An Army of Normal Folks - Chris Brewster: We Don't Love Kids in Oklahoma (Pt 2)

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

When 80% of kids aren't reading on grade level in Oklahoma, Chris Brewster believes that they don't love kids in his state. His wife told him "Suck it princess, get to work" and so Chris did. He founded Santa Fe South Schools, which has an inner-city population of 5,000 students that usually score in the bottom 5-10% in the state, but their elementary and early childhood students are in the top 5-10%! Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an army of normal folks. We continue now with part two of our conversation with Chris Brewster, right after these brief messages from our general sponsors. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes. then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways,

disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know True Crime playlist on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At 19, Elena Sada believed she had found her calling. In the new season of Secret Scandal, we pulled back the curtain on a life built on devotion and deception. A man of God, Marcial Massiel, looked Elena in the eye and promised her a life of purpose within the Legion of Christ.

My name is Elena Sada, and this is my story. It's a story of how I learned to hide, to cry, to survive, and eventually how I got out. This season on Sacred Scandal hear the full story from the woman who lived it, Witness the journey from devout follower to determine survivor as Elena exposes the man behind the cloth and the system that protected him. Even the darkest secrets eventually find their way to the light. Listen to Secret Scandal, the mini secrets of Marcial Masiel as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the IHeard Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get her podcasts. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm gig. Shick, I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just want to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Shick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own mark to suicide.

One Tribe, save my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of The Good Stuff.

Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975. LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy. emerged. And it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Venture should never come with a pause button. Remember the Movie Pass era? Where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9?

It made zero cents and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines. Like the visionary behind a movie pass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of movie pass the company that he founded. His story is wild and it's currently the subject of a juicy new April. Beodocumentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder.

Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created there are no girls on the internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Haven't I read something that you've said that, I don't know, almost two-thirds of kids in Oklahoma don't read on grade level by fourth grade? If I mess that up, correct me. We've got 70, according to the NAEP, 76% of kids, the national... Three quarters.

Yeah, three-quarters are not reading at grade level. by fourth grade. Well, ever, but by third grade, yeah, even through the course of... Well, then that would indicate that 75% of kids in Oklahoma City are then two-thirds more likely to not have a job and not be productive citizens. It's worse than that, because... It's worse than that. We're talking about two-thirds of 75% of your population.

In the state, so that includes the affluent, high-performing districts. When you concentrate that data in the urban environment, they're bringing the numbers up for you. That's correct. So it's worse. It's worse than inner city. So a small example, there was a school being shut down by a local district. It had proficiency rates in reading at 2% when they were going to shut it down.

2%. 98% of the kids were not proficient in this elementary school. I mean, it's just so virtually none of the kids in the entire school. So the community can go. That's not a school. It's not a school. They're not teaching. anything.

You know, and we could talk about this, but it's the only institution that we pour billions into but have zero accountability for the one thing we actually pay. What's the one thing we pay taxes for in public education? To teach your kids.

For the public to be educated. Right. Which is a measurable outcome. You can actually measure this. But we don't do that. But we put billions in and some of our highest paid public servants are superintendents

in school districts that have some of the lowest outcomes. because we don't we don't hire people to have academic outcomes we hire managers people to manage to kind of keep the fights down or hopefully have a good football team or whatever we need but we're not producing educated let's not get sued no no exactly right let's let's protect our backs well have you ever heard in your state or others of a of a public school superintendent being fired because of academic outcomes I have heard of them being fired all the time by elected boards based on political crap. I don't think I can ever think of one that's been fired because kids weren't doing one. I mean, the number one thing we should be held accountable for our superintendents are the academic outcomes of the children we serve. That's really the only thing.

And yet we don't hold our chief executive officers in our public school systems accountable for that role. It's amazing. They can get fired for fiscal malfeasance or embarrassing the public or even, poor athletic programs. They can also get fired for, you know, if a $26 lunch receipt didn't turn down. Yeah, that kind of silliness. A $26 lunch receipt didn't turn down.

Yeah. Meanwhile, a thousand kids in their district can't read. Cannot read. But the lunch receipt, now that's something we need to be worried about. And so you hire managers, and they hire managers, to manage managers to manage buildings, and they hire managers to manage classrooms, but this isn't a pedagogical skill set issue. And so unless we're really requiring people to be skilled and held accountable for the outcomes in their classrooms, in their buildings, and their districts, we're going to get exactly

what we keep getting. All right. So you've had it after six years, and you bolt, and I think you're going to become a minister now? What's your wife's name? Christy. All right. You must be like up to this point, Christy, this is driving crazy. What does she do? Well, she's been my partner in crime through everything. So she's worked with me in church ministry. She's my accompanist in the choirs I'm teaching. That's cool.

Yeah, because I wasn't the real musician. She was her master's in piano performance. I was just a hack. So I'm up there waving my arm. She's really the skilled musician. She makes it where I can keep my job, basically. So what is she doing while you're teaching? Raising our kids.

She's volunteering. But you have to be. Coming home, this has to evolve over six years, where toward the end, she's even saying to you, you're miserable, do something else. I think, I think she's more like, you know, you keep running your mouth about this stuff. You should just, she's more like kind of suck it up, Princess, get to work. I mean, she's a little bit. I want to meet her. I mean, she's very supportive, but, I mean, she's not all about the feels, right?

We've got work to do, right? I love that. This is the work you've chosen. I'm with you in this. We don't have any money, but this is the goal where we're working with kids. We love kids. And she's always been my partner in crime.

We started dating when she was 16 and I was 17. So we've been married for... In the Philippines? In the Philippines. Yeah, her parents were missionary kid, too. Okay. Wow. And so we're in it through thick and thin,

but I said, I think I think I got to get out and do something. Sell insurance, be a youth pastor, something. And she goes, okay, well, let's pray about it. it, which meant she needed me to think about it a little bit more. And I talked to my principal, and he said, well, you should go back and get your administrative degree. I'm like, for what? He said, to become a principal, I said, well, your job sucks.

Why would I want to be a principal? He goes, well, you should, you should go get your degree. I'm like, that would be, that's an awful idea. But he was my mentor and Dr. Raoul Font. So I listened to, I went back to the University of Oklahoma, and I began to study to get my administrative degree and I focused on school reform and appropriately I just thought well if I'm here I might as well read about some some school reform and what I found was um much to my chagrin is that there were places around the country where there were some real bright spots there were things

happening with populations like like ours that were exceptional kids were learning where do you remember there were places in Memphis that were starting to see some results like I didn't even know where Memphis was really at that point, right? We looked at some places in California, in Texas, in New York, like these little bright spots. Like, how are they taking this radically impoverished community, mostly black and brown kids, English language learners, and having academic outcomes? What is the secret sauce here? Like, what's going on? I began to sort of unpack what really was taking place in those. And I thought, well, if it's happening somewhere else, maybe we were obligated now to see that it happens.

in our city. So the shift in my mentality was, like, to me, it was God saying, look, look, there are places where there is hope in this work. So you just need to learn how to do it. We began to think differently about that. And then, yeah, the sort of ironic thing was as I, as I finished my coursework, my first administrative post was at Deer Creek High School in Edmond, Oklahoma. And so it was about 17, 18 minutes away. on the highway, from Capitol Hill. And Capitol Hill was 98% pre and reduced lunch, qualified, 98% poverty. And Deer Creek was 2%.

