Resignation of Lance Hindt

During a school board meeting in March 2018, an individual named Greg Gay (also known as Greg Barrett) spoke during a public forum segment of the meeting, and accused Hindt of shoving his head in a urinal when they were both enrolled in a secondary school within the district, and said the incident drove him to the brink of suicide.[5][6] Hindt denied Gay's allegations, claiming he will only be judged by God.[6]

Following the incident, Alabama judge David Carpenter also accused Hindt of bullying during their secondary school years. While Carpenter said that he was not a victim of Hindt's bullying, he has witnessed "frightening, intense and near constant" bullying of weaker classmates by Hindt. Carpenter even labeled Hindt a "thug".[5]

Prior to the incidents' surfacing, Hindt was noted to have taken very public stance against bullying.[7]

At around the same time, a man named Sean Dolan ran Hindt's dissertation through a software and discovered that it matched with another paper, leading to accusations of plagiarism.[3][8] The University of Houston administration stated that it would investigate the matter.[9]

Other incidents of violence also came to light. In 1983, under deposition, Hindt admitted to hitting a man and leaving him unconscious in an alley after the victim had accused Hindt of driving too fast near where children were playing.[10]

After an 18-month investigation, the University of Houston removed Hindt's dissertation from their official website. In May 2018, Hindt announced his resignation and retirement effective January 1, 2019, saying that he cannot fulfill his duties as superintendent and that he had done "dumb things".[11] The district agreed to pay $955,795 as severance; a payment which violated Texas Education Code Section 11.201 and resulted in a loss of $513,755 in funding.[12]

To pursue any defamation claims on behalf of Hindt, the district hired the law firm Feldman and Feldman.[13]

Hindt would later campaign for the KISD board members who had defended him and arranged his huge severance bonus.[14]

The district has been criticized for its perceived inaction on Hindt's plagiarism allegations, which critics say run afoul of the district's responsibility to provide an ethical education to its students.[8] The district's decision to retain a law firm for possible defamation lawsuits was also criticized as possibly an act of bullying in and of itself by the district against its critics,[8] or even an attempt by a taxpayer-funded entity to silence those who were thinking about criticizing a public official.[15]