I grew up in Burns Township, just outside of Nowthen.  I was lucky to have terrific family growing up.  My parents modeled how to give a kid the kind of support they need to excel.  I learned how to be assertive from my sister.  Her struggle against breast cancer, which ended tragically at 29 years old, showed me just how important good health care is.  She was just a couple of weeks from running out of health insurance when she died, and as a health care adjuster, she knew it.  It was awful knowing that while she was saying goodbye to a heartbroken family and her 2 and 4 year old children, bankrupting her family with medical bills was in the back of her mind.  That is just wrong.  It is the experience that galvanized my opinions on the need for a national health care system.

My elementary and secondary education was all given to me by the amazing educators of the Anoka-Hennepin School District.  I attended Ramsey Elementary the first full year it was opened as a kindergartener and stayed through fourth grade.  For fifth through seventh grade, I went to Sandburg Middle School and then to what was then Fred Moore Junior High for eighth and ninth grades.  I finished up at Anoka Senior High.  During my time in school, I was part of the change from junior highs to middle schools, watched my teachers manage the overcrowding of my very large cohort of students, saw the very beginning of the PSEO program, saw the end of reasonable funding for our district, and learned what a joy a teachers’ strike is to a seventh grader.  Throughout all that change, my teachers gave me a top notch education.  It is an honor to be working with many of the teachers that gave me such a good start in life.

I got my elementary education degree and middle school endorsement in mathematics (with a minor in French) from St. Cloud State.  Last year, I completed my master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from Saint Mary’s.  I subbed for a year after college and when a student I had worked with a few times shot his family and then himself, I got cold feet.  It brought home what an enormous responsibility we have as educators, and the terrible consequences of shortchanging our kids with large class sizes and paralyzing workloads.  I decided to see if the grass was greener in the business world by taking a job in sales at Ryerson Steel.  It was a good fit since I had worked in my dad’s family machine shop since I was fourteen.  I found the grass to be higher - I made a lot more money and worked less to get it - but not greener.  I had a customer one day getting pretty intense about a part for corn chip packaging machines and I realized I just didn’t care about sales.  Don’t get me wrong - I love snack foods.  But I just can’t dedicate my life to them like I can to education.  So I renewed my license and was lucky enough to get a position at Jackson Middle School.

At Jackson, I started out in 0.9345 position (yes, they calculated it out that far) teaching seventh and eighth grade math, Assurance of Mastery math and reading, and managing the first year of JMS’ AOM program and paraprofessionals, all while on a cart.  I learned quickly about workload issues.  More importantly, I learned how incredibly supportive educators are as my colleagues kept me afloat that year.  Since then, I have been on a seventh and eighth grade looping team and now teach three levels of seventh grade math.  Going through the transition of JMS from the slightly large middle school it was to the gigantic school it is today taught me so much about transition in education.  Everything that made that transition successful was based on an effective, dedicated, united staff.  The one downside to being AHEM president would mean I would need to leave the supportive, invigorating environment at Jackson.

One thread that remained constant in my life has been my political and advocacy work.  My first job with a paycheck was calling to identify voters when I was fourteen years old (thank you Kathleen Sekhon for that job!) for the DFL.  Since then, I’ve managed the campaigns of two terrific women for state representative, Bonnie Walters and Betsy O’Berry.  I was the president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Organization for Women in 1998.  Locally, I have served on the Economic Development Authority for the city of Ramsey and have been on the board of the Friends of the Oliver H. Kelley Farm.  I have volunteered on countless local, state, and national campaigns.  Twenty years of political work culminated in being elected a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

Out of all the advocacy work I have done, my favorite has been working with Education Minnesota.  Since Laura Schommer got me to help count ballots for a local election, I have been hooked.  I went to the AFT conference the summer after my first year of teaching and gained the confidence to take over the chair of AHEM elections committee.  After working with on a sixth congressional organizing campaign, I was appointed AHEM’s Governmental Relations chair.  Two years ago, I was elected Vice Presdent of AHEM and joined the negotiations team.  I feel I've had the chance now to complete a full circle of union activism with these new opportunities.  At the state level, I have served on the Policy Development Committee and am currently a member of the Governing Board and Executive Committee. 

To better serve our members, I looked to connect with the larger labor movement.  I currently serve on the board of the Minneapolis Central Labor Union Council as the record clerk and am a member of the Minnesota AFL-CIO General Board.  There, I have learned so much from activists in a variety of different types of unions.

How can I do all this?  First off, I have tremendous support at home. I am married to Roger Landon, who I met when I worked at Ryerson Steel where he is a plant foreman.  I was lucky to gain not only a wonderful husband in Roger, but also terrific stepsons Brian, 23 and a writer, and Jesse, 32 and a graphic artist.  I am lucky that all of them and my parents, nieces and nephew all live within a few miles and can spend a lot time together.

The other fuel for my work are my colleagues and students.  After seeing how educators transform their students’ lives and our whole community by their work, I can’t help but want to fight for them.  Seeing the potential in the extrodinary young people I have the honor to work with each day, fills me with hope for the bright future I am sure lies ahead.