{"id":336073,"date":"2026-06-14T15:35:22","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T15:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/336073\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T15:35:22","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T15:35:22","slug":"episd-audit-reveals-years-of-systemic-breakdown-in-employee-evaluations-for-top-officials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/336073\/","title":{"rendered":"EPISD audit reveals years of \u2018systemic breakdown\u2019 in employee evaluations for top officials"},"content":{"rendered":"

In August 2025, less than two months after retiring as El Paso Independent School District superintendent, Diana Sayavedra emailed six members of her former cabinet and two other employees with an unusual request: create performance evaluations of their work for the prior three years on documents she had attached, and send them back to her personal email address.<\/p>\n

Someone informed Chief Internal Auditor Mayra Martinez of the request. Her subsequent investigation found that Sayavedra and her predecessor, Juan Cabrera, had rarely evaluated the performance of their cabinet officials \u2013 the leadership team who are among the district\u2019s highest paid employees \u2013 going back to 2013, according to a report obtained by El Paso Matters under the Texas Public Information Act.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sayavedra didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment from El Paso Matters. Cabrera said he wasn\u2019t contacted by the district auditors, but said he recalls doing evaluations in a paper-driven process when he was superintendent.<\/p>\n

Former school board President Israel Irrobali \u2013 who lost his reelection bid in May 2025 \u2013 approached Martinez while she was conducting the investigation. He warned her that the audit could be \u201cperceived as political,\u201d Martinez said in response to questions from El Paso Matters. Irrobali said he doesn\u2019t remember such a conversation.<\/p>\n

She said she completed the investigation without interference or direction from others. The existence of the audit report, dated Sept. 11, 2025, has not been previously reported.<\/p>\n

The audit report and the events surrounding it raise deep concerns about a district that has faced repeated problems over the years, said David DeMatthews, who holds the W.K. Kellogg Endowed Professorship in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.<\/p>\n

\"\"David DeMatthews (Courtesy of University of Texas at Austin)<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a district that has just a legacy of concerns around transparency and operations, ethical violations at that highest level, it\u2019s just frustrating and disappointing to see this continuing to happen, even while the district is wrestling with very difficult financial issues and other issues,\u201d said DeMatthews, who was a professor of educational leadership at the University of Texas at El Paso from 2013 to 2018.<\/p>\n

DeMatthews, who reviewed the four-page investigative report at the request of El Paso Matters, said the findings will be dispiriting to principals, teachers and other employees in the district who are regularly evaluated and held accountable for their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s going to be a kind of broken trust in that environment, and you\u2019re going to lose credibility because you\u2019re putting people in classrooms and in schools under a different level of scrutiny than people holding these top posts who are supposed to be seasoned educational administrators,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Even though their performance wasn\u2019t evaluated as required, Sayavedra\u2019s top aides saw their salaries rise, according to records obtained by El Paso Matters under state open records laws.<\/p>\n

Her eight direct reports saw their total pay rise by a collective $59,375 between fiscal year 2023, Sayavedra\u2019s first as superintendent, and fiscal year 2025. That\u2019s just under 5%, which is in line with pay changes for most EPISD employees in those years.<\/p>\n

In fiscal year 2026, only four of the eight employees worked the entire year because the others retired during the school year. Those four continuing employees \u2013 Carmona, Carrasco, Collins and Rodriguez \u2013 received pay raises totaling more than $26,000, or 4%, over the prior year.<\/p>\n

Direct comparisons to other employees in fiscal year 2026 are difficult because the state funded pay raises for most teachers<\/a>. Hourly and non-teacher positions received 1.5% raises for the current fiscal year.<\/p>\n

The audit report is the latest in a long string of questionable decisions and poor leadership that have plagued El Paso\u2019s largest school district.<\/p>\n

Superintendent Lorenzo Garc\u00eda resigned in 2011 amid an FBI investigation into allegations of test manipulation and other wrongdoing. He pleaded guilty the next year to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and was sentenced to 3\u00bd years in federal prison.<\/p>\n