Wow. The soccer team I coached at Deer Creek, or at Capitol Hill, had one white kid on the team. And we were very good because the Hispanic culture valued soccer, so we were pretty good. And went to Deer Creek, we had one Hispanic kid on the team. And they valued football. They were two A-State champions the next year,

but our soccer team was just, it was not good. good. And a parking lot full of mostly beater cars, and those were the teacher cars, to a parking lot full of BMWs and land rovers, and those were the kids' cars. And I'm like... 15 miles apart. What? What? You're not in Kansas in a total. Is that right? 15 miles apart. Well, 15 minutes apart, about 42 miles. Yeah, so... But not two separate universes. No, the same area code.

A quick drive across. What? And I was just just... I mean, it was jarring how radically different it was to be born in this community versus this community. Okay. Next pontification, I say it every day. Everybody who will listen, the zip code at the time of your birth should not predetermine your ability to succeed in our country. But it does. It does because the systems are embedded in those zip codes that sort of maintain those cycles we're talking about.

maintain the cycle of affluence and opportunity or the cycles of poverty and all kinds of social society. It's just the truth. And we need to look ourselves in the mirror and realize so much of what we have in this country and the world is luck of the draw. We didn't earn it either way, right? When we're born into it, and again, this was that thing that just continued to be churned in me that if you... Boy, that eats people up when you hear that, though. And And honestly, let me tell you something. My mom was married and divorced five times. I worked hard to get over some of that trauma and get through college.

And I started a business with $17,000 that now employs 132 people and we do business in 42 countries. I worked hard. And I earned that. I did not earn the access I had to capital to start that business. I did not earn the access I had to scholarships to go to college. Those things I didn't earn. So when someone says, well, you didn't earn that as a result of your privilege, it doesn't mean everything you have in the world is just handed to and you're lucky.

And we need to quit being so self-conscious over that concept. but it also means the kids whose luck of the draw at the time of their birth if they didn't earn the crap that they're surrounded with like the ticking fan and everybody needs to drop

this weird reaction to the truth of privilege and just look at things for what they are and understand them and quit taking them so damn personally. I don't understand why it's even an issue. I don't either. If we can help kids, why don't we want to help kids?

And to understand how kids are where they are and why we need to help kids, we have to be honest with ourselves about privilege and earned and zip codes and birth and reading levels at third grade and just drop all these preconceived notions that we like clan ourselves into. It's destructive to our society. The whole society. It hurts us as well. It hurts everybody.

It's a worst place for my kids to grow up. I've got nine kids. There are four biological and five adopted. You're nuts. You are insane and your wife is a warrior. She's Wonder Woman, actually. That's her other gig. But the difference in what each one of those kids needs to be successful is right in my face.

So they're all, as you can imagine, very, very different. So at the microcosm, I know I have to do something different for each. of our children so they can have success. I thought you said you were Baptist. You're Catholic? I grew up in a Catholic country, you know. I'm just kidding. We didn't mean to adopt five.

We were open to adoption. Then the first adoption was the sibling set of three, and then birth mom had two more, and we adopted those. So it's phenomenal. That's a whole other story. Okay. So you're at Deer, what's it called?

Deer Creek. Deer Creek. The juxtaposition is just smoking you in the face. And I said, well, I loved it. The district was amazing. I mean, it was wild before the first home football game. One of the booster clubs members called me and said, hey, coach, what do you want for your pregame meal?

How do you want your steak cooked? I'm like, what are you talking about? Well, we cook steak for the kids before the home games. I'm like, what are you talking about? I mean, sometimes we give a bag of burgers from McDonald's and feed them some cheap pizza or something, but they were custom slicing steaks for their football team before the home games.

I want to know how one of mine cooked. And in that moment, I thought, man, this is just another one of those infinite examples of complete differences in how we're approaching the rearing of children in our society. These kids are incredible kids. They were kind. They worked hard. They were great athletes.

but so were the kids at Capitol Hill. But there was nobody calling me up before the soccer game saying, how do you want your steak cooked? It was nobody in the stands, right? It was... And I guarantee you there's no kid being hit with by brick in the back of his head laying in a pull of blood on the street outside that school

with folks rolling up and taking them off in a car. And if it had happened, it would have been national news in that neighborhood. That's right. It's a good point. It would have been... It would have been... stations would have been there talking about this tragedy at Deer Creek or outside of

Jerk Creek and nothing in South O'KC. Though I had lots of those experiences where I just was reminded of this completely obvious disconnect between how we reared children in this community versus how they were being supported in this community. So I got this weird phone call in this late winter of 2001 from somebody I thought was a network marketing scheme. You know, you get those calls from, you know, your friend said to call you.

And he said, I want to talk to you about an opportunity to start a school in South O'KC. And this was Jose Gomez. And Joe Gomez had founded an organization called ORO Development Corporation. And basically it was a nonprofit that had been around serving migrant farm worker populations as they migrated through the central part of the U.S. and his heart had been, he was Hispanic and grown up, he was a U.S. military vet,

and had said, we need to take care of the community, just a remarkable, just quiet servant, a deep man of faith who had built this small nonprofit, just serving people who were underserved. And he had seen some sister nonprofits in Arizona and Texas and places starting these things called charter schools to serve that same population. And so he thought, well, let's start a charter school. I could not remember what a charter school was, had no idea, I had to go back and look at whatever chapter that was in my graduate textbook that talked about what charter schools were because in 99, Oklahoma started its first charter school. I had its first charter school law on the

books, but it was 2000 when the first charter school opened. So this was brand new. This was 2001. Went down and sat with he and a couple of the members of the community in a storefront. You know, weirdest job interview I've ever had. It ended up. in, you know, handholding in prayers. These people were Pentecostals. I'm a Southern Baptist. I didn't know what was going on. My arms were being raised.

