Bio: Laurie Wimmer, a 32-year veteran of Oregon politics, was for nearly 26 years a Government Relations Consultant for the Oregon Education Association. In that time, Laurie became a policy expert on school finance and taxation, school choice, student health and safety issues, civil rights, education governance, and community college funding. Her magnum opus was the passage of the game-changing Student Success Act, which boosted education funding by $2 billion a biennium. Laurie has served as an appointee to various policy groups. She was the co-founder and 20-year chair of the Oregon Revenue Coalition. She also served as Vice Chair of the School District Business Best Practices Advisory Committee, as a member of the School Revenue Forecast Committee, and on various educational advisory groups relating to student poverty, the equalization formula, charter and virtual school laws, gun violence prevention, instructional time, and school safety. She is currently serving her seventh year on the advisory council for the African American/Black Student Success Plan. She served for 10 years on the board, most recently as Vice President, of Oregon’s Virtual Education program (ORVED) through the NW Regional ESD. Prior to her work with OEA, she was Executive Director of the Oregon Commission for Women for six years, where she helped to pass historic legislation on family leave, stalking, sexual harassment, domestic relations law, civil rights, and women’s health policy. Laurie has been a writer and editor for more than 40 years. Her work has been published in international, national, and local publications, including Black Lamb, Zephyr Magazine, Today’s OEA, and Willamette Week. She authored a chapter in a book published in 2020 entitled Surviving the Death of your Ex. She wrote and produced for OEA an Annotated Glossary of School Finance and Taxation, co-authored for the Revenue Coalition a Primer on Tax Expenditures, and recently published a comprehensive overview of School Finance and Revenue policy for education advocates. She has served as advisor to the Constitution Team at Parkrose High School, as President of the Vassar Club of Oregon and of the Vassar Class of 1980, and as President of Emerge Oregon. She also regularly lectures on education policy at various Oregon colleges and universities. Wimmer is an honors graduate of Vassar College. She interned with the Project on Equal Education Rights and the New York Public Interest Research Group while at Vassar. Laurie is the parent of two children, Griffin, 32, and Riley, 29, and was legal guardian of Akili, age 21, and Amina, now 26. She lives in Portland with her partner, PSU Professor Ramin Farahmandpur, and dog Zuki.