thank you so much it is great to be here my name is privilege i apologize so proud to serve as the senator from the thirty seventh district right here and i see a lot of you in the audience that i know i remember the very first community forum like this i think i was still at one america at the time and so proud to be the founder of hate free zone than one america and have worked on many of the issues that you're raising today i think the issue of discrimination has several answers one is that we need more people in government both in elected office but also at the agencies who understand the specific cultural challenges that different communities face just like we heard earlier one of the big issues is that we don't always have the kind of cultural competency that we need and a lot of our work is to make sure that we are bringing that forward number two we need to have accountability when discrimination happens much of the work that we did  a free zone and want to merica initially was around discrimination specifically we had a helpline as many of you might remember many of your community organizations are doing this work right now where you get discrimination complaints and then you have to work through them through my office at the state senate we have taken on many of those issues in our office so we do a lot of constituent services to try to bring those discrimination complaints up further and then the final thing is policy we have for many years tried to pass policies at the local state and the federal level that really address this issue of discrimination and making sure that we have specific remedies in place to address  yellow mean almost donor elements well done ok so to address those issues and i think that that is one of the third things that we need to do and i'm really looking forward to continuing my career of advocacy on behalf of people who are being discriminated against and making sure your voices are at the table thank you here at the age of eight and for the majority of my life i lived in low income housing with a single mom my mom still lives in low income housing and we were we've been in the system for over twenty years now and i've seen firsthand the kind of discrimination that takes place i'm not a policy expert i am not here with all the answers i'm here to really listen and this is something that i've seen firsthand and i know brady i think some of the issues that were brought here of how he would approach policy the things that he's done in olympia the way the addresses issues is he doesn't take the credit he listens and he brings people to the table and listen to them about it i think that people who have experienced racism have experienced discrimination in housing they know their stories better than anyone and they and i know that brady is a bridge builder at home make sure to work with the community in order to get it done and he's been very effective in olympia and passing things like justice reform and mental health and you do the same when housing and home make sure that our communities are at the table and i'm really honored and grateful to be here at things again to joyce and to almost organizing this but i'm really thankful for the space i think we are the answers i think that it's elected officials jobs to listen to wise and that these stories the stories that you share they are powerful the power that we have in this room is going to impact things like housing policy  so i get to you know i'm ok and so when your values to get arrested it's really really difficult so i think that there's opportunities to link transportation and housing and there's my career shoes around transportation and bad grades in an advocate of and he'll continue to advocate for so i'm on the transportation committee in the state senate and obviously we're running now for a federal seat but one of the problems with the state transportation money is that we are prohibited from essentially using those gas tax dollars for a whole lot of things that we should be using it for and we have not enough money in the budget to fund some of the things we need to be funding and so what you've seen is the street magic increase in transportation costs because we're not funding public transit from the state dollars there's actually an amendment in the constitution that president prohibits us from using those dollars to fund transit which then means you have to fund property to use property taxes so my belief is that we really have to make sure we're bringing more dollars into the system at the federal level specifically we have got to come up with different ways of funding transit and transportation and really making sure that it's called the highway trust fund at the federal level making sure that we are putting dollars into the highway trust fund because ultimately that those dollars are going to help leverage the state and city dollars but at the core we need to make sure we get rid of that amendment that i am and to my mind some of you might know past that basically wrists tricks us from putting any money into public transit and stops us from being able to really have the opportunity for people to have cheaper forms of transportation i also think that building on the public you know sort of transport into development projects and many of you in this room have worked on that that's another really important way to reduce transportation costs and i'm very proud in the state senate to have worked with homesite and so many partners here in the room for the southeast economic opportunity center because we are going to bring for the first time to the ranger valley higher education workforce housing and small business development all there that means that people are not going to have to spend as much on transportation because they're going to be able to live right next to a transit center where they can then get to their jobs more easily so those are i think many of the things that we have to do and i'm looking forward to continuing that work at the federal level as well first because absolutely i think the department of justice must investigate every police shooting and do an independent investigation and actually that is what is starting to happen now the department of justice is now going in and launching  independent investigations of every police shooting but i think we have to go further than that and i'm very proud also to have been one of the very first sponsors to sign on to our state initiative that would change the burden of proof for how you actually hold police accountable that's the incredible initiative that think