What's at stake?
Despite pushback from community members, teachers and parents, administrative staff will be moved to different school sites for the upcoming school year as Fresno Unified deals with the loss of staff from reductions and retirements.
Parents and educators in Fresno Unified urged the district at the final board meeting of the school year to reconsider transferring around two dozen or so administrators to different schools, a staffing shuffle that the district is saying is already finalized.
First during a news conference on Tuesday and then again during Wednesday’s regular school board meeting, parents, students and staff from FUSD schools advocated for vice principals and principals that they say are being moved to different schools for the coming school year. According to parents and teachers, the district has given little reason or communication for the shuffling of the administrators around its schools.
In an interview with Fresnoland, Superintendent Misty Her said she stands by her decision, saying that the moves were made with student success in mind and to help the district reach its objectives outlined by its goals and guardrails.
“We thought about every single kid, we thought about what every single student needs, and what we need to do across our district to build strong leaders, so that we can then move our goals and guardrails,” Her said.
Her stressed that the staffing changes, which coincide with a loss of senior staff across the district due to a retirement incentive offered earlier in the school year, were difficult but made with every student in mind.
During the meeting’s public comment portion, community members urged the district to reverse the staffing changes, urging against the district’s strategy of trying to replicate success at other school sites using trusted staff.
“I would be willing to bet that every single one of you would agree that treating schools like a factory is a bad idea,” said Heather Price, a community member who spoke at Wednesday’s meeting against the staffing changes.
“However, these decisions you’ve made recently are exactly like that, you’ve literally pulled and plugged people, employees, as if they are easily replaceable, as if the good that they were doing was not actually good that they themselves created by their own hard work or extraordinary abilities,” Price added.
Trustee Susan Wittrup also asked the superintendent to reverse the staffing changes following the public portion comment of Wednesday’s meeting. Her said that she respected and understood the feedback she received from Wittrup, but ultimately said that as the superintendent, the board has entrusted her to make the decision.
Community members previously said in a news conference on Tuesday that these changes to school site administrations could have a significant effect on school culture and that the district has given little communication for the shuffling of the administrators around its schools.
“Our VPs understand the workings of our school, so having two VPs new there’s a lot of questions: Is this going to work? How is this going to impact not just school culture, but also students, too?” said Karen Zeru, a teacher from Duncan Polytechnical High School, at Tuesday’s news conference.
Matt Matera, an educator and parent of a student at Juan Felipe Herrera Elementary School, advocated for the school’s vice principal, Sarah Chavez, to stay at the site. He said that the movement of vice principals by the district comes from a flawed understanding of how administrators cultivate school culture and student success.
“One district leader recently spoke to parents and teachers at an impacted school, and noted that their students should be OK with sacrificing having a great vice principal, so that students at other schools can also succeed,” Matera said. Matera did not name the district official.
“Now, as a parent, this zero-sum approach is unacceptable, because school district leaders have the power and responsibility to help all students succeed, not our children,” Matera said, adding “it’s also becoming clear that this massive personnel shift is being made because district leaders view school administrators as interchangeable parts of a district-wide machine.”
According to Manuel Bonilla, president of the Fresno Teachers Association, part of the concerns shared by parents and teachers are the lack of communication by the district with site staff before the end of the school year. Bonilla said that while the district had previously stated that site staff were to be notified of the changes in February, school administrators have told the union that they weren’t made aware of the changes until late May.
Bonilla also questioned why the district has not allowed for community input on the staffing changes, citing the district’s guardrail language around community engagement.
Parents and teachers previously spoke at a FUSD board meeting on June 3 and asked the FUSD Board of Education to consider reversing the staff transfers.
Marie Williams, the FUSD’s associate superintendent of school performance, responded to questions from multiple media outlets on Tuesday morning, immediately following the news conference. According to Williams, it is common for the district to reassign school site leaders every school year to fill in the roles of outgoing and retiring administrators.
Williams also noted that the PARS retirement incentive offered by the district earlier in the school year led to a higher number of vacant positions this year.
Williams said that these staff moves would “enable us to be able to meet our really ambitious goals that we’ve set on behalf of students,” referring to the district’s literacy goals outlined in its goals and guardrails.
When asked about parent and teacher concerns regarding the loss of experienced and trusted staff at their school sites, Williams said that while veteran administrative staff are valuable to their communities, their experience can be useful in other sites that are bringing in new staff.
“So, we see the tenure at their current site as an asset in moving to a different site to ensure that we don’t have imbalance in our schools, right, and so I do understand how that lands for people that have been in places for a long time and feel really attached to the community,” Williams said.
Regarding any opportunity for community input on the staffing changes, Williams said that the process of moving staff has not typically included outside feedback. Also, she said the district had notified principals in February through in-person conversations, and that the district had been hiring for principal positions up until May 27.
FUSD approves budget for 2026-27 school year
Wednesday’s board meeting also saw the approval for the incoming school year’s district budget and Local Control and Accountability Plan.
The district’s previously projected deficit of $55 million for the 2026-27 school year has been reduced to a projected deficit of $23.29 million. Additionally, the district’s reserve level for economic uncertainty, which previously sat at 3.69%, is now sitting at 5.52%.
Additionally, the district’s projected deficit in 2027-28 has been decreased from $16.48 million to $5.78 million and boosted the reserve level from 2.77% to 5.23%.
Overall, the total revenue outlined for the 2026-27 school year is $1,560,563,979, of which $1,026,025,951 come from the Local Control Funding Formula. In 2026, revenue sat at $1,474,452,415, with $997,015,862 being LCFF funds.
The district’s chief financial officer, Patrick Jensen, has previously said that the district, while making gains, is not yet in the clear financially. The 2026-27 budget assumes a 92% student attendance rate and a loss of 1,200 students, 1,100 students, and 1,700 students in the next three years, further impacting the district’s student funding.
