Why did Fresno Unified spend 15 months, $75K to pick an insider as superintendent?
For the past 15 months, Fresno Unified board has been searching across the country for a permanent superintendent, but their eventual choice was right under their noses.
Despite opposition from the teachers union and Trustee Susan Wittrup — the latter argued the district needed an outsider to transform a failing culture — the school board on Wednesday officially removed Misty Her’s interim tag, making her Fresno Unified’s first female leader.
After a long and tumultuous search, which cost the district $75,000, the board’s selection has left some people wondering: Why did trustees choose an insider?
“We keep talking about hiring people home-grown, hiring people who are from the Central Valley. This was the perfect opportunity for us. I’m following through with that promise to the community,” said Trustee Keshia Thomas.
The six board members who voted for Her defended their pick and the search process. They pointed to her three decades of experience in Fresno Unified as a teacher and administrator, her knowledge of the community and her commitment to improving the students’ achievement.
“She was best oriented to what the district needed. She was the best in terms of knowing what exactly to do,” said Trustee Veva Islas, the board’s clerk. “She came across with this very genuine, really expressive love that she had for this community and for our children.”
Islas said that although improvements could be made to the search process, the board made the hire based on the feedback collected from the community.
“We heard from our families and students that they were really wanting to see somebody who mirrored the struggles they have encountered, themselves,” said Trustee Claudia Cazares. ”Misty has worked from the ground up at our schools, and the history she has with our curriculum and our initiatives. Given all that, she was the most qualified candidate we had on our interview.”
It’s unclear how many other internal candidates interviewed for the job. Wittrup said at a press conference last week that the district received roughly 25 applications and the board interviewed four finalists.
The board reportedly interviewed at least three outside candidates who lead large, urban school districts in other states. This included a former national superintendent of the year and the former leader of the Madera Unified district, according to GV Wire, a local outlet owned by developer Darius Assemi.
Fresno Unified search process drew criticism
Complaints about the lack of transparency in the search process began as early as April 2024 when the board narrowly decided to conduct closed-door interviews with district employees only. Wittrup, the board president at the time, and dozens of community members criticized the move and called for a national search.
Valerie Davis, the current board president, said the board’s intentions were misunderstood. The plan was to interview internal candidates first, before conducting a broader search, she told The Bee.
Last month, a week before the board’s superintendent vote, GV Wire obtained the names of four finalists who interviewed with the board, and reported that a “community advisory panel” participated in the interviews but was only allowed to ask scripted questions.
Davis said forming an advisory panel was part of the search process coordinated by the headhunter firm. Under the guidance of the firm, each board member provided the name of a community member who lives in the region represented by the trustee.
There was no direct communication between the board and the panel, Davis said. She also said she doesn’t know who the other six panel members were.
Ben Johnson II, a consultant from the search firm, said the panel served as an additional opportunity to gain insight from various members of the community. They provided the board a consensus feedback on the candidates’ strengths without ranking them.
Johnson declined to share the names of the panel members and how they were chosen.
“Their role is advisory, not to tell the board who or who not to hire,” Johnson told The Bee before trustees announced their pick. “Each of the panel members signed confidentiality agreements. Someone clearly violated their commitment to respect confidentiality.”
Fresno Unified’s spokesperson Nikki Henry defended the interview process, saying it was critical to ensuring the strongest possible candidate pool.
“Many high-level leaders might not have applied if there had been a public interview process prior to finalist selection, given the potential risk to their current roles, teams, and communities,” Henry wrote in an emailed reply. “Protecting candidates’ privacy safeguards both their current employment and the integrity of the search process.”
Fresno Unified declined The Bee’s California Public Records Act request for the resumes of superintendent candidates who interviewed with the board and the names of members in the advisory panel.
Wittrup, who opposed Her’s hiring, criticized the district’s “entrenched culture of failure” and said the board’s decision as a sign of maintaining the “status quo” and lack of leadership.
