The 2018 Defamation Vote

Sean Dolan had volunteered in Katy ISD schools before any of this. He recalls asking a principal how a parent changes something a school will not change, and being told to go to the school board.

On 19 February 2018 he addressed the board during Open Forum at a work study meeting. The district's minutes summarize his remarks in one sentence. That sentence is the whole entry.

The recording of the same three minutes is longer than the summary of it. He described an assault on a school bus caught on video, after which he says the other student stayed on that bus for the rest of the year despite his requests to press charges. He described a phone taken from his son's bag with the SIM card destroyed, after which the student responsible was returned to the same class and the same table. He described a hallway assault in which his son hit back and both boys were punished equally, though he says video showed his son had not provoked it, and said the punishment cost his son his eligibility to try out as school mascot.

Then he described the death of his older son, and what happened when the younger boy went back to school. Classmates teased him about his brother. One of them said his brother had died from being retarded. The boy picked up a pair of scissors, kicked a trash can and ran out of the room. In the meeting that followed, he told the board, after being told everything his son had done wrong and every punishment he faced, a counselor asked whether anything was going on at home that might explain the boy's anger. The brother's death was already on file.

He did not begin at the podium. Before the February meeting he had contacted the district and the board directly, more than once, about what was happening to his sons. Those messages are the first thing in this sequence and the archive does not yet hold them.

He did not begin at the podium, and the district's own systems date the attempts. Katy ISD's website carries a contact form, and every message sent through it arrives with the same subject line: "EMail sent via KatyISD.org Website from Sean Dolan". The district's public information office numbers every records request it receives. Both leave a trail with dates on it.

What follows is that trail as it stands in the mail archive on this machine, listed by date. The messages themselves have not yet been read into this record, and the open item below says so.

He called that negligence, if not breach of duty. Then he put a question to the superintendent. The Parkland school shooting had happened five days earlier.

He raised a second subject in the same three minutes. He had asked the district, in an open-records request, for the list of data fields its student information system uses. Not student data. The names of the fields. He told the board he had been asked three times to withdraw the request, that the district's technology department had told him it tracks over 300,000 data points on students, and that the district had referred the question to the Attorney General rather than answer it.

That thread runs on through the year. In July he told the board the Attorney General had upheld the district's refusal.

One thing about the rules governing that evening is worth knowing before the next chapter. A revision to the board's public participation policy, drafted in January 2016 and adopted in January 2017, changed what the board was permitted to do when a speaker raised a subject that was not on the agenda. The earlier text barred the board from deliberating or deciding. The revised text bars it from deliberating or responding. Both versions are held in this archive. The change predates the arrival of the superintendent named in this record and the hiring of the district's first general counsel, and is not attached to either.

He came back on 19 March 2018. The minutes record why in one line.

From the podium he said that before the February meeting an administrator had approached him and tried to talk him out of speaking, telling him a board meeting was not the place to discuss bullying and asking him to make an appointment instead. He said he had left four voicemails with that administrator's secretary and had no call back from her, from any administrator, or from the board.

He put the district's own organizational chart on the record, with the community at the top, the board below it and the superintendent below that, and asked why concerns about the safety of children were not worth a reply.

The superintendent then took his own three minutes to answer. He noted that the exchange was being recorded. He said each allegation had been addressed in full when it occurred, that the district had no record of any follow-up until the previous month, that the incidents had been reinvestigated anyway, and that the review found each of them addressed fully and appropriately.

He then asked, on the recording, whether the speaker's son who had died had ever attended school in Katy ISD. He called it a yes or no question. He answered it himself: the district had no record of that child attending. The boy had lived in Florida with his father and was never a Katy ISD student.

When the speaker tried to reply he was told his three minutes were up.

Between February and March, Dolan recalls doing the thing he does for a living. He says he built a Facebook advertisement, put about two hundred dollars behind it, targeted it at the Katy ISD area and asked whether anyone else was having the same problems. He says that is how Greg Gay found him, and that the two men met for the first time the night before this meeting.

Gay was the next speaker. There is no gap in the recording between the two.

He gave his name as Greg Barrett, said his legal name is Greg Gay, and said he graduated from Katy in 1983. He described being bullied by students, by teachers and by coaches. He described having his head pushed into a urinal until his lip burst, being kicked while he lay on the floor, being sent home covered in urine, and going home and putting his father's handgun in his mouth. In the last seconds of his three minutes he named the superintendent as the person who pushed his head into the urinal.

What followed is a matter of public reporting rather than district records. The account carried nationally and then internationally. The superintendent denied it publicly.

Two days later a witness went on the record. ABC13 reported on 21 March 2018 that Christopher Dolan, who attended West Memorial Junior High School with the superintendent in the 1970s and later graduated with him from Taylor High School, remembered the incident. "I do remember, recall, one incident that happened where Lance Hindt took Greg into a bathroom," he told the station. "He was in the bathroom and put his head, into uh, into a urinal." He also said of the man who had spoken at the podium: "I was really proud of him. It takes a lot of guts to do something like that, especially when you've been bullied as a child."

Christopher Dolan is no relation to the speaker. Dolan also recalls a yearbook page showing both men at the same school being found quickly. That page is not held in this archive.

The district's answer came in two parts, one the next day and one a week later.

Katy argued with itself in public, and it did so on both sides. Two petitions ran within a week of each other. Both are recorded here in full, because the district's account of this period describes an organized campaign, and what the public record shows instead is a town divided.

