The following candidate announcement was submitted by JoAnn Cummings, Democratic candidate for Alabama House of Representatives, District 4. The News Courier will publish candidate announcements as we receive them and as space allows ahead of the Nov. 6 general election. They should be no longer than 700 words and emailed to adam@athensnews-courier.com. Announcements will be edited for length, grammar, style and content.

For the last six years, I’ve watched the legislators in Montgomery, where the business bills they introduce speed through quickly and good bills go nowhere. Through social media, I’ve tried to inform people and get them involved in bills that affect their everyday lives.

I want to be representative for District 4 because there is too much work being done on behalf of special interests, while the needs of regular people are being ignored, especially those of children, seniors and others who cannot advocate for themselves. I will go to Montgomery to advocate for all the people.

We need to restore funding to our public schools and bring salaries for teachers back to where they were 10 years ago. Our schools need to be fully staffed, including with academic and mental health counselors, so that teachers can focus on teaching. We need to repeal the Alabama Accountability Act, which didn’t improve student performance. Seventy-four percent of scholarship recipients have never attended a failing school. Repealing the act would stop diverting $30 million per year from public education. We need to reduce testing so teachers can do real teaching, not teaching to the test.

Our students and underemployed adults need training for the skills that the modern workforce requires. Concurrent and post-secondary classes at vocational schools, technical schools, community colleges and even apprenticeships need to become an affordable way to give our workers higher skills for better-paying jobs of the future. If we divert some of the millions we give away for training as incentives to a few new companies and use that to provide low-cost training at our technical schools, then all the companies in our state can benefit, not just those few new ones.

I have been a strong advocate for Medicaid expansion since our state opted out of it. It will improve the health of the working poor, add tens of thousands of jobs to our economy and reduce our insurance costs. Preventive care and regular chronic care for people means fewer emergency room visits for extreme health conditions, which cause our hospital and insurance bills to be so high. I volunteered for two years as an Affordable Care Act navigator, helping people get enrolled in insurance, and my greatest disappointment was that half of my clients were too poor for Obamacare and had no expanded Medicaid.

Our minimum wage has been too low for too long. I watched the Legislature rush through a bill as fast as possible to deny local communities the ability to set a higher minimum wage in higher cost areas. I support a living wage so that a full-time worker is able to support his or her family without extra jobs. Higher minimum wages for so many of our service-industry workers means they can get health insurance, won’t need public assistance and will increase state revenue with more sales and income taxes. A living wage is better for our state and our economy.

Alabama is the most unfriendly state for solar in the country. More than 100 major companies, like Walmart, Walgreens, Kohl’s and Target, have renewable energy targets to achieve, but they will install those systems in other states because our rates, regulations and politics make it a hassle and less cost-efficient to install solar here. We are ranked 49th in solar jobs, and we are missing thousands of good-paying clean energy jobs. I want to change that.

I have been married to my husband, Chris, for 40 years. We have two sons, Tim in Huntsville and Brian and his wife, Vanessa, in San Francisco. We came to Decatur about 20 years ago when Chris became production manager on the Delta IV rocket.

Both of my mechanical engineering degrees are from California State University, Northridge. I worked as a test engineer on the B-1 and B-2 bomber programs. I have also been a small-business owner. In the 1980s, I had a store selling solar systems, and in the late 1990s, I started an online store selling GPS consumer products, which I brought with me to Alabama when we moved here. I will use this experience and my advocacy background to work on behalf of District 4.