was originally reported by Lauren Nutall of .

ARLINGTON, TEXAS — In early December, drilling resumed near Mother’s Heart Learning Center.

Newly installed gas wells dot property at 2020 S. Watson Road, less than one mile from the day care. One day in December, the sound of fracking machinery was so cacophonous that children couldn’t play outdoors.

For gas companies and stakeholders, the project is . But many Arlington residents and experts say it could come at the expense of the community��— especially its children.

In January 2025, the Arlington City Council unanimously approved a permit allowing French oil and gas company TotalEnergies to install 10 new gas wells in East Arlington, which has a heavy concentration of Black and Latinx residents. It marked the first time in over a decade that the city council approved a permit for a new drill site after years of community opposition.

Named Maverick, the new site also lies near three schools — Johns Elementary, Adams Elementary and Thornton Elementary. Five wells owned by the same company already occupy the plot of land near the new drilling site, which the company has owned since 2008.

Hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — is used to extract gas by pumping pressurized water, sand and chemicals into bedrock. Texas policymakers have lauded the activity as a boon to local communities, garnering $2.48 billion in state tax revenue in 2025, according to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Arlington is choked with hundreds of these gas wells. The city, which sits atop the Barnett Shale, is a modern-day Golconda. ��

But fracking has drawn sharp criticism from health experts, who say it could be linked to severe conditions like preterm births, congenital anomalies, lung diseases and childhood cancers.

The practice has also elicited backlash because of its role in accelerating the global climate crisis through greenhouse gas emissions. TotalEnergies has been embroiled in legal controversies for years, and its troubles have mounted in recent months. , brought on by a coalition of French environmental groups and more than a dozen municipal authorities.

The company has rejected proposed limits to its fossil fuel production. “It makes no sense at all to prevent TotalEnergies [from] producing oil and gas that the global energy system still uses today,” it “The courtroom is not the right place to advance the energy transition.”

The 19th interviewed Arlington residents about the impact fracking has had on their lives. They shared their fears about their grandchildren’s health, their experiences living in neighborhoods impacted by fracking and their reservations about TotalEnergies expanding operations in the city.

Devastated residents throughout Arlington

Ingrid Kelley, 69, has grown tired of the gas wells sprouting throughout North Texas. Several sit less than a mile from her house in East Arlington, and a pungent lingering scent of sulfur and something else that she can only describe as “rotten” has settled into her neighborhood. She fears what might happen to her 4-year-old grandson, who lives with her and attends Mother’s Heart Learning Center.

“I can’t project and trace what all is going to affect him and all those that live around there and all those that are around these sites,” she said. “It’s very hard to project what’s going to happen, how many people are going to have increased cancer risk, respiratory disease, cardiac disease — all the things that go along with being premature or having congenital heart disease that affect you the rest of your life.”

Her grandson — who was born in Arlington with a congenital heart disease — has had to undergo intermittent nebulizer treatment since he began attending Mother’s Heart in 2024, a treatment typically reserved for those who have lung complications. He had no prior respiratory complications, Kelley said. Kelley won’t open windows at home, fearing contaminated air from nearby fracking sites will seep in.

“We’re like one big science experiment here,” said Kelley who, in 2016, became involved with . She is now on the board.

Edgar Bunton, who is in his 60s, moved to his home in southwest Arlington six years ago and lives less than 600 feet from more than a dozen wells. His wife began to experience frequent and unexplained migraines. Two of his grandchildren who live near these gas wells have respiratory complications, which Bunton attributes to the wells.

“I really got on board because of my grandbabies,” he said.

The adverse health effects of hydraulic fracturing on children have been studied over the decades.

“This is a cumulative risk issue, because this is not just one chemical at a time people are being exposed to,” said Meagan Weisner, a senior health scientist at Environmental Defense Fund and a former public health epidemiologist who has studied health impacts related to oil and gas development in Colorado. “This is dozens of chemicals coming from more than just one site because they’re already near other wells.”

According to Weisner, the contaminants released are dangerous to nearby residents not only during the drilling phase, which emits numerous toxic chemicals, but also after.

“There were a lot of parents that were reporting their children were feeling ill during the pre-production phase,” Weisner said, which encompasses drilling. “So it would not surprise me at all if these residents in Texas that are close to these 10 wells experienced adverse health impacts because of their proximity.”

