Katy ISD school chief must put students above his reputation

Only one thing is more disturbing than the allegation that Katy Superintendent Lance Hindt severely bullied a classmate decades ago: the utter lack of compassion the educator has shown the man who came forward.

That man, 53year-old busithe nessman Greg Gay, whose family goes back more than a century in Katy, told me this week that his decision to confront Hindt at a school board meeting recently had nothing to do with some unsettled score or needing closure. It had everything to do with helping kids. “To me, this was all water under bridge. It was gone,” he said. “I had already forgiven him for what he did, and the rest of those kids, too.”

But then, he saw a video of Sean Dolan, another local businessman, addressing the school board about the bullying of his own son and imploring trustees to do more districtwide about bullying before something tragic happens. The board appeared unmoved. Dolan told me no one he addressed that day has contacted him about his concerns.

“I saw the way Lance treated him, and I said this is wrong,” Gay said of the superintendent. “Somebody has got to stand up and put a fire under Lance’s butt to do something. I wanted to put him on the spot so that he would have to acknowledge there’s a problem in the district.”

And that he did. But as Gay took the mic and gave a statement to the board on March 19, he says, he noticed Hindt smiling, heard a laugh coming from somewhere else, and he became overwhelmed with emotion as he described how he says Hindt once attacked him in the boys’ bathroom at a Katy ISD middle school. Gay alleges that Hindt shoved his head in a urinal as others watched, leading Gay to go home, put a pistol in his mouth and contemplate pulling the trigger.

Gay walked away before fin-

ishing, but as soon as the story broke, and a video of the statement went viral, Gay was inundated with hundreds of social media messages, from as far away as Israel, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia.

One mother in Ohio wrote that her son had seen the video of Gay confronting Hindt and immediately came to her, acknowledging that he was being bullied at school and was thinking about suicide, and asking for help.

“I just broke down in tears,” Gay said.

Rejecting the story

He’s grateful his story touched lives. But he can’t understand why it doesn’t seem to have moved Hindt.

The superintendent later tried to justify his strange, smiling demeanor during Gay’s statement at the public forum as shock. But he has done little to acknowledge Gay’s painful recollections, or even broader problems addressing bullying in the district.

“He doesn’t even have to admit that he did it to me,” Gay said Tuesday. “He could just say ‘I don’t remember that, but I’m sorry it happened to you.’ He’s basically denying that he knows who I am.”

Hindt has denied any involvement in the alleged incident and maintains that position, a district spokeswoman told me Tuesday, even as a classmate who says he witnessed the bathroom bullying came forward to corroborate. And even as another former classmate, now a circuit court judge in Alabama, alleged that Hindt was a “vicious bully” when they both attended Taylor High School, where Hindt played varsity football.

Gay says he thought maybe Hindt had changed, maybe he would apologize. But as of deadline Tuesday, he says no one at the board meeting had contacted him about his statement.

Hindt has made only vague statements hinting at some wrongdoing in his past.

“I recognize I am not a perfect person; none of us is. I certainly wasn’t as a teenager, and I am not as an adult,” he said in a statement released Monday in which he also referred to a religious awakening in 1992. “When I was young and dumb, I did dumb things.”

Vague hints aren’t enough, not for a man who oversees one of the largest school districts in Texas. If Hindt has done “dumb things,” why not admit them, give a few specifics, apologize and set an example for his students?

The only apology from Hindt came this week in a statement to staff, saying he regretted the negative media attention the story had brought to Katy, a district used to being lauded for high performance in sports and academics.

Hindt also took time to attack the media for inciting public criticism through “half-truths, viral videos, edited tape, false statements and gotcha moments.” Frenzied attacks, he said, lack context and distort truth. Again, no specifics — although he did suggest demonic motivations among critics:

“As I have seen, there is evil among us, those that will do anything to destroy someone’s good reputation and 27 year career,” Hindt said in the statement.

Dangerous example

Gay has said from the start he never intended to get Hindt fired. He had heard parents laud the superintendent’s performance in many areas. He only wanted to help kids who are struggling with bullying in the district today, he said.

“Now, all the kids in the school system understand that he was a bully, and they too can get away with doing this and they can still end up head of the ninth-largest school district in Texas,” Gay told me. “He’s setting a very, very bad and dangerous example.”

Dolan, the Katy parent whose son’s story of bullying inspired Gay to come forward, agrees. He says the only bright spot in the whole ordeal is that parents and staff in Katy are coming to him in droves with their own stories of bullying within the district.

If it’s true that the superintendent had a history of bullying, he might be uniquely qualified to address the problem, Dolan said.

“If he does that, this whole thing shifts,” Dolan said.

If he doesn’t, the problem will only get worse.

“The guy nearly killed himself,” Dolan says of Gay. “That’s what worries parents. What happens if one of our kids is in that position? Is the response to call the victim a liar? Or to show compassion and hear them out and validate their concerns and try to do something to help them?”

Anyone duty-bound to protect children should know the answer.

“He doesn’t even have to admit that he did it to me. He could just say ‘I don’t remember that, but I’m sorry it happened to you.’ ” Greg Gay

“I recognize I am not a perfect person; none of us is. … When I was young and dumb, I did dumb things.” Katy Superintendent Lance Hindt