After LEX 18 got questions from viewers about furniture purchased for Fayette County Public Schools’ administration building, we took a look at some of the expenditures over the last year.
Many of the purchases listed in the records provided actually went to the district’s schools after being delivered to the administration building, but there were some high-dollar purchases that stayed in the building that caught our attention.
One of them was a series of furniture purchases for the redesign of the district’s 42-employee human resources department, which is housed in the John D. Price Administrative Building.
The initial records provided to LEX 18 did not appear to break the HR department furniture purchases down to individual items, but rather into a few larger expenditure reports. The main purchases for the department included one for $175,920.66, another for $81,980 and a third for $4,962.49. Those items add up to a total of more than $260,000.
So where did that money go? The school district took LEX 18 through the office to show where the purchases ended up.
Jennifer Dyar, the chief human resource officer, said that the office’s redesign was funded with grant money rather than out of the district’s general fund. Records later provided to LEX 18 show that the funding was from ESSER grants.
The HR department serves the district’s nearly 10,000 employees, and the redesign was meant to help streamline onboarding and other HR processes, Dyar said.
“That was part of the redesign, to create a 'one-stop shop' for employees so they can come and get everything they need done in a much faster way,” Dyar said.
Before the redesign, employees and applicants had to go to different locations to complete fingerprinting and other onboarding tasks, a process that took nearly a month, she said. Now, it’s a five-day turnaround.
The school district started this school year with no vacancies, and Dyar said that that is a good return on investment.
LEX 18’s Leigh Searcy asked what Dyar would say to people who still might question if the spending was necessary.
“I'd love for them to experience what our new employees get to experience … in order for us to provide the services needed to our students, we have to have high quality staff members to help recruit and retain them,” Dyar said.
One of the other office furniture expenditures in the administration building that LEX 18 was interested in was a $16,000 purchase for a former administrator’s office. When we asked to see the office in question, we were told that the administrator no longer works there and the office is used for something different now.
The initial records provided to LEX 18 did not go into detail about the $16,000 purchase, so we asked for clarification and were told to put in another open records request.
Through the second request, we obtained invoices that were still vague and didn’t explain how many items of furniture or what types of furniture were purchased with that money.