People were praying out loud. I don't know if it's Spanish or in tongues. I'm like, what is going on here? This is the strangest job interview I've ever had in my life. And Christy, my wife, said, well, how did it go? I was like, I have no idea. I have no idea what just happened. I'm excited because they're talking about serving kids in South O.K.C.,

but I don't have any idea what this looks like. Well, I want to back a little bit. He had, Joe had been. trying to find somebody to lead a school he wasn't an educator had no idea but he wanted somebody who knew education what i found out later is i was about fourth on the list and the other three had said no thank you we're not interested so i was like not jv i was like the bench on the the ninth grade team i was not even i was barely a name on the list when he called me and so i was just the only one that said yes at that point and crazy enough crazy and well ignorant um i think one of the three

above you were probably chased off by the talking in tongues in the Pentecost. Maybe. He's like, I can't work with these people. They were all three actual educators who knew what they were doing, too. So I think they said, there's just no way for this to, this can't succeed. Yeah. Do you have any students? No. Do you have any money? No.

Do you have the charter written? No. Well, we're just not thinking that's a good professional move for us. This business plan has holes. There's no, there was a business plan. There was no business plan. There was nothing. The business plan is all.

Yeah, it was like here, we want to start a school. Will you start a school? That was the whole conversation. We'll be right back. Hi there. This is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes. Then have we got good news for you.

Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12. of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know true crime playlist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

At 19, Elena Sada believed she had found her calling. In the new season of Sacred Scandal, we pulled back the curtain on a life built on devotion and deception. A man of God, Marcial Masiel, looked Elena in the eye and promised her a life of purpose within the Legion of Christ. My name is Elena Sada and this is my story. It's a story of how I learned to hide, to cry, to survive and eventually how I got out. This season on Sacred Scandal hear the full story from the woman who lived it. Witness the journey from devout follower to determine survivor as Elena exposes the man behind.

kind of cloth and the system that protected him. Even the darkest secrets eventually find their way to the light. Listen to Secret Scandal, the mini secrets of Marcial Masiel as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get her podcasts. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation.

And I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission.

I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The Holiday Rush. parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Smokey tells you when he sees you passing through. Remember, please be careful. It's the least that you can do.

It's what you desire. Don't play with matches. Don't play with fire. After 80 years of learning his wildfire prevention tips, Smokey Bear lives within us all. Learn more at smokybear.com. And remember, Only you can prevent wildfires.

Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester and the ad council. I go back to Christy and she goes, I said, I think we're supposed to start school in South O.K.C. And I was thinking in the back of my mind, she would... Because the interview was so convincing. Because I honestly felt like she was going to speak truth, right? She's like Holy Spirit Jr. in my life. And she's the one that's the one that's a little bit there, boy, we need to slow this down.

Go back and tell them what kind of steak you want next week. Well, exactly. So I'm in Deer Creek, and I've got this, I mean, the professional pathway. Yeah. And I, we think about this, we pray about this, and my superintendent comes to me a couple weeks later. And she said, I want to talk to you about next year. And she starts to lay out that there's an administrative role that's coming open, and then she'd like me to think about it. And, I mean, I'm 32 at this point. This is looking pretty good on paper. And I said, well, Dr. Tudwell, I think what I'm going to do next year,

is started charter school in South Oklahoma City. And she kind of cocked your head and looked at me and said, hmm, well, what you think about it a couple weeks and come back and tell me. And I went home and I said, well, this is getting really real right now because this is our professional career. Christie was stay-at-home mom, raising our two littles. We were living on an educator income. There's not much margin there at all.

And we thought about this. And I honestly thought Christy would say, no, this is really not. the right timing. And she's, basically, she says, you've been running your mouth about this for years. Like, basically if... Put up or shut up. Put up or shut up. It's exactly what it was. And and so we did pray about it. We thought about it. But again, mostly, mostly ignorance and hubris and trying to think, yeah, we can do this thing. It's how I started by business. I swear to you, it was ignorance and hubris and a little bit of faith and the willingness to work. Yeah. Yeah. Work was, Yeah. I worked hard before, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

So we decided to start a charter school, didn't know what we were doing. We wrote a charter that was a few pages in length. It was kind of the Wild West and charter schools in Oklahoma. I was like, sure, you can start a school, and you can start a school, and you can start a school. And I went back to Dr. Twidwell two weeks later and said, I think I'm supposed to start this school. And she goes, well, let me get this straight. From what you've told me, you want to start a school. It doesn't exist.

With students you haven't enrolled and teachers you haven't hired. And a building that you don't know where it is. We didn't have a building. We didn't have curriculum. We didn't have furniture or anything. So when you put it that way, it doesn't sound like a great business plan. But yes, ma'am, I think that's what we're going to do. And it was that I think it's one of those weird moments where you don't have a choice.

You just, you're in it now. So you got to go do the work. Starting businesses very, very similar. You want to eat. You're going to go to work. And so we started this crazy idea to start a charter school. And it was wild. Really honestly, no reason it should have succeeded in opening,

much less succeeded in opening now 25 years later. It's next school. Okay. Now before we go forward is a good time to help people. I think people by now and this year have heard the word charter school, right? I don't think most people understand how charter schools are funded because our view is still in, district public schools. If you live in an area, you go to the school and you can have busing and you can have food if you fall below poverty level and how kind of in general how the public system is supposed to work. Right. And then you've got pro quo and private schools, which you pay your

tuitions and are largely affluent and everything else. But then there's this thing called a charter school, and I don't think people really understand financially how they exist, where the kids come from, how they get in. Could you explain just not specifically yours, but the overall view of what a charter school is, whether it's in Oklahoma, Memphis, or L.A. So somewhere around 1991, a group of teachers, I think in Minneapolis, actually, said something like, all right, district folk. If you just gave us the money you're spending on a school, we could design a better school. Here's our charter. Here's our contract for how we'd run a school. And there were some folks who were crazy enough to say, all right, you educators think you know what you're talking about. Go run your

school. And it was this idea that if there's a need and a group of people that can respond to that need to fill a void in a community with public dollars to be used for public school students and open enrollment, that maybe there's some opportunity. And from that sort of genesis, we now have, I think, 47 states with some type of charter school law on the book. So I think in the state of Tennessee, and this may be dated, Alex may can figure it out, but I'm going to pick a number that's close. I think we spend about $14,000 per kid in Shelby County schools. I'm pretty sure of it. Pretty close, okay?

