Meet a teacher running for Michigan Legislature: Michelle Levine-Woodman

With former educators in office alongside Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan students are a top priority in our state government. Teachers across the Mitten are paying attention.

“Meet the Teacher” nights can be a whirlwind. 

Typically scheduled a few days before the school year begins, the high-energy, community-building events are an opportunity for students and their families to meet their new teachers, see their classrooms, drop off school supplies, and get excited for the upcoming school year. 

But there’s another place Michiganders can meet teachers who have a big impact on their lives every day—the state Capitol.

That’s because 17 members of the state Legislature are former educators. When the 2023 legislative session began, former teachers took the reins of every single state education committee.

Since the last election, even more teachers have decided that they could have a hand in improving the lives and education of more than one million students across the Great Lakes States by serving in the government. Like Michelle Levine-Woodman—a middle school choir teacher and Democrat from Macomb County who is running for state representative this November. 

“For someone to tell me that they know what’s happening in my classroom—when they’ve never been in my classroom—is not acceptable to me.”

Levine-Woodman didn’t always want to run for office. From an early age, she knew she wanted to be a teacher.

“I do have a piece of paper, actually, from when I was 4 that says I wanted to be a teacher,” said Levine-Woodman in a recent interview with The ‘Gander. 

She already had her mom’s approval. While Levine-Woodman was growing up, her mother was a teacher in the Chippewa Valley Schools, in Clinton Township—a suburb north of Detroit. Levine-Woodman remembers feeling the nervous excitement in the air as she helped her mother and her “aunts”—fellow teachers at the schools—set up their classrooms for each upcoming school year. 

After graduating with her own education degree, Levine-Woodman couldn’t find a job teaching music in Michigan schools, so she moved. In 2019, she moved back to the Mitten and began teaching middle school choir and music at Algonquin Middle School—in the same school district that her mother taught in for decades.

Over the past eight years, Levine-Woodman has taught marching band, middle and high school choir, drama, and even cultural literacy classes like introductory-level Spanish and German.

“For me, choir in particular is about working together to succeed and to create something together that’s beautiful. It’s a community that the kids build, where they learn to trust each other and get to express themselves,” said Levine-Woodman. 

“They get to try things that they’re not perfect at, and it’s safe. You get to learn how to fall gracefully, which you don’t get anywhere else.”

Levine-Woodman said that teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic made her realize students had much more going on than she had imagined. 

“So many of my students were home alone while their parents had to work because they couldn’t afford to stay home—they worked in fast food, at the grocery store,” said Levine-Woodman. She remembers one student who would attend her choir class virtually from her family’s car because the student’s dad was asleep after working third shift. 

“It hasn’t gotten better since we got back to school. We want to pretend everything is okay and over, but it’s not. Something has to change, and I want to be the voice for those changes.”

While she loves being a teacher, Levine-Woodman knows that what her students are allowed to learn is heavily influenced by political decisions. 

In 2020, she ran for a spot in Michigan’s House of Representatives but lost in the general election against Steve Marino (R-Harrison Township). The Democratic hopeful says that conservative agendas like Project 2025 fueled her fire for a second campaign. 

“For someone to tell me that they know what’s happening in my classroom—when they’ve never been in my classroom—is so frustrating, and it’s not acceptable to me,” she said. 

“We want doctors to be doctors, so we let them be doctors. Let the teachers be teachers—we don’t have a hidden agenda.”