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How FCPS Got Here: The Liggins Crisis, Traced Back

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Paul Oliva

Sometime around mid-July, Attorney General Russell Coleman’s office is due to answer a question that sounds procedural: did the Fayette County Board of Education violate Kentucky’s Open Meetings Act on June 10, when it emerged from a two-and-a-half-hour closed session and unanimously suspended Superintendent Demetrus Liggins with pay? Liggins filed his appeal June 30; state law gives the AG ten business days to decide.

From the outside, the fight looks like a six-week scandal: a forged legal threat, a 1 a.m. separation email, a suspension, a whistleblower complaint. Traced back through the record — board evaluations, internal emails made public by local reporting, two independent investigations, a state special examination and one rewritten state law — it reads instead like a five-year collision that arrived almost exactly on schedule. Here is the whole arc, with the receipts.

The hire (2020–2021)

The story starts with a death. Superintendent Manny Caulk died in office in December 2020, at 49, in the middle of COVID-era remote schooling. After a five-month national search, the board in June 2021 unanimously hired Demetrus Liggins, then superintendent of Greenville ISD in Texas — a district of about 6,000 students, roughly a seventh the size of Fayette County’s. Board chair Tyler Murphy praised his “proven track record.” The résumé line worth remembering five years later: Greenville’s state “Superior” financial-management rating. His four-year contract paid a $275,000 base — with a car allowance, an executive-coaching benefit of up to $25,000 a year, no severance schedule, and no penalty for resigning.

The warnings and the report cards (2022–2024)

For three years, two records accumulated side by side — one public, one internal — and they pointed in opposite directions.

The public record was glowing. The board rated Liggins’ first year “exemplary.” The 2023 evaluation specifically praised his “management of the budget.” The 2024 evaluation, on a simplified two-tier scale, found he “met expectations” in all seven domains.

The internal record, as later reconstructed by two independent investigations and reporting on district emails, was darker. Warnings about projected salary shortfalls circulated inside FCPS finance as early as October 2023. In February 2024, budget director Ann Sampson-Grimes warned that the end of roughly $95 million in federal COVID relief required cuts of at least 5 percent, and identified $18–19 million in needed reductions. She warned again in writing that July. And in December 2024, when board member Amanda Ferguson emailed Liggins to ask why the board hadn’t been told that departments were ordered to trim their budgets by around 10 percent, Liggins replied that district finances were “very healthy” — and cautioned her against entertaining staff complaints.

A month later, in January 2025, the board renewed his contract 3–2, through June 30, 2029.

The year the money broke (2025)

In May 2025, a $16 million shortfall surfaced in the district’s roughly $848 million budget proposal. What followed compressed a decade of institutional failure into eight months. Over Memorial Day weekend, the board voted 3–2 to raise the occupational license tax — and in June the Attorney General’s office declared the vote void because the board hadn’t given the public notice the law requires. State Auditor Allison Ball opened a special examination days later. The contingency fund turned out to hold not the anticipated $42 million but $26 million, below the board’s own 6 percent policy floor.

In August, Liggins placed Sampson-Grimes — the budget director who had been warning about exactly this — on administrative leave, and assumed direct oversight of district finances himself. She sued him and the district for whistleblower retaliation in September. That same month, legislators on the Interim Joint Committee on Education grilled Liggins in Frankfort, where he conceded that “much of the criticism surrounding FCPS budgeting process has indeed been warranted”; three lawmakers called for his resignation and Murphy’s. Sen. Amanda Mays Bledsoe described the saga as reading like “a rejected script from a political satire.”

Through all of it, the honors kept coming: the Kentucky Association of School Administrators named Liggins the 2026 Kentucky Superintendent of the Year in July 2025, and in December he was named one of four finalists for national superintendent of the year.

The floor gives way (early 2026)

Two independent investigations landed in February 2026. The first, by attorney Leigh Latherow of VanAntwerp Attorneys, found Liggins “failed to fully comply” with board policies on budget planning and reporting — though not intentionally. The board took no action. The second, by the Tueth Keeney firm, faulted three senior finance officials and traced the warnings back to October 2023, finding the general fund had fallen from about $83 million to $26 million in two years, with “no intentional misconduct by any individual.”

Then the district’s new interim CFO, Kyna Koch — a former state associate commissioner of finance hired in March — found the real bottom. In April the district announced its books had been “fundamentally misstated” going back to at least 2008: broken internal controls, miscoded allocations, missed federal reimbursement deadlines, money shifted between accounts, and a six-figure software contract that never went to the board. Fiscal year 2027 was projected to open with a beginning balance of zero. The consequences arrived in May: $1.9 million in staff reductions touching 120 employees, a board-approved short-term loan of up to $95 million to keep the lights on until fall tax revenue, and an $880 million tentative budget. Liggins announced a 10 percent pay cut whose actual dollar value the district never clearly explained.

