What’s at stake?
Bob Nelson was superintendent of California’s third-largest school district for nearly seven years. He led the district through multiple defining moments, including the COVID-19 pandemic, two narrowly averted teachers strikes, and multiple contentious elections. Now, he’s hoping to teach future Central Valley educators about how to navigate the politics of public education in a tenure-track role at Fresno State.
Outgoing Fresno Unified Superintendent Bob Nelson wants the next generation of Central Valley education leaders to know how to read between the (political) lines.
He had to do it constantly over the past seven years, steering the state’s third-largest school district through one controversy after another.
Now, he’s going to teach Fresno State students how to do it.
“You have to understand, where is the money behind that? Where is the power behind that? What are the structures behind that? Who’s connected to whom behind that?” he said. “Understanding those and being able to put those dots together is mission critical to remain in the superintendency.”
The district announced in January that Nelson was leaving his position at the end of July for a tenure-track job at Fresno State, where he’ll instruct teachers working on their administrative credential or seeking out other educational leadership positions at the Kremen School of Education and Human Development.
That’s after holding Fresno Unified’s top job since 2017, which the district touts as an unusually long tenure in a time of turnover and instability in public education.
He saw the district through multiple defining moments, including the COVID-19 pandemic that dealt a devastating blow to Fresno Unified’s already below-average test scores, two narrowly averted strikes from the Fresno Teachers Association, and multiple divisive election cycles.
He looked back on several of those moments in a recent interview with Fresnoland – including his proudest accomplishments and biggest regrets.
On the search for his successor and school board politics
Nelson inherited a politically fraught district from his predecessor Michael Hanson, who was ousted by the school board in early 2017.
It stayed that way right until the bitter end – up to and including the search for Nelson’s own successor.
“I actually recommended in January … that they just name an interim right away and take as long as they wanted to pursue a national search,” Nelson said. “I was the product of that same experience.”
That’s ultimately what the school board did. Trustees appointed Nelson’s former deputy superintendent, Misty Her, to the interim position in early May – but only after weeks of controversy and public outcry over the process.
Much of that started when Board President Susan Wittrup publicly denounced the board’s decision to interview internal candidates first rather than launching a national search. She criticized the move in a GV Wire op-ed and later at a news conference.
Others soon joined her, including Fresno Teachers Association leaders and representatives of Granville Homes, the development company owned by Darius Assemi – who’s also Wittrup’s boyfriend and the publisher of GV Wire.
Nelson said the coalition that formed around this issue says a lot about Fresno Unified politics and two of its major players.
“What you have is the developer community and the labor community working in collaboration to change what’s happening at the superintendent’s level,” he said.
But developers’ and labor unions’ influence hardly stops there. They also have a presence in everything from school board elections to the construction of new schools.
Nelson said he’s concerned that few Fresnans are connecting the dots between these political players and election spending or trustee priorities.
“One of the things that’s hard is when, for example, a board president raises $175,000 in contributions for a trustee race – the vast majority of which are coming from either the Assemi family of companies or Harris Construction or developers – and then flip and turn and you have kind of a pseudo-media outlet in GV Wire reporting on the positive allocations that this person has generated,” he said.
Wittrup outraised all other candidates across multiple school board races leading up to the November 2022 election by a margin of over $100,000, when she took down incumbent Terry Slatic. She received over $15,000 from Granville Homes and donations from several other developers, as well as the Fresno Teachers Association.
She brushed off Nelson’s comment in an interview with Fresnoland, saying her relationship with Darius Assemi is well-known to the public.
“My decision to run for the school board was based on the community support that I received during my campaign and the changes needed. Darius is very supportive of that,” she said. “I don’t know of any other interest he has as far as who the superintendent is or the success of Fresno Unified. It is only just the outcomes for students.”
She said she also believes the Assemis’ ties to GV Wire are publicly known and that she talks to “any reporter that calls me.”
“I’m not running GV Wire by a long shot,” she said.
“We’re not as in sync as maybe Dr. Nelson thinks.”
Wittrup added that focusing on “adult interests or agendas” over students’ academic outcomes is a misuse of district leaders’ time.
“This whole little narrative of, there’s some dastardly thing happening in the background, that somebody has ulterior motives, is just smoke and mirrors,” she said, “and to spend time on that is a huge distraction.”
Nelson, however, wasn’t so sure that Fresno voters have a clear picture of Wittrup’s ties to Fresno developers.
“The average person, if you’re not putting the dots together on that, that’s a bit of a problem,” he said.
“But the average person doesn’t go to the Fresno County electoral site and look up who the funders are of trustees.”
Superintendent Nelson’s biggest regrets
Nelson’s term saw several dramatic shifts on both the local and national stage. A global pandemic changed the world. School board trustees came and went.
But one thing stayed the same: Fresno Unified consistently failed to bring a majority of its students up to par on reading and math standards.
It’s one of Nelson’s biggest regrets.
“The number of kids that are proficient is not high enough,” he said. “I would have loved to have changed that, because I think it would change public perception around Fresno Unified.”
Still, he sees his tenure as “a story in two acts” as far as test scores go.
Between Nelson’s first day on the job and 2019, Fresno’s Smarter Balanced test scores improved, and those gains outpaced state averages.
At the same time, Fresno Unified was starting from behind. Only about 37% of students were meeting reading standards when Nelson took over in the 2017-18 school year, and only 27% were on par for math. That rose to 38% and 30% in the 2018-19 school year.
