Democrat makes bid for House seat
SoVaNow.com / July 22, 2019
A Democratic candidate who is challenging Del. James Edmunds for the 60th District House of Delegates seat will speak at a party gathering today in South Boston.
Janie Zimmerman, a Charlotte County resident who has filed to run in November, will introduce herself to Halifax County voters and grassroots activists at the Democratic Party committee meeting at 6 p.m. at Italian Delight.
Zimmerman, 51, is making her first run for public office. She is a teacher for Prince Edward Public Schools, working with youth detainees at the Piedmont Regional Jail Authority. “Those are my favorite kiddos,” she said. “The ones who have fallen through the cracks, who people have given up on just because they have some issues.”
Zimmerman has a master’s degree in special education from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., and earned her bachelor’s degree at Northwest Nazarene University in Idaho. She moved to Southside Virginia two years ago from Portland and resides in Phenix, just over the Charlotte-Campbell county line from Brookneal.
Her priorities running in the rural 60th — which includes Halifax, Charlotte, Prince Edward counties and a small portion of Campbell in the Brookneal area — are to improve K-12 education and broadband access.
“Rural areas have so much less than some of the big cities. Virginia isn’t just Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C.,” she said. “Every student deserves the same education.” Zimmerman said as a legislator, she plans to make a priority of raising salaries for Virginia teachers. “Education funding is a big part of what I’m concerned about. Virginia has some of the lowest paid teachers in the country.
“That’s something I feel with my own paycheck.”
Of spotty internet coverage in rural areas, Zimmerman said that, too, is a problem she has experienced personally as she launches her campaign from her Phenix home. “Rural broadband is a huge issue for me.”
On her campaign website, http://www.janiezva60.org, Zimmerman also spells out other priorities, such as bolstering rural health care through greater support of community health centers and combatting climate change with passage of a Green New Deal Virginia. She also said she will campaign on ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, an issue that surfaced in the General Assembly in the 2019 session.
After the state Senate passed the ERA on a bipartisan, 26-14 vote, it died in subcommittee in the Republican-controlled House. To become part of the Constitution, the ERA must be ratified by 38 states; 37 states have already done so, mostly in the 1970s. While legal questions remain on whether the ERA would become part of the Constitution if one more state enacts the amendment, Zimmerman said she would like Virginia be the state that pushes the ERA past the finish line.
“Virginia was really close last time, it would take just one more state to get it over the mountain. It’s that close.”
The daughter of a Vietnam veteran, Zimmerman grew up in the western U.S. and has been a teacher for nearly 30 years. She and her spouse moved from Portland to Charlotte County two years ago to tend to an elderly family member. Zimmerman has been employed by the Prince Edward school district since moving to the area, and taught last year at Prince Edward Middle School.
She said she decided to run in early June, when primary elections were held for the General Assembly. (Her opponent, Del. Edmunds, did not draw a primary opponent.) “People came to me and said, ‘Hey, we want a Democrat running on the ticket,’” said Zimmerman, adding that she had become “more passionate [about politics] since the election of our current president.
“We got to change some things … But you can’t complain about things if you don’t do something about it myself.”
Zimmerman has created a Facebook page, Janie Zimmerman for Delegate-VA60, along with her website. She has been showing up at events in Charlotte County and is making her first foray into Halifax for the local Democratic committee meeting.
The election is Nov. 5.