The New York Times said bluntly that Trump has plunged the global economy into chaos with his wild and wooly tariffs. He doesn’t know what they are, who pays for them, how they affect trade. He is listening only to Peter Navarro, the tariff evangelist. Trump is not the master of “the art of the deal” (a ghost-written book). He is the master of obfuscation and chaos.
Six months into his new administration, President Trump’s assault on global trade has lost any semblance of organization or structure.
He has changed deadlines suddenly. He has blown up negotiations at the 11th hour, often raising unexpected issues. He has tied his tariffs to complaints that have nothing to do with trade, like Brazil’s treatment of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, or the flow of fentanyl from Canada.
Talks with the United States were like “going through a labyrinth” and arriving “back to Square 1,” said Airlangga Hartarto, the Indonesian minister for economic affairs, who met with U.S. officials in Washington on Wednesday.
The resulting uncertainty is preventing companies and countries from making plans as the rules of global commerce give way to a state of chaos.
“We’re still far away from making real deals,” said Carsten Brzeski, global head of macroeconomics at the bank ING in Germany. He called the uncertainty “poison” for the global economy.
Gone is the idea that the White House would strike 90 deals in 90 days after a period of rapid-fire negotiation, as Mr. Trump pledged in April. Instead, Washington has signed bare-bone agreements with big trading partners including China, while sending many other countries blunt and mostly standardized letters announcing hefty tariffsto start on Aug. 1.
Fresno Unified and its teachers union reached an agreement in mid-June to attempt to mitigate the impacts of a long-standing program ending.
The multimillion-dollar program was touted by the district as a way to close gaps between student groups less than three years ago.
Finances, inconsistent program implementation and varied results are some of the reasons the district says the program was eliminated.
The Fresno Unified School District and its teachers union have reached an agreement to terminate a decade-old, once-promising student improvement program that expanded from a pilot in a handful of low-performing schools to 40 of the district’s 67 elementary schools and one middle school.
Faced with rising program costs, declining enrollment and cuts in revenue, the district decided that inconsistent results could not justify the program’s high expense of almost $30 million.
“When you have finances crash with programmatic inconsistencies … just kind of created the perfect storm for us to go a different direction,” said David Chavez, district chief of human resources, who also worked for two former superintendents.
The Designated Schools program, which operated under three superintendents, was a district initiative to improve achievement through additional daily instruction by targeting the specific needs of students. The effort was extensive: 30 additional instructional minutes per day for students, 10 extra paid days of professional development for teachers, and either a math or reading coach in each school.
Under the agreement with the Fresno Teachers Association, the coaches will return to the classroom as regular teachers, and teachers will see a phaseout of their 10-day training over the next few years. For students, aside from losing 30 minutes of instruction, there will be no transition. They can participate in the after-school program they are already entitled to attend, where they may receive intervention or instruction from teachers who choose to participate.
Dismantling the previously praised program raises questions about how and why it went awry.
The district blames inconsistent program implementation across schools, but it failed to set standards or hold schools accountable to the program’s tenets.
Going Deeper: Who Designated Schools served
Designated Schools, affecting 24,000 students and over 1,250 educators across 41 campuses, were intended to close academic gaps among students and were typically located in neighborhoods with large numbers of socioeconomically disadvantaged students. In the extra 30 minutes, all students received additional instruction or intervention in some way.
Reading specialists at Wilson Elementary, a Designated School, used those extra minutes on remedial instruction for struggling fifth graders who were unable to read even at a third or fourth grade level, said Drew Colburn, a fifth grade teacher.
During intervention time, Colburn and other teachers divided their classes into small groups by proficiency level and targeted students’ weak points, allowing all students to get additional support, without missing core instruction.
At Wilson, following slight improvements, 18.6% and 12.1% of students achieved reading and math proficiency in the 2023-24 school year, according to Ed-Data.
Teachers say they saw improvements, which may not have been as apparent on summative state tests that the district evaluated to determine program effectiveness.
“If you take that 30 minutes away from them, they’re going to come to fifth grade with even more of a deficit,” Colburn said.
Inconsistent implementation or lack of oversight?
The first “Designated Schools” were actually three of the district’s lowest-performing schools. Fresno Unified gave teachers more time to plan, additional instruction time with students and extra support as part of the state’s turnaround model to reform persistently low-achieving schools.
The schools started to see improved student performance, including double-digit gains in some instances, according to district Superintendent Misty Her.
“We thought, ‘Can we take what happened there and now replicate it into other schools?’” said Her, who was a school administrator at the time.
In 2014-15, under the label of Designated Schools, two schools, along with nine others, implemented the model. Over the last decade and multiple years of implementation, the program expanded with the district being the initiative’s biggest advocate.
The model, when implemented as intended, supported improved student outcomes on state assessments for English and math, Fresno Unified said in May 2021 in its accountability plan for the 2021-22 school year, when the program cost $19.9 million across the 41 schools.
But, according to district leaders, schools implemented the program differently, undermining the effectiveness of the extra staff and extra 30 minutes, and leading to varying results.
Timeline of Designated School expansion, elimination
2014-15: Fresno Unified implemented the Designed Schools initiative at 10 elementary schools and one middle school
2015-16: 20 schools were added as Designated Schools
2016-17: 10 more elementary schools became Designated Schools
From 2017-2019: The model had improved scores on state assessments for low-income, foster youth and English learner student populations, according to district accountability plans.
2019: Annual funding for the program continued to increase, rising to over $18.6 million.
2020-21: Hanover Research conducted its analysis, showing mixed results from the program.
2021: Fresno Unified, in its accountability plan for the 2021-22 school year, said the initiative would “address the needs of students by providing extended time to accelerate learning and close the gap of learning loss resulting from the pandemic.”
2022: The district suggested expanding the program to its remaining two dozen elementary schools.
2023-24: Fresno Unified proposed phasing out the initiative before abandoning the idea later in the school year.
The district added a special assignment teacher to every Designated School, but gave schools the autonomy to use that position as they saw fit. Some schools used the position as an intervention teacher; others used the extra support to assist during class or pull students out for individualized or group instruction. A few schools required the specialists to take on multiple duties, consequently hindering their work in the classroom.