So if I can get a charter and an agreement starter, charter school, are you saying that for each kid that comes into my school, the state will give me $14,000 because that's what the average cost. See, I'm trying to understand the financial. Okay, so the financial side of it basically is that, I mean, you set up a nonprofit that will charter with a state authorized authorizer who say, here are your state rules for running this public school. Yeah, you got to meet the standard.

state qualifications. There's a high standard for, it's non-sectarian, you've got to have a curriculum, you've got to be insured, you've got to have strong financials, special ed, compliance with all ADA, and all of the, every rule, the basic way to understand charter school is every rule that applies to children in a public school, in a traditional public school applies to children in a charter school, every rule. See time and Carnegie units and graduation requirement. But it's a nonprofit. But the nonprofit then can turn and say, but the rules that apply to the adults,

We've got some latitude there. So there's no tenure. There's no union agreement in our school. I can pay teachers more or less. I can use non-certified but highly qualified staff. For example, a chemist could come and work to teach chemistry for me. Even if he doesn't have his teacher certificate, which you would have to have at a public school.

That's correct. Which is a little crazy. Yeah, it's a little crazy. That's a whole other conversation. Highly qualified people who actually produce results. God forbid, don't let me teach in a school. Economics 101 class as a guy who's been 33 years in international business. You might know a little bit about it.

Let's have a 22-year-old who just graduated from the University of Memphis to it instead because they have a certificate. Exactly. So charters get to take advantage of that. Yep. The money, how does the state then give a certain amount of money per student based on that ratio? So most of the money that if the charter school were a public school, the same amount of money that would flow from local and federal sources will flow through the entity into that

school. Okay. But then that school, their board will decide how it's, how it's spent. The charter school. The charter will. So you'll decide with your local. Oh, so each charter school has its own board. That's correct.

And so it's not a private school. No. But it's removed from the district board and district superintendent because it has its own board and its own management because it's. a 501c3. But the state makes a contract that says, but for the kids that you take, we will fund money to you based on the same ratio that we fund money to kids in public schools. That's right. So October 1 is my child count. I'll turn a number of students who are enrolled at Santa Fe South schools to the state. We are funded on that amount of school and the type,

amount of students and the type of students. So there's a waiting formula in every state that says impoverished kids get this factor times the state aid. A bilingual kid would have this. Special ed kid would have this. So they calculate all this in each state and say, this is the money that the public is spending to educate this child. Your public charter school will now use that money to educate these children. But because it's a 501c3, you can then also take outside donations to build the school. It almost is replacing the old school. PTA and booster club. It's much, but it's actually more challenging because some of local sources you don't have an advantage of. The number one thing we don't have. Now, there's two things that

charter schools are underfunded in. One is there's often an administration fee charged by the authorizer. In some states, that might mean you only get 85% of every dollar. Oh, that's interesting. And it's retained by this group. So sometimes it's 5%, 1%, but sometimes it's a much less amount than that 14,000 you quoted. The other piece is that local funding, which built buildings. I quoted with the caveat that I don't know what I'm talking about. But I think that's probably good. I pull up the number of bill.

It's 10,9.59. We could pontificate about education forever, but money is rarely the issue. That's correct. So the state of Utah is the best education state in the country. And theirs is less than Memphis. Your money is not the problem. But the point is.

But the point is. I just want people to understand kind of how a charter school is funded and operate. So that's it. So the big issue that we face is facilities and infrastructure. So most districts will pass a bond and then levy a local tax to repay the bond. So if you want to build a fine arts stadium, a new school, a football stadium, these are all paid for through a local bond initiative. Charter schools don't have any of that. So facilities are very expensive, as you're aware, to build. In your industry, you know how prices are going up. If I need to open a classroom for a classroom full of kids, and it cost me $300 a square foot to build,

I don't have any money to build that. There's no state backing. There's no state backing. So I have to be very creative and very lean in my budgeting because all of my facilities costs come out of my per pupil amount. Okay. Well, so based on that, starting this charter school was absolutely ludicrous. Yes, yes.

You had nothing. From my perspective now, I would not have approved me. No way that I had any business. There's no way. I would highly recommend I not be allowed to start a charter school for all those reasons. But you did. Yeah, we did. We started with 120 kids.

Where'd you get them? Well, here's what we thought. So I hired these teachers, sat them around a table like this, we had two cell phones and an office phone and a dot matrix printer printout of names and phone numbers. And they said, what's this? I said, well, these are all the incoming freshmen in Oklahoma City Public Schools. I said, where did you get these numbers? I said, that's not important.

We may have stole them. We have friends in low places. They said, well, what are we supposed to do with these? I said, well, you call the numbers and you tell them about our school. What do we tell them? I said, do you tell them anything you need to tell them? Because if you don't have students, you don't have a job. And they're like, oh, we get this.

So your teachers became recruiter. So we're on the phone like, yeah, we opened an August. It's going to be a great school. Like, we're going to have football. Yes, we're going to have football. Are we going to have this? Yes, we'll have it all. I mean, we literally, Coach, we did not know what we were doing.

Like, we did not know what we were doing. But we cast this vision for a school that we're sort of forming in real time. Because we believed in kids. We believed in opportunity. We believed in our ability. This was probably unfounded. But we believed in our ability to do better than the local system, despite all of these things that we hadn't taken care of, like,

fire coat issues in the building and ceiling tiles and actual chairs and those types of things. So we're calling these parents and they begin to assemble and enroll. And we thought, well, look, they are such bright parents. They know exactly how good the school is going to be. Well, I very quickly realized that that wasn't the equation at all. That what they were doing is in their mind saying, maybe this wet behind the ears white kid in a church basement with no experience, no equipment, no computers, no textbooks,

is a better option than the local high school. Now, can you imagine being a parent? That would be a value judgment in and of itself is so incriminating on the local high school. It was horrifying to me that we were the best option? There's no way we could be the best. Looking back on it, why would any parents say,

my most precious asset, my child, is better served with this guy? Because although it wasn't on the nose, word gets around the neighborhood when a kid's laying convulsing in the street with blood coming out of the back of his head. They know what's going on. Everything about those institutions was bad for their children. Everything about it. From the moment they walked in the door, they knew they were in a bad place for all of the reasons. Physically, emotionally, mentally, they just were not...

But parents didn't have... You know, we have choices, right? if we can move to a district that we choose, if we can private school, if we can homeschool, we have choice. So affluent, mostly white people have choice. Impoverished communities have no choice. And so charter schools are about choice giving the power of the public institution back to the public and from the institution. So right now in these inner cities, the institution maintains all the power. There's no reason to improve because you don't have to.

You open the doors and your zip code has assigned the students who will come in the door. And there's very little accountability to the actual education. Could you run a business if there was no competition and you could set your own prices and... Yes, but could I run my business without accountability? I mean, look, people hear me, okay? I have coached kids that got advanced from one grade to another because they had good attendance. Oh, yeah. That's not uncommon.

That's very common. That is sick. Yeah. We'll be right back. Hi there. This is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes. Then have we got good news for you?

Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all. all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know true crime playlist on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At 19, Elena Sada believed she had found her calling. In the new season of sacred scandal, we pulled back the curtain on a life built on devotion and deception. A man of God, Marcial Almasiel, looked Elena in the eye and promised her a life of purpose within the Legion of Christ. My name is Elena Sada and this is my story.

It's a story of how I learned to hide, to cry, to survive and eventually how I got out. This season on Sacred Scandal hear the full story from the woman who lived it. Witness the journey from devout follower to determine survivor as Elena exposes the man behind the cloth and the system that protected him. Even the darkest secrets eventually find their way to the light. Listen to Secret Scandal, the mini secrets of Marcial Masiel as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get her podcasts. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then.

And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide.

One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The Holiday Rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Smokey tells you when he sees you passing through. Remember, please be careful.

It's the least that you can do. It's what you desire. Don't play with matches. Don't play with fire. After 80 years of learning his wildfire prevention tips, Smokey Bear lives within us all. Learn more at smokybear.com. And remember,

Only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester and the ad council. So anyway, we got to get to it. You start this school that shouldn't even be a school with a bunch of people that are passionate, but honestly, neophytes as it pertains to running a school. That's right.

And in a church basement. Yep. And? A kid showed up. We had a waiting list, the first class. And I mean, for the first 22 years, we never even recruited a kid. It was all word of mouth.

Never did it again. We grew every year from that first class of 120 kids, seven teachers to now we serve 5,000 kids, 650 employees, a budget of about half a million the first year to 52 million this year. Just for a second. In one facility? No, it's all over the place. We have schools in former grocery stores,

former malls, former armory, former private school, it didn't want to be in the south side anymore. We'll put a school in just about any facility I can bring up to... And what ages are we talking? So now we serve pre-K through 12th grade. As I mentioned, we did everything

that my daddy would say Bass Acords trying to get it sorted out. When kids came in the door as ninth graders, I quickly realized they're five years behind. They remember the third grade reading proficiency thing. You're catching them late. And now we had this thing called End of Instruction Exam.

that we're starting to come in, some good accountability. But I realize I have four years to make nine years growth with kids who are already, their trajectories downward academically and not upward. I can't do this. There's no, we're good, but we ain't that good. You can pull them out of the river,

but eventually you've got to go up river and find out why they're getting in the river in the first place. So I got to start a middle school, right? We've got to get up river. So we open a middle school. They're three years behind. There's still behind.

I'm a little slow here. So if we get them, out of the delivery room, into the classroom, before they go back. But even, I mean, you know, as well as I do in under-resourced communities, children aren't school-ready even in pre-K. They walk in. They're not. Because they haven't been read.

Bedtime stories are sung lullabas, and they just haven't developed. Because mama's working three jobs. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not incriminating anybody, just saying it's the fact. It's the fact. And so we built it backwards until we're finally, We're finally very good at what we do because we've learned over the years. And now we start schools early childhood pre-KK and one and then build them a grade level at a time. We're building feeder patterns now into our was one charter school.

Now we're a charter school district. We're a pretty sizable district. You're serving 5,000 kids? Yeah, this year. Do you still have a waiting list? In various grades we do. So like pre-K, sixth grade, ninth grade, where they're sort of moving into another school. grade-level configuration we have waiting list.

When you catch them in sixth grade and ninth grade, are you still catching kids that are way behind again? So do you have transitional programs to get kids caught up? It's extremely hard work to catch kids up who haven't been in our system already, but we do a lot of direct instruction, a lot of tutoring programs, a lot of associated assistance for kids to catch back up,

and still sometimes we don't make it. And everybody needs to remember, this is a choice these kids and families are making to come to these charter schools. This is a choice they're making to try to get a better opportunity for themselves and their children. This is, again, I'm going to say the word again, a choice, a cognitive choice. So when you look at these impoverished areas and you shake your head, they're like, do they not even care? Hell yeah, they care. They love their kids, just like everybody else loves their kid.

But absent choice, what can they do stuck in a system? That's exactly right. And what your place has given is a choice, a determination, an opportunity. And in 20 years, you've gone from 120 to 5,000. Now it's time for the data points. Give us a comparative analysis. on what your schools have been able to do for its students first their peers in the public schools.

So the early sort of indications of success were graduation rates, attendance rates. Early like first five, six years. Yeah, just kids who stayed in school, right? Ironically, as we kept kids in school who were less likely to stay in school, your ACT scores don't go up initially because those are the kids that would bring down your ACT scores.

So graduation rates going up, being able to get kids into community college, into career certifications, into the military increased significantly. But we were still not, and still are not cracking in one of our high schools, that overall sort of college admission, North Star of a 25 on an ACT that we want. You want to average 25? We want to get to 25 for our kids when they get out. 22 would be admission to most schools. 25 would be our highest goal for our kids in our schools. One of our high schools, the Pathways Middle College,

model is really an interesting model. Again, open enrollment embedded in a local community college called Oklahoma City Community College. And kids there begin their college coursework the second semester of their sophomore year in high school. There's about 450 kids in that 9th through 12th grade school now. Last year, my senior class from that high school, 86% of the kids got their first college degree two weeks before they got their high school diploma. Are you hearing all this, Bill? Remind you something? That is...

It's one of the most productive... Guess what the name of the school. I coach high school football. What did it? Middle college. Middle college. There you go. That's the name of the school.

So, you know this work, right? If you give kids opportunity and supports, it's remarkable what they can do. It's freaking phenomenal. These are normal kids. We have no admission test. Now, they know what they're getting into, and they, when they go to this high school, they're on a college campus. These 15-year-olds will be going downstairs to the college classes.

They'll get college supports. They'll also get us right in the middle of their work because they're not 18 yet. There's nothing private. We know if you go to class or if you do your homework. And we're paying for all tuition fees and books. There's no cost. There's no debt associated with that. Those parents have figured out this is a heck of a deal.

That's the biggest bargain in the United States. I mean, it's 40K worth of college education scholarship handed to you with your first college diploma. I mean, you've got this in the bag. So that's really working well for a big chunk of our kids. Our comprehensive high school has not quite reached those, but our elementary and middle schools are really starting to see the academic results that we expect. So our three established elementary schools and our two early childhood schools are performing in the top 5 to 10% of the entire state now with an inner city population that's normally in the bottom 5 to 10%.

So it's completely switched the... What's the demographics of your schools? So we're 97% free and reduced lunch, poverty level or below, 96% Hispanic, 55% are English language learners. So first and second generation migrant population, blue collar, just working class, but least likely to succeed academically in the research. But we're seeing that flipped on its head in the work that our teachers are doing. Nobody's going to listen to a 12-hour podcast. I have literally a thousand more questions that we're not going to get to.

