Presidental Election Resources

Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, PhD, NASP Director, Government Relations
Katie Eklund, PhD, Chair, NASP Government and Professional Relations Committee

November 8th 2016 is Election Day. Folks around the country will cast their vote for important positions at the local, state, and national level. Every election is important, and NASP strongly encourages members to educate themselves on the issues in order to make an informed choice when voting.  

To help with this effort in the 2016 Presidential election, we created a resource that outlines NASP priorities and how they compare with the major presidential candidates' federal policy priorities on related educational and child/family issues. This resource is not intended to be interpreted as an endorsement of a particular candidate or political party. Rather, this is informational in nature only and is intended to demonstrate the various statements and positions the candidates have or have not taken on issues of importance to NASP. As we have done in the past,  information included in this document is taken from NASP Position Statements and other formal policy papers, candidates' official campaign documents, major party platform documents, and policy statements made at official campaign events or media interviews. We have not added any editorial comments to the statements, or attempted to change their meaning. We have presented the words and statements of the candidates as published. The full citation, links to the complete document source (when available), and other information are included for your reference. It should be noted that this document reflects statements that were made before the first presidential debate held on September 25th.

NASP is a non-partisan professional association and does not endorse any specific candidate or political party. Rather, NASP advocates for public policies that align with our vision that "all children and youth thrive in school, at home, and throughout life." We offer school psychologists evidence based information, tools, and resources to support their work with children, youth, and families.

NASP has reached out to the Clinton, Trump, Johnson, and Stein campaign to share policy priorities as articulated in Ready to Learn, Empowered to Teach: Guiding Principles for Effective Schools and Successful Students and has offered to be a resource and partner moving forward. These letters, as well as other education related election resources from outside sources are posted on our website here. Although this guide contains information specific to the 2016 Presidential Election, readers are strongly encouraged to become informed about the views of candidates running for other federal, state, and local offices. We also encourage you to vote. Information about how to register to vote is available here.