For the fifth consecutive year, the Ceres Unified School District continues to see a continual decline in enrollment, Supt. Amy Peterman reported during a one-hour joint meeting of her School Board and the Ceres City Council.

Including preschool, special education students, Whitmore Charter School and the continuation school, CUSD has 13,593 students, of which 28 percent are English learners, 84 percent on free and reduced lunch, and 81 percent are Hispanic and 10 percent white.

CUSD has expanded its dual immersion programs, to now include Mae Hensley Junior High School. 

The two elected bodies met Thursday evening inside the CUSD Board room to exchange information about current issues.

City Manager Doug Dunford, who is in his last week on the job, shared that the city is facing “tumultuous times,” dealing with a structural deficit and “taking the steps necessary to overcome that.”

Economic Development Director Julian Aguirre shared about the developments of new businesses at the abandoned Walmart building which will include Vallarta Super Market, and Ross Dress for Less, Dutch Bros and Take Five Oil Change. A possible new restaurant is being explored as well.

At Roeding and Mitchell roads the city expects a gas station with a Starbucks coming.

On Ceres’ west side, a Mister Car Wash is being constructed next to the new Dutch Bros on Whitmore and two additional businesses are also coming into a strip mall.

“We’re gonna have a huge impact of growth in the end of summer,” said Aguirre.

The abandoned 99 Cents Store space will become a Burlington Coat Factory, he confirmed.

Aguirre also announced that an El Pollo Loco will be setting up shop in the abandoned KFC building at Hatch and Mitchell.

“We are working diligently to get some housing development into the city of Ceres, with the market rate that it is very, very difficult, but we are looking and searching and striving.”

With West Landing there is the potential for Ceres to see development of 4,000 housing units.

Excluding West Landing – which cannot develop until infrastructure is in place – existing projects could see close to 603 new residential units consisting of small apartment complex and multifamily units.

CUSD Assistant Superintendent of Business Services Dr. Kristi Britton explained that an influx of new students is desirable but funding for new school facilities remains an issue to be resolved. She stated that when development occurs, new school facilities are funded by developer fees and another third from state matching funds. The district is pursuing a mitigation agreement with the lead landowners in the Copper Trails master plan area to have the shortfall of a third to be passed onto homebuyers. The district has a mitigation agreement in place for the West Landing project and Whitmore Ranch which has yet to develop. 

“We’ve made some progress,” said Britton. “We actually are utilizing a previous mitigation agreement as our starting point for the two of us to kind of come together, but at this point in time, we’ve not yet reached an agreement. And it’ll be very important for this school district that this is not approved until that mitigation agreement has been reached. We are close. But as of tonight, they still don’t have an agreement that both sides have come to an agreement on.” 

The development of Copper Trails will necessitate opening up Hanline Elementary School as an elementary campus. Currently 10 classrooms on the Hanline campus are being used as classrooms for students of the adjacent Central Valley High School campus. That means Central Valley High will need to build some classrooms, she said.

The council may be approving Copper Trails on Monday, April 13. LAFCO would then have to consider and approve the annexation to the city in approximately three months.

Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services Dr. Paul Rutishauser spoke about the California School Dashboard which evaluates how schools are performing academically and considering improvement. He showed the results from 2025 which show Ceres was in the “yellow” category or “right in the middle for English language arts and math and in green for English learner progress and college career readiness,” said Rutishauser. CUSD improved in those four areas.

CUSD is doing well in its graduation rates and in the “green” category.

Ceres continues to struggle with chronic absenteeism, defined as students missing 10 percent of the school year, and finds itself in the “orange.”

“We don’t like seeing that in orange,” said Rutishauser. “That’s because chronic absenteeism increased by a half a percent. And you obviously don’t want more students to be chronically absent. We did a lot of work early. I do want to tell you that our status there, that 15 to 22% of our students being chronically absent, that is the second lowest rate of chronic absenteeism in our county by 0.1%. So we’re doing very well compared to the rest of the county. We just happen to go the wrong direction last year.”

He shared that 1.7 percent of Ceres students were suspended for at least a day last year which puts CUSD in the green.

Science is a new subject on the dashboard this year and CUSD finds itself in “green.”

He noted that CUSD is outperforming the state average in the areas of the suspension rate, chronic absenteeism, graduation rate, English learner progress, and then also percentage of teachers with clear credentials. Ceres is also improving faster than the state average in English language arts, math, English learner progress, science, college career indicator, and the suspension rate.

CUSD Deputy Superintendent Dan Pangrazio spoke about the district’s community outreach, which includes three to four town hall meetings per school year that focuses on different topics each year. The district also holds educational partner meetings, youth advisory council meetings with students, high school students to share what’s going on in the district, gather input, and to have that two-way dialogue about what’s happening currently.

Britton touched on the district’s total budget of $306 million, noting that CUSD spends about 85 percent on staffing. 

“We’ve had to reduce our expenditures or to make sure we have the right budget for the right number of students, and the right programs that we have in place,” said Britton. “So we’ve been in this rightsizing mode as we experience our decline.”

Currently CUSD is decreasing staff through the normal attrition process.

Schools in California receive funding based on Average Daily Attendance (ADA). Pre-COVID, CUSD saw attendance rate of 95.5% attendance. Since COVID, those numbers have not returned to that level but are around 94 percent.

