Claudia Cazares believes that as a Fresno Unified trustee, her main priority is to make decisions based on comprehensive information.
She spoke with The Fresno Bee about being criticized for supporting an internal search for a superintendent in April and then switching after internalizing feedback from the public.
“A post one of the (community) members made (said) that I’ve been slow to make decisions,” she said. “To you, it means slow to make decisions; to me, it means I wait to have the correct information; I discussed the potential options with my school representative, my principals, my parents, my students. To me, that’s an informed decision to make and not that acts out of public pressure.”
Representing the Hoover area, Cazares has served on the board for eight years and is one of the trustees who actively asks questions during board meetings, which she attributes to her 24 years working in the public sector. Her career has centered around housing and community development. She has worked for Fresno government, city and county, Granville Homes and, in recent years, as a management analyst for the City of Clovis’ affordable housing program.
She said her day job brings a good balance to the board. Cazares said she’s familiar with the process, knows what questions to ask, and she is “very open and quick and adept at asking the questions,” especially when large contracts appear on the consent calendar.
“There’s transparency involved that I promised I would do eight years ago and I continue to do that, ensuring that our public and our trustees have the best information available,” she said.
Cazares was first elected to the board in 2016, and served as the board president in 2019.
For Fresno Unified’s school board races, The Bee sat down with each candidate to discuss their experience and priorities. Here are five questions we asked Cazares. Her answers were edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been a trustee for eight years. What gains have you seen?
Our goals have always been to ensure that our students are given the best tools to prioritize learning, and provided an opportunity to become really good college students or profession-ready adults.
I would continue adding our CTE courses. One of my favorite projects on our list is our agricultural department. We have a large population of students whose parents are farm workers, but they probably have never set foot on a farm themselves.
We’ve also been adding dual enrollment courses throughout all of our high schools, and we will continue to do that with our partnership with Fresno City College and Fresno State. I just got an invitation this weekend that there are two online dual enrollment courses available to high schoolers. My son is in 10th grade, and I’m getting ready to make sure he registers for the class.
Along with that, just ensure that our children are advancing in their test scores. We have two goals set by our interim superintendent, so we want to be able to push that as much as possible and continue to provide the daily necessities for our kids.
Lowering class sizes, we’ve gone to lower class sizes consistently over the last eight years, and we’ll continue to do that. We’ve added nurses and psychologists to all of our schools. I’d love to be able to add additional psychologists. That’s a lot we’ve done and a lot to be done.
People are mostly concerned about academic achievement and superintendent search. What does it mean to the board?
We definitely keep an eye on the release from the superintendent’s office, the testing and evaluations. We’re hoping that’ll show us that our investment and our changes have brought good results. If not, we need to pivot into something else that works better. But if you consider that our bonds have been successfully passed over the last several years, and we recently sold bonds out in the market to finance the last few of our projects. We realized $7 million in interest payment savings. That means that there are a whole world of investors out in the investment world looking to invest in Fresno Unified because they know we are trustworthy, that our board is balanced and we make wise decisions, and that our budget is balanced.
What are your priorities for the Hoover region?
I’ve lived here for 24 years now. I love my region. It was a good mix of young families and established residents who moved into the neighborhood when it was first built, and they lived here and wouldn’t move anywhere else. I love seeing the whole mix of everybody. So we’re interested in making sure that over the next four years, we grow our junior high and high schools to be more attractive to our students. We want to grow our programs and make them stronger so that our kids stay here and go to their local schools.
You were supportive of the superintendent’s internal search, and then you announced on Facebook that you switched to an external search.
We have had several sessions for feedback from our parents, and I have talked to several parents in my region and students as well. Initially, the support was for us to move forward with interim appointments while we figure out what to do. That was discussed in our meeting based on the community feedback provided to board trustees. Again, we made our decision based on the information provided to us. When the community came out in full force and said, “That’s not actually what we had said, we were misunderstood or misquoted,” then, given the new information I had, I made a new decision. It wasn’t a difficult change for me to make based on the information provided.
Why does the teachers union not support you this year? What did they want from you?
I still very much appreciate the support given to me over the last eight years, and I would have loved to have their support this year. When I first started, they just wanted to make sure that I was listening to them, that I understood the plight of the teachers, that I was empathetic towards their needs. I have always been, and will continue to be, very open to listening to teachers. I will do my best to fix whatever concerns they may have.
They have never demanded anything from me over the last seven years, it was a little bit different this last time (with contract negotiations), and I made my decisions over the last year based on the information that was available to me, the questions that I asked, the feedback from my parents and my students. And apparently, that didn’t sit well.
It impacted me personally because I care a lot about our teachers. They are a very important part of my everyday work. I had told the Teachers Association that they could endorse me and not give me funding, and I would pay for my campaign myself. That’s how much I want to continue serving the district.
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