Broken Furniture, Broken Promises, Broken Systems

The School District of Lee County runs on nearly $3 billion a year. It still cannot reliably fix a desk, track a repair, or tell a teacher whether she was paid what an arbitrator ordered her to receive. Our fact-check of the checkable claims rides at the bottom.

By Amber Cebull · July 22, 2026

Somewhere in Lee County there is a classroom with a desk that collapses when a student sits in it. Down the hall, a sink has leaked for six months onto floors the district just paid to install. A broken chair sits in the corner of a room where, on any given day, a substitute who has never been there might not think twice before a kid drops into it. This is not a horror story. This is a Tuesday.

I have spent the last few weeks listening to Lee County teachers, and the same word keeps coming up. Broken. Broken furniture. Broken promises. Broken systems. And every time something breaks and stays broken, the people who absorb it are students.

A business this size would never run like this

This is not a struggling little operation. The district runs on a budget of nearly $3 billion a year. Our superintendent was just honored as one of Gulfshore Business's Women in Business. District leaders speak fluently in the language of business, efficiency, accountability, operations. Fine. Let's take that seriously, because $2.9 billion is real corporate scale.

That budget is larger than the annual revenue of Krispy Kreme. It tops Yelp and YETI. It clears Peloton, and it puts the district in the same financial league as Under Armour. Picture any one of those companies letting a workspace flood for six months, leaving broken equipment where people sit, or losing track of whether it paid its own staff. They would be gutted online by Friday. The stock would move. Someone would lose a job. We hold a doughnut company to a higher operational standard than we hold the institution raising our children.

Broken systems

Start with something as basic as fixing what breaks. The district used to run a program called Castle, one place where a teacher could log a maintenance request and follow it. Castle is gone. Maintenance now lives inside PeopleSoft, the same enterprise system that runs payroll. And here is the part that should stop you. For a long time, the person who submitted a request was the only person who could see it. A teacher and a building supervisor could file the exact same repair, each with no idea the other had done it. No shared queue. No visibility. No way to know if anything was moving. They eventually loosened the permissions, and it was still a mess to sort through.

Ask teachers how they report a broken desk today and you will not get one answer. One emails an assistant principal. One fills out a form. One tells a custodian in the hallway. Four teachers, four different methods. That is not what a working system looks like. That is what people do when the system beneath them has quit functioning and everyone has improvised a workaround. A sink leaks for six months because there is no ticket, no timestamp, and no one whose actual job it is to answer for the queue.

The day the alarm was off

One teacher told me about a day I have not been able to stop thinking about. A couple of years ago a major leak flooded multiple floors of her building. The school was evacuated and students were sent home early. That night, she says, her principal asked a district administrator to close the school the next day and was told no. Closing would have made them the only school in the county forced to make up a day at the end of the year.

The next morning, plastic sheeting sealed off the flooded hallways and classrooms across several floors. The building smelled. Some students went home saying they were having trouble breathing. Around 9:30 she noticed a fire alarm technician working in the hallway outside her room and assumed he was running a test. He told her he was turning the system back on. The day before, she says, the alarm would not stop sounding, so it had been switched off to quiet it, and no one had been able to get it working again. She repeated it back to him to be sure she understood. Students had been inside a damaged building for most of the morning with the fire alarm off. He confirmed it.

I am not going to tell you what to make of that. I am just going to put the law next to it. Under Florida's Uniform Fire Safety Standards, an occupied public school is required to have a working fire alarm system, and under Florida Statute 1013.12 every public school building is inspected for safety to life each year. That is the standard every school in this state is held to. Her account is above. The law is right here. I trust you to read them both.

Broken promises

Now the promise. During the teacher shortage, when there were not enough adults to cover classes, the district made teachers a deal in writing. Cover the classes, earn $1,000 for every fifteen days of coverage, paid out of federal relief funds. The superintendent signed it. And buried in that same signed document is an admission almost no one saw. The district acknowledged that in the prior round, delays in payment and disputes over the accuracy of payments had persisted. They knew their own payment process was unreliable, and they signed anyway.

Then the district decided the money had run out and stopped paying. The teachers union took it to arbitration. In August 2024, an arbitrator ruled entirely for the teachers and found that the district had violated its contract. The bill was $8.2 million. Teachers were to be paid by December 2024. And even then, after a formal ruling with a hard deadline, the payout went out so unevenly that the union was buried in members who could not tell what they had received or why.

One of them is Nikki Lacza, who gave twenty years to Lee County classrooms. She covered roughly 114 days. She kept her documentation. She has gone through her bank statements line by line, and she cannot find where she was paid what she was owed. She is not asking for sympathy. She is asking the one question a $2.9 billion organization should be able to answer in seconds. Did you pay me, or didn't you. She still does not know.

The same failure wearing two costumes

Sit with that. In a district this size, a twenty-year teacher cannot get a straight answer about her own paycheck, and a teacher cannot find out whether her broken desk is on anyone's list. It is the same failure wearing two costumes. The systems exist. They simply do not give the people inside them the one thing a system is built to do, which is show you whether the thing that was supposed to happen actually happened.

And students live inside that gap. They sit in the broken chairs. They learn in the room with the leak. They are taught by people who covered class after class on a promise, then could not confirm the promise was kept, and some of whom finally decided it was not worth staying. Every unfixed thing and every unpaid day eventually lands on a child, because the classroom is where all of it comes to rest.

I have written before about why this district seems unable to say any of this out loud. In a companion piece on the July 21 furniture vote, I made the case that its caution looks less like fiscal prudence and more like legal exposure. A desk with a sharp metal edge is not only a maintenance item. It is a liability the district would rather not name, which is exactly how a broken desk survives long enough to hurt someone.

Related: A Lawyer in the Room: what the July 21 furniture vote revealed about liability

Related: The $2.9 Billion Fix: what accountability for these systems actually looks like

The district can plan long-term when it decides to

Here is the part that should stay with you. This is not an organization that cannot plan. Right now the district is planning years ahead for several hundred million dollars in new construction, financed through a $400 million bond, with traffic and environmental studies, permitting across three levels of government, and a five-year timeline its own board chair can recite from memory. It can hold a project together across a decade of design and steer a dozen agencies toward a single groundbreaking, even as its overall enrollment declines and the growth that justifies the building sits in a few specific zones. That is real institutional capacity. Which is exactly what makes the rest so hard to accept. A district that can plan a school twenty years out cannot tell a twenty-year teacher whether her paycheck was right, or a custodian whether the leak he reported six months ago is on anyone's list. The capability is plainly there. What is missing is the decision that maintenance and payroll deserve the same care as a groundbreaking. When an institution can find the will and the machinery for hundreds of millions in new buildings but says the repair queue is simply too hard, it is not telling you what it can do. It is telling you what it has chosen to prioritize.

What I am asking for

I am not asking for a scandal. I am asking for the thing the district keeps claiming to be. An organization this size knows how to run centralized software. It did it for payroll. It can stand up a real work-order system that teachers can see into. It can reconcile the coverage payments in the open and tell every teacher, in writing, exactly what they were paid and why. It can decide that a broken desk and a broken promise do not belong at a $2.9 billion operation.

Broken furniture, broken promises, broken systems. A business would fix any one of them to survive. Our schools carry all three at once, and the families paying for it cannot sell the stock or take their child's education somewhere better run. So we are asking out loud instead. Fix what is broken. Our kids are the ones sitting in it.

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