Katie Nash, the President of the Chandler Education Association, CEA, is running for Vice President of the Arizona Education Association, AEA.
Nash is a teacher who is raising two children who attend CUSD schools. Nash is a regular at Chandler Unified School District, CUSD80, board meetings. From her speeches given at board meetings it appears that she has been working mainly to keep schools closed, kids masked and indoctrinated with critical race theory, taxes high and standards low. Nash has been leading the walk out of around 5,000 Chandler, Gilbert and Queen Creek teachers and staff during the most recent Arizona teachers strike. Her facebook campaign page can be found here.
If you are a conservative, this once again shows that your political opposition is not (only) far away and easy to bad mouth George Soros, but includes people in your own neighborhoods. It may be hard to believe, but there obviously really are people who want kids, even their own kids, masked and taught that they are inherently evil.
The AEA is currently headed by Joe Thomas, a former Mesa Public Schools teacher and key figure in the Red for Ed movement to extract more taxes from families for the benefit of public school teachers and administrators.
Indeed, thanks to the teachers unions' massive political influence, public school teachers and administrators are very well paid, earning far above the average wage in the communities they work in. In Chandler for example the average salary of a CUSD80 teacher is around $65,000 for 9 months of work per year, far higher than the average wage of around $45,000 in Chandler. All but a few of CUSD80's 27 senior level administrators sit on generous six figure pay packages, plus benefits.
The current Vice President of the AEA is Marisol Garcia. She was elected to the post in 2016. Garcia was a middle school teacher in the Isaac School District in Phoenix.
The AEA pays six figure salaries to around six of its approximately 40 staff members. President Joe Thomas makes an estimated $250,000 per year.
For context: the auto workers unions succeeded in extracting huge pay and benefit packages for Detroit car workers, all of whom were forced to join the unions in closed shop Michigan. However, costs rose so high, and standards dropped so low, that Detroit, the former center of American automobile manufacturing, lost out to competition. The market today is dominated by products made in other American states, usually with the right to work. Detroit, formerly called Paris of the West, lost around 2/3 of its population from the peak in the 1950s. Back then almost two million people lived and worked there. Today it's only around 650,000. Unions and their leftist political puppets almost completely destroyed a once great American city.
With their sky high cost and abysmal results, most American public schools would, unless reformed, face a similar fate: replacement by privately run schools in a free market. However, public schools don't offer a product in reasonably free market, they don't face competition. Instead, public school customers, meaning parents and students, are on the one hand forced by law to attend, and on the other have no control over the purse strings. Public schools are about as protected as you can get from real competition, on par with state-owned companies in socialist systems. Yes, there are private schools and yes, you can home school, but, even if you do this, you still have to pay property and income taxes, in full. Charter schools do offer some "free" school choice, but they are limited by regulation and currently under heavy attack by the Biden administration and are perpetually attacked by the teachers unions and the public education establishment. There is nothing they hate more than competition.