At the board meeting of 26 March, between the two petitions, the board president answered from the dais.

Between the March meeting and the April one, the subject changed. A parent who had been asking about his own children went to the Harris County District Clerk and came back with a 1983 case file.

The Houston Chronicle, in a timeline published the following January, recorded who found it.

Fox 26 Houston reported the file that same evening.

What the file described. William Leroy Stein, a banker, brought a personal injury suit over an incident on 18 February 1983. According to the records Fox 26 obtained, Stein had objected to Hindt, then eighteen and a senior at Katy Taylor High School, driving his car rapidly through a neighborhood alley where small children played.

The injuries listed were a fractured skull, a dislocated shoulder and three broken ribs. Stein was in a coma for five days and required two brain surgeries.

The most important line in the report is not any of that. It is what Hindt himself said under oath.

Fox 26 asked the trustees whether they had known about the incident when they hired him. The board president answered.

Four accounts of how the case ended circulated in 2018 and they did not agree. The board president said there were no damages or liability. Stein told Fox 26 the suit resulted in a five figure settlement against Hindt. The Houston Chronicle, reading the court file, reported that it settled with Hindt and the host of the party paying the court costs. And a Release in Full held by this archive recites thirty thousand dollars paid, releasing Hindt and Employers Fire Insurance Company.

In August 2026 the case file itself was ordered from the Harris County District Clerk. The physical file has been purged and the scanned images are all that survive of it. They settle the question, and they settle it out of the court's own mouth rather than anyone's recollection.

The last two documents in the file are sixteen days apart and they point in opposite directions. On 10 December 1985 the court dismissed the case for want of prosecution, because no judgment had been submitted. That order is struck through in the file. On 26 December 1985 the judgment was entered.

Set the judgment beside the sentence. The board president said the case was "fully and finally dismissed, after litigation, with no damages or liability."

After litigation is right. The case ran two and a half years, with contested motions, discovery in another state and an intervening insurer.

Dismissed is not what happened. The case was dismissed on 10 December 1985, that order was struck, and a Final Judgment was entered on 26 December 1985. The distinction is not a technicality: a dismissal disposes of a case without resolving it, and a judgment is the court resolving it.

No damages is accurate as to what the court awarded, and the judgment says in the same sentence why it awarded none. The claims "had been compromised and settled and the consideration therefore paid in full." The court ordered no payment because payment had already been made.

No liability is accurate in the sense that no finding of liability was ever adjudicated, which is ordinarily true of any settled case. What the court did do, in the same document, was tax the costs of the suit against the two defendants, half each. Costs ordinarily follow the outcome.

The archive takes no view of what happened in that alley in 1983. It records that on 27 March 2018 the president of a school board, asked whether the trustees had known, described a court file in terms that the court file does not bear out, and that the answer she gave rested on exactly the distinction between a settlement and an adjudication that the judgment itself closes in a single sentence.

The Release in Full held here supplies the figure the judgment does not state. Thirty thousand dollars, releasing Hindt and Employers Fire Insurance Company. Employers Insurance appears in the docket as an intervenor whose own cause of action was disposed of by decree.

Two days later a second person came forward, and unlike the others he held public office.

Set beside the sequence, the dates matter. Greg Gay spoke on 19 March. The superintendent issued a statement denying it on 20 March. The board president told a meeting on 26 March that the board had fully vetted him. The court file surfaced on 27 March, the day after. The judge came forward on 29 March.

On 2 April the superintendent wrote to every district employee.

The Chronicle also recorded, in the same retrospective, that Hindt strenuously denied taking part in any attack on Gay, and later said that when he was young and dumb, he did dumb things.

Everything in this chapter was public by the first week of April 2018. Five weeks later the board voted public money to pursue defamation claims, and across the forty seven minutes that followed, none of it was named.

Four weeks later, on 16 April 2018, thirteen members of the public spoke during Open Forum. The signed minutes summarize twelve of them in one neutral sentence each: the PTA report; a father describing incidents involving his own children over several years; a woman reading a statement for another mother whose thirteen-year-old had been assaulted in a locker room before basketball practice; four speakers supporting the superintendent, two of them a couple who had driven in from another district; a speaker who had intended to write the superintendent a letter of thanks and said she could no longer do so; suggestions for how to stop bullying; an inquiry about whether the board might be asked to vote on arming teachers, two months after Parkland and two months before Santa Fe; a speaker on term limits and sidewalks; and one on Spanish immersion.

The thirteenth entry does not record what was said. It records what was done.

No account of the subject he raised appears anywhere in the minutes. Of the thirteen speakers that evening, the only one whose remarks are not summarized is the one who was stopped. On the recording he had been speaking for about twelve seconds.

This entry has no counterpart in the district's records. Every set of minutes held in this archive, 558 documents spanning 2013 to 2026, was converted to text and searched for language describing a speaker being stopped, turned away from the podium, refusing an instruction from the chair, or removed. One document matches, and it is this one.

A note on that count. 558 is every BoardDocs attachment classified as a minutes document across regular, work study, special and committee meetings, before de-duplication. A stricter definition, one signed set of minutes per meeting, produces 429. A looser one that includes late revisions and supplemental attachments produces 585. The result is the same in every case: one match.

In fourteen years of minutes, a member of the public is described this way once. Twenty-four days later the board voted to retain outside counsel to pursue defamation claims.

Two other things about that evening belong here, because a record that only shows one family is not describing Katy.

