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By Alex Mertens

The Fresno County Superintendent of Schools Position: I’m Endorsing the One Candidate Who Is Fighting to Be Elected, Not Appointed. After eleven years of the same data and the same excuses, two candidates in this race represent continuity with the network that oversaw the failure. Only one has a plan to actually get Fresno County students reading and doing math at grade level.

Key Points

 

By the time California tests our 11th graders, the last year the state tests them, 44% still can’t read and 74% can’t meet math standards.
I’m endorsing Dr. Johnny Alvarado.

My ultimate motivation in writing this is to contribute to the conversation around literacy in Fresno County. At the end of the day, if the discourse generated by this election leads to better outcomes for our students, we still win — no matter who ends up in the position.

I’ve spent years thinking about what it would take to reverse the brain drain that has hollowed out this county for decades — the steady outflow of talented people who grow up here, get educated, and leave because they don’t see a future worth staying for. There are things about this county we can’t change — the weather is the weather — but the quality of our schools is something we can actually control, and every conversation about reversing brain drain eventually comes back to that. You cannot build a community that attracts and retains its best people if the system producing the next generation is failing most of the kids in it. Employers hesitate to relocate here.

Young professionals hesitate to put down roots. Families who have options leave. And the cycle repeats. Reversing that starts with honest leadership in this office — leadership that treats the data as a problem to solve rather than a narrative to manage.

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant. We have to start doing things differently than we’ve ever done them before.” (Dr. Johnny Alvarado)

Most parents in Fresno County have no idea how their child’s school compares to others in the county, and at the GV Wire forum Alvarado described a school board member who didn’t know that 80% of their high school juniors couldn’t do math at grade level. Data that should be driving urgent conversations sits in spreadsheets that never reach a kitchen table. Sunlight, in his framing, isn’t just about embarrassing districts. It’s about giving parents the information they need to ask the right questions, because family engagement is one of the strongest predictors of whether a child learns to read on time, and that engagement starts with the data.

Background: This Seat Has Been Handed Down Three Times. Here’s the Chain.

I want to be clear upfront: I am not accusing anyone of wrongdoing. But I do think it’s worth noting that the outcome of this race has been shaped by the same two people the last several cycles, and it is genuinely odd that they have now withdrawn their support from the person they backed last time — without, as far as I can tell, any public explanation for why. That pattern seems like something voters deserve to be aware of before they cast a ballot.
Before you vote, you need to understand how this office has actually worked — for as long as I’ve been in these schools, as a student and as a teacher. It doesn’t get won by voters. It gets passed down.

The Succession Chain: Same Network, Four Cycles

Step 1 Larry Powell Retires early, appoints colleague as interim
Step 2 Jim Yovino Appointed interim, wins election with Powell’s backing
Step 3 Michele Cantwell-Copher Backed by both Powell & Yovino, wins 2022
Step 4, Now Eimear O’Brien Powell & Yovino switch their support from Cantwell-Copher to O’Brien for 2026

Powell retired early, handed the interim role to Yovino, who won with Powell’s backing, who then backed Cantwell-Copher, who now holds the office. As Cantwell-Copher seeks reelection, those same two former superintendents have shifted their support to O’Brien. Every cycle, the seat moves through the same network.

O’Brien herself confirmed this on the GV Wire Unfiltered broadcast. When asked why she’s running, she described retiring, exploring Sacramento consulting opportunities that weren’t “firing her up,” and then reaching out to Cantwell-Copher about doing mentorship work—a proposal Cantwell-Copher declined. It was only after that conversation fell through that Larry Powell called and suggested she consider running for county superintendent. Her own words on what happened next: “I said, well, you know, first of all, I don’t really understand that.” The candidate Powell and Yovino are endorsing to lead Fresno County’s schools entered this race without knowing what the job entailed, because Powell was the one who suggested it — the same Powell who backed Cantwell-Copher in 2022 and has now switched his endorsement to O’Brien for 2026.

That’s not democracy. That’s a succession plan, and 206,000 students are paying for it.

Dr. Johnny Alvarado is the only candidate in this race who wasn’t placed here by that network. He’s asking to be chosen by the voters of Fresno County, and that distinction matters for who he’s going to be accountable to once he’s in office.

Track Record
Every Level. Every Region. Thirty Years of Receipts.

Alvarado has done every job in this system. Teacher at every level, principal at every level, assistant superintendent, Regional Vice-President / Superintendent, all within Fresno County across seven districts. He spent nearly 5 years at FCOE (Fresno County Office of Education) supporting districts across the county. He was born, raised, educated, and has spent every professional year of his life here. His family are all products of Fresno County schools.

The proof point he keeps coming back to is Parlier Unified, where 80%, as shared by boots on the ground leaders, are on track for first grade. That’s what happened when Parlier focused on the LETRS and Orton-Gillingham professional development training, both grounded in the Science of Reading, and stayed committed when four of the five other districts in the county’s cohort dropped out. The Parlier team refused to quit, and the kindergarten data is what happens when you don’t.

