California’s system of financial oversight of school districts has mostly worked, having kept all but nine of them from seeking a state bailout loan to avert insolvency. The key to keeping school districts from financial disaster has been close oversight by county offices of education and monitoring by the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team. Plumas Unified in northeast California, with an enrollment of about 2,000 students, will be the first district in over a dozen years to seek a state bailout. In the last week of April, its school board voted to request an emergency state loan of up to $20 million, explaining that it has “exhausted all of its sources of alternative liquidity and any external sources of short-term cash.” The district joins a select group of districts that no one wants to belong to. A state bailout is accompanied by rigorous state and county oversight, loss of local control, extra expenses in paying off the loan, and other conditions that last for years. “Manage your finances because you don’t want this,” said James Morris, the administrator appointed to oversee Inglewood Unified in Los Angeles County, which has been in state receivership for 13 years. Carl Cohn, a leading educator who was superintendent in Long Beach Unified and San Diego Unified, and a former member of the State Board of Education, says getting a state bailout is a fate to be avoided at all costs. “It’s really important to maintain that sense of an empowered community through locally elected officials,” he said.