Education Justice
TABOR mixed with the BS factor has created the conditions for our students to have never had a fully funded education. Colorado is 32nd in per-pupil spending and 46th in teacher pay. Colorado has over 800 unfilled teacher positions. Educating future generations is an essential role in society and an essential role of government and we are failing by not investing enough in education.
Since the 1970s, big money has influenced our government bit by bit toward privatization. Vouchers, “A Nation at Risk,” No Child Left Behind, SB10-191, Charter Schools, etc. have systematically undermined our public institution, have been a tool for union-busting, have transferred public dollars into private hands, and have added to the institutional undeserving of our marginalized students. Public dollars should always be publicly accountable.
I support public schools in every community and will resist efforts to privatize education in Colorado.
Money is not the only factor in improving our schools and preparing our students. The Community Schools Model is a 21st-century, community-centered approach to education. It is a paradigm shift from schools marketing what they already offer and, instead, schools offering what the community already needs. This will help return our school back to being a community hub instead of just a place kids go for eight hours each day.
Research has clearly shown that the SAT and ACT aren’t predictors of college success, but are rather predictors of privilege at home. Standardized tests take away valuable class time, do not give educators useful data to teachers, and are used only as a tool to blame underserved communities for being underserved.
I have worked to expand access to higher education and the trades within the schools and have worked to pass legislation that help expand access to the trades.
As your next State Representative, I will:
Continue to fund our neighborhood schools and completely pay off the budget stabilization factor and pay our educators for their education and experience.
Support ballot measures that require the wealthiest Coloradans to pay their fair share in order to fund our education system.
Develop policy approaches to incentive and retain BIPOC teachers.
Fight for equity in higher education as we work toward tuition-free college for Coloradans.
Continue to expand resources to address the material conditions that cause educational struggles.
Continue the fight for a pipeline for apprenticeships and associates degrees while in high school.
Housing Justice
Housing is a basic human need and should be a basic human right. The legislature has passed some meaningful measures but, unfortunately, many of the best parts of housing policies have been watered down or removed. This is why we cannot settle for just any Democrat in a primary and must support the most progressive ones.
Around 20% of my students at Hinkley deal with unstable housing and about 60% of Coloradans say their community is in a housing crisis. Housing does not fall into the typical “supply and demand” principles because it is an inelastic commodity and we need public policies to protect our working class from the crisis. We should expand access to attainable, sustainable, and permanently affordable housing across the city of Denver and the state of Colorado.
As your next State Representative, I will:
Fight for tenants' rights, including repealing the statewide prohibition on rent control for local municipalities and implementing just cause eviction
Fight for changes in zoning to protect personal property rights– allowing ADUs, Duplexes, Triplexes, and other housing options that an owner wants on their property.
Work to build social housing options and community land trusts that lower the costs of housing and create more entry points to homeownership.
Fight to stop the sweeps of the unhoused.
Economic Justice
Systemic barriers exist that make it difficult for people to get ahead, and this is exacerbated by Institutional racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, classism, and other forms of bigotry. Late-stage capitalism has concentrated wealth into the hands of a few at the top while leaving only crumbs for everyone else and has put systems in place where people with money have more influence over our government than the people at large.
I have spent the last several years organizing and fighting for workers' rights from the national level down to the individual worksite level to try to balance out the collective power of the people against the power of money. I have stood on the picket lines across the country with our workers that took the courageous leap onto the strike lines because wages have not kept up with the cost of living.
According to the MIT Wage Calculator, an adult needs to make $26.17 to make ends meet in our district while our minimum wage is $14.42. We made progress when we tied the minimum wage increase to inflation and when we allowed counties and municipalities to raise wages but we need to push further.
If the cost of living in Arapahoe and Adams counties is $20.25 then the minimum wage should reflect that. This will also incentivize businesses to support us in our fight to reduce housing costs because they will have a direct economic interest in the affordability of their workers. Furthermore, wage theft is the most common form of theft in the US, outnumbering all other forms of theft combined.
As your next State Representative, I will:
Fight to abolish Colorado’s Labor Peace Act which makes it more difficult for workers to organize.
Fight to abolish the Colorado Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR)
Fight for harsh punishments for wage theft and better tracking mechanisms.
Fight to strengthen collective bargaining rights and worker protection like with neutrality agreements and best value contracting.
Stand with workers against exploitation in all forms.
Fight to pay a thriving wage and to end wage theft in the state of Colorado
Fight to put democracy into our economy and our workplaces.
Environmental Justice
The climate crisis has become the most pressing issue for us to tackle as a species. The UN’s 2022 Emissions Gap Report tells us that the world must cut emissions by 45% to avoid global catastrophe, and we are not on track for those necessary cuts. I understand the reluctance to tackle this. Policymakers often pass laws putting the burden on the individual with regressive taxes and fees while ignoring that the biggest polluters are big corporations.
This is a systemic issue, not simply a problem we can solve through recycling and reducing plastic bag use alone. Policymakers often ignore the burden on workers that will occur in the transition if we are not having workers as stakeholders at the table. I will fight to pass policies that shift the paradigm from business as usual, and instead reimagine the way we live and work while considering the economic burden that the transition can have.
As your next State Representative, I will:
Invest in cleaner energy like geothermal that utilizes and expands on the high-paying union jobs that already exist.
