To everyone who has contacted me, I hear you. I am listening. I am also excited and I’m optimistic. I am grateful and appreciative that so many people are standing together, here and everywhere, for equity, for justice, for comprehensive structural change. This conversation, this movement, this paradigm shift, is so much more, so much bigger, than re-imagining police departments. Police reform is part of it, but there is more.
Before I became a council member, I was a 3rd grade teacher in HISD schools. I taught in neighborhoods that were desperately poor, and I taught in neighborhoods that were affluent. The glaring disparity in how the city supported neighborhoods around some schools, but not neighborhoods around other schools, is what drove me to seek this council seat.
There are many pressing, urgent, and immediate needs to be met, but it is also critical to take a long view and look at important investments we can make in our city, that will reap significant long-term benefits.
