Blind loyalty is the best explanation for why some Katy school board members overlooked serious allegations of lying and plagiarism against outgoing Superintendent Lance Hindt, even rewarding him more than $700,000 in “separation pay” when he formally steps down at the end of the year.

Those trustees appear to be no more clear-eyed in their selection of Hindt’s replacement. Despite pleas for a thorough, transparent search process for the new leader of the 80,000-student district, the board voted 4-3 Monday to name Acting Superintendent Ken Gregorski, a Hindt protege, as the sole finalist.

One of those voting against Gregorski was the board’s longest-serving member Rebecca Fox, who said she liked Gregorski but wanted an interim period for him to prove himself and time to gather input from stakeholders.

“No interview. No sharing of vision or goals. No inclusion of stakeholders. It isn’t right,” Fox wrote on Facebook before the vote, drawing the ire of trustee George Scott, a Gregorski advocate who accused her of “anarchy and chaos” for airing concerns.

Involving the public in the public’s business is not anarchy. It is good government. The fact that some trustees see openness as a threat — and haste and secrecy as virtues — should worry anybody who pays Katy school taxes or sends a child to Katy schools.

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It’s one in a series of troubling decisions that make us doubt the judgment and the priorities of the leadership at the Katy Independent School District.

Hindt, who has been running down the clock for months since he announced plans to step down, was the subject of two serious allegations this year. In an emotional appearance at a school board meeting last March, a former classmate, Katy businessman Greg Gay, said Hindt shoved Gay’s head into a junior high school urinal as part of a bullying incident more than 30 years ago. Then in July, the head of a national academic organization urged the University of Houston to investigate “strong similarities” between Hindt’s UH doctoral dissertation and a paper on the same topic written by a high school principal in suburban Atlanta.

Both allegations appear sufficiently credible to merit independent review. But in both instances, the Katy ISD board has chosen, without any semblance of due diligence, to stick by its man.

Indeed, at the board meeting Monday, President Courtney Doyle lamented having to replace Hindt at all, saying “Dr. Lance Hindt would be our superintendent if the obvious reason of his family being harassed and bullied had not taken place.”

At one point, the district even hired a law firm to consider a possible suit against Hindt’s accusers, some of whom aired their grievances online. That’s an absurd waste of public resources.

Hindt initially denied any part in the assault and bullying described by Gay, but he later issued a strange statement that muddied the picture: “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. When I was young and dumb — I did dumb things.” A former classmate says he witnessed the bathroom incident. Another, 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.

Hindt has not commented about the plagiarism accusation, but Katy ISD officials have said they believe the allegations are groundless.

Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, a New York City-based education advocacy group, said he did a side-by-side examination of Hindt’s 2012 UH dissertation, “The Effects of Principal Leadership on Teacher Morale and Student Achievement” and “The Relationship of Principal Leadership and Teacher Morale,” written in 2008 by Keith A. Rowland, then a doctoral student at Liberty University.

“The strong similarities between the dissertations cannot be attributed to Hindt not knowing that what he was doing was wrong. He took steps to cover it up,” Wood said in a letter to UH President Renu Khator, urging her to rescind Hindt’s Ph.D. if the accusations are proven correct. For his part, Rowland has told the Houston Chronicle he also believed Hindt lifted large portions of his dissertation.

Citing privacy concerns, UH officials will only confirm the matter is being investigated.

Not a single school board member has expressed desire to look into these charges — a posture that is a disservice to Greg Gay, to Keith Rowland, and to every student, parent and taxpayer in the Katy school system.

In a few days, Hindt will leave Katy ISD and collect a payout worth two years of his base pay. He’ll exit never having to publicly answer important questions about his character and credentials. It’s outrageous that Katy trustees are now allowing his favored successor to enter the same way.