The Texas Education Agency removed EPISD\u2019s school board in 2013 after finding that it had failed to provide proper oversight of Garc\u00eda. The district was governed by a board of managers appointed by the state education commissioner until 2015.<\/p>\n

The board of managers hired Juan Cabrera as superintendent in 2013. He resigned in 2020<\/a>, weeks after El Paso Matters reported that he and former school board President Dori Fenenbock were being sued for allegedly defrauding California investors in an online school project.<\/p>\n

They settled the lawsuit<\/a> in 2022.<\/p>\n

Sayavedra was hired as superintendent in 2021 after a contentious search process<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Under both Cabrera and Sayavedra, the district experienced falling enrollment as a result of declining births, an expansion of new housing on the fringes of El Paso outside the district\u2019s boundaries, and increasing competition from charter schools and open enrollment in neighboring districts.<\/p>\n

EPISD\u2019s enrollment fell from 63,210 in the 2012-13 school year, when Cabrera arrived, to 46,244 this year \u2013 a drop of 27%.<\/p>\n

Sayavedra attempted to address the enrollment decline in 2024 with what she called Destination District Redesign, which called for the closing of eight elementary schools and a bolstering of remaining campuses. The plan was highly controversial but supported by four of the seven school board members in office at the time.<\/p>\n

RELATED: El Paso County school enrollment drops 2.7% as declining births, migration reshape classrooms<\/a><\/p>\n

In the May 2025 school board elections, Irrobali and another supporter of Sayavedra\u2019s plan, Isabel Hernandez, lost their reelection bids, creating a five-member board majority critical of Sayavedra. She announced her retirement a month after the election.<\/p>\n

\u2018I don\u2019t like people who screw around with records\u2019<\/p>\n

According to Martinez\u2019s report, the internal auditor was notified Aug. 18, 2025, of the Aug. 7 emails sent by Sayavedra to the eight people who had reported directly to her until she retired in June. Sayavedra provided evaluation documents for fiscal years 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25 and asked the district employees who no longer answered to her to fill out the blank section with goals, return signed documents to her via email, and \u201callow her to countersign and send back finalized copies to be kept on file.\u201d<\/p>\n

School district policy requires annual performance evaluations of employees. The evaluations are used to provide guidance, recognize good work, improve performance and determine pay raises.<\/p>\n

DeMatthews said Sayavedra\u2019s request was inappropriate and potentially damaging to the district.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes you start to think, \u2018Is there just this culture in the school district where records can be manipulated and you can sign off on things after they happened?\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cHopefully that is not the actual case, but just from an ethical standpoint, leaders should know better in those roles to ever do anything like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jack Loveridge, the vice president of the EPISD board and chair of the audit committee, said he was appalled when he first learned of Sayavedra\u2019s request.<\/p>\n

\"\"Jack Loveridge<\/p>\n

\u201cMy concern was that there was an effort to falsify records, which for me \u2013 as somebody who\u2019s studied history and has a doctorate in it \u2013 is kind of an insult that you try to alter the past selectively. That isn\u2019t meant to diminish the concern for institutional integrity, but to simply say I don\u2019t like people who screw around with records,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sayavedra retired on June 15, 2025, after a newly elected board majority took steps to remove her. She was given the temporary honorary title of superintendent emerita as a means of helping with the transition of Interim Superintendent Martha Aguirre, who had been the district\u2019s chief financial officer. She had no administrative role in the district after her retirement<\/p>\n

The audit report said the emails were sent from Sayavedra\u2019s personal email to the EPISD accounts of Aguirre, Chief Communications Officer Liza Rodriguez, Deputy Superintendent Marta Carmona, General Counsel Jeanne \u201cCezy\u201d Collins, Deputy Superintendent Vince Sheffield, Chief of Organizational Transformation and Innovation Marivel Macias, Police Chief Manuel Chavira and Operations Manager Elizabeth Carrasco. All but Chavira and Carrasco were members of Sayavedra\u2019s cabinet.<\/p>\n