“The state doesn’t fund us for all of our students that are enrolled; they multiply our enrollment by our attendance rate, which is why we had such a huge focus on attendance for not only student learning – the students can’t learn if they’re not here at school – but also it gives us our funding for the school district.”

Britton dug a little deeper into enrollment and how that affects facilities and future planning. CUSD enrollment, when not counting preschool, special education, special day class students or Whitmore Charter, was 13,540 students in 2019-20 school year and now it’s down to 12,355 students.

Numbers are especially lower at the kindergarten level. She shared that during the 2019-20 school year CUSD had about 1,000 new kindergartners every year while now the numbers are approximately 730. The decline would have been far steeper had the transitional kindergarten program not been expanded.

“But those additional 450 TK students this year has really helped. We have no more new TK windows coming. So there may be new TK students that come, but we don’t have additional months of eligible TK students, because all four year olds are now eligible for transitional kindergarten.”

Britton shared that CUSD doesn’t lose many students after they’ve enrolled but said “we just have fewer students coming to us for a variety of reasons.

“We are very similar to other districts within the state of California that are seeing a decline in enrollment similar to us and there just are fewer babies that were born that were now were now eligible for TK and kinder. And so until we start seeing the residential growth, we’re going to see this decline over time, and this is what we’re planning for.”

If the trend continues by the 2036-37 school year, Ceres could see enrollment of 9,862 students “which is significantly different than our heyday of almost 14,000 students in our school district,” said Britton.

Ceres does expect to grow in terms of adding more housing in the coming years and Britton said she wants that to happen but noted “I can’t plan for things that haven’t happened yet.

Assistant superintendent of personnel David Viss said the district continues to juggle matching staffing levels with student enrollments. He said 46 employees took advantage of retirement, 26 being certificated, three administrative and 17 classified all who received a one-time bonus on top of their typical retirement.

Measure Y projects

Dr. Britton spent time going over how CUSD is spending Measure Y bond funds approved by the voters in 2024. The first project – the reroofing of a building at Mae Hensley Jr. High – wrapped up last summer. 

State money helped CUSD add additional TK and kindergarten classrooms at San Vaugh along with Measure Y funds.

A few weeks ago CUSD broke ground on the Virginia Parks Elementary campus to replace portables with regular classroom buildings. The work should be wrapped up by December.

“The vast majority of our Measure Y school bond is for modernization, and most of that is to replace portables with stick buildings because these portables are in some places significantly older, and they’re much more difficult to maintain than real classroom buildings.”

On the Argus and Endeavor campus, CUSD will replace a large portion of the portables on the Fifth Street side of the campus with additional classrooms, a science classroom, SETE lab, additional classrooms on the upper part of the campus, a new shade structure, and some updates to the courtyard area.

Other projects are planned for Sam Vaughn Elementary 

Shade structures are planned to take place over the next year to two years at La Rosa, Hidahl, Berryhill, Westport and Carroll Fowler elementary schools not using Measure Y funds.

ADA improvements will be installed at the CUSD school farm.

“We also are going to be making sure that Mae Hensley has softball fields similar to what is at the other two junior high,” Britton stated.

Updates will be occurring at the Ceres High School gym with new backboards, as well as some updates to their team room and storage in the current Ceres High School gym.

A lot of work is taking place at CHS with modernization of the classrooms 1-16 building. A new classroom wing will be constructed where portables were once located.

After the Central Valley High School stadium is finished, improvements will be added to the CHS stadium including grandstands with a press box, and visitor side bleachers similar in size to Central Valley High School, and then a new ticket booth entry building for the Ceres High stadium.

Work progresses on the $16.2 million Central Valley High School stadium with walls up on the ticket booth, concession and restroom building, said Britton.

Phase I of the project consists of a:

• 1,800-seat home grandstand and press box made of steel;

• 1,000-seat visitor grandstand;

• Ticket/restroom/concessions building;

• Extended bus loading zone and sidewalk;

• Artificial turf field and all-weather track;

• Fencing and improvements to the parking lot and the entrance to the stadium.

The goal is to complete construction by August 1.

“Except to have home football games at the Central High School Stadium this fall,” said Britton.

Phase 2 will see construction of a restroom/concession building for the visitor side, but also accessible to the varsity baseball.

Peterman highlighted the successes of her CUSD Reed Superintendents Book Club which she started two years ago to emphasize the importance of literacy and encourage a love for reading. Students read a book, write a short review that and turn it into the Librarian at the school, and they earn various rewards. 

To date the program has seen 11,628 books reviewed this year, more than double from last year. An average of 931 students are participating per month. Ninety students wrote 25 reviews, 20 wrote 50, five students who wrote 75, and one student turned in 100 reviews. 

School Resource Officer update

Ceres Police Chief Trenton Johnson had nothing but good things to say about the School Resource Officer program and the city’s relationship with CUSD.

Three officers are assigned as SROs to the high school and junior high campuses but they also visit the elementary school campuses.

He said that the annual active shooter training at Central Valley impressed Johnson because the school district was making changes to “protocols instantly, and we were able to figure out this problem on that day.”

Rutishauser thanked the city for its focus on traffic safety, saying “traffic safety around school is very challenging issue.”

The first town hall for the 2026-27 school year will be focusing on pedestrian and primarily bicycle safety, he said.