CityAndStateNY.com
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Jasmine Gripper LEGISLATIVE DIRECTOR, ALLIANCE FOR QUALITY EDUCATION
Birthday: 10/4/1983
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Twitter: @jasgripper
ASMINE GRIPPER CAME UP through the New York City public school system, and when it came time to choose a profession she envisioned a long career in the classroom. But after a couple years teaching first graders in Brooklyn, Gripper came to realize that “a lot of policies that affect the classroom are often made by decisionmakers who have no idea what it’s like to actually be inside a classroom.” In 2012, she moved to Cleveland to work as a field organizer for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. “That really opened my eyes to grassroots organizing, community building and advocacy,” Gripper recalled. After the election, she found a position that perfectly matched her talent for grassroots organizing with her love of education. The Alliance for Quality Education, a statewide advocacy group focused primarily on equity in education funding, was born out of a 1993 lawsuit brought by a group of New York City parents, in which the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that the state was failing to provide students with their constitutional right of a “sound basic education” or “meaningful high school education.” “The state has made some incremental increases in education funding, but it still owes billions of dollars to our schools,” Gripper said. For Gripper, the highpoint of every year is AQE’s annual advocacy day, which brings hundreds of parents from across the state to the capital to advocate for the public schools. “It’s always great when you have the people who are directly impacted by the schools coming up,” she said.
Where did you go to college? Hunter College-CUNY What politician, living or dead, do you most admire? John Lewis