Laura Schwalm, chief of staff for California Education Partners, where she works with about 50 school districts on systemic change and improvement, said that before expanding an initiative, districts should have a plan, including how to fund it; set clear expectations; monitor the program and its results throughout the year to make adjustments; and invest in teachers and administrators to deliver the program.
An analysis of the program, conducted by Hanover Research in the 2020-21 school year, found that:
Academic outcomes were mixed
Program implementation varied across campuses, with only some schools aligning resources with data-driven practices
District administration had the authority and ability to address the program’s flaws. In fact, the Hanover report recommended that Fresno Unified establish a set of standards on how staff should use its additional time at Designated Schools.
The autonomy, alone, wasn’t the problem; a lack of district monitoring was. Schwalm said using different approaches could have led to improved student results and could have been used in other schools.
“If you’re not monitoring and not adjusting what you’re doing to get better results, then you can’t be surprised when you don’t get good results,” she said.
Former Superintendent Bob Nelson, who led the district from 2017 until 2024, said he and the district leadership “didn’t pay close enough attention to schools that were doing it well” to be models for other schools.
“The issue was we were not learning from the sites we had. That’s what was missing.”
Bob Nelson, former superintendent of Fresno Unified
According to a June 2022 accountability plan, the district still hailed the initiative as being “critical” to the achievement of English learners, socioeconomically disadvantaged students and foster youth.
By November 2022, Fresno Unified wanted to expand the initiative to all elementary schools to improve academic outcomes for students, according to contract negotiation documents with the teachers union.
“Less than a year and a half after they proposed every school site become a Designated School, they’re saying, ‘This program doesn’t work,’” said Manuel Bonilla, teachers union president.
Chavez, the chief of human resources, said Fresno Unified had evaluated the program’s effectiveness every year since its inception and that its continuation, especially since it was meant to be a pilot, had been a part of conversations for years.
But was it effective?
Parents, teachers and administrators told EdSource they believe students benefit from more time with their teachers. The extra 30 minutes amounted to 90 additional instructional hours each year.
“I believe it does give teachers a little bit more time to be able to work with each kid,” said Adriana Ramirez, a Wilson Elementary parent.
But both the district and teachers union agreed that its effectiveness was not a simple yes or no answer.
“Depending on the situation, some components were really good at this site, some weren’t at this (school), and one component that could have been good somewhere wasn’t necessarily really good at another place,” Chavez said.
There were “pockets of excellence,” he and other district officials admitted, but students were not seeing the academic gains the district envisioned.
Though not school-specific, the district provided data measuring the yearly progress of students at Designated Schools compared to students at non-designated schools.
EdSource also evaluated school-specific data from a GO Public Schools 2024 student outcome report based on the 2023-24 school year.
The district-provided and school-specific data is indicative that many schools were making progress under the initiative, as teachers say, while also depicting the district’s point that it was not across the board.
Without data from a 10-year longitudinal study, Bonilla, the teachers union president, said he couldn’t say whether the Designated Schools initiative was effective.
“Some of our teachers felt that it was effective and some teachers felt that there were components that could make it even more effective because it wasn’t,” Bonilla said.
Mitigating impact
The district and teachers union spent six months negotiating how to maintain student support through other programs.
The agreement approved on June 18 dedicates an additional $4 million in the 2025-26 and 2026-27 school years for educators at Designated Schools to offer after-school literacy instruction or intervention.
Educators at Designated Schools, under the agreement, will have the right to refuse the work. If given the opportunity, Drew Colburn, a fifth grade Wilson Elementary teacher who was also a former after-school program coordinator, is confident educators are going to want to do that extra 30 minutes, if not more.
But if teachers decline the assignment, the after-school intervention won’t be as consistent or effective, he said.
And unfortunately, families won’t know the repercussions of the program’s elimination until this school year when it’s no longer in place, Ramirez said. “Parents,” she said, “won’t notice until it’s not there.”
Students in Megan Thiele Strong’s Sociology of Higher Education work in small groups.
Credit: Courtesy of Megan Thiele Strong
We are in midterms — the season when many students realize their course participation is already subpar. Every semester, a handful of students in my courses do not “make it.” When grades are due, there are F’s.
The terrain of higher education is replete with obstacles. Many students are anxious and lack hope for their futures. California State University tuition hikes add to their unease.
Students are stressed. As professors, it is on us to help shift this dynamic in the classroom.
I have taught university-level courses to thousands of students in the University of California and CSU systems in my 15-year career. I currently teach several courses at San José State University, including a course on quantitative research methods.
In fall 2020, as we moved our courses online because of Covid, I was inspired to experiment, and I eliminated high-stakes exams, both midterms and finals in all my classes. I had been considering this shift for a long time as a way to mitigate harm and boost student investment. It felt like a big step. I could hear the critics: that eliminating exams caters to weakness, gives students a free pass, makes their education worth less. And yet, I knew I could rearrange the classroom from “teaching to the test” to teaching to the students in front of me. And, in so doing, also build marketable strengths like critical, analytical and creative thinking, leadership, curiosity and love of learning.
I also had a hunch that learning experiences such as orating course content are every bit as effective for knowledge retention as checking boxes and regurgitating the points of an essay response. Does every student pass my class? Nope. And, I have seen immense benefits since I transitioned away from high-stakes testing.
How do I prioritize the student over the exam?
First, I center dialogue in my teaching experiences. This oral engagement piece is worth nearly 20% of the student grade and I give time for it every class. It takes a variety of forms: I facilitate group conversation among students. I ask for volunteers to answer questions or discuss content with the group at large. Sometimes, I use a random number generator to call on students. Other times, I have every student answer a prompt to the full group. And, instead of student presentations, we do student facilitations where students create a version of chat stations with prompts and questions about the course content and facilitate a conversation with a small group of their peers.
I also create outside-of-class assignments, such as students hosting watch parties with a required post-viewing discussion segment or asking them to talk to someone about particular course content and report on it. The benefits of dialogue for our students and our society span educational, social and economic realms. I have found this approach helps students build their capacity for thought, engagement and discourse both in and outside the classroom.