terms of you know family members of victims have put together to really make sure that we don't have such a high burden of proof you have to show intent malicious intent in order to hold a police officer accountable that needs to change at the federal level so there are a lot of federal grants that go out to police departments across the country including here in our state and the department of justice in the federal government could require that in order to get those grants that police departments would have to invest in deescalation training in other kinds of work that would allow even police officers to know how to challenge another police officer when they see something wrong happening because there's a code of conduct that says we can't you know we can't get involved if some other police officers doing something wrong so i think that's really important also data collection we need to have much better data collection on what's happening around the country and how we really make sure that we know and track what police officers are doing and then finally there's just a whole set of work around incarceration and our police departments often are in this position where there's an incentive to try to incarcerate people there's an incentive to lock people up and we need to make sure we stop that so i think those are three very concrete things that the department of justice could do and actually  the head of the department of justice civil rights division now is a very good friend named funny she is an immigrant herself and she has been transforming the department of justice his role in these police shootings which is why for the first time we're starting to see some accountability on some of these cases brown and black lives absolutely matter i think this is something that we are going to have to handle and our generation and brady has been a champion for criminal justice reform and olympia and he'll continue to do so and i think that there's you can see you do worked on three years on these issues and olympic he'll continue to do so or so in congress them no yes absolutely yeah absolutely and i was a sponsor of that bill in the state senate last year and that's the initiative that i was referring to that the families have put forward it would basically change the level of what you have to prove in order for somebody to be prosecuted because right now you have to prove that there was malicious intent in the shooting in order to move forward a prosecution and yeah so this is one of the big issues i wrote an article last year called i'm a state senator and i'm not afraid to talk about race and what i was trying to raise there is that we have institutional bias and racism built into all of our systems every single one of them and there's data that shows if two people send a resume for a job and one person has the name mohammed for example and one person has the name steve but your entire resumes exactly the same steve gets the job interview mohammad doesn't and so one of the things that we have to do is in our departments if we have people in power in those hiring and recruiting departments that actually come from those different communities that is going to make a huge difference but also we need to make sure that we have goals for every department and in the department of transportation at the state level this is what i've been working on with the secretary of transportation is how do we make sure that our hiring is reflective of the population that is here and you can't do that unless you have goals and then you report on that the other thing is that we've been really successful in our office at helping individuals get access to jobs in state government our office has weighed in and we're really proud to have gotten the first somali american into the department of transportation at a management level job and really helping this is a really qualified person who has a degree in transportation management but couldn't get a job interview even and we advocated for them and used our office to help them get that interview make sure they got the interview and they did get the job because they're very qualified but they were never being allowed to interview so it pulls at the very personal level of how you use this office but also at the macro level of how do you put in place policies and opportunity which directly addresses this what it does is for people who are formerly incarcerated lifted when you were a teenager and opens opportunities for you and jobs for over two hundred thousand people in our state so yes there is a setback racism i used to work for many years at the city of seattle and we had the race and social justice initiative i think it is something that we all need to participate and i think it's a partnership between business as with government with community members we all have a role i see if i can in the back he's doing good work at the city as well but it takes all of us to really step up and find partnerships find opportunities find funding to work together to actually move the needle on things and get things done and brady has done that over and over again i think prop is a huge sense as he's worked and listen with and partnering with people across the aisle in order to in order to pass and i think that's something that we'll continue to do he's able to listen he's able to be patient he's able to put the work first and i think that's going to continue when he's in congress great well thank you so much i am so happy to be here and to see so many of you that we've worked with for so many years the work that i've done as an immigrant coming to the united states when i was sixteen by myself my parents took a all the money that they had and used it to send me here by myself because they believed that this was the place i was going to get the best opportunity and that is why i spent the last twenty five years of my life fighting for other people to have opportunity and specifically to bring the voices of immigrants and refugees to the table and because of our work after nine eleven taking on the bush administration preventing thousands of deportations of somalis or process the country fighting against the anti muslim anti immigrant anti refugee hate that was coming about leading the largest voter registration drive in the history of the state organizing tens of thousands of people for comprehensive immigration reform getting the office of immigrant refugee affairs at the city of seattle started because of our advocacy helping to protect driver's licenses for everybody regardless of immigration status and protecting