Children in particular are uniquely susceptible to harm. “We saw health impacts in children extended out to two miles from the pad,” she said. “I don’t know if that would be the exact same in Texas, but we saw adults had reported significant adverse symptoms within a one-mile radius but, for children, it was within a two-mile radius, and that does track along the lines of children are just much more vulnerable.”

The 19th reached out to the City of Arlington for comment. In an emailed response, the city only said that the drill site was approved because “it met the 600-foot spacing requirement from protected uses, as outlined in the City’s Gas Drilling and Production ordinance.”

TotalEnergies did not respond to questions from The 19th.

Before energy companies descended on Arlington, the sprawling land behind Phil Kabbakoff’s house was decorated with oak trees. When the company Chesapeake Energy arrived in his neighborhood, they were leveled and reduced to kindling. Now, a towering drill rig owned by TotalEnergies looms behind the 84-year-old’s home in their place.

Kabbakoff resides in the Glen Springs subdivision of southwest Arlington, the same neighborhood where Bunton’s grandchildren developed respiratory illnesses.

“A lot of these houses now are leased, and so people come and go, and we don’t know who they are,” he said. “We used to know everybody on the street.”

Like other residents, he was upset that more gas wells were installed by Mother’s Heart. “We were up in arms about it all the way around,” he said.

While Kabbakoff would like to see sustained changes made to fracking practices in the city, he believes that Arlington elected officials will only continue to value the interests of gas companies despite protest.

“They’re never going to change, not this council,” he said. “They don’t know anything about it. Nobody’s researched it. They could care less. They know they make money from it, and that’s all they’re worried about.”

‘Sacrifice zones are safe spaces for polluters’

In 2005, landmen arrived to secure land for mineral ownership and drilling rights from Arlington residents. Ranjana Bhandari, founder of Liveable Arlington, was approached and ultimately declined.

“This is almost 20 years ago,” she said. “Because I was a mother — I had a young child — I didn’t think that it made any sense to have that kind of pollution around our children.”

At the onset of the fracking boom in Arlington, Bhandari spent hours poring over reports from other regions that experienced similar fracking booms, hoping for a glimpse of what this new development might mean for her city.

“Very quickly, they built 56 drill sites here, and they were spread out all over the city,” she said. “There’s literally one everywhere you see, one every few minutes.”

She read studies about cancerous pollutants linked to childhood leukemia coming out of states like Colorado. In the neighboring city of Fort Worth, she saw reports that air quality was slowly deteriorating because of drilling-related emissions of benzene, .

“Benzene is a serious, serious cat,” she said. “It’s a category one carcinogen. There’s no safe amount of it.”

Bhandari recalled a particular moment when she and her family stopped at a red light directly across from one now-defunct drill site around 2011. Within minutes, she said, they began to feel sick. “That was my first inkling that we weren’t just looking at climate harm.”

The discovery was bleak to Bhandari. By 2015, families in Arlington found themselves overwhelmed by the drill sites’ noxious fumes and the effects of fracking that rippled throughout the city — so much so that they decided to intervene. She created Liveable Arlington the same year.

“We were a mothers’ organization — mothers and grandmothers concerned about children’s health — and, through our campaigns and over the years, started learning many new things,” Bhandari said.

“We focused on the science. We focused on the community,” she continued. “I started it as a concerned parent. We were much more focused on fracking near children, fracking near day cares and schools, and so some of our most successful campaigns and most of our advocacy was to stop expansion of fracking around eight sites in Arlington, which are right next to day cares.”

Now 61 years old, she has seen the very problems she once read about penetrate her own community. And the repercussions have been more consequential for some communities than others. More often than not, Bhandari said, they’ve settled disproportionately in majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods, like the one where Mother’s Heart is located.

“The burdens of fracking were so unequally distributed,” she said. “The other bigger picture that people seem to miss when they say, ‘It’s OK to put it somewhere else, just not near me,’ is that you always will preserve a safe place. Sacrifice zones are safe spaces for polluters.”

How could a system millions rely on simply not exist?

Wuori’s answer: That a “crisis of misunderstanding” has turned early childhood centers into an exceedingly expensive and “industrialized form of babysitting” based on the false idea that child care is somehow separate and distinct from education. Instead, Wuori says babies learn from birth — and some research suggests even before that — and their time outside the home should be treated as schooling, not as a place for them to be watched over while their parents work. 

In not embracing learning as an essential purpose, the current child care system, Wuori says, is harmful both educationally and economically for children, their parents, child care workers and society at large.