Jerry Clark spoke at length before him. He told the board he had had six children in the district since 2003 and described a series of incidents involving several of them across those years. His account is his own, it is not connected to Dolan, and it is on the district's tape in front of the same board on the same night. The children he describes are minors and are not named here.

And speakers came to support the superintendent. One told the board she had four children in Katy schools, agreed there was more to be done about bullying, and thanked him for what he had done during Hurricane Harvey, when a district campus was opened for families with nowhere to go. She said she believed he was the right person to lead the district.

Another speaker, a parent of an eighth grader, told the board his family was happy in Katy ISD. Most families in a district of more than eighty thousand students were having an ordinary year, and the record says so.

A speaker later in the same Open Forum thanked everyone who had turned out to pray at the flagpole outside, and said she would like it to become a regular event.

He was back at the podium on 21 May, eleven days after the vote this record turns to next. The minutes for that evening read, in full: "Sean Dolan spoke regarding school safety."

By the end of April 2018 the allegation had changed. It was no longer about what happened in a junior high bathroom in the 1970s. Dolan had set the superintendent's 2012 doctoral dissertation beside a 2008 dissertation by another author, and had taken the comparison to the University of Houston, which had conferred the degree.

On 1 May 2018 Fox 26 published the comparison and asked the district to respond. The board president answered on the district's behalf.

One more document belongs to 1 May 2018, and it was not public at the time. At 8:17 that evening, an hour and seventeen minutes before Fox 26 published the district's answer, the author of the earlier dissertation wrote to a Katy resident who had contacted him.

Keith Rowland had been identified on 10 April 2018 and approached by Nick Fundytus, not by Dolan, before any outlet had the story. This is his reply.

Nine days later the board voted public money to pursue defamation claims on the superintendent's behalf.

The district did not withdraw the statement afterwards. On 3 August 2018, asked again about the dissertation, it declined to comment and referred back to what it had said in May.

The University of Houston opened an investigation and, some twenty months after the statement, removed the dissertation from its server.

One more thing from the same article, because a record that carries only the district's certainty and Dolan's comparison is not a record.

Fox 26 asked a political scientist at Rice University, who had overseen dozens of doctoral dissertations, to read both documents. His assessment went against Dolan on the question of consequence and against the district on the question of fact.

That assessment sits against what the district said on the same day, in the same article. Jones said text had been lifted and that a review was justified. The district did not say the copying was minor. It said the allegation was verifiably false, and that there was zero truth in it.

The university, asked the same day, committed to neither position.

One question belongs to the day before the vote, and it is a question a reader is entitled to ask rather than one this record is asserting.

The University of Houston was being asked to judge the superintendent's dissertation. Katy ISD was about to fund a defamation action over the allegation about it. Were the two institutions talking to each other?

Somebody asked, formally. A Katy resident filed a public information request with the University of Houston for correspondence between its general counsel and the district's. It produced four documents, released on 9 October 2018. This is the first of them.

The other three documents in the release are a job posting Graham shared with her in June, and an exchange in August in which she asks whether he has openings, refers a new law graduate from the Katy area and attaches a resume. None of the four mentions the superintendent, the dissertation, the complaint or the complainant.

So the answer to the question is this. The two were on cordial professional terms throughout the period, and a records request aimed squarely at their correspondence produced lunch invitations and a resume.

It is set out here rather than left out, because a documented nothing is worth more than an undocumented suspicion, and because the alternative is that somebody else finds these four documents later and frames them without the context that sits beside them here.

A special board meeting was called for 10 May 2018. The board went into closed session at 7:30 p.m., reconvened in open meeting at 9:15 p.m. and adjourned at 10:02 p.m. All seven trustees were present.

The published agenda carried two items, both listed as action items arising from the closed meeting. Item 3.1, to consider approval of engaging special outside counsel to pursue legal action for defamation on behalf of the superintendent, other school officials and staff. Item 3.2, to consider an amendment to the superintendent's contract.

Neither item carried a published attachment. The recommended action for both refers the reader to material "as presented in Closed Meeting", which is to say to documents the public cannot see. The regular meeting three weeks earlier published 28 attachments.

The subject of item 3.1 is stated on the face of the agenda. A reader of the posting could know the board was considering legal action for defamation. The posting does not say against whom, and does not indicate that the two items were connected.

The posted closed-session notice does not contain the word defamation. It cites private consultation with the board's attorney, consultation with an attorney by telephone conference, and personnel, to discuss an amendment to the superintendent's contract.

About a week and a half earlier, the allegation that a comparison of the superintendent's 2012 doctoral dissertation with an earlier dissertation by another author showed extensive copying had become public. Dolan recalls a reporter telephoning him for comment on a defamation lawsuit before he had heard there was one. His accounts of how many days separated the two events differ, and this record does not state a figure.

What is not in dispute is the date of the meeting. Charles Griffin moved that the board engage the law firm of Feldman & Feldman as special outside counsel to pursue legal action arising from the defamation of the superintendent, other school officials and staff. George Scott seconded. The motion passed 7 to 0.

Before the vote, a statement was read into the record establishing a public purpose for spending public money. It set out the test Texas law applies when an expenditure benefits an individual: a clearly defined public purpose, adequate controls, and a return benefit to the public body. The presiding officer introduces the speaker as the district's general counsel.

One sentence in that statement connects the two items on the agenda.