“Then everything went clunk” when the pandemic hit and the district abruptly shifted to online learning, Nelson said. Just under 33% of students met reading standards and about 21% of students met math standards in the first round of testing following the pandemic.
Those scores crept up slightly the following year according to 2022-23 test results which showed just over 33% of students met reading standards and over 23% of students met math standards.
Nelson said he feels like they’re in the same position as in 2017.
“It’s that same story,” he said. “OK, you’re making good growth. But you’re still not over that threshold.”
To move the needle, Nelson said early learning is key. He wants students to be able to read by the end of first grade – and that’s the goal of a literacy initiative the district launched in April 2023.
But he said it’s critical the district also ensures buy-in from teachers.
“I see all of (the) principals owning it in a very, very deep level,” he said of the literacy initiative. “The thing that scares me is, can they help teachers get on the same page in terms of feeling motivated, or is this going to be a district initiative that’s crammed down their throat?”
On negotiations with the Fresno Teachers Association
Threats of a teachers strike bookend Nelson’s career in Fresno Unified.
When Nelson took over as Hanson’s permanent replacement in September 2017, the Fresno Teachers Association authorized a strike the following month (though the union and district struck a deal in time to avoid one).
Nelson was staring down the same possibility six years later in October 2023.
Though the latest strike was also ultimately averted, Nelson said he has some regrets about how he handled things the second time around.
“I learned some real lessons in this last lead-up to a strike, where I thought people were behaving in ways that were unethical,” he said, “and I just kind of froze folks out that I thought were not behaving in a way that I consider to be appropriate.
“That’s not on the list of available choices for me. I have to keep those communication systems open, regardless of my personal feelings.”
Nelson wasn’t the only one to call out these behaviors during bargaining on both the district’s and the union’s end. A fact-finding report published during the mediation process charged that both parties engaged in “disrespectful behaviors.”
FTA President Manuel Bonilla told Fresnoland he was “saddened” that Nelson would describe them as unethical and that the union acted “above board the entire time.”
“The issue is that he’s bad at dealing with conflict,” he said. “When there were moments when there was conflict, I would reach out, and he would not return calls. I would reach out to set up meetings, and he would not listen.
“Communication broke down because he refused to engage when things got rough.”
Nelson added that he’s “not sorry” the district pushed back against some of the union’s more costly demands during bargaining — like providing free laundry service for all students and opening up parking lots to unhoused FUSD families at night with paid security.
“Somebody drawing a line in the sand and saying, ‘Hey, there’s just not an infinite amount of dollars to be spent,’” he said, “somebody has to do that.”
Despite that, district spokesperson Nikki Henry told Fresnoland in October the new contract would necessitate between $30 and $40 million in cuts to other areas of the district’s budget for the 2024-25 school year.
At a March 6 meeting, the board approved resolutions to consider eliminating over 100 staff positions to address the budget shortfall.
Bonilla said he’s concerned the district is pushing a narrative that the FTA contract is primarily to blame for the budget cuts.
“That just shows their frame of mind in trying to find a scapegoat,” he said. “We hope that changes under somebody else’s leadership.”
Henry attributed the cuts to a combination of declining enrollment, lower average daily attendance, and “state funding volatility” – on top of the FTA contract.
She added that the elimination of those positions “did not result in job losses” and that “those folks were put in other vacant positions across the district.”
The board is still weighing where final cuts will be made leading up to a budget hearing at the board meeting June 12.
On the next Fresno Unified election cycle
While the board makes important decisions about the future of the district – not only the budget but Nelson’s permanent successor – voters will soon make important decisions about the future of the board.
This November, Fresno High-area Trustee Andy Levine, Hoover High-area Trustee Claudia Cazares, and Roosevelt High-area Trustee Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas are running for reelection.
Nelson said that it will be “fascinating” to see how the prolonged superintendent search process is influenced by the November election.
Wittrup said it’s hard to predict how long the search will take now that the board has pressed “pause” on the process, but countered that the election “isn’t the timeline that matters here.”
“What matters here is that the board get on the same page as far as being focused on student outcomes … craft the goals we want for the district, and then design the superintendent job description based on those goals that the community has vetted.”
Bonilla said it’s a “myopic view” on Nelson’s part to say the union is solely focused on the superintendent search outcome in the coming election cycle.
“In general, there are folks that are running that have failed the system, and we are looking to put people in that position,” he said, meaning the trustee seats, “that are going to get back to the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
No matter which seven people are on the board over the next several years, Nelson said the next superintendent will have their work cut out for them.
“The hard part in Fresno is that a lot of our trustees see themselves as a city council person or a county supervisor in embryo,” he said. “This is the entry level political job on the path to become Jim Costa.”
“You can’t really say it’s untrue,” he added, “because it has worked.”
Some of those success stories include Fresno City Councilmember Luis Chavez, who was elected to the board’s Roosevelt-area seat in 2012. Chavez, whose wife now represents the Roosevelt region at FUSD, has his sights set on a Fresno County Board of Supervisors seat.
Nelson will be teaching his students how to navigate all these political interests, not to mention the range of political leanings on the board.
But he hopes his successor will be ready for that, too.
“That’s super complex, and that’s why most superintendents don’t survive,” he said.
“That’s what makes this job really, really hard – and fun and fascinating, too. I’m embarrassed to say that that intrigue kind of inspires me.”
