They Told Me to Stop.
I Filed the Papers to Have the State Take Over Instead.
Eight months. A handful of citizens. A school district that spent public money to keep its own emails secret and the children who never asked for any of this.
By Travis Spencer · realestatemindset.org
There is a kind of silence that settles over a small town when something is wrong, and everyone knows it, and no one will say it.
I have spent ten months listening to that silence in Godley, Texas. And before I tell you anything else, I want to tell you this: I don’t live there.
I have never had a child in Godley’s schools. I don’t pay its school taxes. I am not from there. By every ordinary measure, this was never supposed to be my fight and for a long while, the easiest thing in the world would have been to look away. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because once you see it, you cannot un-see it, and what I saw I could not square with the idea of doing nothing.
Last month, I filed formal papers asking the State of Texas to step in and take over the governance of Godley Independent School District.
I need you to understand how an ordinary person ends up here because nobody starts here. It started with a question.
That is all it was. I asked to see emails, texts, messages the paper trail every public servant leaves behind whether they like it or not. I asked the one question every public body owes the public it serves: what are you saying, and to whom, with the authority and the money the people gave you?
The District’s answer was to lawyer up.
Sit with that for a moment. A public school district, spending public money, fighting to keep the public from reading public emails.
And here is the part no one warns you about: they make you pay for the privilege of being stonewalled.
To see records that already belong to the public, the District has demanded money. Fees for one batch. A deposit for another. Hundreds of dollars on some requests; on one, an estimate in the thousands. Certified mail, money orders, postage, filing after filing. I have paid out of my own pocket, again and again, for documents we are all supposed to be able to see for free. This work moved from a cause into a second job with no paycheck and then into something that has quietly cost me more than I ever planned to spend. I am not a wealthy man. I have gone without to keep this going. Every receipt in my drawer is a small, stubborn reminder that transparency, in practice, is something a citizen has to buy back from his own government, one fee at a time.
I am not a lawyer. I do not have a firm behind me. So many of these pages I have filed alone on my own time, on my own dime, at a kitchen table, often at two in the morning with my stomach in a knot.
And I kept filing. Because once you start pulling the thread, you cannot un-see what comes loose.
The emails they fought to bury tell a story about the years before the charges. In 2026, the local District Attorney’s office, working with the Texas Department of Public Safety, charged several people connected to this community with running a criminal enterprise among them, people who had been welcomed into the very rooms where this district planned its future.
Let me be careful here, the way I have forced myself to be careful in every document I have filed: those charges are charges. They are not convictions. Every person accused is owed their day in court, and I will not take that from anyone no matter what I believe. I have spent ten months separating what I can prove from what I only suspect, because the children of Godley deserve a case built on bedrock. Not on anyone’s anger. Not on rumor. But what is documented is enough. It was always enough.
So we took it to the only place left.