No trustee discussed the motion. The presiding officer asked whether the board had any other questions, received none, and moved to the vote. Three minutes and fifteen seconds separate the motion from the result, and the statement of public purpose accounts for more than two of them.

Seven years before that evening, on 16 March 2011, the Texas Attorney General had issued an opinion on exactly this question. It concludes that an independent school district may not defray the legal expenses of an administrator who files an action for defamation, reasoning that because a governmental body may not itself bring a defamation suit, its employee may not circumvent that prohibition by bringing a personal suit with the body's funding.

Nothing located in the district's record indicates the board considered it. A member of the public read the opinion to the board from the podium four months later, on 17 September 2018. That appearance is in chapter 13.

Ten seconds after the first result was announced, Bill Lacy moved that the board approve the amendment to the superintendent's contract as presented in closed meeting. Charles Griffin seconded. The motion passed 7 to 0.

Three things about this item are worth a reader's attention.

The board had already been told, in the statement read before the first vote, that the effect on the superintendent was such that he could no longer perform his duties, "thus requiring the next item which is on the agenda." The board funded legal action, and then, on that stated basis, changed the superintendent's contract.

No terms were disclosed. The agenda carried no attachment. The motion refers only to the amendment as presented in closed meeting. The signed minutes record the motion and the result and no figures. Nothing in the district's published record states what this cost.

An earlier amendment to the same contract, approved on 15 May 2017, is recorded in the same form. Moved, seconded, approved as discussed in closed meeting, no terms in the public record.

The resignation came after the votes, not before. The public learned the outcome only once it was already unanimous. The superintendent then read a prepared statement for five minutes, describing the district's work through Hurricane Harvey, a $609 million bond and a five-year strategic plan, and announcing that he would resign effective 1 January 2019. He gave his reason in one sentence.

That phrase is the first appearance of the characterization the rest of the meeting would build on, and it is the subject of the next chapter.

With both votes taken, the superintendent and then six trustees spoke for roughly forty minutes. What they said is the most revealing part of the evening, and what they did not say is more revealing still.

The allegation raised against the superintendent concerned his 2012 doctoral dissertation, which a comparison with a 2008 dissertation by another author shows copies extensively from it. The University of Houston later removed the dissertation from its server. Dolan told the board on 20 January 2020 that the removal happened on 23 December 2019. The archive has not matched that date to a university document.

Across the entire 47-minute meeting the following words are spoken zero times: plagiarism, dissertation, thesis, doctorate, degree, academic, University of Houston.

In the same 47 minutes "bullying" is spoken eight times and "attack" twelve. "Smear", "campaign", "malicious", "organized" and "destroy" account for eleven more.

The substitution is not implied. Two trustees state it outright.

One told the room that a calculated smear campaign had been started under the guise of bullying in the schools. Another said the attacks continued to escalate outside the original topic of classroom bullying.

Read together, those two sentences define the public record of the evening. The bullying complaint is cast as a pretext. Whatever came after it is cast as illegitimate escalation. And the thing that actually came after it, a documentary allegation about the superintendent's doctorate, is never named, so a listener has no way to weigh it.

The same trustee addressed the question of concealment before anyone asked it, saying that in closed session the board sees a great deal it is not allowed to disclose, that the process protects private information about students and staff, and that it is not an attempt to conceal anything.

The closest anyone came to describing the actual allegation framed it as a threat to teachers rather than as a claim about the superintendent: a trustee said teachers were now afraid they would be next, and wondered aloud whether people were searching them for something they did when they were younger.

Two trustees said on the record that they had not known what was coming. One said he did not have prepared remarks and had not been as well informed as some board members about what was happening that night. The other opened by saying she was completely surprised by the action. Both had already voted yes on both motions. The other five read prepared statements.

The first of them also fixed the timing. He said he had been prepared to say goodbye to the superintendent in about eleven days, when his successor took her seat.

That detail matters to who was voting. The trustee election had been held on 5 May, five days before this meeting. It was canvassed on 15 May, five days after it. Two of the seven trustees who voted were leaving the board within weeks, and their successors, already elected, had not yet been seated.

Ashley Vann spoke last and closed the meeting. She can be named where the trustees quoted above cannot, because the signed minutes record who presided. Her closing line is the one at the top of this page. Twenty one seconds after it she adjourned, at 10:02 p.m.

One postscript belongs to this chapter, three months later. On 20 August 2018 the district's minutes record a single line: "Dolan read the Katy ISD policy on plagiarism." That is the only occurrence of the word in this district's minutes anywhere in the archive, and it is a member of the public reading the district's own policy aloud to the board that had voted to fund a defamation action. What happened while he read it is chapter 12.

On 18 May 2018, eight days after the defamation vote, ten people were killed at Santa Fe High School in Texas. Three days after that the board met for its next work study.

Twelve members of the public spoke during Open Forum. The signed minutes name each one and record the subject of their remarks: school safety, metal detectors, outcasts and their relation to the Santa Fe shootings, fathers on campus, counseling positions, an unresolved grievance, and thanks to the board.

One speaker addressed the defamation action directly. Eliz Markowitz, who told the board she was the nominee for the Texas State Board of Education, said she was appalled at the situation, that pursuing such a lawsuit would be a disservice to the district's students, parents and teachers, and that it would set a precedent under which people would no longer be able to speak out for fear of retribution. She is not a Katy parent with a grievance and she was speaking eleven days after the vote.

