Why is it taking Fresno Unified more than a year to hire a superintendent? What we know
Last January, Bob Nelson announced his plans to retire as superintendent of the Fresno Unified School District at the end of the 2023-24 school year.
One year after that announcement, California’s third-largest school district remains without a permanent leader.
The next Fresno Unified superintendent will lead a massive school system of 15,700 employees and more than 68,000 students. They will be tasked with finding solutions to seemingly endemic challenges, from declining enrollment to pandemic learning loss and yawning gaps in student achievement.
Why has it taken this for the district’s school board to find Fresno Unified’s next superintendent? Here’s what we know.
How did the school board respond to Nelson’s retirement?
Following Nelson’s Jan. 22, 2024 retirement announcement, Fresno Unified soon began a superintendent search by holding a series of community listening sessions and spending $40,000 to hire a search firm, Leadership Associates.
In March, the board decided on a 4-3 vote in a closed-door meeting to limit its superintendent search to internal applicants. This decision led former board President Susan Wittrup to hold a press conference to petition for a broader search. More than 100 parents and community members protested at the district’s downtown headquarters on the eve of the scheduled internal interviews, demanding transparency in the search process. The board canceled the interviews.
That same night, the headhunter withdrew from Fresno Unified, citing the search was “compromised.”
The board appointed Deputy Superintendent Misty Her as interim superintendent last May, and vowed to restart its search starting with outside candidates.
But there’s been little actual progress on the superintendent search since then. The board hired a coach to address frequent infighting among board members.
“After the initial news, it was important for the board to slow down and get crystal clear on the goals for the district based on the voices of their constituents,” district spokesperson Nikki Henry said in an email. “That is the important work they are doing now. The intentional timeline they’ve now set will ensure they are hiring the right permanent superintendent who can deliver on those specific goals.”
What’s the latest hiring timeline?
The board’s updated timeline says trustees will select a search firm in February, as well as approve the superintendent job description and develop interview questions and rubrics. The job description will be posted in March and interviews will be conducted in April. The board plans to hire a superintendent in May.
Why is Fresno Unified finding it so difficult to hire a superintendent?
Various reasons have led to the hiring impasse.
One major reason is the fact that the board missed the hiring window last spring, Michelle Asadoorian, a former Fresno Unified trustee, told The Bee.
“It is harder to find the right candidate because contracts usually start and end the same as the academic year,” said Asadoorian.
David Cash, a headhunter from the Education Leadership Services consulting firm, said the position is getting tougher to fill nowadays, with an older generation of superintendents retiring and a younger generation of potential leaders who may not have reached the level of experience that school districts want to see. Cash has 15 years of superintendent experience, serving districts like Claremont, Santa Barbara, and Clovis.
Being a superintendent may not also be as alluring as it once was, as the job increasingly involves dealing with complex political situations while catering to the diverse needs of students, staff and interest groups.
“Not a lot of people apply to be superintendents these days, it’s highly political in nature,” said Cash. “It used to be a very different job, there’s not a lot of people interested in the job as they used to be 10 or 15 years ago.”
There are currently about two dozen school districts across California seeking superintendents or assistant superintendents with publicly available job postings, including large districts such as Sacramento City Unified School District. The nearby Merced City School District, which serves over 12,000 students, spent over a year to find a superintendent.
Some school districts have historically found stability at the top by hiring from within. Long Beach Unified, the state’s fourth-largest district, has a long history of grooming internal candidates to take over the top job. For instance, Long Beach Unified took just three months to hire a replacement internally after its longtime superintendent retired in 2020.
Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district with more than 565,000 students, held a national search in 2021 and recruited the nationally renowned leader of Miami-Dade Public Schools, Alberto Carvalho, during an eight-month search.
Considering the costs and efficiencies, it’s common for the district to consider internal candidates first, or solely, especially when the board is satisfied with the direction the district is going, Cash said.
However, Fresno Unified has long been criticized for its sluggishness in improving student achievement. The district data shows that in the fall semester’s i-Ready diagnostic assessments, 18.3% and 10.4% of students were at or above grade level in English language arts and math.
How did Fresno Unified hire its previous superintendents?
Both Nelson and his predecessor, Michael Hanson, were already working in the district as administrators prior to taking on the role of superintendent, though Hanson was relatively a newcomer when he took over.
Hanson was hired as a deputy superintendent in April 2005 under a plan that would make him the leader in 14 months. Before joining Fresno Unified, Hanson worked in Sacramento and New York. The board ultimately skipped the audition period and gave him the permanent role the same year to save Fresno Unified from bankruptcy.
After leading the district for nearly 12 years, Hanson was fired in January 2017, just before his scheduled stepping down in June because of a federal investigation into the district’s construction contracts – though he said the controversy did not influence his decision.
Nelson, who worked for the district for more than 20 years and was once Hanson’s chief of staff, was named interim and eventually scored the full-time role in September 2017 from a pool of 25 candidates nationwide.
This story was originally published January 9, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
