EDITOR’S NOTE: Seven Democrats are vying in the Sept. 4 primary for the 1st Franklin District House seat being vacated by 25-year incumbent Rep. Stephen Kulik, D-Worthington. The seat serves residents in 19 towns, including Huntington, Chesterfield, Middlefield, Williamsburg, Worthington, Cummington, Goshen and Plainfield in Hampshire County. There is no Republican candidate. This is one in a series of profiles on the candidates.
Christine Doktor, who works as a part-time sheep farmer and a lawyer in Cummington — next to the town of Peru, where she grew up, says her prior legal experience in New York and in her two pro-bono practices locally, along with her work on the family’s third-generation farm, make her an ideal legislative candidate.
The 40-year-old graduate of Columbia Law School has also worked as a legislative aide to former state Rep. Shaun Kelly of Dalton and in the legislative office of former Gov. Jane Swift, and she is the mother of two children and has done pro-bono legal work for the town on education and other issues.
As the only candidate who has worked in the Statehouse and who has also worked on complex legal issues from indigent criminal defendants to women fleeing gender persecution, genital mutilation, and domestic violence, “I have a unique set of skills to offer,” she said.
In her first run for public office, Doktor has identified public education, agriculture, health care and the environment, as well as the economy and civil rights among her key issues.
She is a board member of The Old Creamery Co-op, and as the child of divorced parents who was forced to move three times in six years as a child as her mother tried to find affordable housing for her and her sister, she now advocates for divorced women and their children through the pro-bono 1st Families Advocacy Project she founded.
“Helping my pro-bono clients and my parents as they’ve aged has really impressed upon me how important it is that we have good services and health care access and transportation, so that all of us can grow old in place,” Doktor said. “And once we started farming, we had a dream that some day we would pass our farm to our kids. But we ask ourselves, ‘What will it be like here in a few decades? Farming brings to the forefront environmental issues that need our attention.”
Education, health care
But beyond the gap in services, she’s seen through her pro-bono work, “the reason I’m in this race is that we’re failing our kids on education … We need to get single-payer health care in place to ultimately free up funds that can redirect to education.”
Asked at a Buckland candidates forum about charter schools, Doktor stressed the need to keep the cap on charter schools, which she said are siphoning money from public schools.
“It’s also an issue of socioeconomic equity,” she added. “The vast majority of schools are in eastern Mass. … As it is now, our public schools are truly desperately in need of funding and a funding formula that will accurately meet the need of the schools. We have to go beyond the adequate funding level. We have to have excellent schools.”
She favors a Medicare-for-All proposal.
Doktor’s priorities also include reforming the state Department of Public Utilities to help move forward with solar and other renewable energy solutions, fully funding regional school transportation and special education at the state level.