Dolan spoke near the end of the evening and said he had not planned to. He read out a letter another Katy parent had sent him that day. The letter argues that after a school shooting the conversation goes to the immediate cause and not the root cause, that reports had already surfaced that the young man in Santa Fe had been bullied by students and by adults, and that the adults around such a child have chances to reach him. It ends with a series of questions the writer asks the board to put to itself each night about children harmed by inaction.

The district's minutes record the whole of it in six words: "Sean Dolan spoke regarding school safety."

One more thing happened at that meeting, and it is the largest thing in this chapter. Eleven days after moving the district from a defamation action to a contract amendment in one sitting, and three weeks after telling Fox 26 the plagiarism allegation was verifiably false, the board president announced she was stepping down.

Katy ISD publishes its agendas through BoardDocs, which records each motion, who moved it, who seconded it and how every trustee voted, in fields that can be searched and downloaded.

For three consecutive meetings covering these events, 10 May, 15 May and 29 May 2018, those fields are empty. There is no motion, no mover, no seconder and no vote in the district's searchable record for any of them.

The votes were not unrecorded. Signed minutes for 10 May and 15 May exist and they give the movers, the seconders and the 7 to 0 results. They agree with the video in every particular. They reached the public as scanned images, attached to the agenda of the 27 August 2018 meeting, three and a half months later, under a routine consent item for approving minutes.

The consequence is practical rather than theoretical. Anyone who queries this district's published record for how the board voted on 10 May 2018 receives nothing. This archive returned nothing for that meeting until a person went looking for a PDF filed inside an unrelated August agenda. A scanned image has no text a search engine can read.

For 29 May there are no minutes doing that work either. Motions were made, seconded and carried in open session, and this archive has transcribed them from the recording, with the movers and seconders as announced aloud from the chair. The district's own record of that meeting still shows nothing.

The meetings on either side are complete in the same system. The 23 April 2018 meeting published 37 motions and 147 individual votes. The 25 June 2018 meeting published 21 motions and 147 votes.

A reader clicking through this archive will meet a different and unrelated shortfall, and the two should not be confused. Around a hundred meeting pages on this site carry a line saying the motions and votes for that meeting have not been recorded here yet. That measures this archive's own progress in structuring what the district published. The count in this chapter measures fields the district itself left empty. Neither number implies the other, and the methodology note at the foot of this page sets out how far the second one reaches beyond 2018.

Thirty-nine days after the vote, at the board work study of 18 June 2018, Katy ISD police removed Sean Dolan from the room at the general counsel's direction, barred him from returning, and revoked his three minutes of public comment. The reason was a GoPro camera clamped to a chair.

He does not appear among the speakers on the district's recording of that meeting.

Two accounts of it were written the next morning, independently of each other. One was his own, to a former Katy ISD trustee, and reads: "Got kicked out of the board meeting last night." The other was written by a records requester to a reporter at the Texas Monitor.

On 20 June he filed a Level One public complaint with the general counsel. He wrote that fixed cameras had been used at other meetings by other people, that he appeared to have been singled out, and that it was reasonable to assume retaliation for raising facts about the district. He wrote that the police officers had behaved professionally and asked that they be left out of it. He offered to settle the matter over coffee.

The general counsel acknowledged it on 21 June and said he would respond on Monday. The response came on 25 June and set out the board room's recording practices.

Dolan's reply that day contains the sentence that matters.

He then asked the general counsel to articulate how a camera mounted on a chair reduces order at a public meeting compared with one held in a hand. There is no answer to that question anywhere in three years of correspondence held in this archive.

He was not the only person to file. Another speaker, who had addressed the board about academic integrity, filed his own Level One complaint. The Office of General Counsel responded to it on 15 November 2018.

One more thing was recorded in that same 19 June email to the Texas Monitor. The writer set out what the district's public information officer had said about how records requests were now being handled: that they went to the legal department first, and that people inside the district were putting less and less in writing so as not to subject themselves to Public Information Act scrutiny.

That is a second-hand account of a district employee's remarks, written down the same week by an attorney. It is offered as that and nothing more.

At the same meeting, a member of the public addressed the board on academic integrity. He asked the trustees present, by a show of hands, how many had read the outgoing superintendent's doctoral dissertation.

A trustee raised a point of order, saying that board policy might permit an answer but did not require one, and that if trustees chose not to answer, no answer could be presumed. The speaker accepted that, said he had ten seconds left, and put the question again with the qualification attached: did anyone choose to answer, or did all six choose not to.

Six trustees were present. None answered.

The board president was absent from the 18 June meeting. On 16 July 2018 the same speaker returned to the podium, recounted the exchange, addressed her by name, said she had not been there and that he would afford her the opportunity, and asked whether she had read the dissertation. He then said that she had also chosen not to answer, and continued.

Board policy did not require any trustee to answer. That is on the record and it is the trustee's substantive point. Also on the record: a member of the public asked seven members of a school board whether they had read the document at the center of a matter for which the board had approved public spending on lawyers, and at two meetings four weeks apart no member answered either way. The archive records the question and the outcome and takes no view of either.

Three months after the vote, an outside body examined the two documents and wrote to the university.

The first is about a citation. Wood describes a pattern familiar in plagiarism cases, in which the borrower cites the borrowed work once, early, and never again.

The second is not about plagiarism at all. It is about whether the research described in the dissertation was carried out at all, and it rests on dates inside the document's own appendices.

Wood's three dates are checkable and have now been checked, against the document itself rather than against his account of it.