things like housing and benefits and interpreters and translators for immigrant refugee communities i am really excited to take that work now to the united states congress and if i get elected i will be the first indian american woman ever elected to congress and i will be sure to be putting forward the voices of immigrants and refugees across our state and really across the country at a time when donald trump is out there telling us we need to build a wall and we need to turn away muslims we know that the beauty of this country and the beauty of our experiences and as immigrants is that we bring courage and resilience and opportunity for everybody so i can't wait to go to the united states congress and advocate for that and i'm so proud to have the endorsements of every almost every single major organization in the race as well as many immigrant leaders across our across our city so thank you all so much for organizing this amazing forum and i really appreciate the opportunity to be here thank you closing statements from both of us here so this is my very first political campaign i think and i'm wearing this this is my grandma's scarf and she passed away from us a few years ago but i am wearing it with me  myself why i'm here and how we got here i am during the vietnam war might grant i was pregnant and she carried it she was pregnant she carried my mom on one side of my aunt on the other and she flee from awards foreign country to protect her family and i think if i were to talk to each and every one of us here in this room we have some incredible stories to tell and i'm involved in political process right now and i'm stepping up to work on my very first campaign because i believe in brady he is the mom we're both children of immigrants and his grandparents came here and they started their own businesses i think all of us work really hard we deserve incredible opportunities in this country we struggled a lot to get here and i think that you know if we are immigrants here and if we children of immigrants we have a responsibility brady is an incredible leader because he carries all the lessons of his grandparents his mom with him when he does me and from our state elected to congress and that is incredible how far we've come and brady would represent as sole while he's been able to bridge and work with republicans to pass legislation and we all know what the climate is like right now and olympia that is not easy it takes somebody with humility somebody who really knows the issues and i hope that you know i i love to talk with you more and i'd love for there to get more opportunities like this for us to work together thank you so much lucky a junior at the university of washington right now i grew up with my grandma a majority of my childhood i never really had much like i don't have college educated parents that get through school so so going through teaching me about southeast asian history like the lation shit substance abuse and they don't need to teach and schools and from personal experience i have friends today that they didn't graduate school they didn't who don't have like parents that support as my parents although they speak english some of my friends their parents don't speak english at all the only speak like cambodian  otherwise the traditional methods are sort of failing us and i think we know that pretty clearly saw a brief about me and then to the question that was asked so i'm born and raised right here in the state of washington i think which sort of ties me to the vision of the state in terms of our needs in our struggles that my parents both had an eighth grade education they did not get past junior high school they had alcohol addiction and my oldest six siblings spent two years in the foster care system before i was born and once i and my sister were born they put that family back together the state relinquished control of the kids put the family back together so we grew up in this incredible place of love but without resources because by then my father had sort of destroyed all of his financial viability the poverty of my life is so profound to me that ultimately i lost a mother to lung cancer a young age i lost my father to heart disease and i lost my oldest brother to alcoholism the three health killers in poverty took one of my three family members so my lens of the world is through economic struggle though as a white man who's heterosexual i know that i carry enormous privilege so i have set about my life to change the education system to make it accessible and successful for every child so to the question specifically we will know ever address equity in the state of washington and toward teaching staff in our school boards in our leadership in schools begins to look at the communities in which they serve this is the key to our success long term we do need additional resources and we have to engage parents on a very different level but if we don't bring the language into our schools by hiring the very families and community members who have the local language we can do it it's a resource question it's a staffing question it's a professional development question and it starts by utilizing who's in the community the netherlands holland and i've lived their family nine hundred seventy six until one thousand eight hundred nine when i came to the united states for college i came to america by myself at eighteen years old i took a very big chance to go to college in philadelphia and for the first time in eighteen years i was called bad names because of my skin color experience being alone like many of you i didn't understand american culture very well and it was very much a struggle for me and my plan when i came to the united states was to go to law school and go back to the netherlands where i was raised and worked as a lawyer but i realized that at nineteen years old kids who looked like me were not getting a good public education and i called my parents at twenty years old and said i'm not coming back i'm going to give the rest of my life to education in the united states and so i've served in and around schools for the last twenty five years i've raised three children in our public schools my children are nineteen twenty and twenty one years twenty one years old and i have two boys and a girl and all of my an administrator for the last eight years and i absolutely believe our teachers need to get like the students they're serving as one of the reasons i'm running and the first black woman said ran for state on fence and selected i'll be the first black man or woman to be elected to an executive