Second, I adjusted my assessment strategy, moving from high-stakes exams to smaller, lower-stakes assessments; up to 35 graded learning experiences per student, per course, per semester. I incorporate content from my past exams into learning experiences, open-book quizzes and self-grade assignments. I construct my courses with varying levels of low-stakes opportunities for them to demonstrate proficiency in a topic — a video game mentality of earning points to level up, to build their investment in the course. It also makes it easier for the student — and professor — to spot gaps in understanding early, when there’s still time to address them.
Third, and following the logic that options boost student buy-in, I increase student choice in our curriculum. Where possible, students choose content. If there are larger edited volumes on a course topic, students choose the chapters they read. In Statistics, it’s choosing which graphs from The New York Times they want to analyze.
Fourth, I increase student agency by encouraging students to opt out of some of the curriculum. By constructing my courses with varying levels of low-stakes opportunities that build student buy-in, it feels responsible and empowering to make some content optional. As part of this strategy, I began to offer extra credit opportunities and other very low-stakes options, including learning experiences worth less than 1% of the total points.
Finally, and most importantly, having witnessed students in crisis over the years, and based on personal experience, I include content focused on student mental health. For example, I include optional student check-ins, where students can earn a few points by describing their experience both in and outside the classroom. I ask them, “Are you OK?” These experiences bring to the forefront how deeply valuable and vulnerable our classroom space is.
I trust my students, and I work to gain their trust not only by how I interact with them, but also through curricular decisions that constitute their classroom experience. Even if high-stakes testing is appealing to some students, even if it maintains a tradition that feels endemic to higher education, we know it devalues nontraditional student experience, perpetuates the wealth test as a proxy for merit, is a part of the racialized school-to-prison pipeline and is anathema to imagination.
Students are having learning experiences, for better or for worse, in our classrooms. Education should not be a burden to bear, a hazing experience, nor an obstacle to individual worth, even if that has been its tradition.
If the California State University system can forgo long-standing traditions of high-stakes assessment across 23 campuses, we can do it in our university classrooms.
•••
Megan Thiele Strong, Ph.D., is a professor at San José State University and a 2023-24 Public Voices Fellow at the TheOpEdProject.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
I invite anyone who reads this to try to explain why this administration is reducing spending on scientific research.
Broad writes:
President Trump’s budget plan guts federal science funding for the next fiscal year, according to an overview published by an external group. Particularly at risk is the category of basic research — the blue-sky variety meant to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and sow practical spinoffs and breakthroughs in such everyday fields as health care and artificial intelligence.
The group says it would fall by more than one-third.
The new analysis, made public Wednesday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a general scientific society based in Washington, D.C., added up cuts to the budgets of hundreds of federal agencies and programs that do scientific research or provide grants to universities and research bodies. It then compared the funding appropriated for the current fiscal year with the administration’s proposals for fiscal year 2026.
For basic science research, the association reported that the overall budget would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent. For science funding overall — which includes money for basic, applied and developmental work, as well as for facilities for research and development — the analysis found that the federal budget would fall to $154 billion from $198 billion, a drop of 22 percent.
The new analysis shows that the Trump administration’s budget plan, if adopted, “would essentially end America’s longstanding role as the world leader in science and innovation,” said Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.
His group, Mr. Smith added, is working with Congress to develop “a funding plan for strategic investment that would help to sustain continued American scientific leadership rather than destroying it.”
Mary Woolley, president of Research America, a nonprofit group that promotes science, said the new analysis showed that the budget plan “is threatening not only science but the American public. If approved by Congress, it will make the public less safe, poorer and sicker.”
Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, did not reply to a request for comment on the new analysis.
In early May, the White House unveiled a budget blueprint that listed proposed cuts to a handful of science agencies. For instance, it sought a reduction in the budget of the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much basic research, to $3.9 billion from $8.8 billion, a drop of 55.8 percent.
Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the science association, said in an interview that the comprehensive analysis drew on several hundred proposed budgets from federal science agencies and programs, as well as figures supplied by the White House Office of Management and Budget. In May, the budget office made public the rough sketch of the administration’s overall proposal for next year but included only a small number of science agencies and figures.
Ms. Zimmermann added that the association’s new compilations would be updated as new budget data from federal agencies and programs became available. However, she said, the group’s estimates of cuts to federal basic research are “not going to be undone by a minor number change.”
The science group has long recorded the ups and downs of the federal government’s annual spending on science. Taking inflation into account, Ms. Zimmermann said the administration’s proposed cut of $44 billion would, if approved, make the $154 billion figure the smallest amount that the federal government has spent on science in this century…
In May, science appeared to be high on the list for significant funding cuts, while large increases were proposed for the Pentagon and Homeland Security. Until the science association updated its reports on the proposed presidential budget for fiscal year 2026, however, the public had no clear indication of the overall size of the federal cuts.
The proposed drop in federal funding for science research, if approved by Congress, could let China match or take the lead in global science investments, Ms. Zimmermann said.
In April, the science group published figuresshowing that China had greatly increased support for its scientific enterprise in the past two decades. As of 2023 — the most recent year available for comparisons — China’s investment was close to equaling that of the United States.
Experts say it could take years of data gathering to know if China is pulling into the lead.
The entrance to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Following government warnings about the dangers of being in a war zone, California universities and colleges have safely evacuated their students who were attending study abroad programs in Israel. The future of those programs for the rest of the school year remains uncertain.
The U.S. State Department recently has categorized Israel as a Level 3 travel risk, which urges U.S. citizens to “reconsider” their travel and presence in the country “due to terrorism and civil unrest” in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s current retaliations in Gaza. The Level 3 ranking and family concerns were enough for the University of California and the California State University systems to take action. Level 4, the worst potential ranking, is an outright travel ban.
UC’s Education Abroad Program (UCEAP) reported that its students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem have left Israel and are all safe. However, UC declined to say how many students were involved and where they are now. Mandatory travel insurance covered the evacuation expenses.
