Climate of Hope

Guest: Christopher Brown, PhD, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction in Early Childhood Education, University of Texas at Austin As more and more states create public preschool programs, pre-K is becoming more like kindergarten than daycare. And kindergarten is the new first grade. What most kids do in kindergarten today is a lot more academically focused than you and I experienced decades ago. Doing away with playtime in kindergarten is not serving our children, though.

Guest: Mary Mattingly, Artist, Founder of Swale Project New York is nicknamed “The Big Apple,” but good luck finding an apple tree from which to pluck a healthy snack. Forget about picking the apple, just being able to buy fresh produce is a challenge in parts of many big cities across the country, which the USDA refers to as “food deserts,” because there’s easy access to a fast food joint, but not a grocery store. New York artist Mary Mattingly is working with the idea of bringing fresh food to the people. She’s planted a garden and fruit trees on a barge that has just arrived at a pier adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Guest: Sam Payne, Host of BYUradio’s “The Apple Seed” Sam Payne joins us from Topeka, Kansas, where he learned first-hand the story of desegregation in the days of Brown vs. Board of Education.

Guest: Paul Stancil, JD, Professor of Law, BYU President Donald Trump is not a fan of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s the one based in California where judges have twice now halted Trump’s executive orders on immigration – first, the travel ban and last week, the order aimed at defunding sanctuary cities. Since then, President Trump has complained on Twitter and in the press about his opponents bringing their challenges to his policies in California courts where they’re more likely to get a liberal judge. In fact, this type of shopping around for a friendly venue happens a lot in the US court system. It was no coincidence that opponents of President Obama’s policies choose to file their challenges in Texas courts, known for being more conservative.

Guest: Phil Larson, Assistant Dean for Communications, Strategy, and Planning, University of Colorado Boulder On Monday morning, the US military sent a spy satellite into space aboard a special rocket built by SpaceX. What's special about the rocket is that it's reuseable. About 7 minutes after it roared away from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral and released the satellite into orbit, the rocket came on home, touching down gently on a landing pad just off the coast. It's the tenth time SpaceX has pulled off the feat of launching and landing a rocket. Up until just a few years ago, the rockets were for one-time use only. Which is a little like taking your car on a road trip and then sending it to the junkyard.

Guest: Trisha Leimer, President, Their Story is Our Story Trisha Leimer is an American woman living in Germany, the European country that has received the largest number of refugees. As she began to meet and work with some of these individuals, she got involved in a nonprofit collaboration called “Their Story is Our Story.” Its mission is to help individual refugees share their stories through pictures, art and interviews distributed online and various social media sites. Leimer is now the group’s president and she stopped by our studio during a recent visit to the US. We asked her why letting refugees tell their own stories is important. Find out more about Their Story is Our Story