Campaign Phone
7653373642
Education
Delphi Community High School (Delphi, IN 1975 Valedictorian); Earlham College (Richmond, IN 1979, BA, Phi Beta Kappa); University of Oregon (Eugene, OR 1986, Teaching credential, Social Studies); Chapman University (Monterey, CA 1993, MAEd); Indiana State University (Terre Haute, IN 2005, Teaching License, Spanish)
I want a halt to the expansion of taxpayer funded vouchers for private and parochial school tuition. Instead, we need a renewed emphasis on out public schools, which serve over 90% of Indiana's K-12 students. With 22 years of experience as a public school teacher, I know that teachers constantly re-evaluate whether to stay in the classroom, in light of relatively low salaries coupled with high demands on their professional time. Indiana's budget also needs to expand to provide universal access to high-quality pre-school so that all children have the opportunity to take advantage of an outstanding education. This needs to carry through in the form of enhanced state support for two- and four-year university education as well.
While I appreciate the need for voter photo-ID laws, I think we need to remove any obstacles to acquiring those IDs for legitimate voters of all ages and circumstances. Likewise, we should do more to ensure that all can actually exercise their right to vote, whether they live in private housing, nursing homes, college dorms, or other institutions and whether or not they have easy access to automobiles. We need to protect our county vote centers, as well as early and absentee voting opportunities. Ultimately, I would like to see Indiana explore more systematic vote-by-mail, as states such as Oregon have shown it can be convenient, safe and reliable while increasing overall voter turnout.
With the reality of human-induced climate change ever more obvious, I believe Indiana is losing that balance between long-term protection of natural resources and reasonable economics. Environmental disasters know no boundaries and, compared to other states and countries, Indiana is too often going in the wrong direction when it comes to providing incentives for protecting our resources. Whether it be restoring net-metering for rooftop solar; or imposing deposits on glass bottles, aluminum cans and single-use plastic containers; or extending tax incentives for recycling construction waste, there are many ways that Indiana can do better. The protection of agricultural resources from the effects of climate change must be acted upon.
Affordable and available housing is perhaps our society's greatest challenge, and one for which I see no simple solution. As a first step, some already-successful programs should be expanded, such as those that provide affordable subsidized senior housing. I believe that a root cause of the housing problem is the increasing concentration of more wealth in fewer hands. Builders have every incentive to construct housing for higher income earners and the wealthy while working class wage earners, the elderly on fixed incomes, and the poor see an ever-increasing portion of their income going to rent or mortgage payments on fewer and fewer available and affordable houses.
In general, I would favor Indiana making the constitutional and legislative changes that would make voter initiatives and referendums easier. Certain popular issues typically die in committees or get killed in other steps of the standard legislative process. However, to be done well, referendums need to be accompanied by solid voter education. In an era of worsening civic education, heavy partisan advertising, disinformation on social media, and the collapse of traditional forms of print and broadcast mass media, I fear that voter education is becoming inadequate. Non-partisan voter guides, such as I've seen produced by the League of Women Voters, can be one step towards overcoming that inadequacy.
