Well, this is a little awkward, considering I essentially wrote an obituary for Fresno Unified field trips last week.

Apparently, I buried them a little too early.

On Thursday, Fresno Unified Superintendent Misty Her announced that the centralized field trips eliminated for this school year will return, with the Foundation for Fresno Unified Students stepping in to cover the cost.

That means students will once again have access to experiences that, only a week ago, appeared to be disappearing because of the district’s financial challenges.

Fresno Unified Students Are the Winners

Before getting into the questions I still have about how we reached this point, the most important part deserves to come first: This is genuinely good news for Fresno Unified students.

Parents spoke up, teachers pushed back, students made their feelings known, and thousands of people signed a petition asking the district to reconsider what it had done.

Eventually, Fresno Unified listened.

The point here is not that the district lost some public battle or that the teachers union gets to take a victory lap around downtown Fresno. Parents do not need to spike the football, and the superintendent does not need to be cast as some villain defeated by an angry mob armed with permission slips.

Nobody needed to lose.

The kids simply needed their field trips back, and for this school year, they got them. The kids won.

That does not mean we should pretend the road to this announcement makes complete sense.

Turns Out, We All Agree Field Trips Matter

There was one part of Her’s statement Thursday that immediately caught my attention because it sounded remarkably familiar.

“I never doubted what a field trip means to a child,” Her said.

She described how a school field trip could be the first time a child sees the ocean, steps onto a college campus, walks through a museum, attends a theater performance, or experiences something that previously existed only in a book.

I read that section and had pretty much one reaction: Great, because that was the entire point.

That is what parents were saying. That is what educators were saying. It was certainly what I was saying when I wrote about the cuts last week.

Field trips are not simply days when students get to escape their desks while teachers spend several hours counting heads and praying everyone makes it back onto the bus.

Field Trips Fill the Gaps for Some Children

For some children, these trips create experiences their families cannot easily recreate on a Saturday afternoon.

Not every parent has the money to take the family to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Not every parent can take a day off work for a college visit or load everyone into the car for a trip outside the Valley.

School can help close some of those gaps, which is why these experiences carry a little more weight than simply giving students something fun to do.

Her’s description Thursday captures that beautifully.

Which, admittedly, makes the original decision a little harder to understand.

If these experiences really can be a child’s first glimpse of the ocean or first walk across a college campus, then why did saving them require petitions, public frustration, union pressure, and a week of people demanding that Fresno Unified reconsider?

That is not me trying to be cute about it. It is the obvious question.

Fresno Unified Heard the Community, Eventually

There is also a part of Her’s announcement that deserves credit because accountability only means something if we acknowledge it when someone actually accepts some.

Her said families should not have learned about the change the way they did, after the school year had already started in August.

“That did not happen in the way it should have, and for that, I take responsibility,” she said.

I appreciate that.

Her also announced Fresno Unified will establish a Community Budget Advisory Group made up of parents, teachers, school employees, principals, students, and community leaders.

Members will get to look at the district’s actual budget, learn more about how school funding works, and help weigh some of the difficult decisions Fresno Unified says are coming as enrollment and average daily attendance continue declining.

That seems like exactly the type of conversation families probably should have been part of before this whole field trip mess exploded.

I suppose discovering that community engagement is useful after the community revolts is still technically discovering that community engagement is useful.

Progress is progress.

Her Stands By Broader Budget Decisions

Her also made clear that she stands by the broader budget decisions Fresno Unified made and that the financial pressures facing the district have not suddenly vanished because people were upset about field trips.

That is an important distinction.

Fresno Unified can face legitimate budget problems while the public still believes one particular budget decision was wrong. Those two things can exist at the same time.

The district does not have to be financially carefree for parents to question why this program was the place to save money, particularly when critics have pointed to Fresno Unified’s large reserve as evidence that other options deserved consideration.

The good news is that another option was ultimately found.

The Foundation for Fresno Unified Students stepped forward and will pay for the centralized field trips that were eliminated.

Problem solved … at least for now.

The Kids Won ‘This School Year’

There are three words in Her’s announcement that I do not think should be overlooked: “this school year.”

The Foundation is restoring the centralized field trips for this school year, while Her also warned that its generosity does not erase Fresno Unified’s long-term financial problems.

That means Thursday’s announcement answers the immediate question without fully answering the bigger one.

What happens next year?

I would really rather not write another obituary in August.

If Fresno Unified believes these field trips can expose children to places, careers, and experiences they may otherwise never encounter, then they deserve to be treated as more than something that survives only when the community becomes angry enough to save them.

Her said that schools have always funded field trips in variety of ways, but the centralized district program is the guarantee the students deserve.

You Cannot Keep Rebuilding Guardrails

I feel that they failed their “guardrail” of not proposing major decisions to the Board without having a community engagement plan.

How many guardrails must be driven through before the road is too dangerous to drive?

But, the new budget advisory group could possibly prevent this from happening again.

Maybe the most useful thing to come from this controversy, beyond the return of the trips themselves, is that Fresno Unified has now created a mechanism to bring parents, students, and educators into these conversations before decisions are announced instead of after everyone starts asking what happened.

That would be a meaningful change.

For now, however, I am perfectly happy to admit I buried the field trips too early. Which, I do not regret.

This Isn’t About Winners or Losers, It Is Only About the Kids

Nobody needed to be humiliated here.

Fresno Unified did not need to lose and the teachers union did not need to defeat anyone.

Parents did not need some ceremonial acknowledgment that they had forced the district to surrender.

The adults simply needed to figure out a way to preserve something that everyone now seems to agree matters. They did.

The buses get to roll again, students get those experiences back and, at least this time around, the kids won.

About the Author

Anthony W. Haddad is a Fresno-based reporter and columnist best known for the award-winning Millennial View column series. He covers a wide range of topics, from pressing local issues and community concerns to the everyday challenges and experiences facing millennials today.

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