ONONDAGA COUNTY — After announcing her run for the 10th District of the Onondaga County Legislature, Manlius resident Carrie Ingersoll Wood began to notice more and more the parallels between the political realm and the field of education to which she had become accustomed.
Wood will be representing the Democratic and Working Families party lines going into the election this fall, the latter of those alignments inspired by her “blue-collar” upbringing.
She went on to put herself through college while working on the side, becoming the first in her family to earn a degree. As a matter of fact, she has a few, including an associate degree in liberal arts from SUNY Broome Community College, a bachelor’s degree in English rhetoric and general literature from Binghamton University, and a master’s degree in English adolescence education, all of which she pursued after the age of 30.
It was in the wake of a health scare her husband, Jim, had in 2016 that she committed to going a step further for a PhD from Syracuse University in teaching and curriculum.
“I had, up until that point, always dreamed about getting a PhD, and it was something in the back of my mind,” Wood said. “But when Jim nearly died, it just changed the timeline. If you want to do something and you feel a call for that or you feel motivated or pulled by something, you should do it.”
She employed that same mindset when she announced in the spring that would be campaigning for the county legislature, a policy-making body she had previously been asked to run for by people she knows only to turn down the thought of doing so initially.
“But then the thought didn’t leave,” Wood said. “I did a little more investigation and talked with more people and really sat with the thought with myself for a while, and then I made the decision.”
With it being her debut campaign not just for the Onondaga County Legislature but for any elected position, she has sought the advice of others who have run for office and been involved in different levels of government in order to learn what to anticipate and what the experience of getting one’s name out as a candidate and going door to door can be like.
Drawing from her own insight in a classroom setting and as a member of the parent-teacher association for the Maine-Endwell Central School District where her oldest daughter was a class president, Wood has additionally seen in the months since her announcement how a school is a “microcosm” of a legislative district.
“A school is a community with leaders, and your teacher is someone who is looking to do the best for everyone inside of that classroom,” Wood said. “You really have to be a communicator and be bipartisan in your decisions to present information.”
Outside of her work as an English teacher in the Johnson City Central School District and the Syracuse City School District, Wood worked at Cornell University for a time as an undergraduate coordinator helping students in the school of electrical and computer engineering keep on track with their course curriculums and overcome personal difficulties en route to graduation.
For the past year now, she has been the director of the Disability Cultural Center at Syracuse University, which combines with the LGBTQ Resource Center and the Office of Multicultural Affairs on campus to comprise the Intercultural Collective. The Disability Cultural Center intends to build community for disabled students through programs, affinity groups, mentoring and events like wheelchair basketball tournaments that promote the identity of having a disability as a positive to embrace.
This past fall, Wood set foot into politics more officially than she ever had before when she became the secretary for the Manlius Democratic Committee, a role that, as she said, “fostered a sense of wanting more participation.”
“Before I became secretary, I was on the margins just kind of watching,” she said. “I would go to meetings here and there, but once I stepped into that arena, I saw that it moved in a lot of similar ways to what I’m used to inside of education. You can make significant changes inside of your community through grassroots involvement, and that’s where I found myself.”
Wood has lived with her husband of 31 years in Manlius since 2015. She calls it a “beautiful place to live” that has been welcoming, genuinely friendly and full of “energy, enthusiasm and hopefulness.”
The villages she would be representing with the 10th District, though, are the neighboring ones of Fayetteville and Minoa, which she said have their own unique heritages and histories as well as the “small-town charm” of where she grew up, Apalachin, New York.
The 10th District is currently represented by Fayetteville’s mayor, Mark Olson, who is seeking reelection to his county seat in November.
Wood said the issues in the forefront of her mind are affordable housing, the local child poverty rate and protection of natural resources.
She also said that she wants to make the district a more attractive place to live for individuals moving into the area and a place that inspires local graduates to reflect with nostalgia and return to raise their own families.
In addition, she said she is willing to make compromises and that she plans to hear as much feedback as possible relating to the needs and concerns of constituents, including the younger citizens of the district.
“I really care about the development of the youth in our community and their viewpoints and what they bring to the table,” Wood said. “I think a lot of times we can overlook what younger people think because they haven’t had that lifelong experience. I’m very interested in always checking myself to make sure that I’m open to new ideas, that my views are not stagnant and that I’m not missing a bigger picture.”
Moreover, she said she hopes to no longer see national-level politics divide people, bring about apathy or deter anyone from engaging at the community level.
