Tommy Vitolo Interviews 4th District Congressional Candidate- Jake Auchincloss [11:58-15:57]

Let's talk for a minute about education, which I know is also now personal to you. I see the books behind you. And I will tell you that spending the time reading them with your son will be really delightful when he starts mounting the words and following along with his finger. My daughter has learned to read over the last year and it's really wonderful. So, book education is important to me. It's important to society and supporting public education and figuring out how to do it right is not always somehow so easy. So, tell us, tell us again, from the federal government, how should the federal government be supporting public education? I'm glad to hear that it gets fun to read as they get older right now. He's three and a half months. I got to say we read to him all the time and it's not that stimulating. Mostly just jewels on them. The very first position I ever took when I ran for the city council was to expand pre-K and to get to full day kindergarten. I'm proud to say we made progress on both those fronts during my tenure. There is almost no higher impact investment that we as a country can make than to get kids ages zero to a high quality cognitive and socio-emotional development. We know that brains at that age are very plastic. We know that we can really make a difference in kids' lives. And we as a country, frankly, should be embarrassed that as one of the wealthiest, most sophisticated economies in the world, one in every five kids in this country is food insecure. And many fewer kids than that have often have exclusively many more kids than that do not have access to high quality early education or frankly high quality to 12 education. The federal government has a number of roles to play in this. I'll highlight a couple. One, I fully support Joe Biden's call for expanding funding for early education. As a no brain we should done that 25 years ago. Number two, we should expand the earned income tax credit, probably the most effective anti-poppy program for kids ever devised in this country. And then number three, we need to start thinking about schools as footprints for wraparound services. One of my mentors on education, Joan Wassert-Gish has really put this point forward that if a kid comes to school and doesn't have to, the kid comes to school and is afraid of gun violence, the kid comes to school doesn't have secure housing, the kid comes to school and he's hungry. You don't refer them to a different agency, you don't bat them around. You provide those services on-site because you already have the footprint to deal with it at the school level. That requires increased funding and that requires I think a holistic understanding of the value of engaging with kids at the most vulnerable but also the most high opportunity moments in their lives. And that means expanding snap benefits, that means making housing security a right for kids. That means taking on gun violence in a really, really hard-nosed way and treating as a public health crisis as opposed to purely a criminal justice crisis. So, you know, I hate to pivot from schools to guns, but frankly, neither you nor I chose to make that our reality and it is our reality. I live in Brookline, Jake, you live in Newton. I grew up in a town called Brookfield, Connecticut, which is immediately adjacent to Newtown, Connecticut. And in fact, kids I went to school with had kids in school, in that school, in Sandy Hook on that day. And so, it's absolutely personal to me. And when we talk about guns, I think, you know, there's two, there's multiple facets, but there's the murders and the school shootings and there's also the suicides. And some hoping you can talk us through your thoughts on appropriate federal policy that deals with one or the other or perhaps both.