“We can confirm that students on UCEAP-sponsored programs are safe and have departed Israel. It’s our policy, following best practices on travel safety abroad, not to disclose the number of students in a given location or their specific location during emergency or urgent location changes,” Jennifer Monroe, UCEAP’s Director of Marketing, Communications, and Engagement, said in an email to EdSource.
The students are now taking online or hybrid courses in connection with Hebrew University, she said. And UCEAP “continues to evaluate the safety and security conditions at the program location and region to determine if in-person programming can continue,” Monroe added.
The California State University reported that a Chico State student in an internship in Israel has returned to California. Another student, from the CSU Northridge campus, was about to leave home to start a program at the University of Haifa but did not depart because of the situation there.
“We will be suspending our program and not sending anyone there, said Jaishankar Raman, director of CSU’s International Programs. “We are waiting until we see how the situation unfolds for the spring and we will await what the State Department advises us.” The Northridge student was offered a spot in other overseas programs but declined. He “decided not going anywhere now would be better and to assess the situation in the spring,” Raman said.
Three years ago, universities in California and across the U.S. canceled overseas studies programs as the pandemic took its toll worldwide. It took more than a year for some programs to reopen and then some other nations with higher Covid rates remained off limits for a while longer.
Many U.S. institutions are suspending programs to Israel for the time being and pausing plans for future programs, according to a statement from Caroline Donovan-White, an official with NAFSA: Association of International Educators, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that encourages and supports study abroad and exchange programs. Institutions rely on their existing risk management resources and tools like the State Department travel advisories to guide them in times like this, she explained. (NAFSA was founded as and used to be known as the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers.).
“The pausing of programs happens from time to time for many reasons and universities have plans and policies in place for those situations. Our members tell us they are in close contact with their students studying all over the world–not just in the Middle East–as they may feel especially vulnerable and isolated from their support network right now, particularly those of Jewish and Muslim faiths,” Donovan-White said.
The University of Southern California offers studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya in the Tel Aviv area (also known as Reichman University). But USC said that since no student had signed up this fall, no special action was needed.
“USC does not have any students studying in Israel during this fall semester. The university will not be offering study abroad programs in Israel this upcoming spring semester and is closely monitoring the situation in the area,” Anthony Bailey, Vice President for Global and Online Initiatives & Dean, USC Bovard College, said in a statement to EdSource.
Stanford University said it has no programs in Israel.
School districts around the nation are facing a terrible financial problem.
During the pandemic, they received billions in federal funding under the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund (ESSER), which they are required tospend or commit by the fall of 2024. Meanwhile, many districts, especially ones in California, received massive increases in state funding. Recently, because of declining revenues, states are projecting deficits and education budget cuts. This means that districts, especially urban districts suffering from declining student enrollment, could be hit by the double whammy of the ESSER funding cliff and a state budget crisis.
As I traveled the state visiting our urban districts, I listened to one budget presentation after another from finance officers talking about a post-ESSER Armageddon. In the last district I visited, I sat in a packed auditorium as the CFO showed how they’d spent their one-time money on ongoing costs and funded programs that couldn’t survive. As he droned on about all the horrible things that would happen, I drifted off to sleep.
When I awoke, the auditorium was empty. I looked down at my watch and noticed it had stopped 28 days after the board presentation. I’d clearly been out for a while because my fingernails were long, and I’d grown a full beard. I’d been asleep until the Halloween day after the ESSER funding cliff. I assumed that I owed my life to the extra-large burrito I’d eaten before the board meeting. I walked out and entered the district offices, looking for signs of life. Everywhere I walked, there were overturned tables, candy wrappers and papers strewn about.
As I turned a corner, I noticed three people shambling toward me with the typical urgency of a central office manager. I was about to approach them when I realized they were zombies trying to eat me. Terrified, I ran to my car and drove away. Over the next few days, I visited schools and district offices that were filled with zombies. It was clear that something terrible had happened and that it was connected to the ESSER funding cliff, but I couldn’t fathom what.
I knew there was only one place to find the answer — the state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team. When I walked through their doors, I was relieved to find that they were still human. From the haggard looks on their faces, it was clear that they’d been working nonstop on a cure. “What the hell happened?” I asked.
A crisis team leader pointed to flow charts taped on a nearby wall. “We knew that the ESSER cliff would be bad and that a state budget crisis would make it worse. We also knew that some of our more financially irresponsible urban districts were already deathly ill. We were especially worried about the declining enrollment ones whose school boards made politically popular decisions to increase salaries with one-time money and wouldn’t make difficult decisions to lower costs, like closing small schools and cutting staff. What we didn’t expect was that the people in these zombie districts would actually turn into zombies,” he sighed.
“Is there anything we can do to fix this?” I entreated. He shrugged and motioned me toward another room.
“Ask him,” he said, pointing to a shadowy figure on the other side of a thick plexiglass wall. I looked closer and cried out, “Oh my God, that’s a zombie.”
“I prefer the term ‘differently human’,” said the zombie, who introduced himself as a local teacher’s union president. I asked him how he would cure the situation so kids could get back to school. He said, “There’s nothing to cure. We showed during the pandemic and in places like Oakland afterward that we don’t need kids to have schools. All we need are teachers. Now, we are proving it. Of course, if anyone wants to come back, we’ll welcome them with open arms.”
“But zombies eat children.” I gasped.
“Yes. There will be accidents, but the class sizes are delightful,” he said, smiling widely.
I left and again wandered the state, looking for anyone with a cure. Thinking that one of the state’s tech billionaires might be helpful, I traveled to in Silicon Valley to meet a famous one who’d focused on education and pleaded for his assistance. He listened for a few minutes and then cut me off. “Why would we help?” he said. “They did this to themselves with the tax money they took from us. Now, we have much less money which means they have less money.”
“But what about the kids?” I asked. “They can’t learn in zombie districts.”
“It’s just like New Orleans after Katrina,” he said. “Sometimes you have to destroy something that is bad before you can create something better.”
I threw up my hands, wondering what could possess people to think in this destructive way. At my wits’ end, I made one last journey to visit the Oracle at Georgetown University. She was sitting in her office nursing a cup of tea. She offered me a cup and told me I could ask two questions.
