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The founder of the Connecticut Parents Union is challenging the president of one of the state’s largest teachers unions for a seat in the State Senate as an Independent Party candidate on the November ballot.
Gwen Samuel, a Meriden resident, is taking on her first political campaign to challenge incumbent Jan Hochadel, D-Meriden, for the 13th Senate District seat. The district includes Meriden, Cheshire and parts of Middletown and Middlefield. Though Samuel did an exploratory campaign for the seat in 2022, she ultimately decided not to run.
Samuel told CT Examiner that this was her third attempt to get on the ballot in 2024. First, she said, she tried to primary Meriden Republican candidate Elain Cariati. When that didn’t work, she ran as a nominating petitioner, hoping to get enough signatures from across the district to place her name on the ballot. Now, after planning to run as a write-in candidate, she’s won the endorsement of the Independent Party.
Although Samuel has only recently set her sights on holding political office, she’s well-acquainted with the state legislature. Back in 2010, she played a role in passing a law that required the creation of parent governance councils in school districts, which could suggest changes in struggling districts. She said she also helped pass a law in 2013 that eliminated felony charges for parents who tried to send their students to schools outside their district.
Samuel’s decision to run for office was spurred by Gov. Ned Lamont’s use of executive orders during the pandemic, which she said should have been curtailed once businesses started to reopen. She also felt disturbed by Hochadel’s election to the Senate and the power that the teachers unions wielded.
“I got concerned because they have such a strong hold. This is not derogatory — they’re organized,” she said. “They’re powerful. And I don’t know how parents and students can contend with that fairly. … We’re a bunch of individual families doing the best we can with the circumstances and the cards that we’re dealt post pandemic.”
Samuel described herself as “family and community first.” She said she wants to concentrate on supporting families so that the government could take a backseat. She talked at length about accountability in state spending, among parents and within neighborhoods.
Samuel centered her focus on what she called “economic viability,” calling for an “audit of the auditors” at the state level. She said the state should hold programs accountable to deliver results, and, if they are not delivering, consider replacements. She also wants to examine the number of state employees and directors, and see if there’s any “bloat,” or money being unnecessarily spent on things like lawsuits.
Samuel said there needed to be more opportunities for people reentering society from prison to find work as well. She noted that Springfield, Massachusetts, offers case management, employment support and help with addiction and mental health treatment.
She is a strong advocate for school choice, whether that be charter schools, magnet schools or trade schools. She noted that the legislature has refused to fund the Danbury Charter School, which parents — many of whom speak Portuguese — have advocated for for five years.
In both Danbury and Middletown, proposed charter schools had strong community support and met all legal requirements, but legislative politics have kept them from receiving funding for two years, she explained.
“In a town that has one high school bursting at the seams, charter [schools] answered the call. That could have been a traditional school or technical school. I would have supported it, as long as you had the checks and balances, everything approved,” she said. “I wouldn’t have cared about the model. It was the need of the students. And my concern is [that] my opponent, just based on data, just based on who their mission is — their mission is to protect their members.”
Samuel said she disagreed with provisions in the state funding formula that pay a portion of per-pupil funding to traditional public schools even when the child has attended a “choice” school for years.
“They have kids that have started charters from kindergarten and graduated. The child is not back in the [traditional public] school, but that school still gets a portion of that per-pupil allocation. And then you get extra money and then you still do poorly? You don’t get to get extra money on top of every other school that’s not getting the extra money and still have single digit reading levels,” she said.
Samuel was also involved in a lawsuit brought against the State Department of Education, which sued the state for race-based quotas in magnet schools. The quotas resulted from Sheff v. O’Neill, a 1989 court case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Hartford Public Schools was perpetuating a system of separate but equal schools and ordered the state to integrate the district.
One of the methods for integrating the district was to make more choice schools available for students, including magnet schools. The state subsequently adopted a law requiring that magnet schools in Hartford be capped at 75% minority students. But Black and Latino parents sued the state, saying the quotas were keeping minority students out of high-quality schools.
“No child within the state of Connecticut should be denied access to a safe, quality educational experience because of their skin color. And that is what Sheff did. Was it its intent? No. It was for Hartford. People tend to forget that. Sheff was dealing with Hartford, but the unintended consequences are now we’re bussing kids, kindergartners all over the place,” Samuel said.
The lawsuit was dismissed after Hartford agreed to end the racial quotas.
Regarding public safety, Samuel said it’s not about investing money into policing, but rather getting people to have pride in their communities. She said parents need to be responsible for their children’s whereabouts and advocated for neighborhood watch groups.
“I grew up on, ‘It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?’ That’s going to be on my website,” she said. “Because we know where everything else is going on, we don’t even know where our kids are. So I’m bringing back family and community first.”
Samuel said addressing public safety also meant making sure children were in school, that people had access to jobs, and that seniors could safely go outside their homes. She wants to see regular wellness visits on the conditions in convalescent homes and residential facilities, and ensure that seniors are getting good food and felt safe in their neighborhoods.
“These are our walking history books,” she said.
Samuel also criticized what she called “flavor of the month” ideas, like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives and the No Child Left Behind program.
“For the Black community, we’re still seen as victims in need of saving, and I have a serious problem with that. Because if you give fair access to opportunity and hold people accountable, you don’t have to get into these ‘flavors of the month,’” she said. “No Child Left Behind. We leave so many children behind. We are a flavor-of-the-month country.”
On affordable housing, she ultimately believed it should be up to towns to decide what they needed, adding that the state should work more with landlords.
“There are people who lost multifamily houses during the pandemic. If we had partnered with them, [gotten] them the dollars to renovate, then we would have addressed the housing,” she said.
While tenants should have protection, she said there should also be more protections for landlords and that tenants needed to be responsible for paying their rents.
Going forward, Samuel emphasized that she wasn’t part of a political “machine” and didn’t have the money that came with an established party.
“All I’m asking for as an underdog candidate is just fair access to the opportunity to run, that American dream of being able to do so,” she said. “Parties don’t vote. The people in the booth vote.”