Candidate focuses on education

Growing up in Minneapolis, Liv Coleman had a front seat to the changing political landscape.

Her father was a Minnesota state employee and her mother a psychiatric nurse and inner-city teacher. As a fifth-grader in 1990, she watched as Democrat Paul Wellstone upset incumbent Rudy Boschwitz for a U.S. Senate seat, even though Wellstone was outspent by a 7-to-1 margin.

The same year, a school project on the stock market fueled Coleman’s interest in Japan and its trade disputes with the U.S. Now, she’s fluent in Japanese and uses it in her work as a political science and international studies professor at the University of Tampa.

“Politics was part of our daily conversations growing up,” said the now 39-year-old Coleman. “We read the newspaper.”

During summer breaks from Smith College in Massachusetts in 1999 and 2000, Coleman interned in the Minneapolis’ mayor’s office when Sharon Sayles Belton was the first woman and first African-American to hold the position. Belton served from 1994 to 2001.

“She was tough as nails,” Coleman said of Belton. “She was a former probation officer. She didn’t have any toleration for anybody who broke the law or wasn’t serious about government.”

Now a decade later, East County’s Coleman is stepping into the public spotlight as a Democrat running for the Florida House District 73 seat against Republican Thomas Gregory.

“I’ve been concerned about the crisis of democracy,” Coleman said of why she decided to run for office. “People are losing faith in democracy. We need a binding American nationalism rooted in freedom, toleration and the Constitution.”

Coleman will focus on public education. She wants to secure more funding for public education and find a way to reduce the burden of “high-stakes testing” so teachers have more room in the curriculum to teach critical thinking and creativity with basic skills. 

Her husband, Matt Lepinski, thought he was stupid in third grade because he performed poorly on standardized tests. Now, he has a doctorate in mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“He always had that potential,” she said, adding he added a tutor for test-taking. “People don’t want these tests to define them.”

Coleman said she worries some children may internalize those feelings of failure and prevent themselves from realizing their full potential.

“I’m running to make Florida public schools No. 1, to make sure our schools are safe and to make sure our public dollars stay in the public school system,” she said. “We need to make sure teachers and students and anyone who works with our kids have the tools and infrastructure they need to succeed.”

She also believes the state should make the first two years of community and technical college education free.

“We need to at least start talking about it,” she said.

Coleman also hopes to increase environmental protections so polluters pay their “fair share,” enhance monitoring of water quality and improve regulations on septic tanks. She also wants to address gun safety by requiring universal background checks and a ban on assault-style weapons.

Coleman said she hopes to bring a bipartisan approach to the Legislature because she said  it takes both parties working together to tackle issues like education.