“Oh Great Oracle,” I said. “What could we have done to prevent this, and what can we do now?”
“The answer is one and the same,” she said. “School districts and their communities knew what was coming. They should have had the courage to say no to spending short-term dollars on future costs that would require ongoing funding. They must make hard choices on people and schools that they don’t have enough money for. They must have state and local leaders who will encourage them to do so, and when possible, give them cover. And those political leaders must be willing to make these choices even at the expense of their careers, knowing that they are doing the right thing. That will cure this apocalypse and prevent the next one.”
I thanked the Oracle and pledged to share her wisdom, hoping that others would listen too.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
A would-be intruder would have a difficult time trying to sneak into the new Del Sol High School in Oxnard, which opened in August with its first group of 475 first-year students.
That’s because the $189 million campus was planned and built with security at the top of the list of concerns, officials say. And that puts it at the forefront of a trend throughout California and the nation as school districts respond to school shootings and try to prevent any more violence.
At Del Sol, two perimeters of 8-foot-high black fencing — designed to deny a foothold to potential climbers — surround the campus and fill in openings between the buildings’ edges. After incoming students file through Del Sol’s two gates under the watchful eyes of campus employees, the only entry is through a glass cube-like lobby. There, visitors are screened carefully from behind a bulletproof glass window and, if approved, admitted through a locked metal interior door. Cameras survey the courtyards and exterior walkways. Coming soon is a new schoolwide door-locking system for emergencies.
Students walk through the quad area of Del Sol High School during the passing period in Oxnard on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023.
“Nowadays safety and security are the first priority. The rest follows that,” explained Oxnard Union High School District Superintendent Tom McCoy on a recent tour of the school, which opened this fall. Many of the same safety features built into the new 47-acre campus are being added as retrofits where possible to the district’s 11 other high schools and one adult school. That includes Hueneme High School, where 22 years ago, a teenage gunman took a student hostage but was soon killed by a police sniper while the hostage was saved.
Throughout the nation, new schools are being designed — and older schools retrofitted — to make them as safe as possible for students and staff and as difficult as possible for a potential assailant to gain entrance and cause deadly trouble. Those features often include a single point of entry, new fencing, limited visibility into classrooms, bulletproof glass in vulnerable spots and new alert and locking systems.
McCoy and educators and architects throughout the state and country say the challenge is to make a school safe without making it look like a bunker or penitentiary. They say Del Sol and other campuses succeed in showing that a pleasant and secure learning environment can be created.
Oxnard Union High School District Superintendent Thomas McCoy walks through Del School High School on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023.
“It’s a fine line,” Del Sol principal Terri Leon said. “We want our kids to feel safe, but we don’t want them to feel imprisoned. I think (the design) does a good job of balancing that. Our kids seem to like the design and the spaces and how everything is set up. But then we are pretty secure.”
The campus was designed by the PBK architecture firm, which has nine offices throughout California. So far, the school consists of eight buildings, mainly two stories and connected by walkways. All share plenty of outdoor space and plazas. Corridors and classrooms have large windows, providing much light and views of mountains. Students can present projects or hold meetings in big, flexible interior spaces. While a sense of openness exists inside the campus, there is no mistake that the exterior’s decorative black metal mesh fence presents a strong impression of do-not-enter to an uninvited visitor — even without old-fashioned barbed wire or chain link.
In California, many older schools were built when openness and a sense of freedom were important, taking advantage of the climate with unprotected breezeways, unfenced lawns and multiple easy entries. School officials and architects and parents say they don’t want to entirely lose that, at least inside secure perimeters.
“Security is on everyone’s minds,” said Michael Pinto, design director at NAC Architecture firm’s Los Angeles office, which has worked on many school projects with anti-crime features. “It is really a concern of parents. And when someone is concerned about the safety of their children, there is nothing you can do but respect that and take those concerns seriously.”
That does not mean designing a dark, windowless bunker or having excessive fencing, said Pinto, whose projects include the current rebuilding of the century-old Belvedere Middle School in East Los Angeles. Belvedere’s new buildings were placed to form much of the campus’ exterior boundaries. As a result, the amount of fencing is actually reduced from the old arrangement, according to Pinto. Meanwhile, inside the campus, students get a lot of outdoor space and light.
“We don’t want hermetically sealed schools,” said Pinto, who served on the Los Angeles city attorney’s commission on school safety. That panel’s 2018 report called for improved security measures like single entries, along with better mental health services and more societal gun controls. The federal government has issued similar guidelines that emphasize clear sight lines and access control, along with clean and upbeat school environments.
The Saugus Union School District in northern Los Angeles County recently spent much of a $148 million bond issue for security measures at its 15 K-six schools. Those include new single-point-of-entry lobbies with secondary locked doors leading into the campuses, better fencing and lighting, new door-locking systems and window shades that can be closed in an emergency. Identification letters and numbers have been painted on roofs so police or fire crews can see them from the air and get to the right location quickly in an emergency, according to Nick Heinlein, the district’s assistant superintendent of business.
The goal is to make campuses “as safe as we can make them without them seeming unappealing,” Heinlein said.
The need was brought home by a tragic 2019 episode at Saugus High School, a hometown campus run by a separate district, Heinlein said. A student armed with a pistol shot five schoolmates, killing two, before killing himself. When something like that happens, “there is always something that can be learned,” Heinlein said. Among other things, changes were made to allow students to flee if necessary through campus exits with panic bars that can be opened from the inside or that can be easily unlocked by adults in an emergency, he said.
Responses to school violence go beyond architecture and window panes. Staffs are getting better trained on how to lead lockdowns, evacuations and student drills. Campus and municipal police are being better trained for a faster response to shootings, searching quickly for assailants and being well-armed enough to counter them. Schools look more closely for students’ behavioral and emotional problems that could escalate. Mental health resources have been boosted, as have methods of reporting threats.
Rebecca Gallardo, Del Sol High School receptionist, checks in visitors and buzzes them in through her desk on Oct. 3, 2023. Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
The reception desk of Del Sol High School contains bulletproof windows. Oct. 3, 2023. Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Double fencing is in place around Oxnard’s Del Sol High School. Oct. 3, 2023. Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Students walk through the quad area of Del Sol High School during the passing period in Oxnard on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023. Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
The brand new Oxnard school, Del Sol High School, on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023. Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Del Sol High School students in Oxnard on Oct. 3, 2023.
