FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — With a critical Fresno City Council vote just days away, Fresno Unified leaders are sounding the alarm, saying the proposed Southeast Development Area (SEDA) could cause a sharp decline in enrollment.
“My message to anybody out there that’s listening is to just consider Fresno Unified as well. Consider the students of Fresno Unified,” pleaded deputy superintendent Ben Drati.
Mayor Jerry Dyer joined KMJ’s Ray Appleton show on Tuesday to respond.
Listen to the report by KMJ’s Liz Kern.
Mayor Jerry Dyer believes the concerns are overblown and that the plan is needed to bring affordable housing and lucrative businesses to the city.
“Fresno has lost its competitive edge in terms of being able to compete against cities like Visalia,” the Mayor said, “to be able to put in flexible research and development to be able to attract advanced manufacturing to an area.”
The city plans to start small, opening up only the southern portion of SEDA near Jensen and North.
The ultimate plan would see this new development stretch out as far as Temperance, where it would meet Clovis Unified’s $500 million Terry Bradley Education Center.
Drati fears this will shift wealthy and middle-class families out of Fresno Unified and into Clovis Unified, similar to when Clovis West opened.
“A lot of students that would have gone to Hoover and Bullard automatically went to Clovis West, and that’s a separate district for Fresno Unified,” he said. “We did lose student population from there. It would do exactly that. We have a proof of concept already.”
Fresno Teachers’ Association President Manuel Bonilla sent us a statement against the project, writing,
“SEDA is a vote against Fresno Unified students and educators. By pulling enrollment and funding out of neighborhood schools it leads to larger class sizes, cuts to arts and career-technical education programs, fewer counselors and support staff, teacher layoffs, and ultimately school closures. That kind of instability hurts students first and puts educators in an impossible position of doing more with less.”
“I completely understand what happened in the past in our distant, distant history was wrong. The fact was, we allowed for urban sprawl,” Dyer said.
The mayor says developers, not taxpayers, will pay for the development.
The Fresno City Council will vote on the matter this Thursday.
