Nixon has carried this lesson from her mother with her ever since. When her now-21-year-old son was entering kindergarten, budget cuts hit the public school system in New York City hard. “I walked into the school on the first day with him, and it was so different than the school that I had toured in the spring and picked out,” because of the massive budget cuts, she says. They had let go of the art and music teachers, the assistant principals, and two-thirds of the paraprofessionals (a.k.a. assistant teachers and other staff ). Soon after, Nixon joined her first protest and she never looked back. Since then, she’s been a spokesperson for the Alliance for Quality Education, a campaigning for public-education fairness, where she’s helped fight back against education budget cuts over the years (and even got arrested protesting budget cuts outside of City Hall in 2002). During her campaign, she’s pushed back against the growth of charter schools, denounced over-policing in schools, and called for doubling Gov. Cuomo’s proposed increase to school aid to $1.5 billion by raising taxes on the wealthy.