A recent show on radio station KPFA 94.1 featured a discussion about the racialized threats to less affluent urban public school districts as state authorities pressure school leaders to take out bailout loans to resolve budget shortfalls. These loans come with draconian terms that eliminate the authority of voter-selected school boards and impose extreme austerity measures, including the closure of many schools in poorer neighborhoods.
A dozen mostly minority school districts have been forced under state control in the past 20 years, including the Oakland Unified School District. At present, Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD), an ethnically and racially diverse district of about 42,000 students, is the target, but the district’s school board and the community are fighting back.
Speaking on the July 15 show, “Education Today,” hosted by education professor Kitty Kelly Epstein, Taylor Kayatta, a certificated public accountant (CPA) who serves as the first vice president of SCUSD, spoke about the ongoing struggle of their board and community to keep SCUSD from being taken over.
“There’s been pressure on my school district for over a decade now; there’s a feeling (from the state) that we’re intrinsically broken, that we cannot manage our finances,” said Kayatta, who has two elementary students in SCUSD.
“It reached a fever pitch a couple of years ago before COVID; I really felt it as a parent in the community that they were coming for us,” he said.
“Within the past year, they’re back at it again,” he said. “The pressure right now to accept a state loan is something I am not sure I could even describe.”
He said that the outside authorities would not even allow the board to hire its own financial adviser to help find solutions; the state takeover is the only option they want.
“We have a county superintendent in Sacramento County (who) has been on the job for decades. It’s been his mission, in my opinion, that something is wrong with Sac City Unified, that we are the problem child; we need outside control, (and) we shouldn’t be running ourselves,” said Kayatta.
In a district where enrollment is slightly declining, and many students have complex educational needs, SCUSD does face financial difficulties, he continued.
“There’s going to be challenges with the budget in the long term, but I think we need to address that in a way that is community-driven, with the community understanding what it means rather than accepting some blanket (imposed) ‘best practice’ that often involves making dramatic, harsh cuts, things like closing schools without plans.
“If you need to make cuts, make them in a way that makes sense rather than just trying to save a dollar this school year,” he said.
For example, closing a school may save a little money in the short run but almost always means loss of student enrollment as families move out of the district, which ends up costing a district more than it saves and can lead to a cycle of decline and demoralization.
Closely allied with the County Superintendent is the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), “which has been at the heels of this district as long as I’ve lived in the district,” he said.
FCMAT is a state-funded nonprofit based in Bakersfield that has been granted sweeping authority under state law to pressure school districts to adopt fiscal austerity.
In theory, something like FCMAT would be a good thing, an agency that would help districts that face some financial difficulties, he said. “But my experience and the experience of people in Sacramento is that they’re an outside agency that has its own motivations.”
“They are not about helping you save your budget and helping you get through temporary (issues). They’re more about taking control over a district that they think shouldn’t be running itself.”
A school board is democratically elected and exists as “the people’s voice,” Kayatta said. Local schools need leadership that understands the problems and issues the community faces, “not an outside appointed group of people from Bakerfield who don’t really understand what Sacramento needs,” he said.
Show host Kitty Kelly Epstein, who actively opposed the state takeover of Oakland schools two decades ago, discussed its impact, which formally lasted until OUSD’s bailout loan was repaid in June 2025.
“When a district is taken over by the state, that means the school board loses all their power, which means that the electors, that’s the residents, lose all their power because they don’t get to elect anybody. There’s somebody put in charge, and they make all the decisions.”
“In the case of Oakland, Oakland’s debt could have been solved internally. That was not allowed by the state senator at the time, Don Perata,” she said.
“The actual amount that the district needed was about $37 million, and they were not allowed to use their own money to cover the debt. The loan that was imposed without the will of the people of Oakland was a $100 million. They fired the superintendent, brought in a state receiver, and spent the $100 million on whatever they wanted because there was no participation by people in Oakland,” she said.
“I know it sounds shocking. It was shocking, and Oakland was not the only district. There were others: Inglewood, Vallejo, Compton, said Kelly Epstein.
“The people who often have the least amount of input anyway, because of inequalities and racism in our system, get the little bit of participation that they have in schools, which is to elect a school board, taken away from them.”
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