position and i believe that's important for our children i believe it's important for our adults to see that it's possible to be on later saying and i absolutely believe we need quality early childhood for every family and fortunately the role that we serve is kindergarten through twelfth grade but i will tell you as a mom and i was that middle grounds why couldn't qualify for head start and we couldn't afford private and so i stayed home i made a sacrifice and made there it and thirty thousand dollars for the five people in our house  and i stayed home and i started a school in my grads because i believed it was that important and so i will be advocating to make sure everyone gets really quality early childhood programs thank those africans who came five hundred years before me and made it possible for me to be here and i want to live under displays as well knowing the history of it and wondered to to make it happen i want to thank you both for being here and for answering these say i became an adult in this space in this community and i'm grateful for my elders and those who thought so i will be kind of leading the rest of the questions you'll have to minutes instruction to disrupt the school to prison pipeline so that when it went to changes in curriculum and instruction and we do use to change the school to prison pipeline and for me i've been training teachers and disrupting the school to pr pipeline for a long time and i stand there in new regulations around discipline right now and maybe you live in a school district where there is now known to suspend center expansion and i think in theory that's a good idea but if we don't provide training for teachers and how to interact differently with students what will happen is students will be just beat any classroom that's called in school suspension which to me is no different than out of school suspension so we absolutely need to provide training for teachers to know how to communicate more effectively my experience as the mother of three large children who are very loud is that there's a culture that happens in school most of our teachers are middle class white women and most of our students who are not louder tend to stand and said things and so we have a class of cultures that we need to address intentionally and we need to provide instruction around that and so at the state i believe we need to provide some guidelines for instruction about how to help our teachers we can't expect them to do something different if we're not willing to teach the other pieces we have to help students understand what i call the game of school had yourself in school and function and school in a way that makes you feel proud to be yourself but also helps you play the game and get the job done at school and so i think we have to adjust both students and how students set up an experience but also our instructors so our school system like our society creates an inequity from birth the economic injustice that underlies this state in particular has a growing number of people with less and less income and a handful of people who who are growing their income or stretching this thing out but you live in the very state t are low income and middle income people significantly higher than any other state compared to our very wealthy so from moment one a child born into poverty or born into struggle in this state is going to have less economic opportunity language acquisition immediately as parents work multiple jobs because we don't have an adequate system of child care from birth to five so i as a person who's been elected democrat for last six years i've been a part of i think a pretty powerful talk this that is trying to change the economic justice equation that starts in school to prison pipeline when you go to school and you've been absent language acquisition and you've been absent basic skills including numeracy and you haven't had the supports and the system doesn't supp supports outside of the school building then you begin a trajectory for students that's very different if you come privileged in ready you get to accelerate and if you come in struggle by third grade eighth grade eleventh grade high school graduation beyond the gap continues to widen so we have to operationalize what that means every single step of the way we have to change the way we investors because from everyone getting something similar to driving dollars into communities most in need most in need it's a question of being equal versus to washington he may need additional financial support given his financial situation we have to change the game in the public sector to create justice because the economy is stretching this thing to the point that low income families are almost never escape their color and immigrant and refugee teachers to reflect you know the population of our children so what plans do you have to increase the number of teachers of color and immigrant refugee and how do you attract people sure whoever is elected to this role is not only the superintendent of public schools in charge of nine billion dollars and four hundred employees in everything that is involved in kindergarten through twelfth grade but we also sit on the board of natural resources so we need an opinion about tree harvest we sit on the student achievement council which is looking from birth essentially to career and trying to have a strategic plan and one of the places that this office sits on is the professional educator standards for this person gets to have an opinion in a vote on a board that makes a lot of decisions about what are the requirements for teacher colleges to recruit retain and advocate and support future teachers we can't change the game unless we have very intentional recruitment strategies but it begins far sooner than a high school junior senior we've got to talk about the value of teaching and learning and staying in the community from the time a child enters public school if you ask kids today what do you want to do when you grow up you're going to hear things like software engineering and video game maker and all kinds of stuff is pretty cool these days thirty or forty years ago you would have heard disproportionally i want to teach their resources have to be there the recruitment has to be there it has to be locally based grabbing folks in their community to teach there needs to be similar turn of certification to get people into schools who are already professional in something else but need help in the teaching world and then support you have to have mentorship and professional development through your entire