The Incumbent
Seventeen Years at FCOE. The Numbers Haven’t Moved.

Cantwell-Copher has real relationships across the county and I have no doubt she cares deeply about students. The question isn’t whether she’s capable — it’s whether seventeen years at FCOE, the last three and a half as superintendent, has produced meaningful movement in the data. The numbers suggest it hasn’t, at least not at the pace these students need.

At the GV Wire forum, she described 1.5 to 2 percent annual growth as “statistically significant” and her formal closing described herself as “three and a half years into a 10-year plan” — which, at that rate, means asking for considerably more time without hard benchmarks to measure progress against. Four of five districts dropped out of the county’s own science-of-reading cohort on her watch — Parlier Unified, which Alvarado was supporting, was the only district that stayed the course. When asked for a district where she’d stepped in to stop social promotion, she said: “There are probably some examples.”

She has been at FCOE for seventeen of those years, and the case for staying the course rests on a timeline that our students simply don’t have.
I don’t think the eleven-year plateau in county-wide scores is entirely her fault. And I genuinely hope the discourse generated around this election has shown Dr. Cantwell-Copher how deeply the community cares about literacy — and encourages her to be stronger in how she holds districts accountable if she happens to win reelection.

I also don’t know the circumstances that led Powell and Yovino to withdraw their support from her in this cycle. But if the reason is that she was pushing harder for students — doing what is best for them even when it wasn’t politically comfortable — then I hope she continues on that course. This community is depending on whoever holds this office to take literacy seriously, and Superintendent Cantwell-Copher should know that.

The Challenger
She Says Scores Went Up. The CDE Data Says Otherwise.

Dr. O’Brien’s whole pitch is her six-year run as superintendent of Clovis Unified. The record of that tenure is public, it’s right on the California Department of Education’s own website, and O’Brien acknowledged the numbers herself at the forum.

During Dr. O’Brien’s tenure as superintendent of Clovis Unified, CAASPP results declined in both English language arts and math. According to California Department of Education Smarter Balanced Summative Assessment data for Clovis Unified School District, all students and all grades, the percentage of students who met or exceeded the ELA standard fell from 70.89% in 2017–18, the year she arrived, to 66.18% in 2022–23, her last full year. That is a decrease of 4.71 percentage points, or a 6.64% decline from where scores started. In math, the percentage of students who met or exceeded the standard fell from 57.86% in 2017–18 to 51.02% in 2022–23, a decrease of 6.84 percentage points, or an 11.82% decline from the starting point.

Source: California Department of Education CAASPP “Test Results at a Glance,” Clovis Unified School District, Fresno County, CDS Code 10-62117-0000000. O’Brien served as superintendent of Clovis Unified from approximately 2017 through 2023.

When Alvarado presented these numbers at the GV Wire candidate forum, O’Brien didn’t dispute the underlying data — she attacked how he expressed it. Alvarado uses percentage increase and decrease to measure score growth, and I don’t think it was malicious. It makes intuitive sense to me: a school that goes from 20% to 40% has doubled the share of students meeting standards — that deserves to be recognized as the 100% improvement it is, not just logged as “up 20 points” alongside a school that went from 50% to 70%. The raw point gain is exactly the same in both cases, but the first school did something far more difficult. O’Brien called this “disingenuous” and “shameful.” That’s not a fact-check. That’s a preference about how data is presented dressed up as a character attack. If the Clovis numbers were genuinely explained by COVID, the straightforward answer would have been to say so — calmly, factually, with context. Instead she made it personal. When someone is confident their record can withstand scrutiny, they defend the record. When they aren’t, they attack the person reporting it.

The deeper problem with O’Brien’s candidacy isn’t the data dispute. It’s the mismatch between the job she’s applying for and the experience she actually has. Clovis Unified is the only school district in Fresno County not classified as economically disadvantaged by the State of California. Every other district in the county carries that designation, which means every other district faces a fundamentally different set of challenges — higher concentrations of poverty, more English Learners, fewer local resources. O’Brien’s entire superintendency was in the one outlier. Alvarado worked at Clovis Unified too, for eight years. But he also worked across six other districts throughout the county, including its most underserved communities, and spent just under 5 years at FCOE supporting districts across the county. One candidate knows what Fresno County actually looks like. The other knows its one exception.
If Dr. O’Brien wins this election, I hope she takes the time to visit campuses across Fresno County and get a real sense of what support looks like in the vast majority of schools she hasn’t had direct experience in. The challenges facing an economically disadvantaged district are different in kind, not just in degree, from what she managed in Clovis. I hope her goals for literacy growth are ambitious enough to truly lift all of our students — not just the ones who were already closer to the finish line.

