ABOUT

I was born January 21st, 1997 in Metairie, Louisiana. I moved to the Northshore right before I started Kindergarten and occupied a small town house in Mandeville because my mother didn't want me to attend St. Clement of Rome, the private school my older brother Matthew attended. The school was abusive. Teachers yelled at students regularly for minor infractions, and some sprayed Lysol on students.

I went through the St. Tammany Parish Public School System, attending Pontchartrain Elementary, Tchefuncte Middle, Mandeville Junior High and Mandeville High. I graduated in 2015 at the top of my class. My weighted GPA was 4.8. I took all honors, Gifted and Advanced Placement classes in high school and received various academic honors, including awards for being the top student in French III, French IV and AP US Government as well as Straight A and Perfect Attendance recognition for all four years of my high school career. I also attended the District Literary Rally at Southeastern Louisiana University three times, for French II as a freshman, French III as a sophomore and Spelling as a junior. I placed second in French II (blocked from advancing to the district race by a classmate who had four more points than me), first in French III and fourth in Spelling. I attended the State Literary Rally for French III and won first in the state, all divisions. I was also part of the National Honor Society and Mu Alpha Theta club. These club memberships involved regular community service, including volunteering at a food bank, washing cars to raise money for children with cancer, and tutoring students in academics.

I attended Louisiana State University from 2015 - 2019, where I was part of the Ogden Honors College and took courses in Mass Communication (concentration: political communication), English (concentration: creative writing) and Film and Media Arts. I earned a cumulative GPA of 3.458 from LSU and graduated with two degrees in English and FMA in spring of 2019, a mere 10 credit hours shy of a third degree in "Mass Com." I worked as a supervisor for the front desks at LSU Residential Life during my time at LSU, where I was often recognized for my excellent abilities to work with persons on conflict resolution skills and my outstanding organizational instincts. I left the university last fall to work on my campaign. I chose the campaign over continuing my education to collect a third degree, which I would have received in December 2019, because I felt I had done enough classroom learning and was ready to gain practical experience and use my skills and knowledge to help the general public.

The hallmark of my senatorial campaign was a unique proposal that completely eliminates state income and sales taxes. The budget plan, which is actually quite simple, includes three forms of revenue collection to fund the state's government. These are based on the public resources an individual takes from society, rather than on one's own earnings or expenditures. Read more on my Policy Proposals page.

I disagree on a philosophical level with the way our education system is set up. I believe kids waste far too much time and money sitting behind desks and studying subjects merely in theory. Rather, students should gain practical education that involves more real-world experience and be given the opportunity to begin their "career jobs" at a much younger age than is generally considered acceptable by the "elite" class. During the campaign, I proposed abolishing the vast majority of college degree programs (particularly humanities, social sciences and arts). I believe such degree programs do not offer any practical instruction or experience and do nothing to prepare students for their careers. People who want to earn degrees like English, art, etc. to provide forms of entertainment in the future do not need to spend their time in classrooms with teachers using a traditional setting and instructional plan. Rather, they should already be offering their unique skills to the world as entertainers (artists, film and television writers, novelists, etc.) Basically, college is a useless and ridiculous waste of time and money for a vast majority of people in humanities, arts and social sciences programs.

Legislatively, I believe the best way to reform the broken education system is to offer employers incentives for hiring applicants who have less college "education" and more authentic, practical, real-world experience and talent that will make them better candidates and enable them to contribute valuable resources to their employers. I view college as a massive scam by academia to take our money while not offering our kids any meaningful training or preparation for their careers. Academia is the source of all problems our state faces with education, and less funding would force colleges to reconsider spending on wasteful activities, accessories, pleasantries, clubs and degree programs. During my campaign, I advocated for a reform package that stream lines the general education process so that students kids complete general education earlier in life, through intensive learning programs that include in-person instruction, online resources, tutors and meaningful hands-on experiences. This package allows students to think more practically about their careers sooner. Students would have options to begin taking courses in relevant degree programs and train for jobs as early as their freshman year in high school, provided they had passed a series of standardized assessments based on the general education curriculum for grades K-8. The proposed process essentially accomplishes two major endeavors: creating a larger work force for our economy, and allowing students and their families to waste less time and money on irrelevant college courses.

The third pillar of my campaign was abolishing lobbying. This is quite a reach, but I also offered a more measured approach that makes it illegal for any legislator or executive cabinet member to become a lobbyist after leaving their job. We can all agree that our government has become corrupted by lobbyists who buy our politicians and bribe them to ignore their constituents once they're in office. I believe we need more regular people from the private sector in government, and I focused heavily on ending corruption in politics during my campaign and continue to do so today in my advocacy work.

I am currently pursuing a career in education because I believe our students need more teachers willing to give them specialized, individualized learning, and find many of the traditional methods of education used in my schooling to be inefficient. However, I also strongly disagree with some of the newer learning methods being written by the higher-ups in our government and feel that these alternative learning strategies often give students a more difficult time learning the curriculum.

As an educator, I encourage using more of a variety of instructional strategies. Aside from individualized, focused learning, I favor the use of technology both inside and outside of the classroom, and believe that the future of education will involve online and remote learning, hands-on experiences in the "real world" that allow students to understand the relevance of the material they're studying to their lives and to our society, and learning from a variety of instructors, including personal tutors and people with relevant career experience in the subject matter being studied.

Currently, I work in retail. I'm licensed as a teaching practitioner and simply need the first job offer that meets my qualifications to come up. I hope to start teaching as soon as possible. However, I'm also enjoying my retail position. I love interacting with customers and seeing what their lives are like on a day-to-day basis. It informs me of the real struggles and concerns people have, which I could use as practical experience if I ever am elected to the Senate in the future.

My pet projects include two stories I am developing for both graphic novels and television, as well as a variety of instructional materials for English education that are aligned to the state curriculum.

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