This past Sunday at Lowell High School, 11 Congressional candidates shared a crowded stage at the Kathy Reticker Forum for Children and Families and shared their ideas on family policy.

“We’re asking these candidates today how they’re going to support our most important national asset. Where are they going to put their support?” Pat Nelson, the executive director of the Concord Children’s Center, said at the event. “Will they put it where it’s needed most, where we know it leads to early success, in prenatal care and kindergarten?”

“We know the battle for funding for children is a hard-fought battle, and we want to know how you are going to fight it.”

The 11 candidates are running in Massachusetts’ third district to replace retiring congresswoman Niki Tsongas.

The forum, which was moderated by Marta Rosa, president of MTR Consulting, honors the memory of Reticker who was the former executive director of Acre Family Child Care and a passionate community advocate.

Photo Source: Rufus Gifford’s Twitter feed.

A Lowell Sun article about the forum reports:

“The most pervasive theme of the afternoon was how to produce healthy, responsible and educated children. Scrawled across a giant screen on the stage behind the long table of candidates was a quote from Nelson Mandela: ‘Our children are the rock on which our future will be built.’ ”

Here are highlights of what each candidate said:

Jeff Ballinger, Democrat from Andover

Ballinger called for a rebalance of power in Washington. He would work to lessen the power that corporations wield and increase the influence of working people. “I really believe that you raise wages and you give people a chance to collectively bargain — that makes society better because they become more active in the communities… so you’ve really got to restore collective bargaining rights in America.”

Alexandra Chandler, Democrat from Haverhill

Chandler says families need healthy relationships built on economic stability. She supports “a very aggressive platform of policies” including expansion of the earned income tax credit and a federal job guarantee to improve the lot “of the working-class families of our district.” Chandler supports universal health care and universal pre-K. Chandler is also a former military analyst, so, she said, it would be easy for her to shift federal funds away from defense and toward families because she can look generals and admirals in the eye and say, “You don’t need that money.”

Beej Das, Democrat from Lowell

“It is a question of prioritizing our expenditures,” Das said. “Of the $102 billion spent on the federal level for education, 20 percent goes toward childhood, so we’re talking prior to a child turning 18. Of that, less than 7 percent goes to kids younger than 3. So the problem is that we’re spending less than 2 percent of our money on a very, very critical time of development for a child.”

Rufus Gifford, Democrat from Concord

“What we need to fight against are the cuts that the Trump administration continues to talk about. And it’s cuts to programs like SNAP, like WIC and others.” Gifford would expand home visitation programs and access to Head Start. Paid family leave is “so critical.” “This is about the basic health of society,” about good paying jobs, universal access to health care, prenatal care, pediatric care, and healthy food.

Leonard Golder, Democrat from Stow

“I have a specific program on making daycare affordable,” Golder said. “Some of those corporations that got huge tax cuts — I would take them away and in exchange give them tax credits if they provide on-site daycare for people who are working. That way families would be able to afford daycare, and they’ll have their children right at the worksite, so it will almost be as it used to be when I was growing up where we had stay-at-home parents.”

Daniel Koh, Democrat from Andover

“As chief of staff to Mayor Walsh, I helped oversee 18,000 employees and a $3 billion budget. And even with those resources, I remember sitting with the mayor and realizing that despite adding hundreds of seats of universal pre-K every year, we still had a $16 million gap to get good, quality, universal pre-K for everyone. That’s where the federal government needs to come in.”

Barbara L’Italien, Democrat from Andover

“We need to be certain that we have access to universal pre-K, because it’s absolutely true that if you have not attended a preschool you are so behind in terms of your functioning lexicon. You do not have the same number of words that you can use and you are not able to keep pace with other children.” L’Italien, who is the mother of a child with autism, also called for early intervention, early diagnosis, and early treatment for children with autism and other challenges.

Bopha Malone, Democrat from Bedford

“If you know the costs of daycare, you know how high it is, especially here in Massachusetts,” Malone said. She and her husband “joke about it all the time, of how it’s like our second mortgage.” But the investment is worth it, she says, because, “When these kids go to daycare, you know they come back, they’re singing. They’re listening to music. They are speaking in different languages. They are with different people.” Malone would fight for universal pre-K so that all children could have these kinds of opportunities.

Juana Matias, Democrat from Lawrence

“I think Massachusetts gets a lot of credit for being the state that leads in public education. However when our most marginalized and poorest students cannot read at a third-grade level, we are not leading in public education.” Matias added that 60 percent of low-income students of color in this state cannot read at a third grade level. “We need to do better, and in order to do that, we need to invest in public education.” She calls for investing more in Head Start and raising wages for child care workers.

Mike Mullen, Independent from Maynard

“I think all of us on this stage agree that from a human rights and a moral perspective the programs that we are discussing are warranted. I think we also have to look at it from an economic and strategic standpoint. Among the OECD nations, the United States doesn’t fare very well in a lot of these metrics. One of them, preschool spending, we spend about .4 percent of our GDP on that, which is half of what the other nations spend. I think if we can make a strategic argument for that investment, we can get larger bipartisan support for that.”

Lori Trahan, Democrat from Westford

“The first thing we need to do is we need to have universal paid leave” for parents, Trahan said. “We need to protect and expand Head Start. We need to increase our Title I funding. We need to remove the barriers to accessing our child care subsidy programs.” Trahan also called for protecting community health centers, pointing out that 1 in 2 Lowell residents use health centers. She would also work to increase the transparency of prescription costs and to put price controls in place so that prescriptions could not rise so quickly.

Rick Green, a Republican candidate in the third district race, did not attend the forum.

Stay tuned. The Democratic primary is on Tuesday, September 4, 2018, so now is the time to get to know the candidates and share your ideas with them.

To watch the Kathy Reticker Forum, click here. To see related Tweets about the forum and this congressional race, Google #ma3rdcandidates. To read more, check out an article in the New York Times that ran earlier this month.

And, of course, be sure to vote on Election Day, Tuesday, November 6, 2018.