Why I am running
Hi! My name is Aarati (“Arthy”) Parmar Martino and I want to earn your vote for Director of Central Bucks School Board. I am running for school board to focus the community on educational excellence. Education helped bring my family out of poverty in India and live the American dream. Education helped an awkward, shy girl like myself achieve her dream building robots at MIT, and then completing my Ph. D. under Professor John McCarthy (the father of Artificial Intelligence) at Stanford University. My first job was at Google and I am proud to be one of the engineers to build and land Google Calendar. Thanks to education, hard work, and luck, I have achieved success beyond my expectations. I want to share how I did this with our community so that our kids can do the same; whether it is learning a trade, going to college, or starting a business, … the sky is the limit!
My parents are from India but I grew up in Alabama in a small town called Gadsden. We were one of the first immigrant families and I have warm childhood memories, especially of my teachers who I felt always had my best interests in mind, My husband and I purposefully chose to live in Doylestown because of the excellent public schools for our kids, who are in 7th and 9th grade at Lenape Middle School.
We can elevate our kids by nurturing our community, providing good administration, supporting our teachers, and informing parents. Twenty years of engineering experience have shown me that you can find solutions to even the most complicated problems, you just need to get all the stakeholders to talk to each other and not at each other. People will differ on how that should be done and that is ok, in fact it is a strength!
I want to further advance our technology curriculum to promote skills for the digital age. We must engender safety by building strong privacy and security guardrails in these virtual spaces.
Also, an amazing array of accomplished adults, from a variety of disciplines, live in our district. Lets pair kids with these adult mentors, to help them find their path early on. Attached below are photos of how I taught and guided our kids (including my own) in science and technology. Kudos to our teachers because I can tell you, teaching is hard work! I am going to support them to do what they do best.
Anyway enough about me, let's focus on our kids. John used to say, “Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to talk nonsense.” Kids need a foundation in the basics to be successful. They need to know how to read, write, and do arithmetic. They must think logically and interpret primary source data themselves. They must learn to see all sides of an issue and balance them. Kids must learn the art of conversation and how to clearly articulate themselves. These skills are more critical than ever because of the information explosion of the internet, technological advances, and social media, not to mention the learning loss due to school closures.
Thank you for reading this, and would love to hear your advice, concerns, and ideas at aarati.parmar.martino@gmail.com.
Aarati aka "Arthy"
Our daughter’s science fair project is bioengineering yeast to express the glow-in-the-dark jellyfish gene (h/t to the-odin.com)
As Den Leader I showed my Cub Scouts how to make a generator out of a motor by torquing it down and using it to light an LED.
In my Doyle winter enrichment class “Google Magic”, we show the power of parallel distributed algorithms like Hadoop by sorting fruit runts. Note to parents: this was a great way to create a moment of peace and quiet too! :)