Meagan knows how these decisions get made. And who gets left out.

She grew up in Salina, a sixth-generation Kansan from a working-class family where caregiving was the job. Her mom was a nurse, and Meagan followed her into it, through home health, hospice, and the hospital floor, then a Master's in nursing focused on how health systems actually run. That is where she learned how care really gets parceled out: who qualifies, who can afford it, who gets told no, and how rarely the people making those calls have to live with them.

Today she is a public health educator for Saline County, teaching CPR, mental health first aid, and parenting classes across the community. It puts her in the room with neighbors at their hardest and most hopeful moments, and it is where she sees the gaps up close. Kids who come to school hungry. Parents who skip their own care to cover a child's. Families one bad month from losing the ground under them.

None of that is bad luck. Much of it traces back to choices made in Topeka: how the state funds hospitals and rural clinics, what Kansas Medicaid will and will not cover, whether every school can feed every kid. Those are the things a state representative votes on, and for years they have been decided by people who never have to watch what happens next. Meagan has watched. That is the whole reason she is running.

Meagan is running to represent Kansas House District 69, the towns in and around Salina that raised her, and she is a mom raising the next generation here too. If you want someone in Topeka who has actually seen what these choices do, help send her there.