Dear neighbors,
As a parent and UW School of Public Health faculty member, I spent years working to protect our children’s health, especially at school, and working to fully fund and improve our schools. This year, there is important work to be done!
When we send our children to school, they should be learning and growing, not being exposed to toxics that reduce their IQ from drinking lead in the school water, exposed to neurotoxins and carcinogens due to our failure to invest in school safety; and we need to ensure that their schools don’t collapse during the earthquake we know is coming.
I’ve been a leader in the long fight to fund nurses in every school. I supervised the UW School of Public Health research documenting how school nurses improve both health and academic outcomes as we work to pass legislation in 2021 to finally increase the state’s funding of just .07 of a nurse per elementary school.
Graphic courtesy UW School of Public Health Community Oriented Public Health Practice Program MPH candidate students Dec. 2021.
That work and expertise were reflected in my leadership developing and passing nation leading legislation:
- To test and remove lead from our children’s school drinking water – a five year effort that finally passed in 2020.
- The first legislation in the US to protect kids from the epidemic of e-cigarettes and vaping. Over 30% of high school seniors in Washington were vaping regularly in 2020 – attracted by flavors such as bubble gum, cherry crush with nicotine levels higher than a full pack of cigarettes in each USB sized pod. I continue to take on big tobacco from addicting new generations of high school and middle school students to nicotine.
We still have a lot of work to continue this fight.
We know that we will have another major earthquake in our lifetimes that will kill tens of thousands of our children (and educators) because generation after generation of legislators have said let the next generation respond to this known risk, rather than investing to retrofit our schools so our children will not be killed or injured.
That is why I sponsored HB 2095 this year, the House version of Senator Frockt’s bill to create a School Seismic Safety Grant program. This builds on legislation I introduced in 2017, which led to funding of the engineering review that has identified hundreds of schools that will collapse in a major earthquake.
This year’s bill would provide $500 million to retrofit schools to meet seismic standards and ensure we complete the work evaluating which schools will fail in a large quake.
I collaborated with the The Seattle Times in their investigation disclosing how children and teachers are being exposed to deadly PCBs in schools from old lighting fixtures.
PCBs are carcinogens, exposure at tiny levels causes damage to the immune system, nervous system, kidney function, and other dangerous health issues.
I’ve introduced an amendment to the budget for the Board of Health and UW to study how to protect our children from PCBs and to give the Board of Health the authority it needs to inspect and implement those standards to protect our children.
And, I’ve been working with three other Representatives to develop a funding program in the Capital Budget to remove these dangerous light fixtures from schools, so our school districts can do the right thing.
Our children need to be safe and learning when they are at school.
Our children and their teachers need to know that we care enough to ensure that a school building is safe.
From fighting big tobacco to stop the epidemic of nicotine addiction from vaping to ensuring our children don’t die in an earthquake, to ensuring we have school nurses, I’ll keep working to protect and promote our children’s health and safety because we can’t push the hidden cost of delay to another generation – and it’s our paramount duty!