When you watch this year's graduating class, walk across that stage, and you know that your kids are going to have a shot. And you juxtapose that with the graduating ceremonies you must have attended at the Capitol. Was it Capitol Hill High School? Yeah. How do you balance those two? That's interesting. I don't look back a lot.

I feel too much of a sense of urgency forward. I get that. I mean, I'm always trying to think. But if you allow yourself. I think what I do now when I see our graduating class, I'm an employer going. Those are kids I want to hire into my organization. These are exceptional young people that I want to work at Santa Fe South. So I'm now in that employer's position trying to contend for these kids.

And I don't think I would have been in that role. I was more grieving at the early graduations. Like now who's going to take care of these kids, right? That's actually what I'm getting at. It almost feels like you've gone from grief to celebration. Absolutely. Absolutely. like uncertainty about what's going to happen next for many of these kids, too.

I hope we can get them back in the community because they're going off like rockets now. Well, I mean, we want them to stay here, to work here, to build their businesses here, to work for us here. And grow our tax base. And grow our economy and our society and our culture. A whole bunch of our kids now, I'm probably a third of our student population, our second gen now. They're the kids of our graduates.

That's awesome. Do you know the weirdest thing world? Isn't it wild? I have three freshmen on the team that I coached today whose fathers I coached. You know we're getting old. That just means you and our old, old men. We're born in, what, 69 coach? So here's what I've seen now.

I'll have this parent come in and say, coach, this is my daughter. And she is so smart. She can count in Spanish and English. She knows her days and weeks and months in Spanish and English. And she's going to do so. I'm like, well, you didn't know that in high school. So we're already ahead of the game. Brother, you were kind of dumb as dirt in high school.

And I tease them, but they are so much better parents now than their parents were about supporting the academic process. So their children are going much further than we ever anticipated. I didn't think the long-term reform was really in the same. second generation of kids that come through. But it absolutely is. It's wild. It's so encouraging.

Nelson Mandela said there can be no keener revelation of the society's soul and the manner in which it treats its children. I have repeated that quote many times in an analysis prep. I know that's something that you've thought about a lot. Yep. Now as a pastor, as a man of faith. And the superintendent of the school, I have used the words that our society is sinful in the way we continue to let kids from the wrong zip codes languish.

And Nessa Mandela challenged us to think about the keener revelation of the society's soul and the manner which it treats its children. You want to speak to that? Yeah, I think what you're hinting at is what I feel most profoundly is the keener revelation of the church's health and soul is profoundly found in how it treats the children in its society. I think, I mean, we hold politicians accountable and business is accountable, but there's no one that should be held more accountable than those who say they follow a God who said in as much as you have done it unto the least. least of these, you've done it unto me. So I used to say I like kids more than adults, but I really do like kids more than adults. I mean, I know I really, really do, because I think adults are sort of, I mean, we're not

only stuck in our ways, but we've sort of made our pathways. And I really do think that there are people who focused their life of service in recognition to what God's done for them. on helping others. And I don't think there's a better place to focus than that on children. So I think we can look at this personally and collectively and say we're doing a good job. And here's one of the ways we can tell that children are the canary and the coal mine in our society. They're the most vulnerable, so they're the first ones to be hurt and to show us where the pain points are in our society.

And they're the fastest to thrive. We can literally turn society around in a generation. That's the hopefulness of this. We can educate, we can change our entire city. We can change our entire country. Right. If we would recognize the third grade literacy thing, recognize the sin of the soul of our culture,

and look ourselves in the mirror and say, we've got this wrong. Here's our moonshot, right? Remember the moon shot? Oh, yeah. Here's our moonshot literacy, right? It's not sexy. What does it say that that's a moonshot?

I know. That should be a baseline. We shouldn't even be thinking about this. We shouldn't, but we are. And we talk about the gangs and the cessationism on social media and the news and all the things and, oh, what's wrong with us? And holy crap, teach our kids to read. Yeah, that's it. And you, my friend, are doing it.

Well, my teachers are, and my leaders are. I appreciate the humility, but you were the idiot that got on the phone with a stolen school list and started telling people you're going to have a football team when you were in a basement. Yeah, and our football team wasn't very good. But our football team, our soccer team is five times six champions. A venture soccer day is pretty salty. We'll be right back. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast.

If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight. People using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know. true crime playlist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At 19, Elena Sada believed she had found her calling.

In the new season of Sacred Scandal, we pulled back the curtain on a life built on devotion and deception. A man of God, Marcial Masiel, looked Elena in the eye and promised her a life of purpose within the Legion of Christ. My name is Elena Sada, and this is my story. It's a story of how I learned to hide, to cry, to survive, and eventually how I got out. This season on Sacred Scandal hear the full story from the woman who lived it. Witness the journey from devout follower to determine survivor, as Elena exposes the man behind the cloth and the system that protected him.

Even the darkest secrets eventually find their way to the lights. Listen to Secret Scandal, the mini secrets of Marcial Massiel, as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation,

and I just want to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't want to have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg

and a traumatic brain injury. because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in

plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts the internet is something we make not just something that happens to us i'm bridget todd host of the tech and culture podcast their arno grows on the internet there are no grows on the internet is not just about tech it's about culture and policy and art and expression and how we as humans exist and fit with one another. In our new season, I'm talking to people like Emil Dash, an OG entrepreneur and writer who refuses to be cynical about the internet.

I love tech. You know, I've been a nerd my whole life, but it does have to be for something. Like, it's not just for its own sake. It's a fascinating exploration about the power of the internet for both good and bad. They use WhatsApp to get the price of rice at the market that is often 12 hours away. They're not going to be like, we don't like the terms of service, therefore we're not trading rice this season. It's an inspiring story that focuses on people as the core building blocks of the internet.

Platforms exist because of the regular people on them, and I think that's a real important story to keep repeating. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. fit dude. You look good. You look like you're carrying these 56 years pretty well despite all the stress and everything else. So I guess there's more. I coached for 32 years like you. I've coached at the high school varsity level. This is my first year to hang it up. So I sort of stayed in shape by working out with kids all these years. But I work out because it's cheaper than therapy.

And I need a lot of work. And so I have a group of pastors and graduates and kids that I work out within the morning because I do think there's a lot to go. I've got work to do. You know, I want to do it as long as I can. I also have a three-year-old and a six-year-old in the house. And as my wife pointed out, we're going to be celebrating our 50th anniversary when my youngest graduates from high school. So we've got we got to stay moving. So tell us about how this is now morphed into some other stuff. So this is the most exciting thing on the future right now. And I know I know we're running out of time, but I really want to get to this. As if all of it is enough, and I think the blessings of continuing to work and do things right

as God continues to reveal opportunities to us. Here we are. You speak into this directly, that long obedience in the same direction, right? It didn't, glamorous and it's kind of ugly sometimes. It was never completely easy, and it was a heck of a lot of work. I know. I don't even know you're, I've never met you before today, but I don't. I know that.

