The important paragraph was the seventeenth one down.
What my sadly late best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal gave readers this September 11th morning was a glowing story on Fayette County Public Schools interim Superintendent Bill Bradford, complete with a great photo of the man, as seen in the newspaper’s tweet about the story shown to the right, handsome, broad-shouldered, looking like he came to the schools from the Police Department. The article told us all the good that he would do, and very little that he had actually done. I suppose that’s not much of a surprise.
Here’s that seventeenth paragraph:
The working budget comes as the district is trying to right its finances and bookkeeping after discovering it had misstated its finances for decades. Multiple investigations have found district officials frequently moved money between accounts and did not accurately report to the school board tax revenues and spending.
Mr Bradford replaces the retired/pushed out Dmetrus Liggins, who had his share, and more than his share, of problems in the office, but he was hired on June 4, 2021, so he can’t be responsible for “decades” of the school administration fudging its records.
What reporter Valarie Honeycutt Spears mentioned sound like crimes to me. Are any of these “district officials” going to be held accountable? Are any of them going to spend as much as a weekend in the Fayette County Detention Center?
But it’s more than just unnamed “district officials,” isn’t it? When people with the authority to do these things, their subordinates usually have at least some idea what’s being done. How many employees didn’t engage in the fraud themselves, but went right along with covering up this stuff?
Mrs Spears’ story began not about the past problems, but what the schools were going to do:
Fayette school officials have cut $1 million in operational costs at Central Office, as it’s preparing to approve a $933 million working budget, interim Chief Financial Officer Kyna Koch said Thursday.
Koch discussed the budget for the fiscal year 2027 that began July 1 at Thursday night’s Fayette County Board of Education planning meeting. There, the board also approved a 2026-2027 Professional Growth Plan for Interim Superintendent Bill Bradford that includes strengthening the district’s financial health.
Really? I didn’t read that as cutting administrative expenses, but as what it truly meant: the Central Office had been wasting money all along!
Bradford, previously an assistant superintendent, stepped into the acting superintendent’s role after Demetrus Liggins was placed on leave in June amid a review of his employment. Liggins submitted a retirement notice in August, which the school board accepted. Bradford was then named interim superintendent.
Mr Bradford is now the interim Superintendent, and might not be hired as the permanent one, but I have to ask: If “(m)ultiple investigations have found district officials frequently moved money between accounts and did not accurately report to the school board tax revenues and spending,” did Mr Bradford know nothing about this before the problems came to light? What was he assistant superintending when all of this was going on?
One problem with bureaucracies is that they involve people working together in offices, and people in offices talk. They know what each other are doing, they know who’s married and who’s single, they know which ones are f(ornicating) each other and which ones go out and drink a lot. Nothing truly remains secret in offices. Heck, even construction workers gab about their lives and what the clown working on that other part of the site has messed up.
The people in bureaucracies do one thing exceptionally well. No, not their actual jobs, though some might be good at them. But what they are really good at is protecting themselves, and each other. Do you think that Sam in the office cares more about the company, or about Joe, his buddy in the next office, with whom he sometimes has an after-work beer?
Perhaps this is where artificial intelligence is really needed. AI can’t lay brick or roof houses or pour concrete, but it can replace most of the human bureaucrats who produce nothing of value but only cause chaos.
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