\"\"The El Paso ISD cabinet under Superintendent Diana Sayavedra included, from left, Martha Aguirre, Marta Carmona, Cezy Collins, Marivel Macias, Liza Rodriguez and Vince Sheffield.<\/p>\n

Sayavedra is not on the list of witnesses interviewed as part of the investigation. The report doesn\u2019t explain why she asked her subordinates to create evaluations of their work long after such reports were due, and after Sayavedra had left the district.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The report said board President Leah Hanany \u201cconfirmed that Ms. Sayavedra was not given a directive to finalize prior year evaluations\u201d as part of her retirement agreement, which paid her $348,000. The agreement called for her to be available for consulting services to the interim superintendent if needed.<\/p>\n

Aguirre served as interim superintendent from June through December 2025, then returned to her CFO role when the school board hired Brian Lusk from Dallas<\/a> as the new superintendent. She resigned in May<\/a>, shortly after alerting Lusk that the district was running a substantially higher deficit than the $6 million that had been budgeted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ongoing investigations have found that the deficit for this school year approached $50 million, which would come out of district reserves. Martinez, the district\u2019s chief internal auditor, is conducting an investigation of how that happened. Lusk has said Aguirre deliberately misled him about the district\u2019s financial health.<\/p>\n

SEE ALSO: Brian Lusk formally named El Paso ISD superintendent, vows to center student success<\/a><\/p>\n

Aguirre has not responded to requests for comment from El Paso Matters since she left the district last month.<\/p>\n

The school board last week took the rare step of declaring financial exigency<\/a> as a means of averting a deficit approaching $40 million for the 2026-27 school year, which would have consumed much of EPISD\u2019s remaining reserve funds. The board also approved a workforce reduction plan that will see the district shed more than 600 positions in the new school year through a combination of unfilled vacancies, attrition and layoffs.<\/p>\n

Among the others receiving Sayavedra\u2019s emails asking them to create long-overdue performance evaluations of themselves, Rodriguez, Carmona, Carrasco and Collins remain with the district. Sheffield, Chavira and Macias \u2013 who sits on the Socorro ISD school board \u2013 have retired.<\/p>\n

The cabinet member who did as Sayavedra asked<\/p>\n

Martinez\u2019s report found that \u201cone cabinet-level administrator indicated that they responded to Ms. Sayavedra\u2019s email and completed the evaluation documents as instructed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The report didn\u2019t name the person. But in response to questions from El Paso Matters, Martinez said it was Carmona, whose title is now chief of special projects for the district.<\/p>\n

Before joining EPISD in 2022, Carmona served as internal auditor of Socorro ISD for eight years, and also served as interim superintendent of the district for 10 months in 2021 and 2022.<\/p>\n

Carmona said she never saw the audit report, nor was she briefed on its conclusions, until El Paso Matters provided her a copy Saturday. She said it accurately summarized the events of August 2025.<\/p>\n

She said she didn\u2019t see anything inappropriate about complying with Sayavedra\u2019s request to complete evaluations well after they were required to be completed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI carried out a request from my former supervisor and I did so without backdating documents or gaining anything from the task. My record is clear: I have consistently upheld transparency and accountability throughout my career,\u201d Carmona said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The evaluations included statements from Sayavedra summarizing her performance over the three previous school years. Carmona said she signed the three evaluations and dated them Aug. 13, 2025.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would meet every two weeks on a one-to-one basis, so everything there was factual. I just signed them and sent them back to her, but I never heard anything,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"\"Socorro ISD Interim Superintendent Marta Carmona , right, listens to arguments in 2021 on whether to institutea mask mandate in defiance of Gov. Abbott\u2019s executive order. (Corrie Boudreaux\/El Paso Matters)<\/p>\n

Carmona said she complied with Sayavedra\u2019s email request, which said, \u201cPlease take some time to update the sections associated with goals prior to returning to me for signature.\u201d <\/p>\n

