Illustration by Tevy Khou
This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. It is co-published here with permission.
The schools of Clovis, California, are not an obvious place for a union campaign. Some of that reflects politics: Nearly half of registered voters in this city of more than 120,000 are Republican, while about 30% are Democrats, and its home county, Fresno County, flipped to Trump this fall.
Some of that reflects history: The Clovis Unified School District has been without a teachers union since its inception in 1959, and it is California’s biggest public school system without a teachers union. But since 2021, teachers, psychologists, sign language interpreters and others in this nearly 43,000-student district have been trying to change that.
Under the name Association of Clovis Educators, or ACE, which is affiliated with the California Teachers Association, teachers and others have pushed for smaller class sizes, better pay and more class prep time. But the real battle, they said, has been to persuade teachers and residents in this conservative community to support a union. (Disclosure: The CTA is a financial contributor to Capital & Main.)
“To mention a union was considered very taboo. It was a four-letter word for sure,” said Kristin Heimerdinger, an ACE vice president and union organizer; and a longtime teacher at the district’s Buchanan High School. “There were people who definitely thought that even mentioning a union was disrespecting the entire district.”
ACE’s success, then, depends on answering a vexing question facing workers now that Donald Trump has been reelected to a second term: Can the potential benefits of a union overcome political divides?
THE FIRST INKLINGS OF WORKER UNREST came with the return to in-person learning in 2020. Around 50 educators served on a district committee to develop pandemic instruction plans, Heimerdinger said. The committee recommended either fully remote instruction or a hybrid option, hoping to limit the number of students on campus. But the school board voted for a full return to in-person learning. The plan gave parents the option of keeping their children online but would not have allowed teachers to decide for themselves to continue teaching remotely.
“It was just very, very shocking,” Heimerdinger said. It seemed the board disregarded what they as teachers wanted, she added. “That is when our work started, because of the breakdown in employee representation.”
Superintendent Corinne Folmer declined an interview request from Capital & Main. In an emailed statement, Folmer said she respected employees’ right to unionize and said the district collaborates closely with educators to establish working conditions.
A group of five teachers, including Heimerdinger, contacted the California Teachers Association about forming a union across the district’s roughly 2,000 teachers and 51 schools.
Union supporters knew they faced an uphill battle. A quote from the district’s inaugural superintendent, Floyd B. “Doc” Buchanan, had long hung in a room where the school board meets: “The professionals who work in our district are proud that we do not have collective bargaining.” “Doc’s Charge” is also posted on the website of the high school named after him.
The pandemic response also reminded educators that the existing representative body for teachers at the time, the Faculty Senate, had no formal power. It also depended on district funding, offering stipends of up to $1,600 annually to its elected representatives. A union, the educators reasoned, would be more effective at getting their concerns addressed.
In April 2021, the Association of Clovis Educators announced its campaign on social media. On Instagram, ACE told followers, “The members of ACE do not aim to work against the values or standards of Clovis Unified, but rather, to better support them.” In language that seemed aimed at preempting backlash, the association added: “In order to do our important work as educators, we need to stay true to the roots of our traditions but not let habits and stale systems hamper our commitment to innovation and accountability.”
As teachers worked to collect enough pro-union signatures to form a union—half of district teachers, or roughly 1,000—they also explained the benefits that unionization could bring. A 2022 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances found that the median wealth of unionized households was 1.7 times higher than the median wealth of nonunionized households, the nonpartisan Center for American Progress reported. When ACE teachers compared the lowest district salaries to similar districts statewide, they said, theirs ranked 16th out of 17.
ACE organizers also wanted the terms of their jobs to improve. Some elementary school educators reported having less than an hour on campus each week for preparation. Jason Roche, an English teacher at Clovis East High School, said some classes have as many as 40 students.
“That’s not good for kids. It’s not good for teaching. It makes me less of a teacher,” Roche said. “Seems like they should hire teachers instead of placing the burden on teachers.”
Teachers who support ACE said they have collected more than 800 signatures, roughly 200 short of the unionization threshold. ACE has said it wants to collect more signatures than required to indicate “stronger majority support.”
SOON AFTER ACE’S INITIAL SOCIAL MEDIA POST, the district mounted a response. A competing group that would be considered a union under state labor law but calls itself an “independent employee association,” the Independent Clovis Unified Educators, also emerged.
The district’s response involved several actions that an administrative judge and the California Public Employee Relations Board later ruled were illegal in response to ACE’s filing of unfair practice charges.
The administrative judge ruled in favor of ACE on several counts. It found that both the district’s inclusion of Doc’s quote about collective bargaining on a notice for a Faculty Senate election that was sent to teachers and staff, and its financial support of the senate—$330,000 from 2020-2021—violated state law barring public employers from interfering with employees’ right to belong to an employee organization. The California Public Employee Relations Board upheld the administrative judge’s determination, and found the district violated state law by presenting the Faculty Senate as the district’s de facto representative of teachers, when teachers had never elected an exclusive representative in the first place.
