Fresno Unified board renews $80,000 coaching contract on governance, leadership
The Fresno Unified school board approved an $80,000 expenditure to renew its board leadership coaching contract for the next two years.
At Wednesday’s board meeting, the board unanimously approved the contract renewal with the Council of the Great City Schools for school board governance consulting services.
The Council of the Great City Schools is a nonprofit providing guidance to member districts on policy advocacy, boosting academic performance, improving professional development, and strengthening leadership and governance.
The governance coaching was introduced to the Fresno Unified board in the spring of 2024, at a time when the board experienced infighting over the superintendent search process. For the first two years of coaching services, the initial contract amount was $100,000.
Board President Veva Islas said she believes renewing the coaching firm’s contract is a good investment.
“We’ve learned a lot. We have established hard goals, and we’re monitoring them,” Islas said. “I would say that I think we’re well on our way in implementing those goals and guardrails, and monitoring our progress, all of that. I think there are still opportunities to learn.”
With the help of the coaching over the last two years, the Fresno Unified board refocused its goals toward student outcomes to help determine how the board prioritizes the allocation of funding and other limited resources.
This shift has driven decisions by the board that haven’t always been popular. Last year, the board eliminated a program that funded an additional 30 minutes of daily instruction at 41 schools amid opposition from the teachers union because the program had delivered mixed academic results, according to the district.
In order to address the district’s longstanding challenges in sustaining student achievement, Fresno Unified board established four ambitious goals in January 2025. The goals aim to boost early literacy, raise test scores, and improve career and college readiness by 2030.
Since then, the board has received updates from Superintendent Misty Her, as well as school principals and teachers, to monitor progress on the goals.
Each quarter, the board conducts a self-evaluation of its governance effectiveness. At this week’s board meeting, trustees rated their performance for January through March at 53 points out of 100.
A key criterion is the amount of time the board spends in public meetings discussing improving student achievement, said chief of staff Ambra O’Connor, who oversees the board’s meeting minutes.
The coach explained to the Fresno Unified trustees at the 2024 summer retreat that an effective board allocates time and energy based on priorities.
“If you say the children are the most important reason we’re here, you’d think we spend half of our time talking about what is working in reality for children,” AJ Crabill, consultant from Council of the Great City Schools, told The Bee in 2024. “Our coaching is, if that’s really a priority for you, spend at least half of your time doing that.”
In the first quarter of 2026, Fresno Unified board spent 249 meeting minutes, equivalent to 20% of the time, on hearing presentations and discussing improving student outcomes, according to records from the district.
Islas said she is unable to estimate how much longer the board will need to continue receiving the coaching services.
“You heard tonight that we did not score ourselves as mastering in a lot of the areas,” Islas told The Bee after Wednesday’s meeting. “When we get to that mastery level, I think that we can say in confidence that we’ve learned everything that we can learn from the consultants, and we may not have a need for them anymore at that time.”
