Sacramento County Board of EducationCandidate for Trustee, Trustee Area 1

I am a parent and long-time educational and student advocate. I live in Southside Park with my partner, Katie Hymans, and our 11-year old son, Zia Kashmiri, who attends William Land Elementary School. We have two guinea pigs: Steph Furry and Wiffles. We moved to Sacramento from Fresno approximately three years ago. 

Over the past 16 years as a worker organizer, part of my main duties included negotiating contracts on behalf of working families. This deep knowledge of labor negotiations is a critical asset for helping resolve the labor issues that have plagued our schools for years. In Sacramento, I co-founded the Sac City Caregivers & Parents Union and together, we successfully stopped school closures, fought budget cuts, and saved after-school programs in SCUSD.

I was born in Texas to Pakistani immigrants, who drilled the importance of education into me early. My passion for supporting working families grew out of watching how my own father’s layoff affected our family. I am a proud product of public schools. I graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas with a political science degree before attending law school at UC Berkeley. I was the first student to ever successfully sue my own law school (Kashmiri v. Regents) and win a $60 million dollar class action refunding fees charged to students illegally. I am a member of the State Bar of California and I understand the value of leveraging the law to defend students against injustice.

WHY AM I RUNNING?

In my son’s first year at his local elementary school, parents had to organize a press conference just to get a permanent 6th grade teacher assigned. At our schools, we face a shortage of teachers, substitutes, and critical support staff like bus drivers, classroom aides, nurses, social workers, and psychologists. In many schools, children have been herded into auditoriums because there isn’t enough staff to support them. In my local district, approximately 3,000 students per day have gone without a permanent teacher and hundreds are still waiting to be enrolled in independent study. 

Our kids need support. Right now. I will fight for revenue to transform our schools, support our teachers, staff, and students. I envision schools with lower classroom sizes and more highly trained, caring adults on campus. Our schools need access to music, sports, and extracurricular activities. Our schools should be safe, healthy, and environmentally friendly. We could do this by putting solar panels on our schools, funding more electric school buses, providing more transportation, and pushing for carbon-free schools by 2030. We need community-centered schools, providing good jobs to the local neighborhood. I will fight for collaborative, community schools that incorporate input of both staff and community members to provide wrap-around services. 

Strong public schools are the heart of our community and the long-term engine for our region’s economic growth. There isn’t a quick or easy solution to fix the issues our children and our schools face. It will require sustained leadership over time. It won’t be easy, but nothing worth doing ever is. That is why I’m running for the Sacramento County Office of Education.