Short answer: No — not the county. Kentucky law requires a school superintendent to be a resident of Kentucky, the state. It does not require them to live inside the school district or county they run.
This is one readers keep asking, and the confusion is fair: it feels like the person in charge of a county’s schools ought to live in that county. But the statute draws the line at the state, not the district — and the distinction matters.
What the law actually says
The rule lives in a single sentence of state law. KRS 160.350 — the statute that governs how a superintendent is hired and what the job requires — provides, in subsection 2:
“Following appointment, the superintendent shall establish residency in Kentucky.”
Two things are worth noticing. First, the requirement kicks in after appointment. A board can hire a superintendent from out of state, and the law then requires that person to make Kentucky home. Second, the word is “Kentucky,” not “the district.” A Fayette County superintendent who lives in Scott, Jessamine or Woodford County is complying with the law, so long as the commonwealth is genuinely home.
Has a Kentucky superintendent ever gotten in trouble over this?
Yes — and the leading example is why we know the rule has teeth. In the late 2000s, the Newport Independent school district in Northern Kentucky hired Michael Brandt, who lived across the river in Ohio, as its superintendent. After he took office, the state’s Office of Education Accountability — the legislature’s watchdog for public schools — investigated and reported that Brandt was in violation of KRS 160.350(2) because he had not established residency in Kentucky.
The dispute went to court, and in 2009 the Kentucky Court of Appeals, in Newport Independent School District Board of Education v. Commonwealth, upheld the residency requirement. It rejected the argument that forcing a superintendent to move to Kentucky unconstitutionally burdened the right to travel, holding that residency is a permissible condition of holding the job.
Cases like Brandt’s are rare — residency is usually a quiet condition of employment, not a courtroom fight. But Newport is the reason it is settled law: the requirement is real, it is enforceable, and the state has a body that can investigate whether a superintendent is meeting it.
What counts as “residency”?
Here is where it gets less tidy. The statute does not define “residency,” and it does not set a deadline — it just says “following appointment… shall establish.” In practice, residency questions turn on the older legal idea of domicile: a person can have more than one residence, but only one domicile — the place they treat as their fixed, permanent home and intend to return to.
Courts and agencies look at objective markers to decide where someone is really domiciled: where you are registered to vote, where you hold your driver’s license, where you pay taxes, and which home you claim as your primary residence. A homestead or principal-residence tax exemption, in particular, is a sworn statement about where your one true home is. Those records are public — which is why residency questions are usually settled not by what a person says, but by what the paperwork shows.
What happens if a superintendent doesn’t comply?
Residency is a condition of the job, so failing to meet it is an employment matter, not a criminal one. The OEA can investigate and report. The local school board, which hires and supervises the superintendent, can act under its own policies and under the same statute, which permits removal for cause by a four-fifths vote of the board with the education commissioner’s approval. As the Newport case showed, the requirement has teeth when someone chooses to enforce it.
Why does Kentucky require this at all?
The logic is straightforward: the person running a public school system — spending public money, answering to a local board, shaping a community’s children — should be a member of the commonwealth that system serves, not a visitor to it. Residency is a modest way of saying the job comes with a stake in the place.
Why people are asking right now
This question has been bouncing around Lexington lately for a reason that won’t surprise anyone following Fayette County Public Schools. As the saga around Superintendent Demetrus Liggins escalated this month — including a now-much-discussed resignation email sent at 3:13 in the morning — residents on the r/Lexington forum started asking the plain version out loud. “He doesn’t live in Lexington, correct?” one commenter wrote under a post of the email. “What city does he live in?” asked another.
Whether that is actually true of any particular superintendent is a separate, factual question — one that turns on the kind of public records described above, not on what people assume. The legal question, the one people keep asking us, is the one we can answer cleanly: a Kentucky superintendent has to live in Kentucky. Not, it turns out, in your county.
Good Question is a Lexington Times explainer answering the things readers actually ask about how Lexington works. Have one? Send it our way.
Sources: KRS 160.350 (Superintendent of schools); Newport Independent School District Board of Education v. Commonwealth, Ky. Ct. App. (2009); r/Lexington.
