Inglewood Unified School District is closer than ever to ending the state’s longest running receivership and returning control of the district to its school board for the first time in 14 years, according to state and county officials.
The state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, or FCMAT, released an annual progress report this week showing the district had met all 153 educational, financial and management standards necessary to prove the school district can stand on its own once again.
Inglewood Unified now must, at minimum, maintain those standards for a year before the state will turn decision-making authority back to its elected board.
“We’ll be able to pick our own superintendent, we’ll be able to vet our own cabinet members, and so those are the things that have been extremely important to this school district,” said Carliss McGhee, the school board president, in an announcement video.
The state took control of Inglewood Unified in 2012 after the struggling school district requested up to $55 million in loans to avoid insolvency spurred by the overstatement of average daily attendance rates and the understatement of its employment and retirement costs and declining enrollment, according to FCMAT.
The district used about $29 million of the available funds to stay afloat and still owes about $20 million today.
It has since become the longest school receivership in California’s history. Throughout the process, the district suffered from a revolving door of state and later county-appointed administrators, with nine different leaders appointed during a 13-year period.
This created “instability in organization development and inconsistency in developing and implementing long-rang recovery plans,” according to FCMAT’s latest progress report.
The current county administrator, James Morris, was appointed in January 2023. That same year, Inglewood had met about 127 of FCMAT’s standards, but remained unable to score high enough on categories related to finances and facilities.
On Thursday, Morris trumpeted the latest results in a video released by the Los Angeles County Office of Education.
“This milestone reflects years of thoughtful planning and steady work to make sure the district is ready for the future,” he said in a statement. “Every improvement we’ve made has been about creating a stronger school district for students and building systems that will last long after the transition is complete.”
Three of the categories of standards monitored by FCMAT — community relations and governance, personnel management, and pupil Achievement — advanced enough to no longer require annual review, according to LACOE.
“This progress didn’t happen overnight. It happened because people came together with a shared belief that every student deserves a strong, thriving school district,” said Debra Duardo, the Los Angeles County superintendent of schools, in a statement. “LACOE has been proud to support IUSD throughout this process, and we’re excited to help the district cross the finish line.”
The district has closed nearly half of its schools since 2018 due to falling enrollment numbers, which have dropped from about 18,000 students in 2002 to less than 6,000 today.
A civil rights complaint sent to the California attorney general by the Inglewood Teachers Association and the ACLU of Southern California last December alleged those closures disproportionately impacted “students with disabilities, English learners and other vulnerable students,” and blamed the receivership.
“Unelected state-appointed administrators have also misused takeover powers to disband neighborhood schools without transparency, compounding decades of disinvestment, unsafe facilities, and neglected student services,” the complaint states.
Even once Inglewood Unified regains local control, a trustee will remain in place with the power to “stay-and-rescind” the school board’s decisions until the district has “adequate fiscal systems and controls in place,” and state and county oversight officials agree a trustee is no longer needed, according to FCMAT’s report.
That trustee could stick around for quite awhile as well. The South Monterey County Joint Union High School District, which entered receivership in 2009 and left it in 2016, continues to have a trustee assigned to it as of this month. Vallejo City Unified and Oakland Unified school districts had a trustee for nearly two decades, records show.
School board member Ernesto Castillo was a high school student in Inglewood when the receivership began in 2012. The school board, while still elected by voters, has not held real power since then.
Returning control to elected officials answerable to their constituents will restore trust in the district and give a voice back to those in the community who have felt unheard by the receivership, he said.
“Our finances are in order, our facilities are improving, our test scores are rising and our governance is top tier,” Castillo said. “Even if it was the longest tenure for any state receivership so far, we finally did it.”
The receivership has overshadowed the district’s improvements in recent years, he said. Test scores are going up and teachers recently received long overdue raises, including a 10% raise this year and an 8% raise last year, he said.
Inglewood Unified has experienced notable increases in college preparation, graduation rates mathematics and English language arts since 2023, though it still remains below the state’s averages in many of the categories, according to the California Department of Education’s School Dashboard.
Castillo hopes Inglewood Unified will someday be seen as a template for struggling districts to overcome adversity.
“I think in the next five or six years, we’ll be the template for the phoenix that rises from the ashes,” he said.
Inglewood’s movement away from receivership comes as its much larger neighbor, the Los Angeles Unified School District, could be heading toward it.
This week, LACOE announced it is assigning a fiscal expert to advise LAUSD amid concerns about its ability to meet its obligations in the 2027-2028 and 2028-2029 fiscal years. LACOE has blamed the cost of recently approved labor agreements, ongoing structural deficits and declining enrollment.
The “Lack of Going Concern” designation given to LAUSD by LACOE this month automatically triggers an analysis by FCMAT that will determine the district’s risk level for fiscal insolvency.
If the district fails to stabilize, the fiscal expert assigned to help out could gain the same “stay-and-rescind” authority the trustee will have in the next phase of Inglewood’s exit from receivership.
LAUSD is currently projected to fall below the state’s minimum reserve requirements and hit a negative balance of $1.45 billion in 2027-2028, leaving the district unable to meet payroll and other obligations by November 2027.
That doesn’t mean a receivership is guaranteed. Though often referred to as a “state takeover,” receivership are rare and only triggered by the school district requesting an emergency loan from the state, according to FCMAT.
Only ten school districts, including Inglewood Unified, have entered receivership since 1990. The most recent, Plumas Unified, received a $8.5 million loan from the state in 2025.
Staff writer Teresa Liu contributed to this article.