The two men met last month, and Guzman laid out his plans for a three-year commission that would work to get funding and create services to help more students stay in school.

Trustee Michelle Asadoorian said she was waiting for Hanson's report at today's board meeting. She said she had heard nothing about the task force until late afternoon Tuesday, hours after the news conference.

"Mr. Hanson does not feel it necessary to follow the direction of the board," Asadoorian said. "He's the CEO of a public company, and he's acting as if he's the CEO of a private company. That is not how education works."

Other board members said Hanson informed them of his plans either Tuesday morning or late last week.

Guzman said he, too, was surprised. After the meeting with Hanson, he had started preparing another presentation about the dropout commission for the board's Feb. 22 meeting. He said he had thought there still was a chance to win district support for his plan.

Hanson said the news conference Tuesday was intended to serve as his message to the board and the entire community about how he wants to tackle the dropout problem. Guzman's three-year plan did not match the district's need to move swiftly, he said.

Mills wrote in an email that she saw the superintendent's task force as an appropriate follow-up to the December meeting. The board had promised the community it would address the dropout problem, she said, and the graduation task force is one way to do that.

Guzman said he plans to proceed with his commission without Fresno Unified officials. Arambula had invited him to join the graduation task force, but Guzman said he was undecided. He doubted its success, and challenged the idea that the task force could finish its work by summer: "That's ludicrous," he said.

Asadoorian said the district had sacrificed an opportunity to have a community-wide, grassroots commission tackling the problem, and will now have two disjointed groups working on the problem, with a gulf of politics dividing them.

Arambula, who has four children who graduated from Fresno Unified, brings a history of board politics with him. He served on the school board from 1987 to 1996, and his involvement in the district continued for the next decade.

He led an effort in 2006 to pack the board with four candidates backed by a group of politicians and business leaders. Voters rejected the slate, ousting board president Luisa Medina and incumbent Pat Barr. The winning candidates -- incumbents Vang and Valerie Davis and challengers Cal Johnson and Asadoorian -- won with teachers' union support. All four are still on the board.

Arambula, who served six years in the Assembly before leaving in 2010, also sponsored failed legislation to shift academic oversight of troubled school districts from state officials to locally elected county superintendents, and giving districts more flexibility in spending education money. The legislation targeted 13 districts, including Fresno Unified. Teachers unions and FUSD trustees, led by then-board president Mills, helped defeat the plan.