Architecture and engineering help a lot, but they aren’t sufficient without other efforts, according to Scott Gaudineer, who is president of the California branch of the American Institute of Architects, a professional organization representing 11,000 architects in the state. “Human intelligence is just as important,” said Gaudineer, who also is president of the Flewelling & Moody firm, in the Los Angeles area, which has worked on school projects. “Schools must keep a watchful eye and offer counseling to a student “who is going through a divorce, who is stressed.”
“The challenge is you never know who is going to show up with an AK-47 and is mentally deranged. It is shocking how often this is happening,” he added.
Two of the most infamous school shooting sites have taken different approaches in the aftermath. In Connecticut, the Sandy Hook Elementary School was demolished in the wake of the 2012 rampage that left 20 children and six educators dead. A new school was built with a moat-like rain garden around it, bulletproof windows and an elevated first floor to make it harder to see in.
In contrast, Columbine High in Colorado remained pretty much the same after the 1999 assault, during which two students killed 12 classmates and one teacher before committing suicide. Some new security measures have been added such as more fencing.
McCoy, the Oxnard Union superintendent, has personal experience encountering violence. In 2001, a troubled teenage boy who was not a student there easily got into Hueneme High School. McCoy, a vice principal then, escorted him off the grounds. The intruder came back, holding a female student at gunpoint as he entered a campus quad through an unguarded gate. A police sniper shot and killed the gunman, and the girl was not wounded.
McCoy, who was nearby but did not witness the shooting, said its lessons are reflected in Del Sol’s design and in improved emergency sheltering and evacuation procedures. Adult staff, he said, must be prepared since “the kids look to the adults immediately and follow our directions.”
During the tour, McCoy pointed out what he said is one of the most important anti-violence features: a wellness center, a big sunny room with beanbag chairs where students under emotional stress can chill out and meet with a counselor. “If they are having a bad day, instead of acting out in the classroom, they can hang out here and spend the time they need and go back to class,” he said. About 60 students a day spend at least some time there, usually at lunch.
Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Eight-foot wire gates surround Del Sol High School in Oxnard on Oct. 3, 2023.
Del Sol, built on a former strawberry and citrus farm in the eastern part of Oxnard, serves a predominately Latino and low-income population, including some whose parents work in the fields. As additional classes enter each of the next three years and the current freshmen become seniors, enrollment is expected to grow to about 2,100 students.
The land cost $25 million, and construction bills so far total $194 million, including $30 million to the city for street improvements, funded by bonds, certificates of participation and other sources, according to McCoy. Athletic fields are being finished to the rear of the site, and plans call for a performing arts center, swimming pool and football stadium to be added when more state or local funds can be found.
The contemporary-style buildings are clad in complementary panels of gray, cantaloupe and white. The black metal fencing has narrow vertical openings that make it nearly impossible to get a foothold, but there are no barbed wire or top stakes that could hurt a student who tries to climb out, according to Mark Graham, its principal architect, at the PBK firm. The company has installed similar security measures at the new $200 million Chino High, which opened last year, and at retrofits at three campuses in the Cucamonga School District in San Bernardino County.
The fence aims to look porous, Graham said. “We wanted to use something that didn’t look so penal. It is there, but it is not like you are being caged in.” Going fenceless is not an option on most school projects these days since security is “at the top of the list of concerns, especially for parents and school board members.”
The New York Times published a long article about the rise and power of Stephen Miller. Miller is one of Trump’s closest aides. His title is Deputy Chief of Staff but he seems to be in charge of immigration policy and many more areas. His goal is to deport every immigrant out of the U.S.
About the turmoil in Los Angeles, where Trump nationalized the state Guard and sent in hundreds of Marines, which generated protests:
The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.
There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy….
Mr. Miller is more obdurate when it comes to domestic policy, particularly immigration. For Mr. Trump’s second term, he has led the president to stake out a series of maximalist positions, from the ICE raids to the use of the Alien Enemies Act to raising the possibility of suspending habeas corpus for people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. Mr. Trump seems to enjoy having Mr. Miller play the heavy on immigration. During his first term, he jokingly told people who urged him to take more moderate stances on immigration that Mr. Miller would never go for them. Last year, he reportedly quipped during a campaign meeting that if it was up to Mr. Miller, the population of the United States would be only 100 million people and they’d all resemble Mr. Miller. The humor, however, underscores something serious: On immigration, Millerism is a more consistent ideology than Trumpism.
While Mr. Miller is an ardent restrictionist, seeking to reduce all immigration to the United States, Mr. Trump has at times backed H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers; created a wait-list for a proposed special visa, called a Trump Gold Card, that wealthy immigrants could buy for $5 million apiece; and expressed regret about the impact ICE raids were having on the agriculture and hospitality industries. Indeed, the backlash to the ICE raids was so great that in early June, Mr. Trump reversed himself and declared the agriculture and hospitality sectors off-limits to that sort of strict immigration enforcement — before, after intense lobbying from Mr. Miller, he reversed himself again. Still, the hiccup was enough to hint at a broader potential rupture, especially if Mr. Miller’s immigration policies continue to prove unpopular. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration, once his greatest political strength.
Fresno Unified and its teachers union reached an agreement in mid-June to attempt to mitigate the impacts of a long-standing program ending.
The multimillion-dollar program was touted by the district as a way to close gaps between student groups less than three years ago.
Finances, inconsistent program implementation and varied results are some of the reasons the district says the program was eliminated.
The Fresno Unified School District and its teachers union have reached an agreement to terminate a decade-old, once-promising student improvement program that expanded from a pilot in a handful of low-performing schools to 40 of the district’s 67 elementary schools and one middle school.
Faced with rising program costs, declining enrollment and cuts in revenue, the district decided that inconsistent results could not justify the program’s high expense of almost $30 million.
