9th District candidate visits Salem, talks health insurance, education

By: 
Kate Wehlann, Staff Writer

Liz Watson isn’t pleased with the job Representative Trey Hollingsworth has done so far. She believes her background as a worker’s rights attorney and experience in the legislature will make her a better candidate to represent the ninth district.

“I’ve been fighting for working families my entire life,” she said during her visit to Austy’s Bookseller and Meeting Room on Saturday. “I know how to take big ideas and translate that into practical solutions that work for our families. I’m a worker’s rights attorney and I worked in Congress as the lead staff member for labor policy on the House Committee on Education and Workforce for the Democrats. I led the development of legislation to make sure people have living wages and make it possible for people to come together to bargain for their fair share and brought a working families agenda to Congress. We have a representative right now who doesn’t care about those things, who’s in the pockets of his corporate donors.”

She was in Salem for a meet and greet and said she is “going to be the person who will put our party [Democrats] back together.”

One of the matters discussed at the meet and greet was that businesses were cutting hours of staff in order to not have to pay for health insurance. Watson said she would work to change that practice.

“The issue of people not being able to get enough hours, that’s been one of the things we’ve noticed after the recession,” she said. “Yeah, we have low unemployment, but when you look at the number of hours people are working, you have people working two or three jobs to try to put together full-time working and that’s crazy. It does not have to be that way … I don’t think it should be that hard. If you’re working hard and doing everything right, you should not be struggling. It’s because people are deliberately making decisions that make your life difficult. We’re the richest nation on earth. We can afford to be decent to each other.”

She also said she would work on behalf of public schools. Her two children, 7 and 11, attend the same elementary school she attended as a child.

“I’m a big advocate of public education,” she said. “… One child has an IEP, so benefits a lot from that federal requirement that every single child succeeds in that. I’m worried about vouchers because when you send a backpack full of cash out of public schools and … let kids take that money out to private schools they were going to go to anyway, frankly, we’re really gutting public education.”

She said the current Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is the wrong person to helm public education.

“I think the first thing is we can’t have a secretary of education who leans so hard on vouchers and why does she do it?” she asked. “Because her family directly benefits from it. They’re in the business of for-profit loans and privatizing schools. We have someone in charge of public education in our country who wants to get rid of it. That’s a really scary place to be in.”

Watson said, on top of this, DeVos “didn’t know or didn’t care” that children with disabilities had a right to access the general curriculum or that students had a right to individual education plans if they needed it. She said DeVos has relaxed all requirements around for-profit colleges and left no way to hold them accountable. She added that Donald Trump’s education budget calls for more than $5 billion in cuts overall.

“We need to be funding our schools, modernizing our schools and … [his budget] is in exactly the wrong direction,” she said. “I think a budget is a statement of values and he clearly doesn’t value public education.”

Watson said the legislature and public need to support public school teachers along with supporting public pre-school to ensure all students can get that necessary step into kindergarten.

“Right now, in Indiana, we’re meeting 12 percent of the need for children who are even eligible for preschool or pre-K,” said Watson. “… That’s an investment we could make and they say for every $1 spent, it’s a $7 return on investment in the early years. I can’t think of a better way to use our money.”

She said, if elected, she will also make hearing the voices of teachers a priority.

“There’s a lot of changes we need to make and I’d start with listening to teachers,” she said. “A lot of times, they are shut out of the conversation and with the collective bargaining law in Indiana, they have very little say in what happens. The pay they receive barely keeps up with the cost of increases. [A teacher friend] told me she’d like to start a college fund for her kids and she can’t afford to start one.”

Watson said she’s running on an agenda for “hardworking people in Southern Indiana to get ahead again, pay for prescriptions, purchase a home, save fore retirement and promote college and career readiness,” things she says Hollingsworth has not placed enough value on.

“I’m a fifth-generation Hoosier and I don’t take kindly to this guy from Tennessee who swept in and bought the seat,” she said. “I’ve been in all 13 counties in the district to hear their concerns and I think we should expect that of anyone who represents us, but Hollingsworth is not listening and is not showing up.”

She said, should she be elected, her constituents could expect someone effective on Day 1.

“We need that,” she said. “Two years is not a long time and that’s the length of a congressional term. We can’t afford to send someone who’s going to spend two years learning how Congress works and how to do the job because that person is very unlikely to go back for a second term. If voters in our district send me to Congress, I’ll deliver results. No one will fight harder than me for Hoosier families.”

Watson is looking for volunteers to help spread the word about her campaign.

“Democracy is not a spectator sport,” she said Saturday. “If we want to make a change, we’re going to have to fight for it. … We’re not doing this alone. The primary is 67 days away. Our best shot is winning the general election.”

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