career you can't just plop people into a school building and say hey now that we've got a community that reflects race ethnicity you're good to go you actually have to invest in professional development along the entire chain you move their professional wife or we will lose them as we do today or forty or fifty percent of our teachers leave us within the first five years that is not a good system it is not a quality system it's not a sustainable system one of the reasons i'm running for this office is to model what's possible just spoken in political spaces i've spoken to over twenty five thousand students in the last year and my methods to them and become a teacher become like me and i am really intentional about that i absolutely believe that model and trying people ninety two percent of the teachers in washington state are white and eighty percent of those are women and so our young people don't get to see educators who look like them and said that's why i am intentionally and setting myself in spaces as the state superintendent i will not of my time in olympia because i believe i need to leverage the platform to be n the school buildings to be and community to model what's possible for young people over the last eight years i have sat and seaports that i think are really important one is called the recruiting washington program evidence kind that supports people of color who are getting master's degrees and teaching we provide mentorship for them free training and free resume building we have got to do more of that if we want to encourage and increase the number of teachers have color coming into the space group and so we're a little bit concerned about you know the timeline and you know so the timeline is currently moving quickly the state is trying to have a finalized  input from the communities right that is truly impacted by this opportunity to get the parents and use of color so i just i want to back up a little bit and explain that when she is talking about so how many of you  heard of the no child left behind so that was legislation that basically set us that and i think the intention was to set the gaps but what it is then is its finest schools so what happened over the last year here's what i hear from communities of color from our tripes from immigrant families that even though people have been asked for their opinion they don't feel heard and so here's what i will say and i was just reading the i was pat web site today the plan is to finish the plan by the beginning of november and then to ask for input after that here's what i say if i'm elected we're going to stop that i'm going to go back out to the community because when i talk to community people feel like they've been  it can't be the same voices because the same voices have not gotten us the results that you need and then we have to be visible we have to come to you we can always ask you to come to us and said that's what i will commit to you as i want to always ask you to come tell them pm i'm going to come to your space and i'm going to people want to come and listen to you and to actually listen to you and to reflect what i've heard in the writing of whatever new legislation it can't just be our language in olympia because that doesn't represent the many voices that are being disenfranchised positives that's occurring here is that our delegation senator patty murray took the lead to find we say that the insanity of the federal government telling our state that countability should look like casting and we have unique needs in the state of washington as do the forty nine other states and so we're getting that control back that's the power of going away from no child left behind to every student succeeds but if it's truly reflective of a state that wants its own accountability that state has to listen to communities who have expectations that things will be different than they have been in the past so the deadline that they're sort of operating under is march for a submission but the new law requires or allows the legislature to have an opinion about this thing instead of your state superintendent submitting it to the federal government saying good to go the legislature actually gets to touch it and no one's sure if that's going to be a formal vote a public hearing maybe just send it to the appropriate committees and somebody looks at it or maybe they don't but this is sort of unchartered territory so we're going to get a chance to slow this down and i think we are both committed to slowing it down and even beyond the march deadline because i believe there may be a deadline beyond that that we can shoot for but what's clear is that communities have not been this into communities of color recent immigrant communities special education community was absolutely abundantly clear that they don't feel that the new system works for them the new approach here's what i want to conclude with if all we did there was rearrange everything and get back to this place where we're going to define the future of every child by a standardized test that is almost exclusively done digitally and almost exclusively done in english then we've completely failed at the idea of bringing flexibility back to our state our accountability system has to change from a standardized test to looking at discipline policies in schools to looking at it how desegregated data is working what are show tunes of color doing p c b cock asians do what are boys doing with their twenty five percent higher dropout rate what does discipline look like in our it's about engaging in dialogue engaging and learning about who is running to represent you and making sure as you go to the polls which you need today before november a that you go educated please ask people around you who should i vote for and why make them give me some reasons do some educating of yourself read up on each of the candidates because they are about to make decisions for you that you may not like and so i want you to take that responsibility and know you're very busy and i absolutely understand that as a mom of three caves i was working full time i was so engaged in my community it's hard sometimes to see why it's important to vote but people are making decisions all around you the presidential race is really really important  things could happen if we don't make the right choice in the presidential election but there are so many other people to vote for down the ballot and so i'm going to ask you do your best to not just vote for president but all the way down the ticket they're going to be two or three pages create about four get