Education

Education has always been deeply personal to me. In the 1880s, my great grandfather founded a school in his rural community because Alabama did not provide a good education to Black children. In the 1930s, my father and his sisters attended that same school because Tennessee did not provide one either. My father became an educator himself at Virginia State University, where he was determined to pass on not just knowledge, but the sense of responsibility that comes with opening doors for others. And like my father, my mother moved away from her hometown because Mississippi did not provide a good education for Black children beyond the eighth grade. She left to finish high school and later became an educator, running TRIO programs at Virginia State University.
The Department of Education was created to close gaps that our state and local governments cannot meet, protecting students’ civil rights and giving everyone an equal opportunity to thrive. But in 2025, the Trump Administration unleashed an all-out assault on the Department of Education, gutting nearly 50 percent of its workforce, shuttering critical civil rights offices, eliminating DEI initiatives and pushing for universal school vouchers. At the same time, the Administration tried to shift core responsibilities Congress assigned to the Department — including federal funds for K-12 programs and billions in higher education aid — to other agencies. When the federal government steps back, it creates more bureaucracy for states, school districts and educators to navigate — and the students with the least support feel it hardest.
My parents and the generations before them fought for the education their states refused to provide. That is why, as the daughter and granddaughter of educators, a mom to two kids in Richmond Public Schools and a former state legislator, I will do everything I can to fight against efforts to eliminate the Department of Education. Education is what allowed me to stand on the shoulders of those who came before me, and it remains the foundation that makes opportunity and democracy possible. We owe it to our students, we owe it to our teachers and we owe it to the generations before us who fought for the educational opportunities they were never freely given.