Fresno Unified School District (FUSD) is California’s third-largest school district, serving more than 71,000 students. In 2017, the district created a department called the Office of African American Academic Acceleration (A4 Office) to find and fix the root causes of achievement gaps between African American students and other students.
The A4 Office started with a $742,000 budget to mentor African American middle and high school students. It has since created 13 different programs, and its public funding soared to more than $12 million in 2024.
The programs’ applications don’t mention a race requirement, yet these programs are marketed as exclusively for African American students. In fact, FUSD teachers, under administrators’ orders, reach out directly—and only—to African American parents and students. With no advertising to the entire student population, other students typically learn about these opportunities only through unofficial channels like word of mouth, if at all.
Academic need doesn’t discriminate. It affects students of all races who need extra support to reach their full potential. This includes children whose parents belong to Californians for Equal Rights Foundation (CFER), a nonprofit group that fights for equal treatment under the law.
These parents have children in Fresno schools who could benefit from A4 programs but were either kept unaware of the opportunities or, worse, led to believe they weren’t eligible because they’re not black. The parents are also deeply troubled that the district spends millions in taxpayer dollars on programs that de facto exclude their children for no other reason than skin color.
After-school programs can provide valuable support for Fresno’s youth. However, it is wrong for the government to gate access to programming based on a child’s race, whether overtly or through covert practices like selective advertising.
As the Supreme Court has stated, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Indeed, FUSD’s race-based gatekeeping violates multiple legal protections: the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the Civil Rights Act, and California’s Proposition 209.
Racial classifications by the government create distortion, resentment, and, in FUSD, segregated learning environments—precisely what our equal protection laws were meant to stop.
Represented at no charge by Pacific Legal Foundation, CFER is fighting back with a federal lawsuit to ensure these valuable educational programs are truly accessible to all students, regardless of race.
What’s At Stake?
- It is unfair and unconstitutional to gate access to valuable youth programs based on a child’s race—regardless of whether that gate is explicit or implicit.
- Taxpayer-funded academic support programs should be available to all students based on need, not race.
- It’s dangerous for the government to classify people on the basis of race, even for innocuous-sounding reasons like academic support programs. Racial categorization promotes harmful stereotypes, like the idea that only certain races need or deserve support programs.