The district never made clear what authority Sayavedra maintained as superintendent emerita, Carmona said.<\/p>\n

Carmona said she didn\u2019t know why Sayavedra was requesting the evaluations, and didn\u2019t ask. She said she didn\u2019t know what authority Sayavedra maintained as superintendent emerita.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd, so, when she sent the evaluations, I figured now she had time to complete it, and, like I said, she\u2019s a very good note taker and has a very good memory, so she completed the evaluations based on that,\u201d Carmona said.<\/p>\n

DeMatthews said Carmona\u2019s compliance with a request to create long-overdue performance records from someone who no longer worked for the district was disturbing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt undermines the credibility of all the records of all the evaluations. If someone is going to go and backdate an evaluation \u2013 and a senior-level person is going to do that \u2013 that runs the risk of undermining all the paperwork. How do we know that other evaluations that seem to be complete were not completed in the same way?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Loveridge said Aguirre, who was interim superintendent at the time, was informed in the audit report that Carmona had complied with Sayavedra\u2019s request to create performance evaluations from prior years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

School board members can\u2019t compel disciplinary action for employees other than the superintendent or internal auditor, the only two positions they direct. School districts rarely publicly discuss disciplinary action against individual employees, so it\u2019s unclear if Carmona received any consequences for complying with Sayavedra\u2019s request.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s out of the board\u2019s purview, but I think Aguirre would have probably told us, or we would have seen the results of some disciplinary action, but she never discussed it with us,\u201d Loveridge said.<\/p>\n

Carmona said she is retiring in December after 34 years as an educator.<\/p>\n

District records show that Carmona was paid $205,000 in the 2023-24 school year, her first full year as deputy superintendent; the same amount in 2024-25; and $208,000 this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018Systemic breakdown,\u2019 not \u2018isolated lapse\u2019<\/p>\n

After learning of Sayavedra\u2019s request for her direct reports to create evaluations for the past three years, Martinez determined the action suggested \u201cevaluations may not have been finalized for multiple years,\u201d her report said.<\/p>\n

Some of the cabinet members who also served under Cabrera said he may not have consistently conducted evaluations for his direct subordinates, Martinez said in the report. She said this created a risk that if cabinet members weren\u2019t being evaluated by the superintendent, they might not be consistently evaluating their own staff.<\/p>\n

Martinez determined that three of Sayavedra\u2019s direct reports \u2013 who weren\u2019t named in the report \u2013 received evaluations in 2022-23 but not thereafter. The other five direct reports had no evaluations during her tenure. That meant that she completed only 12% of the required evaluations in her time as superintendent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The auditor reviewed records of nine direct reports to Cabrera during his tenure and found that he had completed only 14% of required evaluations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cabrera said he was disappointed the internal auditors didn\u2019t contact him for the report, which he wasn\u2019t aware of until contacted by El Paso Matters. He said he remembers conducting written evaluations, followed by in-person meetings, with his direct reports.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can remember for the vast majority of my time, there was all paper. \u2026 The whole time we were handwriting stuff,\u201d Cabrera said.<\/p>\n

He said there was a lot of leadership transition during his tenure, which made keeping up with evaluations challenging. He said he relied on Sheffield, who was a cabinet member under\u00a0 him and Sayavedra, to alert him to necessary evaluations.<\/p>\n

Martinez also analyzed records of 16 employees who reported to cabinet members in 2023-24, and found that only six \u2013 or 38% \u2013 had been evaluated that year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a pattern of incomplete or missing evaluations for cabinet-level administrators over multiple years across successive superintendents,\u201d Martinez said in her report. \u201cThis suggests a systemic breakdown in the evaluations process for cabinet-level administrators and their direct reports, not just an isolated lapse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carmona said she was aware Sayavedra and Cabrera hadn\u2019t evaluated cabinet members for years, but never addressed the issue with Sayavedra. She said she did bring it to the attention of Martinez, the internal auditor, in 2023.<\/p>\n

