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The headlines coming out of Fayette County Public Schools this week are painful. Library technicians shown the door. Technology staff let go. Work calendars slashed for librarians, child nutrition workers, and school law enforcement. Holly Brooks, an instructional resource technician, says her entire five-person team was eliminated–a team that processed more than 20,000 library books last year and logged nearly 5,100 visits to the Teacher Resource Center. Eight technology employees were let go the same day. Another laid-off employee estimates around 100 Central Office positions were cut for the coming school year–a figure the district has declined to confirm.
These are real people who had nothing to do with how the district got here.
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Interim Chief Financial Officer Kyna Koch now acknowledges that FCPS financial records have been misstated for years. Some of the failures have now been traced as far back as 2008. But misreporting alone does not explain how a district arrives at this moment. The deeper problem started well before anyone touched the books.
More Staff, Fewer Students, Lower Scores
The Bluegrass Institute published a detailed analysis of FCPS staffing trends last fall. From 2010-11 to 2023-24, certified staff grew 18% and classified staff grew 12%–even as average daily attendance declined after COVID-19. Over the same period, the average ACT composite for 11th graders fell from 20.1 to 18.9. More staff, fewer students attending, lower scores.
The analysis found that the district continued increasing staff even as post-pandemic attendance dropped, resulting in approximately 314 more employees than enrollment trends would have justified. That mismatch was always there, accumulating--it was simply invisible as long as the books said otherwise.
Koch noted pointedly that not three years ago, FCPS carried a contingency balance of more than $90 million--and it has nearly disappeared. That did not happen because of bad bookkeeping alone. It happened because the district was spending it, on a payroll that had grown disconnected from the students it was meant to serve.
The Ratchet
Public school districts operate in a political environment that makes staffing reductions extraordinarily difficult. Union contracts, job rights, and understandable sympathy for people who work with children create powerful resistance to any headcount reduction–even when enrollment shrinks. The result is a ratchet: staffing goes up readily and comes down only under duress, in exactly the kind of emergency that inflicts the most harm on the employees those protections were meant to shield.
Laid-off employee Tia Brown put it plainly: while there is extensive bloat at the top, many low-level Central Office employees were working tirelessly to help schools. State Rep. Adrielle Camuel, herself an FCPS employee, called the layoffs devastating–dedicated public servants shown the door through no fault of their own, facing one of the tightest job markets in recent memory as casualties of financial mismanagement involving tens of millions in taxpayer dollars.
The Right Lesson
The current crisis is being framed almost entirely as a bookkeeping failure. That framing is incomplete. If Lexington focuses only on the accounting irregularities and not on the staffing structure that made this crisis so severe, the same story will repeat itself once the auditors leave.
I recommended last fall that the FCPS board conduct a comprehensive staffing audit, establish metrics linking hiring to student outcomes, and create transparent reporting to keep staffing and enrollment aligned. That recommendation is more urgent today.
The people losing jobs this week are paying for decisions made long before them, across multiple administrations, in a governance culture that never required staffing to justify itself against enrollment. That has to change--before the next crisis, not during it.
Read Richard's October 25, 2025 analysis But What About Staffing?: Comparing Fayette County Public Schools’ staffing trends to enrollment and academic performance here.
