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As the matriarch of a family with foster children, state Rep. Tarah Toohil believes she has learned all she needs to know about getting things done in Harrisburg.
Toohil, R-Butler Township, and her husband have been foster parents since February 2016 and are co-founders of a Hazleton foster care nonprofit called Brandon’s Forever Home.
Using skills she learned at Northeastern University and Dickinson College’s School of Law, Toohil said she fights hard for her constituents in the 116th District on all four discussed topics: two of which were asked of each local candidate — education funding and online gambling — and two selected for this race — immigration and combating the drug trade.
The largest area of Toohil’s constituency is the Hazleton Area School District, which recently cut kindergarten to half days because of a budget deficit. She said the new formula Gov. Tom Wolf uses did not reduce the district’s state funding but did not increase it, either.
“We have high (English as a Second Language) and high special education,” Toohil said of two specialized areas of education that allowed the district’s funding to stay the same.
She noted Hazleton Area has an early learning center and believes the district is being inconsistent in its early learning plans when it is “emphasizing the importance of pre-k” but then cutting back.
“They should follow through; kids should not be going backwards,” she said.
Toohil said she would push for teachers who have been laid off to apply to other districts as Hazleton’s classrooms “are busting at the seams” with students, referring to 800 new students who entered the district this year.
She credits low housing prices and a boom in industrial park jobs with bringing people, and their children, to the area.
For those same reasons, she is cautious about immigration into Pennsylvania.
“We have a lot of challenges,” she said about the federal government allowing refugees in on tourist visas who then stay in the country to pursue an education.
Not everything about immigration is bad, Toohil notes.
“There are positive things,” she said. “Communities were experiencing a decline, now community growth.”
She also dislikes the way the government gives no path to citizenship for children who graduate after 12th grade.
“Some of them are in the top 100 of their class,” she said.
Because immigration is a hot topic in Hazleton, Toohil believes there is a need to close borders — not just for immigration reasons but also to combat the drug trade in her community. She calls the area between Interstates 80 and 81 a “drug corridor.”
For Toohill, the war on drugs is personal. Her foster children have told her a friend’s sibling passed away. When she was a kid, she said, her friends had car accidents and DUIs but they were few and far between.
“It’s every demographic, every race, doesn’t matter who you are,” she said.
Toohil is hesitant to expand gaming for the online variety, saying her constituents were supposed to get property tax relief with slots and tables and that hasn’t happened. She wants to look at a rebate program because people are losing their homes and not feeling the relief they were promised.
“We need to fix what we have,” she said but didn’t rule out the idea of online gambling completely. “With the budget deficits, all the options are on the table.”
