What's at stake?
District leaders reached out to Fresno Community Parent Coalition, a local advocacy group, before the school year started to listen to concerns from parents following community conversations over two student deaths that occurred at FUSD. Now, the co-founder of the parent group says that the district isn’t trying to make meaningful changes to how much parents can interact with the board.
After a vigil was held in August in front of Fresno High School to honor the death of Daniel Padilla, Kristina Holmes-McIntyre received an email from Superintendent Misty Her, who wanted to meet and listen to concerns from parents in the district.
Holmes-McIntyre, a parent of three kids at Fresno Unified schools, has spent the last year rattling the cages of anyone at Fresno Unified who will listen.
She ultimately co-founded the Fresno Community Parent Coalition (FCPC) in late 2025 after repeated grievances over communication. She says Child Protective Services was called over multiple disputes with her students but she says no follow-up was ever made by the school district after the fact.
Padilla’s death in March – when he collapsed during P.E. – sparked concerns over the district’s response to student medical emergencies and communications surrounding his untimely death and that of Elizabeth Gonzalez, an 11-year-old who died at Homan Elementary after a severe asthma attack in 2022.
According to Holmes-McIntyre, Superintendent Her and Deputy Superintendent Ben Drati met and agreed to work with the parent group to meet their demands for increased transparency. The community parent coalition specifically wanted a new oversight committee for parents to be able to report directly to the board of education, without being filtered through district staff.
Now, Holmes-McIntyre says that district leaders are instead proposing their own group that eliminates the direct communication to the board of trustees that parents want.
“They will listen to you, tell you ‘We’re gonna take some kind of action,’ and then nothing happens,” Holmes-McIntyre told Fresnoland.
The parent coalition’s proposed independent oversight parent committee would have tracked major student injuries and safety incidents, site surveys, bullying and harassment and the district budget to provide quarterly feedback to the board of trustees.
Instead, district leaders want to lean on each school’s parent site council – which already exists – and add principals, who would share what they learn with the chair of the School Climate and Review Team and other administrators, along with the Superintendent, every other month.
Drati also said in an email to members of the parent coalition that the district hopes to implement those tweaks to the site councils by the end of October.
But the problem, Holmes-McIntyre says, is that the district and the parent council agree that the site councils have received far too little engagement from parents to be effective.
“I think what they expected was that our group, because we picked up a lot of traction and we have quite a few members, that we were going to help them, we’re going to recruit parents to come into these groups that they want to form to be sounding boards for administrators.
“That’s not what we’re looking for,” Holmes-McIntyre said.
In a meeting between the community parent council and the district on Sep. 15 where Drati presented the new initial proposal, Holmes-McIntyre said that two other groups of parents were also in attendance to discuss a different set of concerns with Drati. Her was not present at the meeting.
Before the meeting was over, Holmes-McIntyre got up and walked away.
“The problem is they do not know how to systematically attack those issues in a way that they build trust with parents,” Holmes-McIntyre said, adding, “That’s what our group was offering them. We were offering them a mechanism to hold themselves accountable and build trust with parents, but they don’t want to do that.”
Despite this, she said she is open to coming back to the table if the district is open to letting parents share their feedback directly with the board.
Fresno Unified did not respond to questions about the future of the parent oversight committee or on how their proposed structure differs from current school site councils.
Not all parent groups are frustrated with the district, though.
Another local group involved with FUSD families, the Parent Institute for Quality Education (PIQE), said that collaborations between the district and communities need to be clear and accessible and noted that they had a positive partnership with Fresno Unified.
“More broadly, we support meaningful parent participation and constructive dialogue when concerns arise,” said Isaac Cox, Director of Communications for PIQE, adding, “strong school partnerships are built on trust, and that trust grows when families are heard, their concerns receive thoughtful responses, and parents and educators work together to help students succeed.”
The district is hosting its first Parent Advisory Committee meeting of the school year on October 8 at 5:30 p.m. at Parent University. For more information, call 559-457-3390. This group provides feedback on educational achievement goals and the district’s local control accountability plan, or the LCAP.
