By Katrina Stroud
Anya Kirvan wants to represent House District 12, which will cause a great disservice to our community. Her main objective is to enact parental rights legislation. This means allowing parents to ban books on LGBTQ+ and BIPOC topics, censoring sex-ed, preventing pregnant teens from seeking reproductive healthcare, and attacking trans rights.
For the past two years, the parental rights movement has gained momentum from its anti-masker and anti-CRT rhetoric. There are parents who believe they should have more control over the school curriculum, than the teachers who went to college for that reason. Who think they should have complete authority over their child’s body and eliminate safe spaces for LGBTQ+ kids. These are direct violations to our constitutional freedoms of privacy and speech.
This movement does not act in the best interests of the teachers nor students. They don’t try to work with teachers or librarians, but instead they send them death threats. As a result, many teachers across the country have quit their jobs and school districts are forced to hire individuals with no teaching backgrounds whatsoever.
Anya has no plan to raise the salaries of teachers, as she believes college-educated teachers are undeserving of a pay raise. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Colorado teachers earn almost 35.9% less than other workers with college degrees and that is the widest gap in the nation.
We need to re-elect Tracey Bernett. She passed the Public School Contract Terms & Conditions bill, which will help improve schools’ budgets and protect student data privacy. She has also worked tirelessly to pass laws on wildfire mitigation, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improved energy efficiency for farmers and ranchers, and enhanced electric grid resiliency.