Six weeks in freefall (May 19 – June 30)

In mid-May, a printed email surfaced under the FCPS office door of state Rep. Adrielle Camuel — a Lexington Democrat who is also a district employee and had been publicly critical of FCPS finances. The email, styled as a legal threat from Louisville attorney Heather Gatnarek, asserted that criticism of Liggins amounted to defamation. The law firm says it never wrote it and has never represented Liggins. Camuel’s attorneys say district security video shows Liggins slipping the document under her door. Liggins, through counsel, denies fabricating the email and says the video shows something unrelated.

On June 3, Liggins issued written directives concerning Camuel’s remote work and attendance — the disclosures he now says triggered retaliation. On June 5, Camuel’s attorneys contacted the district about the threatening email. In the early hours of June 9, Liggins emailed Murphy that it was “time for me to step away,” seeking a separation agreement that included a year of continued pay and benefits — roughly $390,000 by reported compensation figures. Hours later he rescinded, saying his message had been mischaracterized as a resignation. On June 10 the board suspended him with pay, retained outside counsel to investigate, and installed Assistant Superintendent Bill Bradford as acting superintendent. Gov. Andy Beshear weighed in against any buyout: “You don’t leave a school system that is in a difficult place and expect it to pay you more when you’re already laying off teachers.”

Liggins’ counteroffensive followed in three moves: an open-meetings complaint June 19 arguing a superintendent’s resignation cannot legally be discussed in closed session under the Kentucky Supreme Court’s Carter v. Smith precedent; a 26-page whistleblower-reprisal complaint to the state Office of Education Accountability on June 25, filed the day after the board refused reinstatement; and the June 30 appeal to the Attorney General. One Kentucky school-board attorney, watching from outside the case, estimated the dispute “could turn into a $1,000,000 plus financial fight” — potentially costing taxpayers more than paying out the roughly three years left on the contract.

The boomerang

There is a symmetry in this fight that deserves more attention than it has gotten. In June 2025, the Attorney General’s open-meetings machinery voided the school board’s tax increase because the board short-circuited public process. In June 2026, Liggins is aiming the identical statute at the board’s decision to suspend him. The same law, the same office, the same board — first as the violator, now as the defender. Whatever the AG decides by mid-July, one side of Sayre Avenue’s power map will have been found, twice in thirteen months, to have done the public’s business out of public view.

Fact-check: what SB 4 actually does to Fayette’s board

Hanging over all of this is Senate Bill 4, the law the legislature rewrote mid-session this spring to restructure the state’s two largest school boards, passed over Gov. Beshear’s veto on April 14. Some Lexington coverage has reported that SB 4 ends the terms of all current Fayette board members on December 31, 2026. The enrolled text of the law says something narrower: the term-termination provision applies to “any large school district that has seven board of education members on the effective date” of the act. That describes Jefferson County’s seven-member board. Fayette’s board has five members — its members’ terms are not cut short.

What SB 4 does do to Fayette is surgical: it bars anyone employed by any Kentucky school district for more than 100 days a year from serving on a large district’s board — a provision that grandfathers current terms but makes board chair Tyler Murphy, a Boyle County teacher who is on the November ballot, ineligible for a new term. Murphy and the Kentucky Education Association are challenging the law in Franklin Circuit Court as unconstitutional special legislation, seeking a ruling before the November 3 election.

The clocks to watch

From here, the calendar does the storytelling. Around July 15: the Attorney General’s open-meetings decision, which carries the force of law unless appealed to circuit court — though actually voiding the June 10 suspension would take a court. Early-to-mid July: the restated fiscal-year-2025 financials from auditors Weaver and Tidwell, with full audit findings due at the board’s August planning meeting. This fall: Auditor Ball’s special examination report, which starts a 60-day clock for a corrective action plan. November 3: school board elections in two districts — Murphy’s and Ferguson’s — with the SB 4 lawsuit racing the ballot. And around December 10, an almost unnoticed deadline: state law lets a board name an acting superintendent for only six months, renewable once for three. Bradford’s clock is already running.

The endgame is narrower than the noise suggests. Firing a Kentucky superintendent for cause requires four of five board votes plus the education commissioner’s independent approval after his own 30-day investigation. A negotiated exit requires only money — in a district that just borrowed $95 million to make payroll, from a board whose chair says it is “not entertaining any motions for a separation package,” over the public opposition of the governor. Between those two doors stands everything this district has spent five years not saying out loud.

This explainer was researched and written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) for The Lexington Times from the published reporting and public records linked in the sources below; quotations are as reported by the cited outlets. Liggins denies fabricating the email at the center of the June allegations, and no charge or formal finding of misconduct has been made against him in that matter.

Sources

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