A public archive of Katy ISD governance records.

What this is

A Better Legacy is a public reference archive documenting what elected Katy ISD trustees said, voted on, moved, seconded, and participated in. It exists so a voter, journalist, parent, or researcher can look up a trustee's documented record from primary public sources.

The site is not a blog and not a news outlet. It presents the evidence beside the assertions that describe it, so the record can be verified while reading: meeting minutes, video with timestamps, roll-call votes, official documents.

Who publishes it

Name

Sean Dolan

Contact

Use the form on this page

Sean Dolan attended Katy ISD schools from fifth grade and graduated from the district in 2002. He raised three children in Katy ISD schools.

He founded a marketing agency in 2009 and has spent more than fifteen years doing one particular kind of work: checking what an organization says against what its own records show. He has managed multi-million-dollar media budgets for eCommerce, real estate, SaaS and legal clients, and his professional habit is the one this archive is built on. If a platform reports one thing and the underlying data reports another, he wants to know why.

That is why this site is a database rather than a blog. Every claim on it is traceable to a document Katy ISD published, a recording Katy ISD made, or a public record obtained by request. Where the archive is incomplete, it says so. Where it has been wrong, it says that too, on a dated corrections page.

He began speaking at Katy ISD board meetings in February 2018 and has continued since, on bullying data, school safety, transportation, federal pandemic funds, and the district's use of outside legal counsel.

Publisher disclosure for the 2018 Defamation Vote

I am not a neutral party to the events on that page, and you should know exactly how before you read a word of it.

In February 2018 I asked the Katy ISD board to track data on bullying in its schools. I had three children enrolled in the district at the time. Over the six weeks that followed I wrote to the general counsel and to individual trustees eleven times through the district's own website. On 19 March the district's minutes described my account of its non-response as a "perceived lack of response." On 16 April I was stopped mid-statement during Open Forum, and the minutes recorded that I "was not allowed to complete" my time. On 10 May the board voted 7-0 to retain outside counsel to pursue legal action for defamation on behalf of the superintendent and other officials. In December 2018 the district's general counsel sent me a cease and desist letter.

I am, in other words, one of the people that vote was about.

That is why this page is built the way it is. I have not asked you to take my word for anything. Every factual claim here cites a document the district produced or a recording the district published, with a link, so you can check it yourself and reach your own conclusion. Where I give an opinion, it is labeled as mine and set apart from the record.

The record does not need my help. It needs to be readable.

About the data

Trustee vote counts on this site are sourced from a summary export of the BoardDocs archive generated 15 August 2026. The following limits apply to every count shown until they are updated:

1. Per-trustee counts trail the whole-board totals. The trustee summaries were exported while collection was in progress and reflect 321 of 356 known meetings. The site-wide totals reflect all 356 meetings. Individual trustees seated in 2023–2026 may still be undercounted on their own pages; whole-board figures on the homepage are current.
2. Only votes BoardDocs published are counted. BoardDocs is not necessarily complete. On 29 May 2018 the board made and passed six motions on video that do not appear in BoardDocs. Gaps of that kind exist and are documented separately.
3. First and last vote are not term dates. They bracket a trustee's recorded voting activity. Actual appointment, election, and resignation dates come from canvass records and minutes.
4. "Assent %" is a descriptive statistic, not a judgment. It counts recorded yeas against the trustee's total recorded votes. Most school-board business is routine consent-agenda work; that is true of every district.
5. Name matching is exact-string. Misspellings in source minutes can split one person into two records or merge two people. Records are spot-checked; report anomalies via the corrections process.

Source policy

Factual assertions on documentary pages link to primary records whenever practical: official agendas, minutes, board video, and public documents. When a primary source is unavailable or unstable, the archive says so rather than citing secondary reporting.

External video timestamp URLs are used only after their behavior has been tested. Local copies of underlying district videos and documents are maintained for preservation and analysis; the public site generally points users to the district-hosted originals.

Transcript policy

Machine-generated transcripts are used as discovery tools. They are not automatically elevated into permanent quotations attributed to named people.

When a statement by a named person is presented as a permanent documentary quotation, a human has listened to the recording, confirmed the speaker, checked the wording, and corrected it if necessary. Verified quotations are the only form of quoted speech used in documentary narratives about named living people.

Editorial boundary

The documentary archive may show what a trustee voted, what a motion said, what someone said on video, what the minutes state, what public money was authorized, what happened afterward, and whether a record exists in the district's published system. It does not state unsupported conclusions about a person's motive, character, intent, or morality.

First-person commentary from the publisher is clearly labeled and lives at /commentary/. It does not mix into mechanically generated trustee records or documentary evidence pages.

Corrections

Errors in the archive are corrected in place and logged here with the date, the scope of the correction, and a brief description of what changed.

1. 2026-08-20 The 2018 Defamation Vote

   We attributed six passages from the 10 May 2018 recording to named trustees. Corrected 20 August 2026: the attributions rested on a machine transcript and have been withdrawn.

2. 2026-08-20 The 2018 Defamation Vote

   We reported that 14 of 157 regular meetings have no motions in the searchable record, next to a claim about three meetings in May 2018. Corrected 20 August 2026: the two measurements are now separated and labeled.

3. 2026-08-20 The 2018 Defamation Vote

   We cited the 16 April 2018 agenda as the 23 April 2018 agenda in a comparison of motion records. Corrected 20 August 2026.

4. 2026-08-16 The 2018 Defamation Vote

   We described Greg Barrett as speaking before Sean Dolan at the 19 March 2018 meeting. Corrected 16 August 2026: he spoke immediately after.

5. 2026-08-15 Trustee records

   We published that Rebecca Fox was unusually deferential. Corrected 15 August 2026: her assent rate is among the higher rates of dissent on this board.

6. 2026-08-15 Trustee records

   We published that Rebecca Fox was board president continuously from 2013 to 2017. Corrected 15 August 2026: she held the office in two separate terms.

7. 2026-08-15 The 2018 record

   We published that the 10 May 2018 votes survive only on video. Corrected 15 August 2026: signed minutes exist, published later as a scanned image.

8. 2026-08-15 The 2018 record

   We published that 29 May 2018 was the only meeting with motions missing from the record. Corrected 15 August 2026: 14 regular meetings have none; only this one has been reviewed.

9. 2026-08-15 The 2018 record

   We linked a new staff attorney post to the defamation matter. Corrected 15 August 2026: the role is for special education.

10. 2026-08-15 Dissertation exhibit

    We published 55 matched passages and 1,678 identical words. Corrected 15 August 2026 to 64 passages and 1,946 words.