Fiscal Emergency Declared in Centinela School District

The state has declared a fiscal emergency in the Centinela Valley Union High School District and will send workers to help the district sort out its monetary woes.

The state’s Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team, formed in 1992 as a public agency to help school districts solve their budget problems before they face bankruptcy, made the declaration this week. This is the first school district in California to have been classified as a fiscal emergency, said Thomas Henry, chief administrative officer of the agency.

The district, which includes Leuzinger High School in Lawndale and Hawthorne High School, is unable to figure out how much it has in its budget, Henry said.

At the same time, district Supt. Joseph Carrillo was offered a job June 18 as the associate superintendent at Sacramento City Unified School District. But by Thursday, Carrillo, who was unavailable for comment, had not offered his resignation.

Henry, who is acting as the district’s fiscal advisor until someone else from the agency takes over the day-to-day budget decision-making, said the district will not be able to close its budget for the 1995-96 fiscal year because several documents are missing to verify such items as payroll, personnel, vendor and contractor expenses. Also, the district was spending as much as $40,000 a month to handle litigation brought by its own employees.

“Clearly there are leadership questions at Centinela, at the board level and at the administrative level,” said Henry, who noted that relations between Carrillo and the board of trustees has been strained for some time.

If the district needs a state loan to balance its budget, a state trustee will have to be brought in to run the district, which is what happened to the Compton Unified School District.