Does Fresno’s new high school favor rich families on the north side? Here’s the map

Central Unified School District trustees were nearly at an impasse Tuesday evening, as they sought to create boundaries for the new Justin Garza High School that would balance income levels on all campuses.

Although the board was presented with five options to chose from, they whittled the choices down to two by Tuesday’s meeting. The winning map divides the district into a north/south pattern but was controversial because some trustees worried about income disparity. About 8.4% more students who do not receive free or reduced lunch will attend Garza High than students who do, according to trustees.

The vote was 5-1, with Trustee Naindeep Singh Chann casting the no vote. As part of the agreement, the board will discuss in 2022 if the boundary map is working.

The other option trustees debated divided the district into a more east/west pattern but was controversial because it divided some neighborhoods. Some students would attend elementary school and middle school together but would be split up in high school without realizing it, said Superintendent Andrew Alvarado.

“In 8th grade, we’re going to tell them, ‘You’re not going to Garza, you’re going to East Campus,” Alvarado said, “and you know what, that can be my kid’s best friend. If that happened to me, I’d be in here every single board meeting saying, ‘What the heck are you doing breaking up my kid’s friends?’ We’re not creating any culture, any pride, by doing this.”

Alvarado also pointed out that the map would disrupt traffic patterns because the Central East campus itself is inside the boundary for Garza High.

“We’re concerned that the intra-district transfers will actually will jump out of the roof,” Alvarado said. “I mean, if ... my high school kid was living right next door and I found out that they’d have to be going to Garza, I would put in for an intra-district transfer.”

Chann said that income disparity was more than halved, to 3.5%, in the rejected map, which he favored.

Justin Garza High School

Central Unified’s newest high school campus, its first in nearly a century, will open to freshman and sophomores in August 2021 on the corner of Grantland and Ashlan avenues.

The district’s current high school, Central High, is split into two campuses — Central East, which opened in 1996 and sits on Cornelia and Dakota avenues, and Central West, which opened in 1922 and sits on McKinley and Dickenson avenues. About 4,200 students are split between those two campuses.

After Garza High opens, boundaries will be split between Central East and Garza. Any student in the district wishing to attend Central West will be able to, administrators said.

Tuesday’s boundary decision does not change what middle or elementary school students attend.

Parents can request a transfer if they wish their children to go to a school outside their boundary, including the new Garza High, officials said.

Administrators expect 2,488 new housing units to go up in the district within the next five years, which will increase overall high school enrollment by 360 students.

School officials said they considered many factors to make the boundary adjustment, such as area population, traffic patterns, socio-economic demographics, and future growth.

Do Garza High boundaries favor rich families?

The board was scheduled to adopt boundaries at its Oct. 27 meeting but instead chose to hold one last town hall meeting after trustees became concerned about income inequities.

When trustees reconvened at Tuesday’s meeting, the vote for the north/south option did not initially pass because the board was split 3-3. Former Trustee Richard Atkins’ seat has been left vacant since he resigned after a controversial social media post in June.

Trustees signaled they wanted to push the vote yet again, but Alvarado jumped in, telling them that since new trustees are being seated next month, the item would likely be pushed to January or later, and 8th graders must start registering in the new year.

Alvarado also pushed for the north/south map because he said many parents had told him they bought houses in the northern area of the district because they knew a new high school was being built.

“This new high school conversation has been around for a long time,” he said. “(Parents) purchased homes there knowing that the track was going to be Liddell (Elementary School), Rio Vista (Middle School) and the new high school, eventually, when it was built.”

Chann, who did not like that the boundaries slightly favored the more affluent areas for the new school, pushed back.

“It’s just that we make certain assumptions about certain families, and we don’t make certain assumptions about other families, and even in our conversation here, that seems to come up a lot.”

This story was originally published November 11, 2020 at 5:00 AM.