Teachers and staff should get the pay and respect they deserve as educational professionals. We spend over $4000 per student LESS than the national average, ranking Texas 47th in the nation. Teachers shouldn’t need to buy pencils or white-board markers for their classrooms, or need a second job to pay bills. Teachers are trained and educated: we should trust their judgement when it comes to the books they want their students to read or have in their classrooms. Secular, professionally licensed counselors should be the ones talking to and guiding students and I will make that the law again. We don’t need more guns on campuses either—they don’t make anyone safer, as we’ve seen guns left in school bathrooms by adults we thought were responsible.

As a Type 1 Diabetic, just like James Talarico, I know all too well what it’s like to be worried about insurance, coverage for specific medications and durable medical equipment, if I’ll be able to keep my doctors, and what happens if…?!

Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare), my Diabetes was considered a pre-existing condition, and if I ever were to lose health insurance, I would be uninsurable from there on out. I watched as a kid when the Explanations of Benefits would come to our home in the mail and threaten about how close we were to the “lifetime benefit limits” of our insurance plan.

We’ve come a long way from there, luckily, but we haven’t closed all of the gaps, especially in Texas where our uninsured rate is the highest of any state, and is about 5 million—the number of uninsured people in this state is the same as the number of school-aged kids in this state!

And kids are part of that equation too—a high number of kids are uninsured in our state, meaning they likely aren’t getting the regular preventative care that will make sure they grow up healthy, free from debilitating childhood diseases.

Expanding Medicaid in our state will help insure more people who deserve to be able to see a doctor, but it won’t be enough. We will need to change insurance rules in this state to make sure insurance is paying for people to get care instead of the other way around.

We also have to make sure doctors are excited to come to Texas to work. Many have been scared away by our abortion laws, as legislators pretend to know more than the doctors who trained for many years to have these jobs. It’s time to trust doctors like the professionals they are, and start treating people like we want them to be healthy, contributing members of our community. They need accessible and affordable healthcare to do that.

There are federal funds available in our state for flood mitigation—$505 MILLION—that were awarded after Hurricane Harvey and have not been used yet! What are we waiting for?! We should work to get this money to districts that need it NOW before the next big hurricane strikes.

Flooding is a very serious issue for our district. I will pass laws about not building homes or other structures in floodplains; I will pass laws about the time between an alert going out from the National Weather Service about a flash flood warning and when it reaches local municipalities and must be communicated to people in low-lying areas; outdoor sirens and evacuation plans signed into law were a great start last year, but there should also be an appointed person at each public or private camping area or HOA along the river who will be awake during a flood warning and responding appropriately.

In our district, we may not have big state or private parks where people camp along Cypress Creek, but we do have homes and businesses that are in flood-prone areas.  Some of our favorite restaurants and businesses were flooded and closed for months after Hurricane Harvey swept through, not to mention the entire neighborhoods that had to rebuild homes and fences after being inundated by creek water that escaped 10 foot banks!  A large portion of my district is within the 500 year floodplain where Harvey’s flood waters easily reached.  Not only was it a difficult time for businesses trying to rebuild and get people back in through their doors, but also for the families who were impacted at their homes, many of them the local business owners as well!  We need our flood maps redrawn, with a plan to redraw them frequently as the climate changes in the years ahead.

I joined Moms Demand Action after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvlade in 2022.  I had never considered myself a survivor of gun violence until I joined Moms Demand: when I was in grad school, one of my friends from high school was murdered on the Virginia Tech campus during that mass shooting in April 2007.  And after being a teacher for nearly a decade, I have practiced my fair share of lockdown drills with students.  Every time there’s a school shooting or I did a drill, that added to the fear I felt and still feel and the emotional rollercoaster that comes afterward.  Besides the sadness, there’s anger that it feels like nothing has been done to prevent gun violence (especially in this state) since I was a freshman in high school watching the news about Columbine; or a teacher, about to find out I was pregnant with my first child, listening to the news about Sandy Hook Elementary; to just recently, watching Brown University suffering a mass shooting where they spent the day in hiding.

Moms Demand Action are fighting and I hope to fight for them when I am in the State House.  I am still involved with our local group, and recently attended the national candidate training program called Demand A Seat in Washington, DC!  I hope to earn Everytown’s endorsement as a Gun Sense Candidate in 2026.

The LGBTQIA+ community should have marriage equality, pay equality; feel safe from hate, safe from political violence and personal violence; have privacy in choosing a restroom, and in healthcare decisions; and be free to have healthcare where they can make decisions about their own bodies with the help of doctors and family, and no government.  We don’t need laws about transpeople in sports.  They are 1% of our community and should be free to join whatever sports team they feel most comfortable on or identify with.  Bathroom stalls should be private in every way, so there’s no need to worry about who is going into which bathroom.

Abortion care is healthcare.  Medication abortion is healthcare.  There should not ever be a bounty on a woman or doctor’s head for healthcare provided.  I plan to outlaw travel bans that have been imposed locally.  We should respect women and their doctors and let them make the choices that are right for themselves.  We need to have reproductive healthcare written into law in this country and in our state to protect it for every person.  Ectopic pregnancies in other states are medical emergencies, but in Texas, they wait for you to be at death’s door before taking action. I am disgusted that my two daughters have less rights than I had. I am so disappointed by this state and our country. We must do better, and it starts with trusting women to make decisions about their own bodies.

Book bans need to be overturned. Every student deserves to see themselves in books. Censoring teachers is taking away trust from our educational system. Teachers deserve respect for their years of training and professionalism. Saying that parents are more well-versed than teachers and should have a say on what all students are exposed to is very misguided. Take care of what your own children are reading--that is your job as a parent--not to parent anyone else's kids. I would like to end Mike Morath's tenure as Commissioner for Education and make sure we get better people in for our State School Board positions.

We have so much work to do to address climate change in this state and in this nation!  In our state we have some big hurdles, like our dependency on oil companies and their revenue, and other worries, like low-lying, sinking cities like Houston that will be impacted by a rising sea-level, more extreme hurricanes, and a more variable climate as the jet stream changes course.  We will have to worry about our farmers and how they’ll deal with new pests who are able to live in Texas as the climate changes.  We will likely have to endure even more mosquitoes that will bring deadly diseases that aren’t usually in the United States.

And so, how do we deal with these challenges?  Or can we prevent them?  The data says we are going to have a hard time preventing these challenges at this point.  We should still work to prevent climate change where we can, but it isn’t so much a personal problem as it is an industrial one.  Research shows that methane has a bigger impact as a greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide.  Methane leaks from natural gas leaks and unburned methane being released to the atmosphere during flaring are two huge problems we could tackle with legislation and that our next Railroad Commissioner needs to address.  We should increase our use of solar and wind power, even though our state tops the charts with wind power and is close to the top with solar, there is always room for improvement.  We can also take bold steps to demand green roof structures on office buildings, permeable concrete parking lots, rain gardens, and better building standards to safeguard for changes in our climate.

We absolutely must improve our electric grid and our electric companies’ responses in every way possible to ensure we don’t needlessly lose another single life from a power outage.  We know that winters will be harsher and so will summers, so we need to make sure our grid can deal with the increase for demand, not to mention Texas’ population that is ever-growing.  We will also need to invest in flood prevention and strategies that will protect us from storm surges and hurricanes making landfall here.