Establishing that the Houston Independent School District has handed over credit cards to people with dubious credit is one thing; naming those employees with the bad credit is another.

Texas Watchdog isn't dinging those folks by name in our story today. We're aware that bad things can happen to good people. Medical bills, divorces and other financial blows are sometimes to blame for bankruptcies, both Chapter 7 and Chapter 13, and these things are sometimes beyond one's control.

That’s one of the reasons we didn’t name names in our story today, although the reporting determined that most of those filers had run up extraordinary amounts of credit card debt, betraying a lack of fiscal restraint that should be considered in any circumstance. The names are also public record -- both the names of the card holders as well as the names of people who file for bankruptcy.

The other reason was that there is little to be gained by anyone by naming those people. We figured that the public trust is best served by the awareness, not the gory detail, in this case.

In compiling our report, we obtained a list of the district's credit card holders, then ran some of them against bankruptcy filings in Texas. As we noted in the story, we erred on the side of caution – a unique name, for example, could have turned up a bankruptcy filing in Houston in 2000, but if that filing did not list HISD as that person’s place of employment at the time, it was considered no good for our reporting purposes.

Also, the paperwork for bankruptcies filed prior to 2000 is kept in a warehouse in Fort Worth, a hit-or-miss trip that we decided against -- so, if you were an HISD card holder who filed for bankruptcy in, say, 1998, you got a pass from us.

We also want to note, again, that we ran only some of the 1,200 card holders names' through bankruptcy filings. So, while we say that we found 18 with bankruptcies, the total number may be higher. Or maybe not. There could be 1,000 HISD card holders who have prior bankruptcies, or there could just be 18.

Again, all the information we used is public record. Anyone can access it, so the names of the bankrupt HISD cardholders is in the public purview, even though you won't see them on our site today. However, as with all news stories, we would add this note of caution: We'll be continuing to report on this story and probably others involving Texas' largest school district, and if circumstances change, or if the identity of a bankrupt HISD card holder becomes overtly germaine to a story we're writing, we will consider naming that person then.

Banks know that people with spendy habits are hard to reform and they simply refuse to issue cards to those who have failed to honor their obligation to pay. Does the HISD feel that it is more able than a bank to watch over these card holders? And if the (mostly) privately owned banks don’t hand out credit to these people, why would the district, even on a closely watched basis? That is the point of our story -- not the names of those who have endured financial misfortune.

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