The Fresno Unified School Board will be able to accommodate bigger audiences for board meetings after a $4.6 million remodeling of the district’s downtown Education Center is completed this fall.

It’s the first major overhaul since the district purchased the building in the 1970s, Andrew Corral, a Darden Architects principal who is the project’s lead architect, told GV Wire on Monday.

“It’s going to help the district capture a lot of space that was previously underutilized, especially in the first floor where the original post office was,” he said.

But for the next couple of months, starting with Wednesday’s board meeting, the trustees will conduct meetings off-site at the Nutrition Center on Brawley Avenue in northwest Fresno.

Monumental Moderne Style of Architecture

The three-story cream-colored building at the corner of M and Tulare streets in downtown Fresno began its life as a federal building that housed what was then the city’s main downtown post office on the first floor, a courtroom on the second floor, and other federal offices.

Even after the school district purchased the building, the small post office remained in operation until it was closed in 2018.

The building, which is on the Local Register of Historic Places, was designed in the Monumental Moderne style of architecture by Lewis A. Simon & William Dewey Foster, Architects, according to the local register.

The building opened in 1939 as a Works Progress Administration federal project, Corral said.

Many such projects included artwork specific to the buildings. The WPA artwork in the FUSD headquarters will be retained and incorporated in the remodeling project, he said.

“There’s some tile-kind of murals that are there, and there are some paintings, I believe, in the elevator lobby that are still being maintained,” he said. “For what our design is, kind of modernizing it, while still highlighting the beauty of the original design, so there are certain areas where we are keeping that original tile, the tile work. Because it’s amazing. I can’t believe they were able to do that that long ago and so well, and I can barely get people to do bathrooms correctly at this point. The craftsmanship is just amazing.”

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Better Access for Employees, Public

The first floor is being reconfigured to provide easier access for employees to departments such as payroll and for the public to meet with Constituent Services staffers, Corral said.

The two entrances on the Tulare Street side that have been closed for security reasons will be reopened, and the M Street entrance with the elevator lobby for access to the second-floor board room also will remain open, Corral said.

“The goal on the first floor was to provide streamlined access for both the public and the district employees. … What we’re going to do now is provide accessible access to these two (Tulare Street) entrances, one that will be for district employees to give them a direct access to employee services, like payroll. And then, the district has moved departments like Constituent Services down to the first floor to make it a lot easier for the public to access those services. So that is going to be in the first floor. That’s going to have its own lobby and entrance that serves just Constituent Services, so the public can come directly into that space and not have to go through an elevator lobby, essentially which is what they’re doing now.”

The first floor’s redesign also includes building four small conference rooms that departments can use for small group meetings or as spaces for confidential sessions, Corral said.

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Brand-New Board Room

The former second-floor courtroom was turned into the board meeting room decades ago when the school district purchased the building. The sloping baffled ceiling has been removed, revealing a high ceiling that reaches up to the third floor, Corral said.

The dais will remain at the north end of the room but will be further back. The area next to it where the audio-visual technicians worked is moving to the south end of the room, near the entrance, he said. The remodeling includes an upgrade of the AV systems that will allow technicians to pretty much run it from a laptop, he said.

The new configuration will allow for more seating — 115 instead of 100 — with additional seating and standing room in the lobby area and in the ground floor lobby area for overflow crowds. Altogether, the remodeling will seat an additional 105 people, Corral said.

In the past, overflow audiences could only listen to the meeting on speakers in the second-floor lobby. But now the first and second floor lobbies, as well as the board room, will have video walls with livestreams of the meetings, Corral said.

Money for the project is coming from the district’s general fund, said Angelo Racca, project manager in the district’s facilities department.

Delays Slowed the Project

The goal had been to complete it before the first of board meeting of the new school year on Wednesday, but the contractor now expects to have it wrapped up by mid-to-late October, Corral said.

Why the delay? “Unfortunately, what comes along with all buildings is there are all kinds of unknowns that happen,” he said. “When we started demoing the board room, there were some things that came up that we needed to address. And, so it kind of set us back a little bit.”

Not surprising for an 85-year-old building, one of the things that needed addressing was the careful removal of asbestos. It’s a common fireproofing building material in older buildings that was later recognized as a hazardous material that causes diseases such as lung cancer and mesothelioma. So its removal has to be done carefully.