Customers enter the downtown Fresno post office at 2309 Tulare Street, inside the Fresno Unified School District headquarters. The school district is ending the U.S. Postal Service’s lease there, and the search is on for a site downtown to relocate the post office. Photo by David Castellon

A U.S. Postal Service official from San Francisco will be in Fresno Thursday looking at potential sites to relocate a downtown post office.

There’s not a lot of time to pick one, as the post office on the first floor of the Fresno Unified School District headquarters building at 2309 Tulare St. will have to be vacated by March 31.

That’s because the school district, which currently leases the 2,500-square-foot space to the Postal Service, opted not to renew the lease.

Plans are for the district to take over the space, but how it will be used has yet to be determined, said Jessica Peres Baird, a spokeswoman for the district.

“Plans are being developed as to how to efficiently use the post office area. Fresno Unified is severely impacted at a number of our locations, including the Education Center, and we’re looking at various uses of the space so we can better serve our students and their families,” she said in an email.

The district’s 85,000-square-foot headquarters was built as a courthouse in 1939, with the post office occupying space on the ground floor, just off the lobby, the following year.

In 1976, the school district bought the building, with the post office remaining as a tenant.

Now that the lease is ending, the Postal Service has launched a search for a new, larger space, said Dean Cameron, real estate specialist for the service, who will be touring potential sites on Thursday.

Because of the deadline to leave its current locale, there is no time to build a new post office. Instead, the Postal Service is looking to lease an existing office space or storefront that it can convert and move into by the end of March.

But federal officials aren’t casting a wide net, instead announcing that they want a slightly larger space — at least 3,400 square feet — within a mile radius of the current locale.

“Because what we’re trying to do is find a location as close as possible to the closing location. We don’t want to overlap into other territories,” Cameron said.

“Currently, we have 900 [post office] boxes that are leased there, so it’s important to provide service there for those people.”

Although there would have been no plans to move if the school board wasn’t ending the lease, conditions are cramped enough at the current post office that the Postal Service is looking for a larger space on a ground floor with parking spaces on site or within a reasonable walking distance.