Require the clean energy jobs of the present and future to be high-paying, jobs with collective bargaining rights, benefits, and pensions.
Invest in public transit, zoning, and urban development that reduce sprawl, increase walkability, and reduce car dependency.
Address the historic inequities that communities furthest from power and privilege face due to climate change.
Invest in electric public transportation and EV infrastructure
Create policies like greywater reuse for household and agricultural use.
Invest in sustainable infrastructure.
Hold polluters accountable and require changing practices.
Criminal Justice
The school-to-prison pipeline in our country is a serious problem in our country and systems of oppression exponentially increase the problem in communities of color and poverty. We need to address these problems by going upstream and tackling housing, wages, and the other material conditions that lead to these problems. Furthermore, we need to go downstream and stop locking people in cages for substance use disorders and locking people with a disease up and, instead, provide the resources and care they need for recovery and become community members again.
Rather than creating new felonies and criminalizing addiction, we need to invest deeply in the resources people need in order to thrive. While reducing the number of people, especially BIPOC, who are put behind bars, and investing in policies that reduce recidivism, we also need to invest in housing, food access, mental and behavioral healthcare, education, and policies that create more economic justice.
As your next State Representative, I will:
Fight to decriminalize possession while investing in recovery programs for substance use disorders.
Hold law enforcement accountable for the harms they cause to the community, including expanding ERPO (Red Flag) laws to include law enforcement.
Fight for funding to address the root problems rather than criminalizing the outcomes of under-resourcing our communities.
Immigration Justice
Our immigration policies are set up in such a way that they can allow corporations and big businesses to access exploitable labor while simultaneously convincing some of our community members that immigrants are a problem. Work visa laws create a power dynamic that prevents many workers from reporting theft, assault, and exploitation while allowing them to be leveraged to lower the wages of other workers.
Undocumented people face the constant threat of violence and deportation which forces them into the shadows and are treated as second-class citizens while they are contributing to our communities, our economy, and our workforce. Many of these people came here due to the policies and actions of our federal government and it is our duty to protect them and treat them with full dignity and rights.
As your next State Representative, I will:
Fight for funding into immigrant legal defense funds.
Fight to allow immigrants to have access to education, healthcare, and basic human resources, regardless of nationality or immigration status.
Protect DACA students.
Ensure that immigrants in our community have access to safe, protected, and accountable job sites that prevent their exploitation.
Have our state law enforcement focus on state issues and stay out of federal law enforcement.
Healthcare & Reproductive Justice
Access to culturally competent healthcare should be a basic human right in this country and access to mental health services, abortion care, and birth control are components of healthcare.
No one should be ashamed, stigmatized, or go into debt because of their health. Healthcare is another inelastic commodity. There is no amount of money they can charge us that we will be unwilling to pay in order to not die. We must work to remove the profit incentive involved in healthcare and create a single-payer healthcare system. I believe a national-level system is the most efficient and effective way for this to occur, however, I am unwilling to wait for the federal government to act.
As your next State Representative, I will:
Explore single-payer system options for our state.
Hold hospitals and insurance companies accountable for high prices and require adequate reporting to ensure our healthcare dollars are being spent effectively.
Require transparency in pricing for hospitals and insurance companies.
Pass policies lowering the price of prescription drugs.
Advocate for medical debt relief.
Work to codify abortion care access into the state constitution so the Reproductive Health Equity Act can’t be overturned by future Republican legislatures.
Protect providers of abortion care.
Expand funding for under or uninsured patients seeking healthcare, including abortion care.
Gun Violence Prevention
I am a teacher at Hinkley High School and I was present on that November day when the shooting occurred in our parking lot. I know firsthand the fear that those incidents can cause during and afterward. I also grew up in Aurora and was planning to attend the Dark Knight movie back in 2012 during the Aurora theater attack and was only absent due to getting called into work. Our community has faced and continues to face these traumas. I believe to address these issues we need to attack the root causes.
Violence prevention starts at home: with secure housing, jobs that pay well enough to make spending time with family an everyday possibility, and a fully funded education system that helps kids learn, imagine, grow, and play. Creating a future without gun violence means being bold enough to invest in our communities proactively, rather than responding to isolated incidents reactively.
Our approach to gun violence must take into account the painful realities of our criminal justice system. From the War on Drugs to recent weapons bans in other states, we’ve seen how criminalizing the simple possession creates dangerously unjust police encounters, wastes resources, and rips communities apart — sowing the seeds for future violence. We must be brave enough to avoid repeating our mistakes.
Despite clear evidence that public mass shootings tend to be committed as either death of despair or deliberate acts of stochastic terror against marginalized groups of people, little continues to be done about the dangerous rhetoric that radicalizes the most alienated members of our society. We must honestly address the ways trauma, white supremacy, antisemitism, transphobia, the media cycle, and our culture’s jingoistic glorification of militarized violence abroad contribute to these rare but devastating incidents.
As your next State Representative, I will:
Fight to address the material conditions that lead to violence and deaths of despair like housing, thriving wages, healthcare access, and education.
Support legislation that requires and funds gun locks and gun safes for all Colorado gun owners.
Support negligence laws if your firearm is used in a crime.
Support access to and requirements for gun safety courses.
Hold manufacturers and sellers accountable for enforcement of gun laws.
Ensure that gun laws do not lead to the targeting of marginalized groups.
Support evidence-based gun legislation that is proven to reduce violence.