Cesar Chavez Junior High School will become Louie Arrollo Junior High School following Thursday evening’s unanimous vote of the Ceres Unified School District Board of Trustees.

“It’s actually quite an honor,” said Arrollo, who now lives in Samaritan Village in Hughson. “I didn’t have any idea they would do that but they did it so I’m really thrilled about it.”

Arrollo said the district is planning some sort of ceremony prior to the school opening.

The honor comes just months after Arrollo was honored by the Ceres Chamber of Commerce’s Lifetime Achievement Award in January.

Arrollo said he wants the spelling of L-o-u-i-e on the school name rather than his birth name of Louis.

“Louis is on the birth certificate but I’ve never went by Louis.”

The district decided to rename the school after the fallout of the news about the late farmworkers union leader being involved in multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

In selecting the name of the former Ceres mayor, the board turned down two other name finalists – that of astronaut Jose Hernandez and Eastgate, the area of Ceres where the school is located.

On May 7 the CUSD Board of Trustees voted to remove Chavez’s name from the school in light of the controversies surrounding his alleged sexual misconduct.

The district began collecting names from the community and an ad hoc committee comprised of parents/guardians, students, employees, community members, and Board members met on May 30 to review the recommendations.

The committee narrowed the list of 53 eligible recommendations to three finalists for the Board’s consideration. The names for Arrollo and Hernandez received tied votes among the ad hoc committee.

Arrollo has served Ceres for decades, starting after he moved to Ceres with his family in 1957. He attended Ceres High School, joined the Army where he was a military police officer before returning home to work loading boxes of harvested peaches onto trailers. In 1963, he became the Ceres Police Department’s first Hispanic officer, rising through the ranks over the next 21 years to retire as police commander in 1984.

Arrollo taught law enforcement courses at Ceres High School, earned his master’s degree, and served more than a decade as an administrator in charge of discipline. He retired from education in 2001.

Parallel to his work in schools, Arrollo was elected to the Ceres City Council in 1985 and later served two non-consecutive terms as mayor. Under his leadership the city built the Smyrna Park skate park, launched the Concerts in the Park, and adoption of the city motto, “Together We Achieve.”

In 2026, the Ceres Chamber of Commerce recognized Arrollo with its Citizen of the Year/Lifetime Achievement Award for his decades of service that helped shape the Ceres community. Reflecting on the city he calls “one of the greatest in the Central Valley.”

Arrollo said, “Ceres has been good to me, mainly because of the people who live in Ceres.”

A number of school districts have removed Chavez’s name after UFW labor union legend Dolores Huerta revealed that the late farm labor union founder sexually assaulted her and twice impregnated her. Huerta made the shocking claim after the New York Times published the claims of former United Farm Workers (UFW) workers Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas who claim they were sexually abused by Chavez as teens. Both told the Times that they remained silent for decades for fear of “tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement, his image on school murals and his birthday a state holiday in California.”

Huerta publicly revealed that she was sexually abused by Chavez, a secret she kept for 60 years to protect the farmworker movement. She gave up his alleged two children to adoptive families.

Huerta said the formerly revered UFW founder Chavez sexually abused her as a young woman and decided to speak out after Murguia and Rojas told the Times that Chavez sexually abused them over a five-year period in the 1970s, beginning when they were 12 and 13. When asked why she didn’t expose Chavez while he was living, Huerta said she “believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”

On Instagram Huerta wrote: “As a young mother in the 1960s, I experienced two separate sexual encounters with Cesar. The first time I was manipulated and pressured into having sex with him, and I didn’t feel I could say no because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the movement I had already devoted years of my life to. The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.

“I had experienced abuse and sexual violence before, and I convinced myself these were incidents that I had to endure alone and in secret. Both sexual encounters with Cesar led to pregnancies. I chose to keep my pregnancies secret and, after the children were born, I arranged for them to be raised by other families that could give them stable lives.”