The third finding is a measurement, and it answers an argument the district never made but which a reader might. The two documents are not comparable in length only if the appendices are counted.

The letter also records what had already happened to the person who raised it first. Wood wrote that the university had been called on by at least one other person to investigate, and that the request "has resulted only in a rebuff from the dean of the School of Education that these are matters protected by privacy concerns."

He put the principle plainly. "Plagiarism, however, is not something that happens in private. It is a public act with public consequences, similar in character to counterfeiting."

On the same day the author of the earlier dissertation spoke publicly for the first time. Keith Rowland, a high school principal in Douglasville, Georgia, said he did not know Hindt and had learned of the matter from the news.

Asked about the author of the source document accusing the superintendent by name, the district declined to comment and referred back to what it had said on 1 May, that there was zero truth to the allegation.

The same article carried a figure. It reported that as a result of a contract amended at the last minute, Hindt would receive about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, equal to two years of base pay, on his last day on the job.

That is the amendment of 10 May 2018, moved by Bill Lacy, seconded by Charles Griffin, passed seven to nothing, described on the agenda only as presented in closed meeting, and carrying no published attachment.

Three weeks later the district wrote to the state about Rowland, and in doing so put its own account of the year on the record.

Dolan had asked for all emails sent to or from Keith Rowland in 2018. The district did not say it had none. It said it had them, attached them for the Attorney General's eyes, and asked to be allowed to keep them from the public because of litigation.

The same letter records something this page has not carried. On 2 May 2018, the day after Fox 26 published the comparison and the district's answer to it, the allegation was sent to district staff.

On 20 August 2018 Dolan began reading the Katy ISD discipline management plan's definition of plagiarism to the board. The plan defines plagiarism as the use of another's ideas or products as one's own, says it shall also be defined as cheating, and says it may involve word for word copying, paraphrasing, or simply using ideas and information. He said he had given the trustees a copy of a series of documents.

The general counsel interrupted him, told the presiding officer he had seen the materials presented to the board, and said the matter had not been taken through the appropriate administrative channel. Dolan answered that there were no names on the document. He was told that counsel was speaking. He asked twice for his time back.

The clock was stopped for a trustee's remarks during the interruption and not for counsel's. He was given 41 seconds.

The same recording holds something that goes against him, and it belongs on this page for the same reason everything else does.

In his last 41 seconds he said that a trustee had taken an earpiece out and turned his head away while another member of the public was speaking. The trustee asked to respond, said the remark was a personal attack, said he is deaf in that ear, said there are times he wears the device and times he does not, and said that the one person he would not consult about help with his hearing is the speaker.

He was entitled to say so, and the record shows him saying it.

Two other things he told the board that evening are checkable and are recorded here without comment. He said he had usually donated about $5,000 a year to the district, and had stopped after the district removed its acknowledgments of his donations from its websites. And he offered to pay personally for a survey of the two-way immersion program the board was then considering.

Speakers at the 17 September 2018 meeting were told from the chair, before the first of them began, that they would have one and a half minutes each rather than three.

Later in the same Open Forum a member of the public read the bill into the record. He recited the 10 May motion, then said the check register for July, the last month publicly available, showed the district had paid Feldman & Feldman $29,662.50 for legal services. He asked what public purpose had been achieved, what controls were in place and what return benefit had been realized for that expenditure. Those are the three tests the statement read before the vote had itself set out.

He then read Texas Attorney General Opinion GA-0878 to the board: that because a governmental body may not bring a defamation suit, its employee may not circumvent the prohibition by bringing a personal suit funded by that body.

That is the district's own published check register, read back to the board that authorized the spending, alongside the state legal opinion on whether it could.

In his own ninety seconds that evening Dolan raised the consent form the district had just sent to parents through its student information system. He told the board the form asked parents to allow an appropriately trained administrator to examine a student's personal device and search its contents, that there was no option to decline, and that most parents he had spoken to did not know what they had signed. He asked the district to write to parents and clarify that it was not required.

That thread began in February with a request for the names of the data fields the district holds on students, and it is a separate matter from everything else on this page.

On 15 October 2018 Dolan told the board that a senior district employee had shared his family's private information with a member of the board, and that the information had been used in the recent school board election. He asked one trustee directly whether she was aware that a member of the board had been accused, by another member of the board, of accessing his family's data.

The general counsel interrupted, told the presiding officer the forum was not appropriate for personal disagreements, referred him to the administrative channels, and said this was not a question and answer session. He asked for his time back and was told to continue with thirty-eight seconds. He named three trustees. He was then told he had been warned and his time was up.

This archive has not established the underlying allegation and does not publish it as a finding. What it holds is the record of the question being asked and of what happened next.

Later in the same Open Forum, Angie Waller spoke. She had four children in Katy schools, two of them graduated, and told the board that the district's special education program had been good for her oldest son. She asked the superintendent to stay. On the plagiarism allegation she made a procedural argument: that it was not for the public or for Facebook to decide, that it was for the University of Houston to decide, and that until the university reached a decision no one else should judge whether he had plagiarized or not.

At that point the general counsel interrupted her, telling the presiding officer that to the extent this was a complaint against an employee of the district he would refer them to the administrative procedures in policy. She apologized, said that many people did not believe he had done it, thanked the board and finished.

The same rule, invoked by the same person, on a speaker defending the superintendent. That belongs on this page as much as anything else does.