Wittrup said she had talked to qualified individuals who have experience with turning failing districts around operationally and academically, and the board “missed out on an incredible opportunity” to recruit the best leader.
“I don’t think that she has the experience that other qualified candidates have, that’s the difference. It’s not a personality thing, it’s not a work ethic thing. There are some people who have excellent experience and have excellent results in other large urban school districts,” Wittrup said.
Wittrup declined to answer how other finalists planned to close Fresno Unified’s achievement gap, saying she couldn’t talk about the interviews under the non-disclosure agreement.
Davis said she values Her’s experience and dedication, and the district is on the right trajectory under Her’s interim leadership.
“The experience that they (the other candidates) had doesn’t match 70,000 children,” Davis said. “You can have experience in Clovis, Central, Sanger, but it doesn’t match the magnitude and the intensity and the complexity of Fresno.”
Davis said the region she represents, Sunnyside, has over 16,000 kids, which is the student population of a normal-sized school district.
“It hardly matches apples and oranges and I’m not going to bring anybody here to drown,” she said. “I’m not going to do that to my community. I’m not going to do that to my children. We don’t have two years for them to scale up.”
Fresno Unified’s future under Her’s leadership
Most board members spoke highly of Her’s involvement as interim superintendent in helping the board develop its long-term goals.
“The biggest thing that’s happened for us in this past year is we’ve collectively committed to this framework, which has really seen results in a lot of urban districts around the country,” Trustee Andy Levine said. “As an interim, she’s fully embraced that. It’s been a really powerful experience to embark on that together.”
In Her’s first 100 days as an interim last summer, she learned from listening sessions that the district had set up so many goals that educators and students felt overwhelmed and directionless. She created two interim goals of making double-digit gains to close the academic gap and improving customer service.
Earlier this spring, Her and the school board introduced four goals aimed at raising early student literacy and the percentage of graduates deemed college- and career-ready.
“I think they’re very ambitious goals, and every goal has a metric to it, and every goal has an interim goal with it,” Her said. “The superintendent owns the interim goals, and now I start cascading it down to my executive cabinet. We have to come up with the initiatives that are going to feed into those and then go back to the school sites.”
The board will measure Her’s performance based on the four goals, said Levine.
“We will hold her accountable in the annual review process and all along the way,” he said. “She knows that’s what we’re holding her accountable to, and that’s what I would expect from her and I know that the community will hold us trustees accountable.”
State standardized test results show that only 35% and 25% of Fresno Unified students met the grade-level standards in English and math in 2024.
Though the board didn’t list a specific goal for math test scores, it doesn’t mean that math is left out, Her said.
“Literacy is a big component of math. If you think about where a lot of our students struggle in math, it’s in the performance task, it’s in the problem solving. The reason why they struggle so much with that is because they can’t read the problems,” Her said.
Her is confident that the goals are going to help the district to focus rather than be torn in different directions.
The real difficulty, however, is student attendance. Her admits that Fresno Unified hasn’t figured out how to reduce chronic absenteeism, post-COVID.
Prior to the pandemic, the district maintained a 94.5% of average daily attendance. The number currently stands at 91.6%, a slight increase from 91.3% at this time last year.
“We have not bounced back attendance-wise. I know we’re not the only district, but it’s concerning for me.” she said. “We have exhausted a lot of resources. We’ve gone out to do home visits, and recently, with all the immigration enforcement, when we go out to do home visits, families just simply are not there.”
School districts’ daily average attendance is tied to the state funding in California. Due to the lack of new housing developments, the possibility for Fresno Unified to increase student enrollment is constrained.
“I think the single greatest factor is that we have to give our families reasons to come to Fresno Unified,” she said.
She said the district’s transfer trends show that families come to Fresno Unified for its programs.
“I want to up it even more that they’re not just here for our programs, but they’re here for the experience,” Her said.
“That’s why customer service is so important, because if you go into a school district and you experience love, that you’re cared for, you’re respected, you see yourself in the walls, in the school, in the building, then you want to be in that school district.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated.
This story was originally published May 2, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
