FIGURING FCMAT

One of y'all out there has got to help me out with this one-you really do-cause I'm a little bit puzzled here.
 
I was working on a story about FCMAT, the Financial Crisis Management Assistance Team, the Bakersfield-based public group which got started by the legislature in 1991 to help the Richmond schools get out of a financial crisis, and has sort of grown like Topsy ever since. Now they've got there hands in school districts all over the state, including Oakland and Berkeley. The state is now doing an audit of FCMAT, partly because the group has gotten so big, nobody up in Sacramento seems to know exactly what it's actually doing. Or supposed to do.
   
Anyways, I was reading over FCMAT's "comprehensive assessment" of the Berkeley Unified School District from July of this year, and under the section concerning "empower staff and community," the FCMAT folks wrote: "Of paramount importance is the community's role of local governance. ? A key to success in the Berkeley Unified School District is the re-engagement of parents, teachers, and support staff. Berkeley parents care deeply about their children's future and want to participate in improving the school district and enhancing student learning."
      
Well, ha!, says I, I bet they didn't say that when the evaluated the Oakland Unified School District. (If you believe former Oakland Superintendent Dennis Chaconas, Robert Gammon of the Tribune, and just about everybody on the Oakland School Board, FCMAT was instrumental in taking participation away from parents in Oakland. In fact, partly due to FCMAT's diddling while Oakland schools burned, Oakland's elected School Board was stripped of all power by the state legislature, and the Oakland schools are being run by a state-selected administrator.)
       
Shows what I know. In its overview of its Assessment and Recovery Plans for the Oakland Unified School District, FCMAT writes: "Of paramount importance is the community's role of local governance. ... A key to success at Oakland is the re-engagement of parents, teachers and support staff. Oakland parents care deeply about their children's future and want to participate in improving the school district and enhancing student learning."
  
Me being the curious type, I checked around, and it seems like according to FCMAT's various reports, parents in the West Contra Costa (Richmond) Unified School District and the West Fresno Elementary School District also care deeply about their children's future, yada-yada, etcetera. I mean, didn't they go anywhere where the parents didn't give a rat's ass about what went on in their schools?
    
Okay, maybe I'm being picky. I know that the FCMAT folks are busy down there, what with having been asked to assist in some 300 local school district and county education offices since they were set up, so sometimes they might have to cut corners by just going to the old paragraphs and sticking in a new school district's name. And, after all, FCMAT hires a lot of professional-type folks (using our money, of course, not theirs) to go into these various school districts and do comprehensive evaluations and printed reports, and I know they must be doing something, because their reports are so thick, and really difficult to carry around. Like the guy said about the night goggles in "Jurassic Park," if it's heavy, it must be important. Or something like that.
   
Still, that got me to wondering about what FCMAT is doing in all these places, and why. As far as I can tell, the Alameda County Office of Education appointed FCMAT as Berkeley Unified School District's fiscal adviser back in 2001 after the county office determined that BUSD was not balancing its budget. Under the enabling legislation FCMAT was was asked to conduct a "systematic, comprehensive assessment" of the school district in five areas: 1. Community Relations, 2. Personnel Management, 3. Pupil Achievement, 4. Financial Management, and 5. Facilities Management. Why Berkeley needed help with "community relations" (whatever that is) when their problem only seemed to be some calculators might be a mystery to you. It is to me. Still, FCMAT has been busy in Berkeley ever since, hiring consultants (with our money), making assessments and recommendations in these five areas, and turning out heavy reports.
       
So here comes Oakland, poor Oakland, which ran into some budget problems of its own a couple of years ago, causing the Alameda County Education Office to call in FCMAT as Oakland Unified School District's financial advisers. The enabling legislation that appointed FCMAT required the company to conduct a "systematic, comprehensive assessment" of the school district in five areas: 1. Community Relations, 2. Personnel Management, 3. Pupil Achievement, 4. Financial Management, and 5. Facilities Management. Odd how Oakland needed the same "systematic, comprehensive" help that Berkeley did. You wonder who writes this enabling legislation.
       
Gets even more interesting when you discover that the California state legislature decided that both the West Contra Costa (Richmond) Unified School District and the West Fresno Elementary School District also needed help from FCMAT in the exact same five areas, including that intriguing "community relations" thing. All of which FCMAT gets paid to comprehensively report on using somebody's money, and you can bet it's not their own.
    
Anybody out there got a theory about this?