Some Ohio University students have a full-time job on top of their coursework, and others juggle their student organizations with their many responsibilities. James Joyce, a junior studying computer science and artificial intelligence, is running for Ohio House of Representatives District 95, aiming to lower living costs, support education and protect the natural beauty of Ohio.
Joyce grew up in Cleveland, but “fell in love” with Southeast Ohio when he came to OU. He always knew he wanted to be involved in politics and decided to try to represent the people and environment of the 95th District.
Joyce said he was often told stories about his grandparents, who worked hard to provide a good education for their three children. Joyce’s grandfather came from Poland when he was 17 years old, and worked in a Ford factory until he eventually opened his own business.
Joyce’s mother went to medical school and started her own medical practice to support Joyce and his four siblings. Joyce said he thinks of himself as an “idealist,” as he believes in the ideals of the U.S., but once he learned some people struggle to attain their goals as his family once did, he wanted to make a change.
“Learning the amount of hard work and dedication they put into everything had a huge impact on my life,” Joyce said. “But then also learning that the world has changed in the past 60 years, and that the story that my mom has and the story that my grandparents have, in many ways, is no longer possible for a majority of the country, and learning of that really saddened me.”
During his time at OU, Joyce started Rank The Vote Athens, a club dedicated to the education and advocacy of ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting is an election method in which voters rank political candidates based on their order of preference, according to the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. Ohio currently uses the first-past-the-post voting system, which the Rank The Vote Athens is pushing to remove.
“(Ranked choice voting) filters down to infer that whoever wins the election has at least 50 percent of the vote, which is much better than what we currently use,” Joyce said. “It also helps eliminate things like spoiler effects, where voting third party is no longer throwing your vote away, because if the third party loses, then you could put the Democrat or Republican candidate as your second choice … you're not throwing your vote away.”
As a part of Joyce’s plan to help lower utility costs for those in the 95th District, he wants to introduce “large-scale solar power.”
Joyce said Appalachia has always relied on extracted resources, such as fracking and coal mining, which more than 70 small towns in Southeast Ohio have a history of, according to a previous report by The Post. Joyce said the coal industry left communities with “pollution and destruction” once it was finished harvesting resources.
“We're starting to see that again with fracking, and there's communities that rely on checks coming from companies that are renting their lands to allow the extraction of the resource,” Joyce said. “And so the solution is to create local economies that don't rely on extraction based resources, as well as introducing renewable energies like solar and wind.”
Scarlett Fried, a senior studying media arts production, said she looks for a candidate who cares about LGBTQIA+ rights and the environment and liked the idea of implementing solar power for the community.
“I think that's a great idea,” Fried said. “And I do think it could work for Athens because the town is so environmentally friendly, or I feel like they try to be, so I think that would be a good addition.”
To support people purchasing renewable energy sources for their homes, Joyce has plans to implement a pay-as-you-save program. He said this would allow people to take out a loan to install solar or a house battery, for example, and pay the loan as they save money on utilities.
“That way, it's not causing your bills to go up with having that loan, and eventually, once you fully paid off the loan, you are now just making a profit of savings,” Joyce said.
Education is also important to Joyce, as he said he is a firm believer in ensuring teachers make enough money, have access to any resources needed for teaching and are respected in their profession.
“The foundation of any well-maintained democracy is a well-educated populace, and I'm a firm believer in having a robust public school system and having everybody be educated and curious and open to learning,” Joyce said.
Joyce said teachers are often forced to teach based on a standardized test, which does not reflect their abilities and “forces them to be worse teachers.” He also mentioned how the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled public schools are receiving an unconstitutional amount of funding, as “state legislature has underfunded our public schools,” but says nothing changed after such rulings, which he plans on addressing if elected.
According to the Ohio Senate, the school funding system is constitutional, and “no court has ruled otherwise in 23 years.” This references DeRolph v. State, in which the Ohio Supreme Court ruled the state’s method for funding public school systems unconstitutional four times between 1997 and 2002.
“My campaign is very focused on giving teachers the freedom to actually teach and educate, rather than forcing them to teach to a test,” Joyce said.
Addison Edge, a freshman studying biological sciences, said Joyce’s ideas for education could help boost morale and give students a better view of school.
“I feel like a lot of strong education systems really value their teachers as people,” Edge said. “I feel like sometimes when we get too into cracking down on policies, it diminishes the teachers' freedoms to actually teach and have not just the students pass their exams, but also to really learn. And I feel like that's something that a lot of teachers lose their passion for, when they get treated unfairly.”
Joyce said talking to community members is the most rewarding and hardest part of his job. He said it is difficult for him to hear how people struggle, but he enjoys hearing people’s stories and is happy to be there to help them.
“You hear a lot of sad stories, you hear a lot of bad situations,” Joyce said. “On this campaign, it's helping see that there are people that need help, and being there to help them is definitely the most rewarding part.”
Joyce’s name will appear on the ballot in the Ohio statewide primary election on May 5.
