About Claudia

Claudia Wright has been known for a long time as one of Utah’s master educators.  Acclaimed for her bold and progressive approach to education, she instilled in her students an awareness of their power – and responsibility – to translate into real life activism what they learned in the history, government, humanities, and gender studies courses she taught.  She took them on field trips to rallies for all political parties.  She encouraged their participation in social justice causes.  She emphasized the importance of critical thought as they learned about governance and history from its earliest records to the present.  She cared more about her students’ capacities to think through the implications of what they were learning than she did about their capacity to memorize material for tests.  She thus became known as a teacher who demanded nothing less than her students’ own best.

Claudia earned a B.S. in History and International Relations from the University of Utah in 1971.  In 1980 she was admitted to Stanford University on a full scholarship but chose to forego this opportunity in order to care for her critically ill brother.  What she learned during the next two decades about healthcare for a terminally ill person was instrumental in her future life choices; in addition to instilling crucial knowledge about living–and dying–the experience led to her becoming one of the co-founders of everybody-in.org, a single payer healthcare reform group based in Utah.  As a candidate, she continues to be a passionate advocate for universal health care in this country; she knows first hand, from often excruciating circumstances, what it means to battle with private health insurance companies for lifesaving healthcare coverage.

In 1989, Claudia began taking Women’s Studies courses at the U. of Utah.  Within a year, she had taken the required number of gender and diversity courses to introduce the first Women’s Studies course into the Utah high school curriculum.  Teaching that course enabled her to reach high school girls and boys who were struggling with eating disorders, depression, and sexually-transmitted disease–all teenage problems in which Utah ranks statistically among the highest in the country.  Once again, she brought progressive and relational education reform into Utah schools.

She will do the same in the halls of Congress.  Her intelligence, dedication, education, courage, creativity, and experience are necessary as never before in our country.   She will not back down when speaking requires going against the grain; she never has.  She will not bow down to special interests by taking lobbyists’ money for causes against which she has vowed to fight– causes such as private healthcare industries, oil and gas industries; all industries that represent a non-progressive direction for this country.  She is a person of unusual strength and character, one who will represent Utah with distinction.