On Jan. 25, Patrick Harmon appeared before the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board. We asked him why he’s running for the GOP seat in the 2nd Congressional district of Illinois in the March 2018 primary:
My name is Patrick Harmon. I’ve trained Hazmat teams for 35 years working for myself. I started in 1984. Before that I was a University of Wisconsin-Stout graduate from 1974. Back in the olden days. My top priority is the abject failure of the Chicago city schools and the only remedy that I can come up with for that is to get GED training at street level where people who do not have a car, who don’t have transportation can walk to a church or to another organization, that in Chicago churches are walking distances to everyone.
About a year ago President Obama was offered by Cardinal Cupich the use of his 252 churches to do GED training and what I call adult education. That’s where the idea came from. I’ve started in my mother’s church in the South Shore. The church there is St. Philip Neri and it has a school attached and room to do a large amount of additional training. I can’t think of a better remedy for the half a million or more people in Chicago who haven’t graduated from high school than being able to walk in their own neighborhood to a church or other facility and finish their education and get into the rest of the world, you might call it, from the South and West Side neighborhoods.
The Chicago Sun-Times sent the candidates seeking nominations for Congress a list of questions to find out their views on a range of important issues facing the state of Illinois. Patrick Harmon has not returned a completed questionnaire.
Patrick Harmon
Running for: 2nd Congressional district (Illinois)
RELATED ARTICLES: Patrick Harmon