Severna Park mental health practitioner runs for office
After working as a mental health professional, small business owner and activist throughout the county, LaToya Nkongolo said running for the Maryland House of Delegates seemed like the next step to help Anne Arundel residents at a greater scale.
The Severna Park resident, running to represent District 31B, a district currently represented by Republicans Brian Chisholm and Nic Kipke, operates her own mental health facility in Glen Burnie, Work Life Behavioral Health.
She said her clients have voiced concerns to her over the years about the way the county and state are headed.
“It’s compounding their anxiety, depression and other mental health issues they’re experiencing,” said Nkongolo, also a Republican.
She said one of her top priorities would be shedding light on and devoting resources to the opioid epidemic.
“We’re not hearing much about it since COVID. It kind of fell on the sidelines and we need to address it immediately because we’re losing family members. We’re losing a generation of employees,” she said. “We have so many sick people who don’t have access to treatment and it’s hurting all of us by not making this a primary issue.”
She said, if she were elected to the House of Delegates, she would fight for increasing access to comprehensive treatment, investing in recovery support and getting drug prevention programs in schools.
A program she found particularly effective in her own life was the D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) campaign from the Reagan Administration which became popular in the 80s when she was in school.
“Being in elementary school, I believe that prevention program saved me from not going down the road of addiction because, in my environment, drugs were rampant and I had access to them but that program gave me a different understanding, helped me understand that drugs were bad. I thought they were normal,” she said.
She said she’d work on a similar widespread media campaign if elected.
Other fears she said she’s discussed with clients of hers over the years include feeling their tax dollars are not being spent wisely and worrying Anne Arundel Public Schools aren’t adequately preparing their kids for the future.
“We have to look at the fact that less than 50% of Anne Arundel Public Schools students are ready for kindergarten. We have to look at the fact that most of our students aren’t proficient in math and aren’t reading at grade level,” she said. “We teach kids that education is the ultimate equalizer, that it’s going to provide them a financial future, but, if schools aren’t preparing them for that, how are our kids going to trust it.”
Nkongolo said she’d push schools to focus on setting kids up to get into good colleges with focusing on standardized testing prep and prioritizing literacy and numeracy over what is the politically popular thing to focus on in schools at any given time.
She also said she’d like to create more options for parents when it comes to schooling, including providing tax incentives for parents to homeschool their kids.
Nkongolo, who grew up in poverty, also said she’d limit government outreach programs. She described being on welfare as a traumatic experience as the program was so restrictive.
“I think about when I wanted to paint my room purple and when I wanted a dog but, when you live in low-income housing, there are so many restrictions around how you live,” she said. “I learned at a young age if you don’t limit government, government will limit you and people feel limited by the government right now.”
She said she’d instead work to create state programs to help people better emerge from poverty like accessible job training and financial literacy courses.
“If we create programs that are going to empower people, that are going to help people lift themselves out of poverty, that will do wonders for a person’s self-esteem, for a person to actually feel like they’re a part of and contributing to society,” she said.