“We need more people running for office, especially Muslims and other underrepresented groups, so that we can share this perspective and our experiences because it’s not singular, it’s very much diverse.”

As a middle school special education teacher I work with sixth to eighth graders, so I've really seen these students develop over the course of three years. One student that stands out particularly just graduated from high school. I was able to watch the virtual graduation and afterwards he FaceTimed me and he showed me this poster of his goals. And one of his goals is to become a special education teacher. That's a lifetime moment for me as a teacher, to see that coming full circle.

I experienced discrimination shortly after the 2016 presidential election. The majority of my students are English language learners and there are a lot of a lot of immigrants and undocumented families. So it was really shocking to me to have those incidents happen in a school where a lot of the students are minorities. My classroom is my safe space and it’s a safe space for my students too, so when I approached my classroom on 9/11 and I saw that the windows had been marked up with different slurs and references to ISIS, that shook me to my core.

Since then we've formally adopted restorative justice as a program that we do at the school site, so that includes things like community circles. We have a responsibility to hold each other accountable, and those experiences made me realize I have a role to play both as a teacher but also as an advocate and leader beyond my classroom. That's what really inspired me to run for school board. There's a lot of systemic injustices, particularly in special education, that I felt like the people sitting at the table were not always being mindful of.

When I was originally appointed to the board, I was the only woman, which was really important to me in terms of representation. When I was elected in 2018, I became the youngest elected woman in Santa Clara county and the first hijabi elected official in CA. We need more people running for office, especially Muslims and other underrepresented groups, so that we can share this perspective and our experiences because it's not singular, it's very much diverse. There's a lot of work for us to do, so it's really time for our community to step up.