right now due to lower enrollment. We'll look at the presence of vulnerable populations in schools. So obviously a school with a large proportion of the student body qualifying for disabilities under special education or a large percentage of the student body emerging bilingual students learning English as a second language, that may not be a school that we look at at this time. So programmatic offerings matter as well, student body composition matters as well. We'll also look at the proximity to charters and private schools in the area and whether or not that school can be viable in the future. So these are some of the big factors that we'll be looking at to make these decisions.

MARK BRODIE: You mentioned proximity to charters and privates. Are you also going to be considering like the geography of the schools that you have in terms of if a student is in a school now that closes, maybe having one relatively close by as opposed to having them have to travel across town to get to school?

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Yeah, our true north is always going to be academic quality. So this isn't just really about balancing a budget or dealing with any kind of deficit. We really do believe that this is an opportunity to build a better, more competitive academic product to enhance access and opportunity to programs, extracurricular programs, academic quality. It is really hard to do that in a school of 100 students. It's hard to offer a full-time music teacher. It's hard to offer gifted and talented instruction. It's hard to offer the preschool program in a school of that size. When that school combines with another school that has all those resources, we can really do right by those 100 kids and be competitive and not risk losing some of those students to our competitors. So we're also going to be looking at grade-band adjustments. It's not just about school consolidations, but we might have some schools that might work better as a K-8 versus being a K-5 school. Or we have some schools that we might be looking at that might be secondary academies, right? Might take one of our high schools and experiment with making that high school a 7-12 model, much like was done in the Peoria Unified School District. So those are some of the thoughts and ideas that we have around this project, and ultimately it is about helping us be more competitive.

MARK BRODIE: Right. All right, we'll have to leave it there. That is Gabriel Trujillo, the superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time.

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Thanks, Mark. Have a great day.

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

MARK BRODIE: And I'm Mark Brodie. Scientists are getting a closer look into the formation of our universe thanks to a recent discovery. The international team of researchers, including those from the University of Arizona, has observed 31 quasars from when the universe was 600 to 800 million years old. For reference, that's about 5% of its current age. Quasars, by the way, are among the brightest objects in the universe and consist of black holes, among other things. Xiaohui Fan is a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona and was involved in this discovery. I spoke with him earlier and asked what to him is the significance of this new finding.

XIAOHUI FAN: So what we found was the most distant quasar that is known today in the universe, which translate to actually the most distant very massive black holes that we know in the universe.

MARK BRODIE: And what is the importance of that? Like why is that helpful to know?

XIAOHUI FAN: So let me first explain what quasars are. These things are fascinating. They basically are extremely bright cores of galaxies that is powered by very massive black holes. So they can be as bright as, say, 1,000 or 10,000 times the Milky Way galaxy put together, and in the center of these quasars, there are black holes of probably a billion solar masses. So what we really find is that very early on in the history of the universe, maybe only 600, 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe is now about 14 billion years old, so in the first bit of time in the universe, those very, very massive black holes already existed, which was a surprise.

MARK BRODIE: So what does that tell us then maybe about the formation of the universe or about how things are going in the universe? Can it tell us anything?

XIAOHUI FAN: Right. So it tells us that very early in the universe, in a very early part of the history, like if you think of the universe as sort of a baby, an infant, a lot of things already happened. So black holes, basically they take time to grow. They can grow in a million years or even 100 million years. They take hundreds of millions of years to grow to something like a billion solar masses. And so that tells us that somehow the physics of the universe is such that black holes can grow very quickly and very early. And the theorists are still trying to understand why is that the case, what kind of condition can give rise to these very early and very massive black holes.

MARK BRODIE: Is that something different than what scientists had previously thought?

XIAOHUI FAN: Well, we don't know what we thought, of course. These are new discoveries that are just — so the race to find the most distant black holes have been going on for a very long time. And every time we push toward more distant black holes, we thought, "Oh, this is fairly early." Then we always find something even earlier and even earlier. So I've been involved in this kind of research for the past 30 years, and at the time when I started—when we started doing this, the most distant black holes were quite a bit closer. And now they're pushing it to earlier and earlier in the universe. So we don't quite know how early we can push it, but there are some simple calculation people can calculate, which basically says that our normal way of forming black holes doesn't quite work. The normal way we mean is that if you have a very, very massive star, so say a star that is 100 times more massive than the sun, when they collapse, they collapse to a 100 times the sun black hole, a baby black hole, and then you begin to dump matter into it, and over time it's going to grow. And we think that it would take something like a billion years or more to get this 1 billion solar mass black hole to form. And of course, the universe at the time that we observe these quasars were quite a bit younger. So we don't quite know why is the case, whether it's because you have some kind of physics that allow a black hole to form much bigger to begin with, or some other kind of physical processes that allow these things to grow much faster.

MARK BRODIE: Is it your expectation, though, that at some point somebody will find an older quasar, one from earlier on out there?

XIAOHUI FAN: Without giving too much, yes.

MARK BRODIE: Is that the hope, or would that be disappointing given your findings?

XIAOHUI FAN: We are working on it. We are all working on finding the more distant one, and I think given the kind of data that we have access to, we will find a more distant one very soon.

MARK BRODIE: How do you go about trying to find something so far away?

XIAOHUI FAN: So what make this happen is that what I mentioned, given new data, this is using a brand new space telescope called Euclid. It's a telescope that was launched by the European Space Agency about three years ago. It has a 600-million-pixel camera that looked at both the visible and infrared part of the sky, basically scan the sky. And that is much, much more efficient than what we used to do, which is use similar telescope from the ground. This is a space telescope so you don't have the light pollution, you don't have the atmosphere and all that. So that allow us to detect things much more efficiently and scan the sky much faster. That was what allowed us to discover this new quasar and the new most distant black hole. Of course, this satellite only started to work three years ago. Still have four years of mission to go, at least. That's why I said I believe we will find a more distant one very soon, because we are just starting to look at data from this satellite.

MARK BRODIE: Are the black holes in the quasars that you've discovered similar or dissimilar to ones that you have found or others have found previously?

XIAOHUI FAN: So that's another sort of surprise is that they don't look any different from the black holes that we discovered in other quasars, or more precisely, the quasars we discovered, their properties are very, very similar to the properties of quasars much more close by. And that's different from other things, different from galaxies, different from stars. When you look at, like, James Webb Space Telescope find a lot of very young galaxies that people probably have known, have heard, those young galaxies look quite different from our Milky Way galaxy. But when I look at the data of these very distant black holes compared to the data of very close-by quasars, if I don't know the distance, if I just look at the pictures, look at the light spectrum and put them on the same scale, they look rather similar. So that's another indication that these black holes and the surrounding of these black holes can form extremely quickly.

MARK BRODIE: Xiaohui Fan is a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.

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 @kjzztheshow.