A Texas elementary school principal is accused of telling a job applicant with a troubling record to legally change his name so he could get past the district’s own background screening. He did. She hired him into a special education classroom. A federal grand jury has now indicted them both.
What the indictment alleges
The grand jury returned a seven-count indictment on September 18 against Wendy Bailey, former principal of Crosby Elementary School in Forney ISD, and Michael Raymond Roell, who now goes by Jonathan Michael.
Each is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and six counts of wire fraud. Prosecutors lay out a sequence:
- Bailey learned about Roell’s past when he first applied to the district.
- She advised him to change his name. The indictment quotes her: “A good lawyer can get all the documents changed.”
- He legally changed his name and reapplied without disclosing his prior arrest.
- Bailey promoted his candidacy, took part in hiring communications and moved the application forward.
- He was hired in October 2025 as a special education teacher, at about $67,700 a year.
- When abuse allegations surfaced in January 2026, prosecutors say Bailey failed to report them.
The wire fraud counts rest on the emails, texts and application documents that moved between them.
What Roell’s record actually was
This has to be stated precisely, because it is the hinge of the whole case.
Roell was arrested in 2016 while employed by Garland ISD, on a charge of indecency with a child involving sexual contact. He was fired. A Dallas County jury acquitted him.
So the thing allegedly concealed was an arrest and an acquittal, not a conviction. He went on to work at Dallas ISD from 2022 to 2024 and was rejected by Plano ISD.
That is what makes the charges fraud rather than something else. Nobody is prosecuting him for the 2016 case, which he won. The allegation is that the two of them lied on an application to get past a screening process the district was entitled to run.
What happened at Crosby Elementary
Separately from the federal case, Roell faces state charges: two counts of injury to a child and one count of child grooming.
Those charges follow reports from two teacher’s aides that he inappropriately touched a special needs student and made sexually explicit comments to others. Additional allegations include pushing a student into a bookshelf and pinning a student with his knee.
These are allegations and he has not been convicted of them.
Forney ISD itself reached a settlement with the Justice Department over federal funding compliance failures, agreeing to pay a fine and adopt enhanced reporting measures.
The BeezLoop Take
Charging the administrator is the unusual part, and it is the right call. The pattern this case describes has a nickname in education because it is so common: passing the trash, where a problem employee quietly moves to the next district and the paperwork follows a month behind him. It almost never produces a prosecution of anybody but the employee. Here a US attorney went after the person who allegedly opened the door, and that is the only version of this that changes anyone’s behavior.
The acquittal is the genuinely hard part and it should not be skipped for the sake of a cleaner story. A jury found Roell not guilty in 2016. He was entitled to apply for jobs afterward, and a rule that an acquittal permanently ends a teaching career is a rule that makes acquittals meaningless. If the indictment is accurate, the wrong here is not that he sought work. It is that a name was changed specifically so a screening process would return nothing, which is a decision to defeat a safeguard rather than to survive it.
What should alarm parents more than either defendant is how easily it reportedly worked. A background check is only as good as the name you hand it. A system that can be defeated by a lawyer and a court filing is not a safeguard, it is a formality, and every district in the country runs the same one. Fingerprints and certification numbers follow a person across a name change. Names do not. That gap is not a Forney problem.
And the timeline is the part that should end careers regardless of how the trial goes. If prosecutors are right that allegations surfaced in January and were not reported, then the failure was not only at the hiring stage. Somebody raised a concern about a child while there was still time to act on it, and the case says nothing happened for months. The hiring is the scandal people will remember. January is the part that had a chance to matter.
The district settling with DOJ and paying a fine is an admission that the institution failed, not just two employees. Worth remembering when the defense is that a rogue principal fooled everybody.
The question
If a background check can be beaten by legally changing your name, what exactly is it screening for? And when a concern about a child was raised in January, why was the next step a federal indictment in September?
Related: Cornell expelled students over a reported gang rape and prosecutors could not see the file, and schools banned phones and classroom use went up anyway.
Sources: U.S. Attorney, Northern District of Texas · FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth · WFAA · Texas Scorecard
