*** Tony Thurmond has been endorsed for State Superintendent of Public Instruction by the CDP ***
Dear Friend,
In my 20 years as a social worker, I worked with many children whose emotional development and ability to learn were impacted by the trauma they had experienced in their young lives. A child who is separated from their parent for any length of time can have difficulty feeling safe, focusing on school work, and otherwise thriving.
My heart breaks for the children at the border who will face the long term impacts of separation from their parents. Immediately, our collective national priority must be reunification — click here to support the organizations working to help these families.
We must not let this moment of national outrage pass without addressing the systems that are needed to support these children and the many, many children in the United States who have been separated from their parents either by deportation, incarceration, or any reason.
My years of experience working with foster youth and in detention centers have always influenced my policy priorities for education, mental health, and wraparound social services. If you read my plan for California’s public education system as Superintendent of Public Instruction, you’ll read about increasing counseling services, investing in full service community schools, and combatting the effects of poverty and incarceration on students.
These are the issues that every candidate in 2018 should be running on, and it’s up to us to demand that. I’m grateful for your support for my campaign, and also for your efforts to elect candidates, from your representatives in Congress to your local school board members, who put children’s wellbeing first.
Thank you,
Tony Thurmond
