Democratic candidates running for state representative in three Missouri districts fielded questions about student debt, medical marijuana and campaign finance at a forum organized by MU’s Graduate Professional Council Thursday.
Michela Skelton, Adrian Plank and Maren Bell Jones are running for state representative in Missouri’s 50th, 47th and 44th district, respectively. They struck a similar tone on a lot of issues. All three candidates support Amendment 2 on November’s ballot which would legalize medical marijuana, support limiting gifts from lobbyists and agree that student debt is an issue.
Skelton, Plank and Jones are also all running against Republican incumbents.
GPC Director of State Affairs Kari Chesney organized the event and said she reached out to Representative Sara Walsh, Representative Chuck Basye and Representative Cheri Toalson Reisch to invited them to attend either this forum or the forum two weeks ago.
About a dozen people attended this week’s forum. One of the key issues that came up was student debt.
“The folks that went to school, you know, 15, 20, 25 plus years ago — they don’t have the same frame of reference for how much money it is,” Jones told attendees. “You know, I’ve had so many folks who are a little bit older that they will say things like ‘well, I just worked during the summer and I could pay for it.’”
Chesney said graduate students have some different concerns than undergraduate students.
“I think that students get lumped into one demographic a lot of times,” Chesney said. “You have the college student that the average person thinks of, someone that lives in the dormitories and eats in the Mizzou cafeterias and goes to the Mizzou Rec Center and doesn’t really spend a lot of time in the community except for maybe in the downtown Columbia area. But for graduate and professional students, the vast majority of us live in the community.”