One-hundred Iowa teachers have endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and she marked the milestone with many of them at a campaign event earlier today in Waukee.
“Today public school teachers are working against all kinds of odds that include student-teacher ratios” she said during a Radio Iowa interview, “They’re doing crisis intervention. They’re doing therapy. They’re doing diagnosis and treatment of all kinds of things.”
The first policy roll-out of Harris’ campaign was a proposal to directly use federal money to boost the salaries of public school teachers. The Harris campaign calculates her proposal would give Iowa teachers a $12,000-a-year raise.
The Iowa State Education Association has been an active voice on Iowa’s political stage for decades. Some members of the union recently have said they’re becoming more political active after the state legislature limited their collective bargaining rights.
Harris notes children spend the majority of their waking hours with their teachers and Harris said teachers are bearing the responsibility of classroom instruction, along with security.
“The teachers that I’ve talked with just as recently as the beginning of this last school year, teacher orientation involves teaching them how to tackle a gunman,” Harris said. “I met a first grade teacher that was explaining that she was instructed to carry red lollipops. Why? Well, because when the youngest children want to make noise, give them a lollipop to make them be quiet if there’s a mass shooter in the school.”
Harris’ family has flown to Iowa and the candidate is cooking a Thanksgiving dinner for them at a Des Moines home. She gave reporters a preview of the menu this afternoon.