Just grind, right? It is a grind. I mean, that's the wrestler mentality. It was a wrestler in high school. It's a Memphis Grizzly. Scrut and grind, baby. All right, I voted for you. You got it.

You just grind. That's all you do. So you get up and you keep moving and does, God does that. He works. He rewards obedience. To multiply things. You have no business being in the middle of to amplify way beyond what you have a business. Anyway, so five years ago, I'm looking at durable school reforms.

realizing someday I'm going to die and not any day sooner. We want things that endure for the community way beyond a leader or a curriculum or a technology or some flash in the pan, reform de jour, whatever it is people are doing. What are the durable reforms that maintain

efficacy generation after generation? There are not many, but there's one sort of emerging and it's called the community schools model. And again, it's not very sexy, but basically it said, what if teachers could just teach and kids could just learn? If there weren't all of these things between the two that inhibited that transfer of knowledge that's so critical. So I show up to learn how to read in my first grade classroom, and you really are prepared and ready to teach. Coach, you are ready to teach me, I need to learn, but I can't really see so well.

And you figured this out. So you stop your day to make sure I get my vision screening cared for. All right, we'll get your glasses. I'm hungry to the next week. By the way, everybody, that happens. All the time. Kids get all the way through to a place, and nobody noticed that maybe one of the reasons

they're not reading well or adding well is because I can't see the child. It's simple, right? It's simple. But it literally happens. I mean, honest of goodness, I had a left tackle that kept blocking the wrong guy. This is in high school. He couldn't see the hand signals from the sideline. And his 16-year-old, I said, we're getting your eyes checked.

and then he became a college tackle because now he could see. It seems so ridiculous, but I'm telling you, in these worlds, this happens all the time. And that profound inhibitor is amplified across everything. All these systems of poverty. And so, for example, under-resourced kids will often miss up to two weeks of instruction per year for dental health. Like, what? If my kid needs to go to the dentist, that's second hour. back in school by third hour, we're not missing instruction, but you don't go to that initial

checkup. You get the tooth decay, you get the abscess, then you're out for weeks because mom can't figure out who's going to get you to a dentist that pay for this, and all of a sudden you're way behind your peers, and you don't catch up. And this compounds year in and year out. So community schools have said, well, we can solve for that. You decrease the distance from the problem to the solution for the kids. You put a dentist in the school. Okay. Then you put a health care worker in the school. You put a doctor in the school. You wrap the solutions inside of the school so the kids have access and the families. A nutritionist. So you're not drinking, drinking, Kool-Aid and eating hot fries for dinner every day. And all of these practical things. And then all of a sudden health improves and mental acuity improves and rest improves. So you're a better student.

people do not have the first clue what these kids are up against. So this is simple, right? It is simple. And as it turns out, it's relatively easy when you begin to bring people into the game that are able to run in their lane. So as an educator, if I have to be a full service social institution, I really can't do my main job you're paying me to do, which is to educate. Because I get all of the counseling and nutrition and hearing vision screening, all of this family economics issue, I can't even get to Algebra 1. You got me dealing with all this.

What if I could just teach? Well, as it turns out, teachers are pretty good at teaching. It's revolutionary. And kids are designed to learn, right? They're actually designed to acquire knowledge. And when you can just let people do that, so community schools in small scale have been doing this now for a while. They're embedding the solutions to the sort of present problems

and getting higher academic outcomes. I'm like, well, if a little bit is good, And a lot of something is better. My wife says I have a problem with that. So sometimes she says moderation is better. I think a lot of something is better if it's good. So I thought, what if you took, instead of 300 kids and you served them, what if you took 8,000 kids and put them in a high-quality school in proximity to high-quality

services, everything that they or their family would need, and you concentrated that and multiplied that effect, what could it do to an entire portion of the city, not just the school, not an elementary school. I think it changed an entire city. The theory that we're working with now, the theory of changes, we think we can change all of South Oklahoma City, this area that's called, the police call it the block, we call it the square, because it sounds nicer, but it's this area bounded by interstates, you know, as we do in our inner city where most of the violent crime and poverty and low academic outcomes are concentrated. So every city, Memphis has sections like this. Memphis has the loop. Same thing. Same thing. What if we

were to change the plot, the plight of that group of kids, it will change the city from the inside out. Bottom up. Bottom up. And what if we did this not from hoping the government's going to show up and solve this problem, right? But what if we did this and said, look, all of you people of faith? I mean, what if you really did do the things that you say you're supposed to be doing?

And it's a personal indictment of the church and those leading churches to get outside of our climate control padded pew environments and do the work that you're supposed to be doing. Well, it sounds good in theory, but what it's amounted to is, again, sort of like starting a school, you run your mouth about it and up. People say, all right, well, put up or shut up. We formed a nonprofit that was able to purchase a mall that got shut down. The Crossroads Mall was at one point the sixth largest mall in the country, 1.2 million square feet, underrun one roof, We already have two functioning charter schools in the space, serving about 2,600 kids in two of the anchor stores,

a sister charter network that's the highest performing charter school right across the ring road on the same property. Dove Science Academy will have 1,600 kids on their campus. So we already have 4,000 kids being served right there. And a faith-based nonprofit was stood up in the last year and a half to acquire the balance of the mall not already owned by Santa Fe South Schools. with the purpose of turning the interior concourse into this full-service community schools model

that we talked about. Dennis office, doctors. Everything you can imagine. Like, we basically sent a survey out and said... I'd be honest with you. Forget inner city charter school. That sounds like a cool place to go to school. And this is the...

We want everybody in the city and the state to say, I would want my child to be there. So building it, not from a deficit model, but from an excellence model. The very best full-service health care institution, not a storefront, throw crumbs to the poor kids kind of model, but the very best. In fact, that's why we're here in Memphis looking at some of the models that you guys have already implemented with the cross-town concourse, cross-down concourse, taking an old face, making it

incredible, right? You know there's a school one. Yeah, I've visited it before. Oh, you have. I've been there, and I've looked at Valor, and we've looked at other places that are just doing exceptional work in this area. So we know the academic piece. Like, I know this piece, but now we're now working with local banking institutions and the YMCA and high-quality child care, local businesses like, we have a coffee shop called Not Your Average Joe, whose vision and mission, their world-class product and world-class vision combined. So they exist to serve to employ special needs adults, but they also have some of the best coffee anywhere in the country. So their business model, they've now exploded to, I think, 11 or 12 shops in a bakery.

their business mall is exploding. We want them in our space because they're exactly the kind of partner that we want to have in that space. Not Starbucks, but not your average show. Local restaurants that already employ local community members or local businesses that are thriving. And so now we're in the process. We've raised $11.5 million. That's my question. This is a got to be a capital-intensive deal.

