What's at stake:
Fresno Unified is now officially against SEDA.
Fresno Unified broke ranks with Mayor Jerry Dyer on Wednesday night, voting 4-0 to formally oppose his bid to build a new Clovis on the city’s southeast fringe — and handing the citywide coalition fighting his 9,000-acre Southeast Development Area (SEDA) its most institutionally significant ally yet.
FUSD’s resolution to oppose SEDA passed 4-0, with trustees Susan Wittrup and Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas abstaining and Claudia Cazares recusing herself.
The vote comes after the district’s own financial team estimated SEDA’s buildout could shutter as many as 11 schools and drain $200 million a year in funding; after Fresnoland reported that Dyer privately texted trustees in February urging them to stay out of the fight; and after neighboring Central Unified took the unusual step last month of unanimously approving an identical opposition resolution — a public dare that, with school board campaigns ramping up for November, the seven Fresno Unified trustees could no longer brush aside.
“Our responsibility as a school board is fiscal solvency,” Board President Genoveva Islas said, citing district Chief Financial Officer Patrick Jensen’s estimate that Fresno Unified loses roughly $17,000 in state funding per departing student — about $17 million for every 1,000 students who leave. “It’s not a cut that we can afford.”
For the Rev. Simon Biasell, a Fresno High-area pastor whose three minutes at the microphone drew sustained applause, Wednesday’s vote was less a victory than a tardy acknowledgment of a problem the district has refused to confront for four decades.
“I remember when I was a student at Ernie Pyle Elementary in the 80s, hearing about friends’ families moving out of our district to go to another district because they thought it would be a better lifestyle for their kids,” Biasell told trustees. “If we want what’s best for our families, we have to move outside of this district. That should concern all of us.”
Between 1966 and 1980, as Clovis Unified built up the Clovis West attendance area and its feeder schools, Fresno Unified lost roughly 10,000 students — a 20% enrollment decline — according to Fresno Bee archives. A wave of Latino and Hmong newcomers rescued the district in the 1980s.
But with the California Department of Finance now projecting essentially zero population growth for Fresno going forward, a second rescue isn’t coming, and the same 20% attrition risk is back in play with SEDA, this time with no replacement students waiting in the wings.
“We have to change the culture of our community,” Biasell said. “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”
Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas says FUSD should ignore SEDA, focus on itself
The debate inside the boardroom captured a fault line that has split FUSD trustees for months: Whether the board’s “student outcomes focused governance” framework — a model adopted two years ago from the Council of Great City Schools — bars trustees from weighing in on decisions made by other elected officials, or whether SEDA’s projected fiscal impact to FUSD makes it precisely the kind of issue the board must engage on.
Jonasson Rosas, who delivered the longest defense of FUSD abstaining from a SEDA vote, said the board’s lane was educating Fresno Unified’s children — not adjudicating city land-use plans, which she framed as a matter of democratic separation between elected bodies.
“If we want families to choose Fresno Unified, if we want to compete with Master Plan communities being built in Madera County or other jurisdictions in Fresno County with brand new schools designed in,” she said, “then the answer is right here.” The board, she noted, had not taken positions on Riverstone or a recently approved West Area Specific Plan.
Islas and the three trustees who joined her — clerk Andy Levine, Valerie Davis and Keshia Thomas — rejected that framing. With FUSD already projected to lose thousands of students by 2030 and already cutting positions, they argued, every accelerant to enrollment decline directly implicates the budget that funds classrooms.
“I believe that we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Islas said. “We can be an advocate for this district and still fight for improved student outcomes.”
Community members speak out about developer ties to school board
Wittrup, who is in a romantic relationship with developer Darius Assemi, framed her abstention as a matter of educational priorities. With “approximately seven out of every 10 students” in Fresno Unified not reading at grade level, she said, “every bit of our time, energy and resources should be directed to changing this trajectory with urgency” — not, by implication, at land-use disputes. “I will neither support nor oppose,” she said.
Cazares, a former Assemi employee who now works as a housing manager with the City of Clovis, recused herself at the roll call, citing a conflict of interest.
Public commenters did not let the Assemi connections sit unspoken. Rhonda Dueck, executive director of the Jackson Community Development Corporation, told the board some of its members seemed “more interested in remaining good friends with our mayor or your developer friends, being loyal to the nearby city that you work for, and trying to protect your political aspirations, rather than leading with Fresno schools as the priority.”
The Assemis’ interest in SEDA has been documented by Fresnoland. A year ago, in a backroom meeting with Mayor Dyer that Fresnoland attended, Darius Assemi told the room of major developers that Clovis Unified’s recently completed half-billion-dollar Terry Bradley Center would itself drive demand for nearby development.
“Clovis Unified has a gorgeous, brand new toy,” Assemi said. “We have the new Terry Bradley Center Complex, which is going to create a lot of buzz and a lot of demand around that… There’s going to be a lot of pressure on all of us to provide housing in that vicinity.”
What was spelled out for trustees Wednesday is that every middle-class family lured across the district line and into the Clovis Unified developer pipeline is at least a $17,000 hit to the Fresno Unified budget.
‘That is absolutely systemic racism’
Public comment ran longer than the trustee debate. More than fifteen speakers — pastors, parents, an Fresno Teachers Association board member, residents from Roosevelt, and across the legacy neighborhoods of Fresno Unified — pressed trustees to vote rather than table the resolution again, as they had last month.
Daniel O’Connell, executive director of the Central Valley Partnership and a former American Farmland Trust program manager, told trustees the SEDA debate was a textbook case of the racial geography baked into California land use. He recounted a confrontation with a Stockton developer the year before that city’s bankruptcy.
Pressed on where affordable housing was supposed to go, the developer pointed back to the neighborhoods soon-to-be-blighted by the shiny new neighborhoods.
“All those neighborhoods that will be left behind… with their values deflating” would function as de facto affordable housing, the developer said.
“That is absolutely systemic racism functioning there,” O’Connell told the FUSD board.
As the board waffled on whether enrollment decline was really its own problem, a Hoover-region teacher and Fresno Teachers Association board member captured the room’s impatience.
“Everybody in this room knows that [SEDA] is going to cause a decline in enrollment,” he said. “And everybody knows that if [SEDA] goes through, it’s going to cause schools to close in Fresno Unified. Nobody in this room wants that… Central Unified did it. You can do it too.”
Sarah Valentine, a Jackson Elementary parent and program manager at the Jackson Community Development Corporation, took aim at the mayor’s private outreach.
“Shame on [Mayor] Jerry Dyer for using his [office] to pressure this board by texting members and telling them to stay out of it,” she said. “That is not transparency, that is not collaboration.”
The Fresno City Council is expected to take up a version of the SEDA plan in the coming months. A coalition of labor and community groups has already threatened a citywide referendum if the council approves it; Fresno Teachers Association, the largest union in the city, signed onto that coalition in December.
With Wednesday’s vote, California’s third-largest school district has joined them.