“When you have finances crash with programmatic inconsistencies … just kind of created the perfect storm for us to go a different direction,” said David Chavez, district chief of human resources, who also worked for two former superintendents.
The Designated Schools program, which operated under three superintendents, was a district initiative to improve achievement through additional daily instruction by targeting the specific needs of students. The effort was extensive: 30 additional instructional minutes per day for students, 10 extra paid days of professional development for teachers, and either a math or reading coach in each school.
Under the agreement with the Fresno Teachers Association, the coaches will return to the classroom as regular teachers, and teachers will see a phaseout of their 10-day training over the next few years. For students, aside from losing 30 minutes of instruction, there will be no transition. They can participate in the after-school program they are already entitled to attend, where they may receive intervention or instruction from teachers who choose to participate.
Dismantling the previously praised program raises questions about how and why it went awry.
The district blames inconsistent program implementation across schools, but it failed to set standards or hold schools accountable to the program’s tenets.
Going Deeper: Who Designated Schools served
Designated Schools, affecting 24,000 students and over 1,250 educators across 41 campuses, were intended to close academic gaps among students and were typically located in neighborhoods with large numbers of socioeconomically disadvantaged students. In the extra 30 minutes, all students received additional instruction or intervention in some way.
Reading specialists at Wilson Elementary, a Designated School, used those extra minutes on remedial instruction for struggling fifth graders who were unable to read even at a third or fourth grade level, said Drew Colburn, a fifth grade teacher.
During intervention time, Colburn and other teachers divided their classes into small groups by proficiency level and targeted students’ weak points, allowing all students to get additional support, without missing core instruction.
At Wilson, following slight improvements, 18.6% and 12.1% of students achieved reading and math proficiency in the 2023-24 school year, according to Ed-Data.
Teachers say they saw improvements, which may not have been as apparent on summative state tests that the district evaluated to determine program effectiveness.
“If you take that 30 minutes away from them, they’re going to come to fifth grade with even more of a deficit,” Colburn said.
Inconsistent implementation or lack of oversight?
The first “Designated Schools” were actually three of the district’s lowest-performing schools. Fresno Unified gave teachers more time to plan, additional instruction time with students and extra support as part of the state’s turnaround model to reform persistently low-achieving schools.
The schools started to see improved student performance, including double-digit gains in some instances, according to district Superintendent Misty Her.
“We thought, ‘Can we take what happened there and now replicate it into other schools?’” said Her, who was a school administrator at the time.
In 2014-15, under the label of Designated Schools, two schools, along with nine others, implemented the model. Over the last decade and multiple years of implementation, the program expanded with the district being the initiative’s biggest advocate.
The model, when implemented as intended, supported improved student outcomes on state assessments for English and math, Fresno Unified said in May 2021 in its accountability plan for the 2021-22 school year, when the program cost $19.9 million across the 41 schools.
But, according to district leaders, schools implemented the program differently, undermining the effectiveness of the extra staff and extra 30 minutes, and leading to varying results.
Timeline of Designated School expansion, elimination
2014-15: Fresno Unified implemented the Designed Schools initiative at 10 elementary schools and one middle school
2015-16: 20 schools were added as Designated Schools
2016-17: 10 more elementary schools became Designated Schools
From 2017-2019: The model had improved scores on state assessments for low-income, foster youth and English learner student populations, according to district accountability plans.
2019: Annual funding for the program continued to increase, rising to over $18.6 million.
2020-21: Hanover Research conducted its analysis, showing mixed results from the program.
2021: Fresno Unified, in its accountability plan for the 2021-22 school year, said the initiative would “address the needs of students by providing extended time to accelerate learning and close the gap of learning loss resulting from the pandemic.”
2022: The district suggested expanding the program to its remaining two dozen elementary schools.
2023-24: Fresno Unified proposed phasing out the initiative before abandoning the idea later in the school year.
The district added a special assignment teacher to every Designated School, but gave schools the autonomy to use that position as they saw fit. Some schools used the position as an intervention teacher; others used the extra support to assist during class or pull students out for individualized or group instruction. A few schools required the specialists to take on multiple duties, consequently hindering their work in the classroom.
Laura Schwalm, chief of staff for California Education Partners, where she works with about 50 school districts on systemic change and improvement, said that before expanding an initiative, districts should have a plan, including how to fund it; set clear expectations; monitor the program and its results throughout the year to make adjustments; and invest in teachers and administrators to deliver the program.
An analysis of the program, conducted by Hanover Research in the 2020-21 school year, found that:
Academic outcomes were mixed
Program implementation varied across campuses, with only some schools aligning resources with data-driven practices
District administration had the authority and ability to address the program’s flaws. In fact, the Hanover report recommended that Fresno Unified establish a set of standards on how staff should use its additional time at Designated Schools.
The autonomy, alone, wasn’t the problem; a lack of district monitoring was. Schwalm said using different approaches could have led to improved student results and could have been used in other schools.
“If you’re not monitoring and not adjusting what you’re doing to get better results, then you can’t be surprised when you don’t get good results,” she said.
Former Superintendent Bob Nelson, who led the district from 2017 until 2024, said he and the district leadership “didn’t pay close enough attention to schools that were doing it well” to be models for other schools.
“The issue was we were not learning from the sites we had. That’s what was missing.”
Bob Nelson, former superintendent of Fresno Unified
According to a June 2022 accountability plan, the district still hailed the initiative as being “critical” to the achievement of English learners, socioeconomically disadvantaged students and foster youth.
By November 2022, Fresno Unified wanted to expand the initiative to all elementary schools to improve academic outcomes for students, according to contract negotiation documents with the teachers union.
“Less than a year and a half after they proposed every school site become a Designated School, they’re saying, ‘This program doesn’t work,’” said Manuel Bonilla, teachers union president.
Chavez, the chief of human resources, said Fresno Unified had evaluated the program’s effectiveness every year since its inception and that its continuation, especially since it was meant to be a pilot, had been a part of conversations for years.
But was it effective?
Parents, teachers and administrators told EdSource they believe students benefit from more time with their teachers. The extra 30 minutes amounted to 90 additional instructional hours each year.
