Fresno Unified’s middle schools are getting new laundry machines for students who need them – less than a year after the teachers union proposed investing in free laundry for students.

Are the two connected? Some leaders in the district think so.

“What it shows,” Fresno Teachers Association President Manuel Bonilla told The Bee’s Education Lab, “is that our proposals really have honed in, even from last year, (on) a real need across the system.”

The district made the announcement at a March 8 board meeting, a few weeks after Trustee Andy Levine highlighted the efforts of Fort Miller Middle School teacher Eric Calderon to raise funds to buy replacements for the campus.

“It became really apparent to us how important and how critical the washer and dryer are to the campus,” said Deputy Superintendent Misty Her, “and this initiated a district-wide assessment.

“A washer and dryer will now be baseline equipment for our middle school sites moving forward,” she added. “So the middle schools will soon receive information regarding the replacement and repair cycle.”

Six middle schools, including Fort Miller and Ahwahnee, Hamilton, Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Terronez, will receive one new washer and dryer set each by the end of April, according to district spokesperson Diana Diaz.

With the addition of two new washer and dryer sets for Hoover High School, Diaz said the district is investing just over $14,000 in laundry machines this year.

Last April, FTA proposed the district invest roughly $1 million in free laundry service for students by 2026 in their first draft of proposals for the current contract bargaining cycle.

“I was in full agreement with them then,” Levine said of FTA’s laundry proposal. “I thank them,” he added, for being one of the groups that brought this issue forward.

Links between attendance and laundry access

This district-wide change might not have happened without Calderon’s efforts at Fort Miller.

He told the Ed Lab that he noticed some of his students would show up in the same dirty sweater or sweatpants daily.

“Then, we kind of started to dive deeper.” He began examining the school’s attendance data.

“Are our kids not showing up because of … this very reason?”

He and other staff started calling families of chronically absent students to see what the school could do to help keep their kids in class.

“One of the top reasons (was) that they did not have clean clothes,” he said. “What I would call a basic human need was affecting attendance for our student population.”

This issue is hardly unique to Fort Miller. Fresno Unified has struggled with high chronic absenteeism rates for years, with the percentage of chronically absent students climbing above 50% last year.

To respond to this need among his students, Calderon first tried gathering donations himself using the platform DonorsChoose. The fundraiser didn’t gain much traction until Levine shared it on social media and later highlighted it at a board meeting.

That launched conversations behind the scenes between FUSD administrators. By March, the district announced they’d cover the cost of the machines – not only for Fort Miller but across all the district’s middle schools.

‘It was kind of embarrassing to talk to teachers about’

While Fort Miller hasn’t received the new machines, they’re already implementing systems to ensure students can easily access them.

They’ve already selected a room toward the back of the campus to house the machines, Calderon said. Choosing a semi-private location at the school was important to protect the privacy of families who want to use them.

This issue hit close to home for Fort Miller alumna Alexis Somonski.

Coming from a low-income family, the 22-year-old Fresno State student said she could’ve benefited from free laundry service in school.

“It was kind of embarrassing to talk to teachers about,” she said, “so I never really brought it up.”

“It sounds bad, but kids can be mean sometimes,” she added, “and you don’t want your classmates knowing that you’re struggling with these things.”

Now that the district is investing in this resource, however, she hopes the school will make sure parents know about it.

“Because, you know, some parents aren’t really open about their home situations.”

The machines will be free to use, Calderon added, and likely available during school hours only so staff will be on site.

The union’s similar proposal

Bonilla applauded the district’s move as a step in the right direction and said he hopes the district makes sure to broaden the assessment and repair of laundry machines to high schools as well.

Free laundry for students wasn’t the only investment related to students’ social-emotional needs that FTA proposed, however.

The union recommended spending $1 million annually in clothing and school supplies for students who need them, for instance, and $500,000 on opening school parking lots up at night with paid security for the district’s unhoused families to park their cars.

The student-related investments in FTA’s initial draft of proposals totaled roughly $55.1 million. Many of those remained intact in the first set of bargaining priorities the union shared with FUSD in the fall.

“I would encourage Superintendent (Bob) Nelson, the school board, and all district leadership to re-evaluate their stance” on the rest of the union’s proposals moving forward, Bonilla said.

“I hope that they also recognize that our ideas — which now they’re implementing one by one — across the board have validity,” Bonilla said, “and that they will work us to implement all of them.”

The district exchanged its first set of bargaining priorities with the FTA in November. The contract with FTA is set to expire this June.

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The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Learn about The Bee’s Education Lab at its website.