Her argument was that the competent authority had not ruled and that nobody else got to conclude. It is a reasonable argument and it is answerable, and this is the answer the record gives: the University of Houston removed the dissertation from its server. Fox 26 reported the removal on 15 January 2020.

On 5 November 2018 Dolan told the board what he had found in a records request he had partly obtained, the rest of which the district had referred to the Attorney General. He said it contained texts and emails between board members expressing frustration at the lack of transparency and at not being given the information they needed in order to vote. He said that perhaps explained the high rate of unanimous votes, all but one that year, and that a board not given time to make informed decisions is not deciding.

The documents he was describing are not in this archive. The pattern he was describing is.

In the first week of December the district's general counsel sent Dolan a cease and desist letter. What it was about has not been set out on this page before, and it is not what a reader would guess.

The board had decided to fill the superintendent's job from inside rather than run a national search. Dolan's answer was to post the job himself. He put a superintendent listing on LinkedIn and invited applications, and he received them.

His stated reason is a claim that had been made about Katy: that after what had happened, good candidates would not want to come. He set out to test it. He also used the district's logo to do it, which he does not dispute.

He replied the same afternoon, and the reply raises a question the letter does not answer.

Five days after the letter, on 10 December 2018, the board took the question up in open session, and the recording carries all three sides of it.

A trustee arguing for a national search quoted the board president's position back to the room.

Later in the same discussion a trustee addressed the LinkedIn posting directly from the dais. The chair calls on him by name immediately before he begins.

And at the podium that evening, a former trustee gave his own answer to the question of who would want the job. His reason was not the community.

Three positions, one evening. A trustee saying the claim had never been tested. A trustee calling the test crazy. And a former trustee agreeing that nobody would want the job, for reasons that had nothing to do with the public and everything to do with the board.

A week later the board named its inside candidate lone finalist, four votes to three.

At the 10 December 2018 meeting he asked the board to run a national search for the next superintendent rather than promote from inside without one. He was cut off mid-sentence when his time ran out.

A week later, on 17 December 2018, the board named Ken Gregorski lone finalist for superintendent. A trustee moved to substitute a motion to postpone the decision indefinitely and pursue a professional search with a nationally recognized firm instead. That substitute failed. The main motion carried four votes to three, and the presiding officer asked the audience to stop calling out.

It is one of the fifty-one motions in fourteen years of this district's record on which the board visibly disagreed.

The superintendent's resignation took effect on 1 January 2019. Gregorski was employed as superintendent on 14 January 2019.

The superintendent's resignation took effect on 1 January 2019. What happened over the following ten weeks is the part of this sequence that is least understood, and the part that explains why the record does not end when he left.

Within days, the subject changed from one family to the district's police department. The first dated act is a records request.

A correction belongs here, because an earlier version of this chapter got it wrong in two ways that matter.

It said a serving officer approached a private citizen rather than his own chain of command, and it dated that to January. The correspondence in this archive describes him as a former officer, not a serving one, in every sentence that mentions him. And the earliest meeting the correspondence supports is 7 March 2019, not January.

The difference is not a detail. A serving officer going outside his chain of command and a former employee talking to a critic are different facts with different weight, and the chapter's framing turned on the first.

The first round of allegations was answered with a vote, outside counsel and a public purpose statement. The second round, the one that came from inside the district's own police force, was answered differently.

In 2019 Dolan ran for the Katy ISD board. He says his reason was that nobody would answer him, and that a candidate gets to stand in a debate and ask. He says there were no debates, and that there was a single invitation-only forum with prepared questions, no cross-talk and no follow-ups.

He entered a three-way race and did not win it. Rebecca Fox lost her seat, for the only time in a tenure that began in 2013, and returned at the next election. This archive's meeting records place her at board meetings up to 22 April 2019 and not again until 17 May 2021.

A month after he applied to run, on the evening of 18 March 2019, he went to a WatchDogs meeting at one of his children's campuses. It had been advertised on the campus website and by emailed newsletter for six to seven o'clock. He arrived after it was due to start. Nobody was there. The building was open. He walked from one end of it to the other, and the next morning he posted what he had seen on the A Better Legacy Facebook page. The post is reproduced inside the district's own offense report.

At 11:05 that morning he emailed the school to ask whether he had been in the wrong place or the meeting had been rescheduled.

At 11:27 Captain Kevin Tabor of the Katy ISD Police read the post and opened case 19-0702. The report describes the visit as an apparent attempt to probe security.

At 12:32 Assistant Principal Noemi Barreto replied to his email.

The following day an officer investigated. District staff confirmed to him that Dolan had been on campus for the WatchDogs meeting. Barreto told him the meeting had been advertised on the campus website and by emailed newsletter for six to seven o'clock, that she had been having issues with the access control system, that she waited in the foyer, and that by twenty past six only one parent had arrived, so the two of them went inside to talk. She believed the door was locked when they left.

The report describes the man on the security footage as wearing blue jeans, a black jacket and a black and white baseball cap.

Dolan says he did not know the case existed. He says a version of that evening circulated among administrators and principals in which he had broken into Katy High School, that it circulated during his campaign, and that he could not answer something he had not been told about.

Getting the file took him to the Attorney General. To withhold it the district invoked section 418.182 of the Texas Government Code, a provision of the Texas Homeland Security Act covering security systems, and argued that release would compromise its ability to protect its campuses from terrorism and related criminal activity.

On 3 December 2019 the Attorney General rejected that for nearly all of the file.

