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Eleven years after the California State Legislature created the privately-run Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) to help keep the state’s at-risk school districts from going under, the California State Auditor’s office is about to take its first formal look at just how well the rapidly expanding, Bakersfield-based agency is actually living up to its job. 

The increasingly controversial agency plays a dominant role in the Oakland public schools and is a growing presence in the Berkeley Unified School District.  

The audit is scheduled to begin within a month, and should be finished by mid-Spring. 

California Assembly Education Committee Chair Jackie Goldberg (D-LA) requested the formal state FCMAT audit this fall in the wake of public criticism of FCMAT’s role in the state takeover of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). 

In the fall of 2002, Alameda County Superintendent of Schools Sheila Jordan declared a fiscal emergency in the Oakland schools and FCMAT became OUSD’s fiscal advisor. 

A year later, when Oakland was forced to take out a $100 million line of credit from the state to keep from going bankrupt, the state appointed a professional administrator to run the district, and FCMAT was assigned to assist in the district’s recovery. 

The County Superintendent assigned FCMAT as fiscal manager to the Berkeley Unified School District in 2001 after learning the Berkeley district had mishandled state-assigned funds. 

Now the State Bureau of Audits has been asked to “determine whether FCMAT can demonstrate that its involvement has improved the fiscal health of school districts, thereby preventing the need for emergency loans to school districts.” 

The audit will also examine FCMAT’s contracting policies and administrative and overhead costs, and “determine the level of oversight other entities have” over the organization. 

FCMAT was created by the state legislature in 1991 during a fiscal crisis in the Richmond schools and is run by a governing board consisting of county and local school superintendents representing the 11 education service regions across the state. 

From a small, little-known agency, it has steadily increased its role as the deepening economic crisis afflicts California’s public schools. 

Today, FCMAT had been contracted to assist more than 300 local school districts and county offices of education—including its intervention in officially declared fiscal emergencies in the Compton, Emeryville, Berkeley, Oakland, West Contra Costa, and West Fresno school districts.