Students returning next month to Fresno's Webster Elementary School, Carver Academy and Yosemite Middle School will find new faces and new rules.

Two of the principals and most teachers have been replaced. The schools will have tougher standards, longer school days, extra tutoring, more assessments and far more demands for accountability -- from students, teachers and parents.

The dramatic overhaul is the latest effort to turn around failing schools -- those that are persistently in the bottom 5% of schools statewide. Of 188 on the list in California, 13 are in the Valley, including three of Fresno Unified's 87 schools, two of Parlier Unified's seven and another eight schools in Tulare and Kings counties.

The sweeping changes are happening this year in districts that want to qualify for up to $2 million per school in federal grant money by adopting one of four reform models recommended by the California Department of Education. Choices facing districts include replacing staff, adopting instructional changes, and even reopening campuses as charter schools.

The changes are drastic but necessary, said Fresno Unified Superintendent Michael Hanson.

Hanson said the process has been eye-opening and the need for reform was painfully obvious. For example, Yosemite had "a toxic school climate," he said without elaborating.

Federal education officials have tried for years to make districts apply these reforms to schools that cannot improve poor test scores. Under No Child Left Behind, the federal education reform program, schools designated as "program improvement" campuses for three years or more were supposed to adopt reforms similar to those in the four reform models.

But districts were reluctant to take that step -- until this year.

The pot of federal money seems to have provided a much-needed incentive. In Fresno Unified, the overhaul began before spring break, when teachers at the three schools were told that most would be reassigned because of their school's low performance. The meetings were followed by letters of "ineffectiveness" delivered to every teacher -- about 50 in all -- a step required under the district's union contract.

Greg Gadams, president of the Fresno Teachers Association, complained that even good teachers got a letter. But Hanson said the district had to put all the teachers on notice until it determined who would stay and who would go -- a time-consuming process involving school officials, teaching staff and even some students. Student test scores were also a factor.

In the end, many teachers volunteered to move to other schools. And teachers from other schools chose to come to the low-achieving schools. "Most teachers are where they want to be," Gadams said.

The reassigned teachers went to various schools throughout the district and no permanent teachers lost jobs, said Hanson. The superintendent said the district was careful when selecting new teachers for the three low-achieving schools and equally careful with the reassignments "so we were not creating issues somewhere else."

The changes had to happen because the schools were struggling, he said. Carver and Yosemite were the district's only two middle schools scoring below 600 on the Academic Performance Index -- a measure of how schools perform on standardized testing. The state's target score is 800 out of a possible 1,000.

Ed Gomes is the new principal at Yosemite in central Fresno. He comes from Jefferson Elementary, a downtown Fresno school where all the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. He is credited with improving Jefferson's API ranking among schools with similar demographics from a 4 to an 8 out of 10.