Dolan says the case was closed as unfounded, and that he was never asked a single question during the investigation. This archive holds the report and the ruling. It does not hold a document from the district stating the disposition to its subject.

One more piece of the same thread closed that summer. On 21 August 2019 the district's general counsel answered a volunteer application from him.

On 18 November 2019 the board heard a Level 3 grievance brought by Dolan. A Level 3 grievance is the final internal step: the complainant appears before the trustees and the administration answers.

The hearing was a closed session, so the district's own recording is confidential under section 551.104 of the Government Code and cannot be obtained by request. Dolan was a party to the meeting and recorded it. His recording, forty minutes across four segments, is the only accessible account of what was said.

Everything quoted from it below is machine transcription that no person has yet checked against the audio. Each passage is marked. They are published in that state rather than held back, because the alternative is that the hearing goes unrecorded here entirely.

The first ground was that Dolan had not followed the volunteer rules. Reading from an email he said came from a first grade classroom teacher, the general counsel described a volunteer who came to the classroom when not scheduled, disregarded the schedule he had been given, was spoken to, complied briefly, and returned.

That is the volunteer programme that Dolan had complained about, put back in front of the board eighteen months later as the district's first reason for barring him from it.

The second ground was described as exploitation, or potential exploitation, of security practices, and rested on two incidents.

The first was the evening of 18 March 2019 at Katy High School. The general counsel's account is that the meeting had ended for lack of participation, that a campus administrator single-tapped rather than double-tapped the door, and that the locks were left open. His characterisation of what Dolan did next is quoted below.

What that account establishes, independently of the police file, is the district's own counsel confirming the date, the open door, and that a district employee left it open.

The second incident under that ground concerned an attempt by another man to enter a district building in December 2018. The account given included a serious allegation about that man, repeated three times, followed by a statement that counsel wanted it on the record.

That allegation is about a person who is not part of this record, and it was contested in the room as it was being made. It is not repeated here. What belongs here is the interruption.

The third ground was dishonesty. Two examples were given, and both were Dolan reporting the police department. One was the board meeting the previous month. The other was the corruption and official oppression claim earlier in 2019, the one that produced the outside investigation and the public report described two chapters earlier.

Two other things were said in that room that belong in a record of it.

Asked whether volunteering was a right, the general counsel's position was that there is no case law on it because it is not a right, and that it sits in the sole discretion of campus and district administration. Asked whether barring Dolan had been a decision made by counsel alone, he said his office does not make administrative decisions, and then said of this one that he supported it, and supported it wholeheartedly.

And at 14:42 he interrupted to ask whether Dolan was recording, and whether he intended to project it online. The answer given in the room was that the district was already recording the hearing itself.

The University of Houston's review of the dissertation ran for months. Dolan says he traveled there repeatedly, sometimes with the parent who had asked the board the show-of-hands question, and that he addressed the University of Houston Board of Regents in person, asked its chairman to resolve the matter, and handed over a thumb drive of the evidence.

In November 2019 he filed public information requests with the university.

When the review concluded he was told he was no longer needed. He was not told the outcome. The university cited the federal student privacy law.

The dissertation was removed from the university's server on 23 December 2019. Three weeks later the university wrote to Dolan to say the matter was over.

What the university has said in public is the rule under which a dissertation comes down, and the rule is narrow.

Dolan read the date and the rule to the board four weeks later, in the chapter that follows.

On 20 January 2020 Dolan was the first speaker of the evening. He told the board that eighteen months earlier he had brought the plagiarism allegation to it privately and been ignored, and that within hours of his going public the district had issued a statement calling his allegations verifiably false.

He told the board the University of Houston had concluded its investigation 623 days after reluctantly beginning it, that the dissertation had been removed from the university's server on 23 December 2019, and that the former superintendent had held no press conference to demonstrate exoneration. He put the severance at $750,000 and said the state had assessed a $350,000 penalty against the district's budget because of it.

Then he asked the board for two things. That it publicly confirm it was no longer suing or funding a suit for defamation over the plagiarism allegations. And that it put on the agenda of a future meeting the question of recovering the severance, and whether recovering it would offset the state penalty.

No such item ever appeared.

Nothing in the district's record shows the board answering either request. Nothing in it shows whether the money paid to Feldman & Feldman was ever recovered, or whether anyone asked. The last thing this record holds is the request, and the silence after it, both of which the district recorded itself.

Two weeks after the last chapter, a publication that covers plagiarism as its subject wrote the case up. Its author had no connection to Katy and no stake in the outcome, and his assessment goes against Dolan in one respect and against the district in several. It is recorded here in both directions.

On the allegations themselves he found nothing remarkable, and said so. Neither the bullying claims nor the plagiarism claims were unusual in kind. What he found unusual was the answer to them.

He described what he took to be the cost of that, and it was not a cost to any of the adults in the record.

The passage that goes against Dolan belongs here as much as the rest, and it is quoted without softening.

One line in the article records something this page does not otherwise carry. He wrote that at least some teachers in the district took the same view as the board, and held a rally for the superintendent after a board meeting.

The article also carries three figures, and they are why this chapter ends with an open item rather than a conclusion. It gives the defamation set-aside as twenty five thousand dollars, the separation payment as about seven hundred and fifty thousand, and reports, attributing it to Dolan, a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar penalty imposed on the district by the state as a result of the severance.

The middle figure agrees with the Houston Chronicle. The other two do not match anything else in this record.