“I believe it does give teachers a little bit more time to be able to work with each kid,” said Adriana Ramirez, a Wilson Elementary parent.
But both the district and teachers union agreed that its effectiveness was not a simple yes or no answer.
“Depending on the situation, some components were really good at this site, some weren’t at this (school), and one component that could have been good somewhere wasn’t necessarily really good at another place,” Chavez said.
There were “pockets of excellence,” he and other district officials admitted, but students were not seeing the academic gains the district envisioned.
Though not school-specific, the district provided data measuring the yearly progress of students at Designated Schools compared to students at non-designated schools.
EdSource also evaluated school-specific data from a GO Public Schools 2024 student outcome report based on the 2023-24 school year.
The district-provided and school-specific data is indicative that many schools were making progress under the initiative, as teachers say, while also depicting the district’s point that it was not across the board.
Without data from a 10-year longitudinal study, Bonilla, the teachers union president, said he couldn’t say whether the Designated Schools initiative was effective.
“Some of our teachers felt that it was effective and some teachers felt that there were components that could make it even more effective because it wasn’t,” Bonilla said.
Mitigating impact
The district and teachers union spent six months negotiating how to maintain student support through other programs.
The agreement approved on June 18 dedicates an additional $4 million in the 2025-26 and 2026-27 school years for educators at Designated Schools to offer after-school literacy instruction or intervention.
Educators at Designated Schools, under the agreement, will have the right to refuse the work. If given the opportunity, Drew Colburn, a fifth grade Wilson Elementary teacher who was also a former after-school program coordinator, is confident educators are going to want to do that extra 30 minutes, if not more.
But if teachers decline the assignment, the after-school intervention won’t be as consistent or effective, he said.
And unfortunately, families won’t know the repercussions of the program’s elimination until this school year when it’s no longer in place, Ramirez said. “Parents,” she said, “won’t notice until it’s not there.”
Fresno Teachers Association President Manuel Bonilla, centered on the left, passes the pen and contract to Fresno Unified Superintendent Bob Nelson to sign a tentative agreement that FTA and FUSD reached less than a day ahead of a potential strike.
Lasherica Thornton/ EdSource
This article was updated Nov. 2 to reflect changes in the final version of the contract between Fresno Unified and the teachers union.
Less than 24 hours before a strike by thousands of educators was scheduled to start, Fresno Unified School District and its teachers union agreed on a tentative contract, the two announced during a joint press conference Tuesday morning.
“Our students have been the innocent bystanders waiting through the difficulties of negotiations,” Superintendent Bob Nelson said. “This deal is really about you (students): it’s our joint commitment to avoid a strike because there’s really nothing more important than making sure our students have the opportunity to be in school every day, all the time.”
District and union leaders as well as board members touted the contract for investing in teachers, supporting students and maintaining the district’s fiscal solvency.
To Fresno Teachers Association President Manuel Bonilla, the contract meets and exceeds the four requests that emerged as sticking points throughout negotiations: reducing class size, reducing special education caseloads, keeping educators competitive in pay and maintaining certain health care benefits.
Bonilla and Louis Jamerson, executive director of the teachers union, highlighted key provisions from the offer, including:
Class size reductions for all grades with investments for new classrooms to continue to reduce class size.
A comprehensive guideline for special education caseloads – the first time such guidance has existed in contract language.
Competitive salaries.
Lifetime medical benefits.
“Soon a child will walk into their classroom and have the closest connection ever with their teacher, rather than competing for attention and assistance,” Bonilla said about one of many “wins” for students.
What does the contract offer?
Class size
The teachers union came to the bargaining table with a request to cap class size while the district proposed maintaining class size averages but reducing the number of students over that average for a teacher stipend.
Starting next school year, the district will reduce class size averages to ratios of 1 teacher for every:
Eight students for prekindergarten.
12 students for transitional kindergarten.
23 students for grades K-three.
28 students for grades four to six.
27 students for grades seven and eight.
28 students for high school grades.
The contract language provides guidelines for class size, which say the district will reduce individual class size even more each school year and will reassign 75 non-classroom educators back to the classroom to lower class size.
Benefits
The agreed-upon offer includes what Fresno Unified previously called a bridge to Medicare to meet the same goal as lifetime retiree benefits:
At age 57.5, if an employee has worked in Fresno Unified for at least 20 years, they’ll be offered the same health care plan, and at the same rate, as current employees.
At 65, when employees become eligible for Medicare, they will have access to a district health plan that acts as a secondary coverage to Medicare.
The contract guarantees seven and a half years of the coverage, even if the Medicare eligibility age changes. The contract also includes provisions about the district’s contribution to employees’ health care fund, which, in part, determines health care benefits. The district will contribute less to the health fund, but, according to the contract, it will automatically increase to the previous contribution level within a couple of years.
More than 20% in raises and bonuses
Over the next three years, Fresno Unified educators will receive 21% in raises and one-time payments – up from the previous 11% and 19% offers – which include:
8.5% raises this school year.
3% raises in the 2024-25 school year with a 2.5% one-time bonus.
4.5% raises in the 2025-26 school year with a 2.5% one-time bonus.
Educators will also receive a $5,000 one-time payment as part of a side letter agreement to the contract.
A win for teachers and students
The contract allows educators and students to thrive, Bonilla said.
“As educators and as a community, we’ve made it clear (that) students thrive when educators thrive,” he said. “And educators thrive when leaders value their hard work — when they value that tireless dedication to adequate support.”
While negotiations have ended, many said that the work of building a better Fresno starts now. The district and the union agreed to act as partners in a “collaborative shared decision process (that) will ensure the partners work together in a meaningful way within a timely manner.” Four district leaders, including the superintendent, and four union leaders will be a part of the partnership.
Don Raczka, author of a fact-finding report, recommended that Fresno Unified and its teachers union work closely to find solutions so they can address the “transformational student and teacher support systems the (Fresno Teachers) Association believes essential.”
The partnership, said school board member Andy Levine, will enable the district and union to continue to work on issues over time, not wait three years for the next contract negotiations to come around.
“It’s not over; we start from a different place today,” trustee Valerie Davis said. “Today, our students win.”
