Former St. Louis Public Schools Superintendent Keisha Scarlett sues district, former board member 68%
By Hiba Ahmad0%
4/20/2026, 9:46:03 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 15 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Anecdotal, with Self-Serving Bias as the most egregious example at 27.2% saturation with 254 hits. Analysis detected 1,203 faulty-reasoning hits from 933 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 60.9% and a BS Rank of 68% (7,197 of 21,886 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 67.10% of the article peer group.
Former Superintendent Keisha Scarlett filed suit against St.
Louis Public Schools on Monday, claiming the district violated her contract during the process of firing her in 2024.
Scarlett argues the district terminated her contract “to deflect its own shortcomings on her” and for reporting “illegal activity within the district.”
She is seeking damages, lost wages and benefits.
Her three-year contract began with SLPS in July 2023 at an annual salary of $268,000.
Scarlett was placed on leave in July 2024, then fired for cause in October of that year after the school board found she had violated the district’s hiring practices.
The board said she awarded high-salaried contracts to cabinet-level administrators without board members’ approval.
The lawsuit claims the board did not inform Scarlett of any of its concerns about her leadership or issues around her hiring practices prior to her being placed on administrative leave.
Scarlett also argues that the board placed her on leave outside the parameters listed in her contract.
The lawsuit states this made it difficult for her to gather information to present her case at a hearing before the board.
Her lawsuit states that she was not allowed to retrieve documents from her school-provided email or laptop as she was barred from the district office downtown.
Scarlett alleges the district also violated the Missouri Whistleblowers Act after she said she brought 2,000 outstanding unpaid invoices from vendors to the attention of the board.
She is also suing for defamation against former school board Vice President Matt Davis, who she alleges made false statements about her to the public and the media, including St.
Louis Public Radio.
At the time of her firing, Davis defended the board's decision to terminate Scarlett's contract with the district, claiming the board acted swiftly once it was made aware of the hiring violations.
SLPS declined to comment on the pending litigation.
Davis declined to comment but pointed to the school board's and Missouri State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick's audits of Scarlett's tenure with the district.
Financial mismanagement
After placing Scarlett on leave in July 2024, the board’s attorneys hired the private accounting firm Armanino LLP to conduct an audit of Scarlett’s one-year tenure with the district.
The audit found that not only had Scarlett violated hiring protocols, she misspent public funds.
Scarlett made unauthorized purchases including thousands of dollars on food delivery services and retail purchases, including over $1,100 at Bath & Body Works.
Fitzpatrick released the first of a two-part audit last year that corroborated some of the findings in the Aramanino report.
The report also found that the district was lacking major financial guardrails to prevent misuse of taxpayer dollars.
The board said that Scarlett was solely responsible for the district’s financial mismanagement, but Fitzpatrick said the school board “was asleep at the wheel and allowed Dr.
Scarlett to abuse the system in the first place.”
In December 2024, Davis said “the board has done its absolute best to be professional and transparent in what happened, and most importantly to learn from this and move on.”
In response, SLPS leadership withdrew the more than 20 credit cards with questionable expenditures.
Scarlett’s perspective
Scarlett said she stood by her hiring decisions and spending practices during her short tenure with the district in an interview with STLPR earlier this month.
Scarlett said her decisions to bring on new cabinet members or consultants to help tackle some of the district’s longstanding challenges were all done with the cooperation of the school board.
“As a superintendent, I can make recommendations, but final decision-making rests with the governing body,” Scarlett said.
Scarlett said the school board gave her the flexibility to bring in new talent to the district to build out her cabinet.
She offered salaries that she thought were competitive in the St.
Louis market.
Scarlett said all were within the pay bands listed on each job description, which ranged from $85,000 to $185,000.
“One of the agreements was that the board knew I wasn't working with a full team and that they would really give me runway to have the team,” Scarlett said.
Scarlett initially hired Millicent Borishade, Manal Al-Ansi and Fatimata Sow and later at least five other high-ranking district administrators.
She claims there wasn’t an internal pay structure for cabinet-level positions and brought up issues around equitable pay to the board.
“Every decision that I made for hiring was in the best interest, I believed, of how we were going to move forward and meet the demands of a district that was described as being sort of the national underdog because of the compelling sort of issues the district was facing,” Scarlett said.
“I was up for the challenge and those people were as well.”
Scarlett also said that she was only aware of the two credit cards assigned to her and her office and did not know about the over 20 credit cards circulating across the district.
Those two cards contained charges including frequent food deliveries and everyday school operation expenditures.
Scarlett said the credit cards were being used because of what she called a broken procurement process in the district.
She said she brought procurement issues to the school board’s attention through an audit conducted by Wright and Associates in 2024.
Scarlett declined to explain specific charges made to credit cards assigned to her office, which included items like $125 for a gift card to Massage Envy.
This story has been updated to include comments from St.
Louis Public Schools and former school board Vice President Matt Davis.
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100%flagged-word coverageScott Fitzpatrick
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