Policies
Education, Health, Affordability, Public Safety
Education
The education outcomes we’re seeing here in Shelby County and all across Tennessee should be satisfying to no one. Less than half of our students are graduating High school scoring either Reading or Mathematics at grade level, often neither. So what do we do?
We need to get serious about correcting our lagging Education budget, currently Ranked 51st in the US (behind DC), and as the saying goes, “You get what you pay for.” So let’s fix it.
Private School Vouchers are pulling over $300 million away from our Public Schools, and the protections on these dollars expire after the 27-28 school year, leaving a gaping deficiency in our education budget. We should dissolve this program but earmark these dollars to fully fund Pre-K education across the state. Not only will this program lift our achievement scores, but studies have shown that Pre-K investment improves outcomes and decreases costs in crime and healthcare while also improving economic outcomes. This is common sense.
We need to increase salaries for our educators. While Tennessee ranks high in initial teacher pay, the pay growth ranks at the bottom. This causes an exodus of veteran teachers who would otherwise be mentors and leaders in our school system. We cannot improve our education outcomes if we do not have veteran leadership paving the way for the next generation.
Schools across the state are so ill-funded, that there are tens of billions of dollars of deferred repairs, an estimated $1 Billion in Shelby County alone. This leads to schools that not only fail to meet health code regulations, but dilapidated facilities tell our children that we do not care about their education nor safety. The State needs to start taking these failures seriously.
We need to commit to lifting our Public Education Budget significantly over the next ten years. We need to at minimum commit to breaking into the middle when it comes to per student spending and create a roadmap to provide some of the best education in the Union. We need to stop settling when it comes to our kids.
Health
Tennessee has some of the worst health outcomes in the United States, especially for new and expecting mothers, paired with some of the heaviest medical debt. At this moment, Tenncare will not remain solvent as written, which will imperil even more citizens, including folks in Tennessee. We need to tackle this problem before it gets here.
Firstly, we need to expand Medicaid. Since its inception, Tennessee has yielded over $24 Billion in medical subsidies from the Federal Government, resulting in Tennessee becoming a leader in rural hospital closures. These closures have disproportionately affected Shelby County. Regional One Health now serves a third of Tennessee, being the only Level 1 Trauma Center in the region, as well as components of every state near Memphis. Medicaid expansion will not only help relieve our medical sector by providing insurance for those who otherwise could not afford it, but would also relieve pressure from a distressed medical ecosystem here in Shelby County.
To make matters worse, the refusal to expand Medicaid denies Tennessee taxpayers their own money. All of us pay into this federal program, but our tax dollars go to surrounding states, subsidizing their healthcare instead of our own. State Legislators in Nashville would rather wage a culture war against the Affordable Care Act than provide healthcare to a desperate state. We deserve better.
Secondly, we need to abolish the Abortion Ban.
While Legal Abortion remains a hot button issue in the state of Tennessee, the outcomes of this legislation go far beyond a woman’s right to choose. Since this trigger law came into being, Tennessee has been bleeding healthcare providers and students, specifically in the Women’s Health practices. Tennessee is down 21% in obstetric residency applications per year, damaging our OB/GYN training pipeline as well as diminishing our rate of healthcare students who would eventually call Tennessee home. This has exacerbated our infant and maternal mortality rates, which are 16% and 100% higher than the national average respectfully, making Tennessee the worst state to be an expecting mother.
Public Safety
Crime Lab
Simply stated, Shelby County should have its own crime lab, and it will be my first priority to get the state to help fund it. As of right now, Shelby County is funding two specialists to help with the DNA backlog queue, but we are still shipping these samples to Jackson, slowing down critical response.
There have been many well-publicized instances recently where the lack of a local lab has been a huge part of the problem. A local kindergarten teacher was murdered by a man who had committed a rape over a year earlier, but he was not charged for the rape until after he committed the murder because of a year-long delay in getting test results back. We still have a huge backlog and inexcusable delays on testing rape kits, and this is just the most notable incident.
As a business owner, I have had my own delivery vehicle broken into multiple times over the years, and each time I spoke with the responding officers they mentioned the long wait times for processing evidence. We cannot allow such delays to handcuff our law enforcement.
Local officials, from the very top, are begging for a local crime lab. The need is clear, and this should be a bi-partisan issue.
Gun Proliferation
We MUST address the proliferation of guns in our state, and especially in our district. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for Tennessee children. Our legislature has made it entirely too easy for criminals to get guns, and a few simple changes can begin to reverse some negative trends.
First, we need to repeal permit-less carry. Allowing people to purchase guns without so much as a background check is a frightening idea, and we should at least require proof that they know how to safely operate a gun before we allow them to carry loaded firearms publicly.
We should also allow courts to issue extreme risk orders of protection, temporarily restricting access to individuals who are at risk of harming themselves or others. Not only do guns contribute dramatically to the occurrence of violent crime, they are also instrumental in our high suicide rate.
A huge driver of the increase in crime in Shelby County has been the sudden rise in the number of vehicle break-ins by criminals looking for guns, including in my own cases. The fact that it is now legal to store guns carelessly in cars is the direct cause of this problem, and contributes massively to the proliferation of illegal guns in our community. We should immediately require SECURE storage of guns in all vehicles.
I have had multiple conversations about each of these issues with local law enforcement officials, and they are unanimous in their support for all of these measures. Public opinion is also solidly behind each of these ideas. They would dramatically increase public safety without infringing on our rights. Again, support for these measures should be bipartisan, but extremist Republicans have shown that they will defy public opinion, and law enforcement, to protect the gun lobby. We will have to outvote them at the polls.