I want to be clear: I think all three candidates in this race are intelligent, capable people. This isn’t a judgment on anyone’s character or ability. It’s a judgment on experience. Alvarado has worked inside more of this county’s districts — including its hardest ones — than either of his opponents. That breadth of experience is what I think gives him the best chance of actually helping everyone, not just the communities that already have the most resources.

The Plan
A Real Plan. Not “Change Theory.”

Alvarado’s platform is specific. Day 1: every school board member in the county gets their district’s proficiency data in plain language. He’ll build common assessments across all 31 districts so that conversations are anchored in comparable numbers rather than impressions. District leaders will share what is working in their own schools so that the best practices from each district can be lifted across the county, rather than staying siloed where only one community benefits.

On early literacy, he can walk you through the five-pillar LETRS framework because he’s actually implemented and advocated for it. All opportunities to advance the Science of Reading in our schools will be his focus for early literacy. Our Fresno County schools need more than an early literacy focus and he will ensure all grade level students and teachers receive the support they need to be successful.

People sometimes ask why knowing the science of reading isn’t enough, why schools can’t simply adopt the right method and solve this. The honest answer is that it’s a little like asking why the forestry department doesn’t just clear brush to prevent forest fires. Nobody disputes that clearing brush works. The problem is that it is an enormous amount of intensive, painstaking labor that has to be done one patch at a time. Reading is the same. I spent time tutoring at Reading and Beyond, and I was not a trained reading specialist by any measure. But I sat down with kids one-on-one in a quiet room, and their levels went up, not because I was doing anything brilliant but because I was there, focused on one child, with no other 29 kids in the room competing for my attention. Most teachers with a full classroom simply cannot replicate that, no matter how well they understand the science. What Alvarado gets, from having actually supported this with Parlier, is that the county’s job is to build the systems, the scheduling, the specialist support, the small-group intervention structures, that give more kids that kind of focused attention on a regular basis. That’s the real work, and it’s the part that requires leadership with the credibility and the will to make it happen.

On social promotion, he’s direct: advancing students who haven’t mastered grade-level material is how you produce the 11th-grade numbers this county publishes every year. His proposal is a 180-day accountability chain from classroom teacher to principal to district superintendent to school board, with parents empowered at every link and county resources deployed by data rather than by relationships.

The Language
68% of Students Are Latino. Only One Candidate Speaks the Language.

Fresno County is 68% Latino, and 19% of students are English Learners. Spanish speakers are a large and vital part of this community — not a demographic footnote. Alvarado is the only candidate who speaks Spanish, not as a credential but as a daily reality. He walks into rooms of Spanish-speaking parents and talks to them directly about what children in this county need and what he’s going to fight for.

My mom came to the United States in first grade knowing very limited English. She’s described sitting in a classroom with no idea what her teacher was saying, watching lessons go by in a language she didn’t have yet. That experience stayed with our family. Alvarado doesn’t just speak the language — he understands what it actually takes to help a child move from one language world into another while keeping up with grade-level content, because that’s exactly what English Learner students face every day. In a county where 19% of students are English Learners, the fact that the other candidates can’t have that conversation is not a small gap in the resume.

Why It Matters
He Was That Kid.

When the GV Wire host asked about underperformance among Black and Brown students, Alvarado said simply: “I was a brown kid. I grew up in a very challenging neighborhood.” He described parents who couldn’t help him with reading, writing, or math, and teachers who gave him the foundation that carried him all the way to a doctoral degree from Fresno State and a name on this ballot.

The students he’s asking to lead look a lot more like where he grew up than where either of his opponents built their careers. That’s not a small thing.

The Bottom Line
The incumbent has spent seventeen years at the county office, eleven of them while the data went nowhere, and is now asking for six and a half more years to finish a ten-year plan with no hard benchmarks. The candidate backed by Powell and Yovino built her name in the one district in this county that doesn’t represent the other 30, and her own numbers show scores dropped on her watch.

Dr. Johnny Alvarado has taught at every level, led as principal at every level, and worked across seven districts from the county’s poorest to its most urban, spending nearly 5 years at FCOE. He’s built double-digit academic growth at every major assignment, he has a specific and operational and data-driven plan, he speaks Spanish in a county that’s 68% Latino, and he grew up poor in Fresno knowing what’s at stake for the students this system has failed most consistently.

He isn’t asking for patience, and he isn’t asking for another decade. He’s asking for your vote on June 2.

206,000 students have waited long enough. Vote Johnny Alvarado for Fresno County Superintendent of Schools.

Quotes drawn from the GV Wire Candidate Forum (May 2026), transcribed via Whisper. Verify all direct quotes against the original video at

gvwire.com

. Academic figures from California Department of Education CAASPP and ACGR downloadable data files. O’Brien score data from CDE CAASPP “Test Results at a Glance,” CDS 10-62117-0000000. Succession chain from campaign materials at drjohnnyalvarado4fcss.com