I started teaching in 1999 in the South Bronx.
I’ve spent 17 of my 20 years in education
in the Bronx,
both as a teacher and a middle school principal.
I’ve developed thousands of amazing relationships
with the children and families of this community,
and I’ve learned intimately the impact of
poverty and bad policy on their lives each and every day.
And what I also learned was that Congressman
Eliot Engel
has been incredibly absent and disengaged in most of the district.
He does a good job of engaging about 9% of
the district, while the rest of the district
feels unheard and unsupported in terms of
what they’re going through.
Our schools are chronically underfunded and
underresourced, but our communities have been
historically neglected through policies like
redlining and disinvestment.
And we continue to support Wall Street and
the wealthy among us.
We continue to allow large corporations like
Amazon to get away without paying federal taxes.
And we continue to support out-of-control
spending in our military-industrial complex.
All the while, the kids that I serve struggle
with mental health supports — a lack of
mental health supports, struggle with housing insecurity,
food insecurity, lack of job opportunities, environmental racism.
You name it, my kids and families have struggled
with it.
And I got tired of seeing or not hearing the
most vulnerable in our community centered
in our political discourse, and our children
not at the top of the political agenda.
It just became unacceptable to me.
We need to defund the police because we need
to demilitarize our police.
We need to stop sending federal military equipment
to local police departments.
And we need to focus on accountability and
transparency.
We need to end qualified immunity at the federal
level, where police can violate a person’s
civil rights with impunity, which we’ve
seen happening time and time again.
And we need to reallocate and reinvest those
resources in community health and community
development, so fully investing in our public
schools by hiring more teachers, hiring more
nurses in healthcare, investing in job programs
and everything that creates the infrastructure
for collective and self-actualization and
determination in our communities.
Unfortunately, we continue to disinvest in
our communities
and add more police to communities, 
so that they feel occupied.
That’s unacceptable.
It’s been going on far too long.
It’s a manifestation of institutional racism
through police brutality.
And that’s why we call for truth and reconciliation,
massive financial investment and massive focus
on mental health, social workers and public
health overall.
