“FCMAT Requests Applications of Interest for County Trustee at Oakland Unified School District”.  https://www.fcmat.org/oakland

The state and county offices of education are trying to put the Oakland Unified School District under state control— again.  And again their first method of attack will be FCMAT— the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team.  The first step in a state takeover is calling in FCMAT to make ‘recommendations’.   The district can follow the recommendations and make cuts. If not, a trustee will be appointed who can veto any district expenditure– or the district is put into full receivership.

Two decades ago, OUSD was put under state control; at the end of years of state control, the district emerged 70 million dollars deeper in debt and spending an even higher percentage of the district budget on administration. Then and now, the takeover has had to do more with politics than with a financial crisis. The first takeover was accomplished by not allowing the district to borrow from one budget fund to another, even though that had been allowed in the past.  Developers had their eye on certain valuable district properties— and then there was a ‘fiscal crisis’.

OUSD has been just as under-funded and over-administered for a long time, and neither FCMAT  nor the state had, or has, any intention of changing either one. Almost every year the district claims a deficit and ends with a surplus. Almost every year they are fined a million or more dollars by the state for having too many administrators. State control increased the number of administrators— and then the state fined them for that!  On top of that the district had to pay for a state trustee and their administrators.  

On their website FCMAT says their  “primary mission is to help California’s local K-14 educational agencies identify, prevent and resolve financial, operational and data management challenges by providing management assistance and professional learning opportunities.”  In reality, they are the enforcers for keeping California education underfunded. If educators and parents succeed in getting a school district to reduce class size, or to pay teachers a sustainable salary, or not to close neighborhood schools— the county or the state will send in FCMAT to remind them that their choices are to submit to state underfunding voluntarily or be taken over.  

FCMAT is ‘independent’ so that the county and state don’t have to take any responsibility unless the enforcers fail and they have to intervene directly.  FCMAT— and the state— don’t require districts to cut administration. When they recommend cutting administrators it’s never a requirement for exiting state supervision, so it never happens. FCMAT never recommends that the state fund smaller classes or neighborhood schools or better pay.  

As long as we fight one district at a time, the state enforcer system will continue to work as designed.  Only if there are too many fights, together, at the same time, can we get past the enforcers to confront the people who hire them— the state department of education and the state legislature.