Yeah, it's massive. It's way beyond anything I can imagine. So, I mean... You've raised 11? 11 and a half, we bought them all. 92 acres, we're there. 92 acres is huge. 11, how much do you need?

We need about 44.5 million. Don't you have some oil people in Oklahoma that stroke that check today? You know, we were talking about this earlier with Alex's. There's national money and maybe even international money. I'm convinced that local communities have all the resources they need to solve their own problems, not to wait for outsiders to come in and stuff. Now, I'll spend Walton money. I'll spend Reed Hastings money.

I'll spend whoever wants to give us money. We're grateful to receive it. But I believe that the money is local. And we've had local philanthropists like the Green family of the Mardell and Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby screens. They've been tremendously instrumental in helping us to acquire this. We've got the Inasmuch Foundation, which is local, some local families giving money. And now the biggest issue,

now for me. I think we can come up with the funding. But the long-term sustainability is 80% occupancy of people paying just below market rent to keep their product in the community. This is to be a gift back to our city. And so we need banks and we need Dennis office and we need grocery stores and we need childcare to be in this space and we need them to be successful. Everybody there has to be successful or it doesn't work. but we're excited about that, and we're just going to see it because now it's not up to us anymore. It's up to the city's collaboration in this to see if this is something they want. So we'll know here in about eight to ten months if we're going to be able to pull this thing off.

My goodness, brother. I have no idea if it's going to work. I want to be honest with you. It terrifies me. You had no idea if the charter school is going to work when you quit your job at the great school, the fed stakes to the coaches. Yeah, they were good stakes, too. But I get street tacos now and homemade tamales.

So it's much better, actually. Are you nervous? Yeah. I stay in the state of like, I just don't want to get out over my skis. I don't want to like anticipate what I think. You've lived out over your skis, bro. But there's something about when you're 56, you don't want to leave a mess behind you. You want to leave things well established.

Like you want to leave things like in good position to move forward. I get it. We do start changing. the way we perceive stuff as we age. Yeah, and I get it, but holy smokes. I don't want to be reckless. I want to be ambitious and aggressive because I'm led that way,

but not because I'm just blind. I'm trying to be much more. It's Christine, right? Yeah, Christy. What is she just saying, put up, Buttercup? You know, she's like, dude, this is, she's just so stable, right? Just so solid.

She's, her great-grandparents were Dutch immigrants. I mean, she comes from this line of hardworking people. It's what we're supposed to be doing, right? Yes. Then go do the thing, right? Get out of bed. And in the matter of all this, you pastor a church. Yeah, I'm privileged to be a part of a small congregation in South OKC,

beautiful little group of very, very eclectic group. If you walked in, you would go, this is a very interesting group. In your spare time. Yeah, well, I've got lots of lay people. that support that work. We share a lot of the load. Have you allowed yourself to just rock back on your heels

at home in some quiet time with maybe just you and Christine and taking stock of what this crazy 30-year-old idea was on this charter school and where you are now? So once in a while, as you mentioned, graduation, so this past spring is I'm,

I get the vantage point of being on the stage looking at the community that's gathered. And we always rent venues that are massive because we don't limit the number of people that our kids can invite to graduation. And the Hispanic community, they roll deep, right? They roll deep. So one kid may graduate,

but there's 33 people there or 40 people there. So we have this huge crowd. And I looked at it and went, I just had that moment like, holy cow, you know. It's remarkable that what when you give, of an under-resourced community opportunities, they step through those doors. They do immeasurably more than people would think they would. So it's a huge blessing, incredibly, like crushingly humbling to be around. The team that I have now is so wildly competent at

their work. I just try to stay out of my people's way because they're so good with the finances and the curriculum, the leadership. I completely get that. And I'm like, I do, I have one, one superpower, I can hire really, really talented people and try to stay out of their way, but they're hard to manage, right? I mean, you get really good people there trying to keep them fed and water to something that's challenging. Everybody, Chris Brewster, the founder and superintendent of Santa Fe South Schools, I got to believe if someone heard this and was sitting out somewhere and just wanted a little bit of advice or idea about how they make it do something like this in their community, you'd be willing to share thoughts and ideas.

And if you're in that area, pretty cool place to go to school is the old retired mall. It is. Is there a website about you and this? Yeah, absolutely. So Santa Fe South Schools has a website and all kinds of information there on enrollment and jobs and all that kind of stuff. My email is C. Brewster at Santa Fe South.org. That's C-B-R-E-W-S-T-E-R at Santa Fe South.org.

Again, Santa Fe sounds like New Mexico, but it's Oklahoma City. That's another long story about how we named a school after a street. I mean, it was crazy, but it stuck. And then the Crossroads Renewal Project, we would love to find if there are people being stirred to do like significant legacy work in communities, We would love to have you talk to us about what we're thinking in our community if you want to partner with us or maybe some ideas we have about what you could do in your community. But even more importantly, if you're already doing this well in your place, we'd love to hear from you so you can guide us and direct us in what we're doing. But I mean, more and more like even this conversation, I'm just so encouraged that there are people in every single community doing exceptional things.

I think you sort of labor Sometimes you're lonely You think there's nothing else going on But the more of these kind of conversations That I have, the more I'm aware that God's working through people All over the country All kinds of places, all kind of ways It's what we're trying to connect

An army of normal folks doing this work Such a cool podcast, and the concept is remarkable So I appreciate the work you guys are doing Thanks for taking time to get away from school Just enjoy the rest of the day Memphis, Chris. I really, really appreciate you. Join us. I appreciate your story. More importantly, I appreciate you serving thousands and thousands of community. And I got to believe it's changing the outlook for Oklahoma City. And good luck in the season, coach. I'm jealous you

get to coach. This is my first year not to coach. And I can feel it right now. I know it's aggravated and beautiful. Keep up with the middle college bulldogs. See how we're doing. We'll do. We'll do. Thank you. All right, buddy. Thanks for being here. Pleasure. And thank you for joining us this week. If Chris Brewster has inspired you in general, or better yet to take action by caring about the education of all kids in your community, doing something about it, adopting a child, or something else entirely, please let me know. I'd love to hear about it. You can write me anytime at bill at normalfolks. us.

If you enjoyed this episode, share our friends and on social, subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it. Join us, join the army at normalfolks.us, any and all of these things that will help us grow. An army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. Until next time, do it you can. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you.

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