Fayette County Public Schools is eliminating 120 district level positions as it continues to work through almost two decades of financial mismanagement.

The cuts take effect on July 1st, but the city of Lexington is stepping in and hosting a virtual job fair to help FcPS employees who are losing their jobs.

When we first heard about the layoffs in Fayette County Public Schools, I said to several members of my team, I said, we need to do something.

And one of the things we're very good at is, our job workforce center work.

Lexington.

And that's how all this got started, is we looked for how the city can help these folks.

You know, these are our friends.

They're our neighbors, and they're losing their jobs.

So we're here to help our work.

Lex, folks decided Kentucky Career Center would be a perfect partner.

Because we do this on a regular basis.

So as mayor, what this means for me is these folks who want to work and can work will be able to find jobs through the job fair.

And work Lexington is an initiative of the City of Lexington.

Our goal is to help individuals find employment.

We've partnered with the Kentucky Bluegrass on multiple different, events and projects and that sort of thing.

And so it was just a natural partnership to reach out to them, when this happened.

And so we started with a rapid response, with them, which is where you go in and you share, with multiple partners about all the different services that are available to the folks that are getting laid off.

And through conversations, we just decided that it would be a good idea with this amount of people that were being laid off, to have just an individual job fair just for them.

This one in particular is a virtual job fairs through Premiere Virtual.

So it's a virtual, job fair platform that we utilize, and that we offer to businesses.

And essentially the job seeker is creating a profile, and then the companies are doing the same.

They're building their booth.

And what happens is the job seeker can get in there and visit those different booths of employers that are part of the, that are part of the virtual job fair.

And then the the employers can also access the resumes and things like that.

And so what they do is they talk to each other, through messages or if things intensify as they, they're able to do a video to video call and talk to each other.

Without with it being virtual, that we get that opportunity from employers outside of Lexington as well as in Lexington.

And then it would also give the opportunity for individuals to be able to attend.

Maybe that wouldn't be able to attend otherwise.

And then, it just makes it easier all the way around, for individuals to be able to attend employers as well.

The job fair started out specifically, for the county public school employees that were being affected by the layoffs.

But it is also open up to any general public who wants to participate in the job fair.

Well, currently we have about it, about 20 employers that are participating as of today.

Employers can register up to the date of the day of the event.

So it ranges anywhere between education to manufacturing, health care.

So there's there's a variety of different positions that they can apply for.

So there's a pretty good, amount of employers participating in this event.

I think it's imperative for us, when we see a need that one of our partners in the community has, that we try to help them.

You know, we don't have all the perfect answers for everything that comes up there, but we can do this part.

The virtual job fair is next Wednesday, June the 17th from 10 a.m.

to 2 p.m.

job seekers can register on the Kentucky Career Center website.

The fair is open to the general public.