“All environments for young children are learning environments,” he said. “The question ultimately comes down to, “Is your child in a good one?”

Wuori, who espouses a “transformative” investment of public funding in early child care, began his own career in the field over three decades ago in the classroom. Teaching in an afterschool program “lit the fire” in his interest in child development and inspired him to return to graduate school.

After teaching kindergarten in South Carolina public schools for five years, he moved into school district leadership before spending 14 years as the deputy director of South Carolina’s Early Childhood Education Agency, . 

He eventually founded a public policy consultancy practice, , focused on the needs of America’s young children and their families. Through his work, he partners with state elected leaders and advises them on early childhood policy topics. 

But Wuori is perhaps best known for his social media presence on where he posts delightful videos of babies, using them to explain key child development concepts. His feed, which has amassed a prominent following, was recently described in a New York Times as “educational, but also, simply put — ‘awwwww.’”

Your baby learns to speak – not just from listening – but from watching.

I’ve written many times about the keen observational powers of babies. Infants are expert observers of their parents’ faces, which (among other lessons) provide important clues as to how mom and dad…

— Dan Wuori (@DanWuori)

Days before the official release of his book, The Daycare Myth: What We Get Wrong about Early Care and Education (and What We Should Do about It), Wuori spoke with ����Ӱ��’s Amanda Geduld.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: Your book makes the argument that day care doesn’t exist. I think readers will hear that and say, “Well, my kid is in day care. So what do you mean that it doesn’t exist?” Can you explain what you mean?

Dan Wuori: What I mean by that is that for the better part of 100 years, we have had a policy in place — one that has really created services that are designed to support parental employment more than they are designed to support the optimal development of young children. The central thesis of the book is that we have fooled ourselves into thinking that there is this thing called day care, or child care, that is separate and distinct from education… 

What we know from decades of science at this point is that that’s simply not the case. We know that young children are learning, not only from day one, but increasingly, we have this understanding that some very powerful early forms of learning actually may begin in utero. And so that’s a very different proposition, right? 

… This artificial distinction between care and education is really what I’m talking about … We have conceptualized child care as almost like a holding facility, right? We’re thinking about very custodial forms of care, and that translates, in many cases, into policy. We have states that are proposing, for example, as a solution to the financial crisis that the child care industry finds itself in, deregulating in ways that sort of strip away any requirement other than those that just entail the very basic health and safety of those kids. And that is a very low bar, and, frankly, a dangerous bar, and one that frankly, we end up paying for in the long term.

You also note that the vocabulary we use matters. If we’re getting rid of the term day care, what should we be using instead?

The truth is the term day care has fallen very much out of fashion even in the field in recent years and been replaced with child care. What I would love to see is an acknowledgement that this is all either early childhood education or early care and learning. Because some acknowledgement that ultimately these are not simply holding facilities for children, [but[ that these are powerful learning laboratories, and developmental spaces, and that’s true regardless of what the sign out front says. 

All environments for young children are learning environments. The question ultimately comes down to “Is your child in a good one?”

You talk also about how our current model, “Simply doesn’t work, and it doesn’t because it can’t work.” Can you explain a little bit of what you mean by that? 

What I’m talking about in that section is our current economic model for child care. What we know about child care is that it is sort of like a broken, three-legged stool. We know, for example, that parents are paying more for child care in most every state at this point than they pay for in-state college tuition or for their housing costs. And so that it is unaffordable to parents in really significant ways. 

We know concurrently that for the business owners themselves, this is not a profit-making venture … Providers are scarcely keeping their doors open, and the whole sad thing is sort of cobbled together on the backs of a low-income workforce that is almost exclusively female, and in many states, majority women of color, who are literally subsidizing the cost of care to families in the form of their low wages. 

They are highly dependent on public assistance programs themselves, making at or near minimum wage in most states. And in fact, according to some recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, making roughly 60 cents an hour less than we pay dog walkers in this country.

The whole thing gets down to: we talk about all of those different forms of crisis that the field is in. There’s a compensation crisis, and there’s an access crisis, and there’s an affordability crisis. But the book makes the case that all of those crises are really a side effect of the fundamental crisis in the field, which is a crisis of understanding. 

That we are failing to acknowledge these settings for what they truly are, and that as a result not only are we sub-optimizing this incredibly powerful window of human development, but we are saddling taxpayers … for decades to come for the result of our inaction and our failure to get things right in the early years in ways that are ultimately far more costly than doing things right in the first place.

