Jackie Baker is an educator from Susquehanna County. This is her third time running for the Pennsylvania State Senate. 

“I’ve worked with many communities and families who’ve been in need, and I know firsthand how important taking care of our families [is], especially when it comes to making sure our parents can feed their children, making sure they get a good education [and] making sure their communities are safe,” she said. “I turned my advocacy and my hard work as a teacher into running for the state senate because I care and I want to make a difference for the families of Pennsylvania.”

Baker said that being a representative is a public service job. She doesn’t take corporate money, she said, and her campaign is a grassroots campaign, because “it should be voters who believe in their candidate” who get a candidate elected. 

Baker said that Pennsylvanians pay a lot more on many things than residents of other states. “Right now, our lowest income earners, our middle class workers, get taxed almost twice as much as the millionaires, trillionaires and multi-billionaire companies that work here,” she said. She would support closing tax loopholes and using the resulting revenue to invest in education, health care and other public services. 

On data centers, Baker said that, in the research she’s done, this type of development would not be good for Pennsylvania residents. She said that the companies behind data center developments plan to come into Pennsylvania to extract its natural resources, without bringing jobs or lowering electric costs. She compared it to natural gas drilling as a similarly extractive industry, one where companies have been allowed to “police themselves [and] break environmental laws.”

“As we listen to our neighbors and our communities, we have heard loud and clear they do not want data centers in their backyards,” Baker said. “Absolutely, they do not want them.”

Baker said she would “fully fund education,” and listed several specific areas that needed support. The state needs more programs for early learners, she said; it needs more funding to support teachers’ resources; classrooms need to be updated to remove health impacts like mold and lead; support staff need to be paid a living wage.

Only about one third of education funding in Pennsylvania comes from the state, said Baker. “We have this unequal funding of education across school districts because so much of it comes off of property taxes. So what I would like to see is Pennsylvania invest more state dollars into funding education and schools and let us relive some of the [burden] on the property taxes, especially since we have so many seniors who want to stay in their homes, we have families—it’s getting so expensive.”

Baker said that health care costs are “extremely out of control,” due to for-profit hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. She mentioned the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP as having impacts that will hurt people. 

Baker talked as well about the decline in local health care access. When she had her last baby, she had to travel over two hours to a hospital, she said. “That’s dangerous.”

“We don’t even have enough doctors or clinics around, and we certainly don’t have enough emergency systems,” she said. “We have lost our local police, we are losing EMS, we are losing hospitals, and we have an aging population, and we are waiting a very, very long time for an ambulance or someone to come.”

On housing affordability, Baker said that a lot could be done with zoning to allow different kinds of homes to be built, including buildings on smaller plots of land. She said as well that the state should allow community solar co-op programs, helping lower overall home costs. 

“We have a lot of companies coming in here that are trying to buy up a lot of land [and] sell it for big dollars,” she said. “In our state, houses cost way, way more than in a lot of other states in the country and because of that, unfortunately, we have a brain drain going on; we have a lot of people leaving the area.”

“I’m really excited to get to work in Harrisburg,” said Baker. “I really hope that I can count on everyone’s vote. I have a lot to do. I’m ready to get to work.”

“Between fixing our tax system, our health care, raising the wages, lowering costs for homes, we have a lot of work to do—investing in education and transit, so many things,” she said.