School districts across the land are contending with rising education costs and constrained revenues. Ballooning retirement obligations and ever-growing personnel expenditures in particular are leaving many district budgets in the red. Yet state policies for assisting school districts in financial trouble are uneven and complex. Interventions are often haphazard, occur arbitrarily, and routinely place politics over sound economics. This brief presents a menu of sensible state responses when districts are insolvent or nearly so, as well as a tiered sequence of interventions that range from help to actual takeovers. The tiered interventions for districts in financial distress are: (1) Collaborative supports; (2) Financial management; and (3) Administrative control. [Foreword by Marguerite Roza, Amber M. Northern, and Michael J. Petrilli.]