What’s at stake?
A small school district board is battling with residents of an upscale suburb over 600 acres of land – with millions of dollars in property value as well as school district bonding capacity on the line.
A fight for over 600 acres of territory is raising questions about the future of a small rural school district, as well as an upscale Granville Homes development in the foothills of Fresno County.
Residents of Ventana Hills, a gated community of luxury homes east of Friant, are petitioning Fresno County school officials to move from Sierra Unified School District’s territory into the Clovis Unified School District.
Residents say few of their children attend Sierra Unified schools to begin with and that they want “better options” for their kids to go to school.
But Sierra Unified, a district of under 1,500 students, is fighting back, accusing the petitioners of trying to jack up their property values.
Clovis Unified, meanwhile, has remained neutral on the matter, a district spokesperson confirmed.
Despite the districts’ differing stances, Fresno County’s process of reviewing the petition is already underway. Two hearings on the matter are scheduled this month in each school district, including the first this Thursday, Sept. 5, at Sierra Unified’s Foothill Elementary School.
Ultimately, the fate of Ventana Hills’ districting lies with an obscure county committee within the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools’ office.
Who’s behind the petition?
Ventana Hills is a neighborhood of million-plus-dollar “semi-custom estate homes,” built by influential Fresno real estate development company Granville Homes.
The community is about a dozen miles from downtown Clovis and two dozen from downtown Fresno.
Marc Thurston, a resident of Ventana Hills who filed the territory transfer petition with the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, described Ventana Hills as more of a “suburban neighborhood than a mountain community.”
“It’s not like we have horses or farms-type animals, (or) ride motorcycles or anything through our area,” he said.
“We are more like what you’d find on a golf course.”
As for school-aged children, Thurston said there are about 10 in the community.
Only two of them attend Sierra Unified, while the rest either currently or plan to send their children once they’re old enough to schools in other districts or private schools.
“The students up here don’t go there,” Thurston said, meaning Sierra Unified.
That includes Thurston’s own daughter, an eighth grader, who’s in private school right now.
When his daughter starts high school, Thurston said, he would prefer to take her to a Clovis Unified high school, as opposed to driving her another “13 miles up the hill” to Sierra High School.
“Everything we do is down in Clovis and Fresno,” he said. “My wife’s job is down there. My daughter, all of her after-school activities are down there.”
‘We’ve said no,’ Sierra Unified board president says
This isn’t the first time Sierra Unified has been petitioned to surrender territory to Clovis Unified.
Developers’ involvement in some of these petitions has left Sierra Unified parents and school board members skeptical whether the petitioners’ bottom line is education or property values.
At a July 29 special meeting, consultants for Sierra Unified shared that the territory Ventana Hills residents are seeking to be transferred covers roughly 652 acres of land, including the Granville development as well as currently undeveloped land.
That territory as a whole is valued at roughly $38 million, Shin Green of Eastshore Consulting told the board, or about $1 million in bonding capacity. (Sierra Unified currently has a $24 million bond on the November ballot.)
It’s difficult to identify a premium on home prices between Sierra Unified and Clovis Unified given the smaller sample size of homes in Sierra and the larger lots they’re located on, said Fresno-area realtor Joe Haydock. But touting a home’s location within Clovis Unified district boundaries is a common marketing tactic in local real estate.
“A number of realtors use Clovis Unified as a selling point for homes that are located in that school district,” he told Fresnoland.
The Sierra Unified board made the criticism that Ventana Hills residents are just looking to boost property values part of their formal opposition to the petition.
At an Aug. 12 meeting, the board passed a resolution stating the petition “appears to have been filed for the primary purpose of increasing the property values in the territory proposed for transfer.”
“We’ve said no,” said Cortney Burke, Sierra’s board president, in an interview with Fresnoland. “We’re not up for this. The community isn’t up for this.”
Some Sierra Unified community members also worry relinquishing territory could spell trouble for the district’s attendance figures – which could then tank how much funding they receive from the state, given California’s attendance-based funding formula for schools.
“The only way for Sierra Unified to hold steady or to grow,” said Sierra Unified alumna and parent Hayley Ferguson in an interview, “is to have that development from the lower foothill area.”
Developer interest in Sierra Unified’s territory
Another recent example of efforts to transfer territory between Clovis Unified and Sierra Unified dates back to May 2019, according to a letter Fresnoland obtained through a Public Records Act request.
That attempt included a reply from the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools’ office to Jeff Roberts, then with the Assemi Group. Roberts famously served time in federal prison in connection with a 1990s zoning scam before resuming work with Granville Homes, operated by a brother of the Assemi Group’s Farid Assemi.
When asked about Ventana Hills’ recent petition, Granville CEO Darius Assemi sided with residents, stating that the petition “was a response to being ignored.”
“On the other hand, Sierra (Unified) District has clearly said they need the properties for their proposed bond,” he said in a text message to Fresnoland. “In the end, Sierra is thinking about property values, while (Ventana Hills) parents are petitioning for their kids’ futures.”
Burke acknowledged the blow that losing those 600-odd acres would deal to their bond.
“It would be tough not to have that area, as far as bond capacity. That’s not the main reason we’re fighting, of course,” she said, “but that’s definitely going to be an issue.”
What’s next for Sierra Unified and Clovis Unified?
Though Sierra Unified and Clovis Unified can make their stance on the petitioned territory transfer known, it’s not ultimately up to them anymore, according to California Education Code.
Instead, a committee in the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools Office will decide – though the State Board of Education could also get involved down the line if the county committee’s decision gets appealed.
That 11-member county committee, called the Fresno County Committee on School District Organization, will hold two hearings to receive input from both districts, the petitioners and community members.
The committee must also ensure the territory transfer meets a set of nine conditions outlined in Education Code Section 35753. One of these conditions requires that “the proposed reorganization is primarily designed for purposes other than to significantly increase property values.”
The first public hearing will take place Thursday, Sept. 5, at Foothill Elementary School, located at 29147 Auberry Road in Prather. It is scheduled to start at 5:30 p.m.
The second hearing is set for Tuesday, Sept. 17, at the Clovis Unified Professional Development Building, located at 1680 David E. Cook Way in Clovis. That hearing will also start at 5:30 p.m.
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