Student demonstrators in Katy, Texas, protest the school district’s transgender policy that allowed staff to ignore students’ requests to use specific pronouns.Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
Mike Hixenbaugh first knew things had changed when someone on a four-wheeler started ripping up his lawn after his wife placed a Black Lives Matter sign outside their home on the suburban outskirts of Houston.
Hixenbaugh is an award-winning investigative reporter for NBC News. He’s covered wrongdoing within the child welfare system, safety lapses inside hospitals, and deadly failures in the US Navy. But when his front yard was torn apart in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests, he saw a story about race and politics collide at his own front door. “They’re targeting us,” Hixenbaugh recalls. “My wife, my kids, me—and it’s about race.”
So like any investigative journalist, he started investigating and soon discovered that “the ugliness of our national politics was really playing out at the most visceral level in these suburbs.”
Hixenbaugh’s reporting about the growing divides in his neighborhood soon led him to the public schools, specifically those in Southlake, Texas, a suburb of Dallas where parents were engaged in heated, emotional battles over race, gender, DEI programs, and the role of public education in the US.
As more than a dozen states sue the Trump administration over its policies aimed at ending public schools’ diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, More To The Story host Al Letson talks with Hixenbaugh about how America’s public schools have become “a microcosm” for the country’s political and cultural fights—“a way of zooming in deep into one community to try to tell the story of America.”
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