Throughout the book, you make arguments for why we need to shift this system — for economic reasons, for educational reasons and just because it’s the right thing to do. What would a shift in this system look like, both practically on the ground and in terms of outcomes?

Yeah, I think about that question in two categories, really. The big picture message of the book is that we need transformative public investment in young children and families. I have also worked in the public policy space and with policymakers long enough to know that transformative system change very rarely happens in one fell swoop. So while making the case, for example, that early childhood development needs to be seen as a public good instead of a private market service, the book … also suggests then both some low-hanging fruit in terms of things that we could do proactively right now in ways to help improve compensation, for example, but also there’s an entire chapter that is dedicated to what I have labeled sort of forms of public policy malpractice — examples of federal and state policy where maybe with all the right intentions, the execution of our policy is actually exacerbating some of the financial crisis in the field. 

… I see policymakers increasingly saying to me, “You know what I get the brain development pieces of this. I know this is important. I know we need to do better. What I don’t know is, how do we pay for it?” 

And one of the major messages in the book is we are already paying for it. We’re just doing it in the dumbest possible ways. We are very much taking out, at scale, a payday loan that we are meeting our very basic immediate financial needs at the highest possible long-term cost to taxpayers … We’re paying more in terms of remediation and retention and special education throughout our K–12 system. We are paying for worse health outcomes … that could be mitigated against by doing right in the early years …

There’s an anecdote later on in the book that was recounted to you about how much some of these early child care and education teachers are struggling financially. Can you share that?

I had the good fortune two summers ago to partner with the state of Kansas on a listening tour as they were assessing the strength of their early childhood system. I traveled across the state, talking with business leaders and early childhood providers and parents, and got into a conversation with a child care provider. 

We’re there, and I was asking her, “What do you need most? How could state policymakers help support you?” And she said, “Oh, well, you know, the thing that I really need the most is a floating substitute who could sort of go from classroom to classroom.”

And I said, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Like, somebody to help give teachers a break or use the restroom or have lunch to themselves?” And she said, “Oh no, we mostly have that covered. I’m worried that I need to give them time to get to the bank.”

… And so I said, “Oh, you know, to deposit their checks?” And she said, “Oh, no. Not that kind of bank. I can’t pay them enough to feed their families, and so I try to make time for them each week to be able to visit the local food bank.”

And boy, that just — I mean, to this day, that’s one of the most upsetting stories that has been conveyed to me in this field in my career. These women, who are literally being entrusted to help co-construct the brains of young children, are making so little that we would have to be sending them to a food bank despite their full-time employment in what I could argue is the world’s most critical profession.

One framing motif that you use throughout the book is the food pyramid (released in 1992 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture based on what turned out to be of healthy eating). Can you explain why you chose that motif and how it reflects what’s happening in this day care myth?

I use that food pyramid example as sort of a framing around an area of public policy that we got boldly and catastrophically wrong and raise the question for readers: Where might we be doing that currently? What’s happening in our public policy that 20 years from now, we might look back at and say, “Wow. We can hardly believe we ever got something so wrong.” 

And the book really makes the case that right now in our approach to young children and families we have created … this bizarro world for children that — in so many ways unexamined — is precisely the opposite of what we know from the science of early development …

One good example of that is that we know that the earliest weeks and months of life in particular play an absolutely critical role in attachment … And so then we juxtapose that against knowing that this is a country where 1-in-4 American mothers have to return to the workforce within two weeks of giving birth. And you know that in our early childhood settings we are seeing data that suggests that the teachers in those programs turn over to the tune of about 40% a year … And so during precisely the weeks and months of life that young children most need continuous, stable, nurturing relationships, we are seeing those relationships interrupted — both by a lack of paid family leave provisions and through our terrible misunderstanding of the importance of out-of-home, early childhood settings, in ways that are bound to fail us later on. 

… My hope is that the book is an opportunity for us to press pause and to really rethink some of the underlying assumptions around how we have structured provisions for young children and families in this country and to come together on a bipartisan basis. One thing that I feel very strongly about — and I’m very proud of in the book — is this idea that … if ever there was an issue that really should bring us together across the partisan continuum, this ought to be it, because it makes sense for children, it makes sense for the strength of nuclear families, it makes sense in terms of our economy, it it makes sense for taxpayers … There really is something for everyone — hopefully in this conversation and hopefully in the book.