An outside investigation of fomer Fayette County Superintendent Demetrus Liggins found him responsible for circulating a faux email with the intent to intimidate employees who might speak against him amid the district’s ongoing budget crisis.
The Fayette County Board of Education hired Ashland-based VanAntwerp Attorneys to investigate Liggins after FCPS employee and state Rep. Adrielle Camuel reported the document, which was slipped under her office door May 20.
The report was delivered to the board last week and made public Wednesday afternoon.
“Taking into account all of the circumstances and all of the information obtained, it is my opinion that Dr. Liggins’ intent in placing the email under Rep. Camuel’s door was to discourage and intimidate her from speaking out against him,” the Aug. 14 report concludes.
The findings indicate at least eight copies of the document were found at the John D. Price Administration Building, and timestamped video surveillance shows Liggins “rounding” those locations.
VanAntwerp said it did not find sufficient evidence to firmly conclude Liggins wrote the email, however.
According to the report, the superintendent, who announced his retirement Friday, did not speak with investigators. Only FCPS-issued devices were examined in the course of the investigation, not personal ones, VanAntwerp noted.
“This does not equate to a finding Liggins did not create the Email,” VanAntwerp wrote in its report to Fayette County Board of Education Chair Tyler Murphy.
An hour before Liggins’ “walkabout,” IT search history shows queries for “best attorneys near me,” “best attorneys in Louisville,” “kaplan johnson abate & bird llp” and one regarding a superintendent search, the report found.
The school board placed Liggins on administrative leave in June after the incident, though officials have never stated an explicit reason for the action. Through his attorney, Liggins has claimed the leave was in retaliation for his reports of “fraud, waste and abuse” inside FCPS.
The district is facing another year with a budget deficit following the discovery of years of mismanagement and a depleted contingency fund that does not meet state minimums. At least one other investigation found Liggins violated policy in not properly overseeing the financials of Kentucky’s second-largest schools district.
In a response Wednesday evening, Amos Jones, an attorney for Liggins, said the VanAntwerp investigation was “structurally tainted.”
“VanAntwerp is trying to change the subject from fraud, waste, and abuse to Dr. Liggins’s day-to-day foot traffic among offices where he always hand delivered materials to his subordinates,” the statement reads, in part. “...This is the last-ditch, low-road effort of failed lawyers with a conflict of interest to try to rehabilitate their shattered images.”
