Fresno Unified School District: Fresno Unified Continues To Bargain In Good Faith During The Pandemic

Press release from the Fresno Unified School District:

2021-10-28

Fresno Unified School District has been collaboratively working toward ongoing solutions to ensure adequate teacher preparation time without reducing instructional minutes for our students and without disrupting schedules for families. The proposals received from Fresno Teachers Association at current, all include reducing instructional minutes for students and revising school schedules during the last 30 days of the semester. The District is trying to determine a solution that does not reduce instructional minutes for students, disrupt schedules for families, and does not shift any additional burden to site leaders and/or classified staff.

We are Fresno Unified, and as Fresno Unified, our students, staff, and families are entitled to and deserve to have the same instructional supports that all students, staff and families have across our community. Our students deserve their instructional time, our families deserve reliability and consistency, and our teachers deserve their prep time.

Our District leadership team has been working in space with Fresno Teachers Association (FTA) leadership regularly and have already addressed at least eight of the items on FTA’s original 10point plan. That original 10-point plan did not include the current issue of teacher prep time, which was brought to the district less than one month ago. Specific steps the District has taken since the beginning of the current school year include:

In addition, Fresno Unified has:

Fresno Unified students lost 28% of all instructional time during the 20-21 school year, compared to pre-pandemic minutes. Research has demonstrated that students in historically underserved groups and communities are experiencing more ‘learning lag’ as a result of COVID school closures than their peers. Our families and parents have struggled economically and emotionally throughout this pandemic and have shouldered much burden during the more than one school year that students were in distance learning. Knowing this, the District is unwilling to compromise student’s instructional minutes with their teachers or change and disrupt schedules of families with five weeks left in the semester.  

District Statement Press ReleaseDownload

This press release was produced by the Fresno Unified School District. The views expressed here are the author’s own.