Martinez said she doesn\u2019t recall any such conversations with Carmona before beginning her investigation last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Carmona did not raise concerns to me regarding Ms. Sayavedra\u2019s failure to complete employee evaluations prior to August 2025,\u201d she said. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Recommended reforms<\/p>\n

In her investigation, Martinez found breakdowns by the district\u2019s human resources staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cHR did not consistently monitor or ensure compliance with evaluation requirements for the superintendent and cabinet-level personnel. In addition, the evaluation process for the district is highly manual, making it challenging for HR to track completion and ensure timely compliance,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The report recommended that the board clarify to Aguirre, then interim superintendent, that Sayavedra\u2019s role as superintendent emerita included no administrative duties. Aguirre was to communicate that message to the cabinet.<\/p>\n

Carmona said she never received any clarification from Aguirre on Sayavedra\u2019s role as superintendent emerita, and never discussed the audit\u2019s findings with the interim superintendent.<\/p>\n

Aguirre didn\u2019t respond to a request from El Paso Matters about the 2025 investigation and report.<\/p>\n

Martinez said HR should use technology to reduce reliance on manual tracking of performance evaluations for more than 7,000 employees.<\/p>\n

She also recommended that Aguirre and future superintendents be explicitly reminded of their obligations to conduct evaluations of their direct reports, and \u201creinforce the importance of evaluations as a performance management and improvement tool.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Loveridge said he and Hanany, the board president, briefed Lusk on the report and the need for consistent employee evaluations when he was hired in December.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had no qualms about that, no reservations about that,\u201d Loveridge said.<\/p>\n

DeMatthews said public awareness about the report\u2019s findings will make it even harder for the district to build trust with its community.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just really disappointed to read it, just given all that EPISD has gone through already, and what it\u2019s going through right now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u2018The engagement could be perceived as political\u2019<\/p>\n

Martinez began her investigation into the performance evaluation issue at a time of heightened tension in the district. Two trustees had recently been ousted in elections, creating a new board majority that quickly moved to reopen Lamar Elementary School, one of the schools the previous board had voted to close.<\/p>\n

The new five-member board majority began the process of removing Sayavedra, drawing intense criticism from the two remaining members of the former majority, as well as some members of the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Martinez\u2019s report didn\u2019t mention any attempt to influence the outcome of the investigation, but El Paso Matters asked if anyone had raised concerns about the audit at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Israel Irrobali, trustee of the El Paso Independent School District, prepares for the start of a board meeting, Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022. (Corrie Boudreaux\/El Paso Matters)<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the engagement, I was contacted by former Trustee and former Audit Committee Chair Israel Irrobali, who expressed concerns that the engagement could be perceived as political. I advised Mr. Irrobali that Internal Audit has a responsibility to follow up on such concerns and that, as a former audit committee chair, he was aware that Internal Audit conducts its engagements fairly and objectively,\u201d Martinez said in a response to the question from El Paso Matters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Irrobali, who had been off the board for more than two months when Martinez began her investigation, told El Paso Matters he didn\u2019t remember a conversation with the internal auditor about the evaluations issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cI honestly don\u2019t recall ever asking Ms. Martinez to forgo any audit or any report, as I didn\u2019t do that for four years as a chair of the audit committee,\u201d said Irrobali, executive director of the El Paso Association of Contractors.<\/p>\n

As a former board member, Irrobali would not have had access to the district\u2019s audit plans. It\u2019s not clear how he would have learned about the performance evaluation audit, but he said he maintained close connections with some district employees after leaving the board.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t recall that situation clearly, to be quite honest, it was over a year ago. But what I will tell you is I maintain relationships with several of EPISD district employees, staff members, from cabinet level down to teachers, paraprofessionals, recess attendants or lunch room staff,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Martinez said she completed her investigation of the performance evaluations as planned.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one directed me how to conduct the review, what conclusions to reach, or whether the engagement should proceed,\u201d she said in her statement.<\/p>\n

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