Litchfield is a Democrat running for Virginia Senate District 27

Democrat Ben Litchfield is running for his party’s nomination for the Virginia Senate District 27 seat in portions of Stafford, Spotsylvania, and Fredericksburg.

Litchfield, 36, is a consumer protection attorney who has worked at the National Credit Union Administration writing regulations governing the payday lending industry. He attended college at George Washington University and Howard University School of Law.

He served as the Stafford County Democratic Committee Chairman from 2017 to 2021. Litchfield married his wife in 2015.

According to VPAP, the district leans Republican. Litchfield is running against Joel Griffin in the Democrat Party Primary Election on June 20. Find your polling place.

See my full interview with Litchfield here. You can also see my interview with his challenger, Griffin, here.

Where do you stand on school choice?

“I’m a huge supporter of our public schools. I think that one of the problems with that is that you see disinvestment in these public schools that may not be performing up to standards. And really, what I think we should be doing is putting more money into them, looking at why they’re not performing, and really investing heavily in them. I think every public school should be just as good as the next one.

We saw a big budget battle this spring between the Stafford County Public Schools and the Board of Supervisors, which gave the schools $16 million, its largest one-time investment. But, it was still far short of what the schools requested. So how do we get those underperforming schools to become more like the “rich” school, as you put it, the good school? How do we do that while funding those schools in ways that people can afford to do so in these areas? Because frankly, many people move here because it is cheaper than living closer to Washington D.C.

“Well, I certainly made that choice myself, so I’m sympathetic to it. I think that the business model way of looking at it is a little bit wrongheaded because, unlike a traditional business where you can shop with your feet, you can’t exactly change your geography. You can’t move from Falmouth to Garrisonville and vice versa. Theoretically, you could, but most working families can’t. They are where they are in the schools that are in that area are the ones that they typically send their children to. And I don’t think that many working families have the resources to try and shop around and pick what school is best for them. We need more teachers, obviously. I’ve been talking to some of the supervisors and Stafford about adjusting cost to compete so that we can get more money for teacher salaries for paraprofessionals.”

“And we need to elect school board members who are really committed to making sure that funding is adequate for all of our schools and that it’s fair and equitable. I think that sometimes what we see with politicians across the board is that they’re happy to get their little slice of the pie, but they don’t really think about the county as a whole.”

Where do you stand on CRT / social-emotional learning in schools?

“We need to start by being very clear that CRT is not taught in our schools. This is an advanced topic that I learned in law school at Howard. What I do think that we should be learning is true history. I think it would be a very sad state of affairs if our students didn’t learn about Dr. King, Rosa Parks, about the civil rights movement. Because that’s part of the fabric that makes America such a great country, is that we can express civil discontent, that we can fight for civil rights through these mechanisms, and that we’re always working for a more perfect union. I think it’s part of the great story of our nation. And so it would be very sad that if we didn’t study these things, it would be very sad if we didn’t study the Civil War. It’s all part of who we are, and I don’t think that anything about that is teaching our children to hate America. For example, I push back pretty forcefully on this idea that by learning about the civil rights movement, we’re going to somehow teach our kids not to love this country.”

Do you know of a school where that’s happening?

“I was deeply concerned with some of the History Sol revisions that we saw. There was huge pushback from the Virginia NAACP. There was discussion about how some of these standards weren’t age-appropriate, how certain things were left out teaching about indigenous people, for example.”

“Social, emotional learning, I really don’t have a problem with it. My nephew has mindfulness classes. It teaches him to make friends. He has autism, and this has been really helpful for him to make friends and to be mindful about his personal space and about his relationship with others. I don’t really have a problem with it. I don’t see the cause for upset. Social, emotional learning, I really don’t have a problem with it. My nephew has mindfulness classes. It teaches him to make friends. He has autism, and this has been really helpful for him to make friends, to be mindful about his personal space and his relationship with others. I don’t really have a problem with it. I don’t see the cause for upset.”

If you’re elected to the Senate, what will you do to make sure that the law enforcement officers who want to serve are able to do so to protect the community?

“I agree that we are facing a real challenging time for our law enforcement. We’re asking them to do more and more, and we’re putting a lot of stress on them, and it’s a very stressful time to be in law enforcement. I think that there are a lot of things that we can do to make their jobs easier. And this is actually part and parcel of what criminal justice reform advocates are saying.

“We can implement and fund the Marcus David Peters alert so that we have mental health professionals responding to mental health incidents instead of law enforcement. We can have conversations around policing in schools. I really think that we should not be asking our law enforcement officers to serve as a backstop for discipline in our public schools. Now there is a role for SROs, and I think that SROs keep us safe, as we’ve seen in Spotsylvania.”

“But what I am concerned about is this idea that, all right, there’s an SRO in the school, so discipline issues go to the SRO instead of having school officials handle it. And so I obviously think our law enforcement need to be compensated competitively. I think that we need to provide them with any mental health treatment that they need just to give you a story about that.”