In June, following an appeal by ACE, the California Public Employee Relations Board found that the District “dominated” the Faculty Senate and ordered the district to dissolve it. An appeal from the district is pending.
Meanwhile, a group of teachers that includes former members of the Faculty Senate formed an association that called itself the Independent Clovis Unified Educators. ICUE has positioned itself as an alternative to ACE since November 2021—six months after ACE went public. Under California law, if a union gets signatures from 50% of workers, and the Public Employee Relations Board verifies the signers, it must still face off in an election against any competing union that gets verified signatures from 30% of workers. In Clovis, that is roughly 600 teachers.
“ICUE believes this model of teacher representation is a better fit for Clovis Unified which is a District where the teachers have taken pride in being nonunion,” said Tony Silva, a labor representative with Goyette, Ruano & Thompson, the law firm representing the ICUE. In May, ICUE reported having about 700 petition signatures from teachers.
ICUE TAPPED INTO REAL FEARS. Roche said that some teachers have told him they worry the California Teachers Association will wield undue influence inside their classrooms if ACE is certified as the union representing Clovis teachers. In conservative Clovis, not all educators necessarily embrace positions such as the CTA’s vocal stances against white supremacy and for protecting LGBTQ+ rights.
Workers seeking a union in conservative districts often battle cultural norms, said Eunice Sookyung Han, an associate professor in the University of Utah’s Economics Department. The perception that unions are for Democrats has been enough in some politically conservative areas such as Clovis to dissuade workers from unionizing, Han said, even when a union might improve working conditions.
That could be changing, Han said, given that roughly two-thirds of Americans approve of unions today, and union elections have surged in recent years. “Starbucks is unionized. Walmart is unionizing. When they hear about it, they kind of think, ‘Oh, maybe it’s OK,’” she said. “This ongoing conversation and this ongoing attempt, I think, it’s going to lead to success eventually.”
One Clovis elementary school teacher who identified as a Republican initially opposed unionizing. She asked to remain anonymous because she feared retaliation from administrators for supporting a union and worried that she will be ostracized by colleagues who don’t support unionizing. But after having more than a half-dozen conversations with colleagues who are union supporters and attending informational meetings, she said a union came to make sense to her. (She voted for Donald Trump in the fall.)
“I want kids to feel successful and feel confident in their abilities,” she said. “That’s why I do what I do.” During her two decades in Clovis, she said doing that work had only gotten harder.
Her class planning time at work has shrunk, she said, and she now spends half of her weekends grading or preparing for the week. She’s had trouble getting enough pencils and tissues for students from the district. And she does not feel she has enough support to address her students’ social and emotional needs, which have heightened since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If I want to plan, that means I’m doing that in the evening—which takes away from my family—or I’m doing that on the weekends,” the teacher said. “Or I’m going to be that teacher that’s teaching on the spot. That’s not effective teaching.”
Joining a union grew more appealing to her as she considered her options, she said. After all, she reasoned, teachers in neighboring school districts with similar political values were unionized. So were other public servants in Clovis, such as police officers and firefighters.
The teacher said she’s mentioned her concerns to the district but has seen “no changes in any of the things that I have complained about.” Often, she said, problems are brought up in staff meetings, but there’s little follow-through. She chose to support ACE rather than ICUE because of the vast resources provided by the California Teachers Association.
“I love the district I work for. I love the kids that I [serve],” she said. “But I also want to be heard.”
TEACHERS WHO SUPPORT ACE are still collecting signatures for their petition and argued that the union’s momentum is building in the district.
In 2022, the district’s psychologists and mental health workers got enough signatures to certify a union. Psychologists and mental health workers voted to affiliate with ACE rather than a competing union, Clovis Psychologists for Clovis, which negotiated a contract governing working conditions through June 2025.
In August, the Clovis Unified School District voluntarily recognized ACE as the union for roughly 30 American Sign Language interpreters, after a majority of interpreters signed a union petition and submitted it to the Public Employee Relations Board. That union is now negotiating its first contract with the district. Recently, the district redacted the anti-union passage from “Doc’s Charge” in the school board room.
A few dozen ACE supporters continue to gather signatures, and organizers are focusing on individual outreach to teachers at campuses with no visible union support. To address concerns of conservative educators, Heimerdinger said, ACE is explaining how unions work and highlighting the Republican Caucus of the California Teachers Association. The statewide teachers union, she added, has a record of improving working conditions for educators, regardless of political affiliation.
“Our attempts are now to be strategic,” Heimerdinger said. Still, she said, “we are stubborn. And we’re not going to go away.”
That goes for the Republican supporters, too—including the elementary teacher too scared of repercussions to share her name.
“I don’t feel like this is Doc’s Clovis anymore,” she said. “I think those people that are high up and in charge have forgotten what it’s like to be in the classroom.”
