My Why
“Where are you from?”
It is a question I have been asked my whole life. My accent gives me away as someone who came from someplace else. My answer is simple, even though my story is not.
I was born and raised in England, the daughter of parents who had immigrated there from Panjab, India in the early 1960s. Who worked long, hard years so that their children could have more than they did. My father spent his early years in a foundry before my family saved enough to buy a small business, and I grew up working alongside them in it. From the time I was a small child, without quite knowing why, I loved America. I could not have found it on a map, but whenever I saw the flag, I saw possibility, opportunity and hope, and I wanted to be a part of that story. In 1987, at eighteen years old, I finally was. My family and I arrived in California in search of the American dream.
My parents gave me far more than a new country though; they instilled in me the values that make me who I am today. My mother, who grew up at a time and place in India where girls were not sent to school past the third grade, never stopped learning. She taught herself English, held fast to her Panjabi heritage, Sikh faith, and taught my siblings and me, the value of Seva, or the Sikh spiritual practice of giving back to others. From my parents, I learned that education is the pathway to economic mobility and equity, that you persevere when things are hard, that you use your voice when something is not right, and that you give back to those who need a helping hand.
Kerman Is Home
When I walked into my first classroom at Kerman-Floyd Elementary in 1993, Kerman was a small farm town on the west side of the county, the kind of place where the almond orchards and vineyards began, where the sidewalks ended, and where families knew one another by name. I did not know then that I was walking into a community that would be my forever home.
Kerman has grown in the years since, and I have grown with it. I have watched new neighborhoods rise where there were once open fields, watched new schools open their doors and watched the town become home to families from many places. I have seen Latino, Hmong, Panjabi families and so many others work the land, open businesses and raise their children side by side. When I see the Sikh Gurdwara and the church a few streets apart or hear three languages spoken while my family and I are picking up dinner at La Estrella, I see the America I dreamed about as a child.
Kerman is not only my home, but my heart. It is where my husband, Harbax, and I have built our life. Our sons grew up in Kerman schools and today my granddaughter attends Goldenrod Elementary, and my grandchildren will be walking the same school hallways in Kerman. I am blessed to be growing older in Kerman, surrounded by multiple generations of my family, in a community that has been a part of every chapter of my adult life. Kerman gave me my first classroom, my first home and a place to belong.
Why I Chose Education
I did not stumble into education so much as I recognized it as my calling. My mother raised us to understand that as Sikhs, we are called to serve. Some give with their pockets, some give with their hands, and some give with what they know. I had no fortune to give, but I had a mind that loved to learn and a heart that wanted to be of use, and from my very first year in the classroom I understood that teaching was how I was meant to serve. I found it in the small, ordinary miracles that fill a school day; the struggling reader whose face lights up when the sounds finally come together, the parent who leaves a conference feeling seen and heard for the first time, the quiet child who decides one morning she is brave enough to raise her hand. Thirty years later, those moments still move me exactly as they did then, and I have never once wondered whether I chose the right path.
That calling has carried me from the classroom to nine years as principal of Wishon Elementary, to coaching twenty-one new principals across Fresno Unified, to the district cabinet as an assistant superintendent, and now to the Tulare County Office of Education, where as the Director of the Mid-State Collaborative, geo lead, I work alongside educational leaders across eleven counties, and educators across the state of California. Along the way, I earned my Doctorate in Educational Leadership and Management, and I have had the privilege of serving rural and urban districts, English Learners, students with disabilities, migrant and foster youth and families from every background imaginable.
All these years in education have taught me this: children rarely fail for lack of ability, and families rarely fail for lack of love. What fails them, more often than we like to admit, is the system itself: the paperwork that no one explained, the meeting scheduled during a work shift, the door that a family never knew it was allowed to knock on. I have seen it from behind the teacher’s desk, from the principal's office, from the district cabinet, and from across eleven counties, and it is the same everywhere. Because of this, I have carried the question my mother’s story planted in me along: How do we build a system where a child’s future does not depend on how well her family can navigate it? That question is why I became a teacher, why I became a principal and why I have spent my life trying to understand school systems well enough to remove the barriers that keep children from reaching their full potential.
Why Run for Trustee Now?
For more than 30 years have worked to make school systems better in other people’s towns, and I am running now because it is time to bring what I have learned home, to the district that gave me my start and the community that gave my family a place to plant our roots.
But it was a small boy who made the call urgent. My decision to run for the Kerman Unified School Board became even more personal when my family experienced firsthand how difficult it can be for a school system to meet the individual needs of a child. When our grandson needed an educational setting Kerman USD could not provide, our family was faced with difficult choices. The options available to us within Kerman Unified did not meet his specific needs. We faced a difficult choice: have him transported over an hour away for a program or search for another educational setting that would better serve him. My family ultimately found a program outside of Kerman, close to home where he is now thriving.
I am grateful that we were able to find a solution. But I could not stop thinking about the families who may not have the time, resources, knowledge, English language, or ability to navigate the system to find an alternative.
I have sat on the other side of that table for three decades, and still, as his grandmother, I felt what every parent feels: the fear that you are not doing enough, and the helplessness of watching a child you love wait for the education he is entitled to while the meetings are scheduled, the assessments are completed, and the paperwork makes its way from one desk to the next.
Our family was fortunate. We had the time, the knowledge and the ability to advocate, and we found a program outside of Kerman Unified where he is now excelling. But that is not the part of the story that keeps me up at night. What keeps me up is this: if it was this hard for my family to advocate for our grandson, with everything I know, what is it like for the parent working two jobs who cannot leave for a mid-morning meeting, or the father who does not have the words to ask for what his daughter needs, or the family that simply trusts the school system, as every family should be able to? Their children are still waiting, and I have spent too many years in this work to sit by while they do.
My Commitment
I know how a school board works, and I know that a board member's real job is not to run the district but to make sure the district is running for every child. If elected, that is what I will do.
I will listen to families and educators before I speak, because the people closest to a problem usually understand it best. I will champion high academic achievement for every student and insist that students with disabilities and English learners receive the support and opportunities they are entitled to under the law, not eventually, but now. Stand with the teachers and staff who show up for our children every day, work to make Kerman Unified a place they want to stay, bring transparency and accountability that a community deserves from the people it trusts with its schools and its tax dollars.
My parents crossed an ocean believing that education could change a child's future, and it changed mine. It gave a girl from a foundry family a classroom of her own, a home in a small farm town, and a life spent in service to children. I do not need a title, and I am not looking for recognition. I am looking for a way to give back to the community that gave me all of that, and to help build a Kerman Unified where every student is known, every family is heard, every educator is supported, and every child has the same chance I was given.
That is what Seva, or selfless service, means to me. This is my why.
