Listen: EPISD superintendent out amid pressure from trustees. Here’s what to know.

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Correction: This transcript has been changed to correct the teacher organization for which Ross Moore is president. The audio and the original transcript incorrectly identified the association.

Diego: The leader of El Paso’s biggest school district is out.

Three-and-a-half years after Diana Sayavedra began her role as the superintendent of El Paso Independent School District, she agreed this week to retire under a voluntary separation agreement with the district amid pressure from the district’s trustees.

It happened following a dramatic school board meeting Tuesday, when dozens of El Pasoans passionately spoke in favor of Sayavedra, while others criticized the trustees who forced Sayavedra out, namely, board President Leah Hanany and trustees Jack Loveridge and Alex Cuellar. The big question that remains, though, is why? And what comes next for EPISD?

El Paso Matters education reporter Claudia Silva will join me in a minute to help us understand what’s going on in EPISD and what’s driving the recent tumult in the district.

But first: This El Paso Matters Podcast episode is sponsored by Tawney, Acosta and Chaparro: Truck Crash and Injury Attorneys. Their team of local, seasoned trial attorneys are ready to help if you’ve been injured in a crash.

Claudia, thanks for joining me.

Claudia: Thanks for having me back, Diego.

Diego: So, Claudia, what happened with EPISD Superintendent Diana Sayavedra this week? Was she fired, or did she retire? What happened?

Claudia: Yeah, so the EPISD board voted to accept Superintendent Sayavedra’s resignation from the district, which came suddenly and without much explanation or prior indication from her that she was wanting to leave.

Notably, this all happened after a major change in the power dynamics on the EPISD school board after the recent May 3 election. Two of Sayavedra’s supporters, Israel Irrobali and Isabel Hernandez, were ousted by the newly elected trustees, Robert Osterland and Mindy Sutton. And two of Sayavedra’s critics, Leah Hanany and Jack Loveridge, won their reelection bids. These four trustees were aligned during their campaigns, giving them quite a bit of voting power when it comes to making board decisions.

So, right after the election, the board immediately took a vote to limit some of Sayavedra’s hiring power, and they also, about a week later, held a closed door meeting where they discussed her employment status. The language on that agenda did indicate that the board was looking into, you know, considering firing her, though, we really don’t know exactly what was said in that meeting or what the purpose was. Notably, trustee Daniel Call did talk to us and did tell us that that was the purpose of the meeting, that they wanted to fire her.

Exactly one week later, the board held another closed-door meeting to discuss some similar items, and they also discussed a potential resignation agreement. Despite hours of public comment from people urging Sayavedra to stay, the board did accept her resignation. Now, with little explanation on why this happened so suddenly, there is a lot of speculation that the board was actually trying to push her out, and she resigned. Rather than being fired. And I think being fired could be considered a stain on her record, and I think it might have been just an easier transition for her to accept the resignation, rather than potentially being forced out.

Diego: Yeah. And I mean, like you said there, I think the big question everybody has is ‘Why?’ And there hasn’t been a lot of explanation from the trustees like you said.

Can you just shed a little bit more light on maybe what led up to this decision, potentially? Did it have to do with this plan to close several schools that had declining enrollment? Did it have to do with declining academic performance in EPISD? Maybe something else?

Claudia: You know, I think a lot of people who have been paying attention and even those who supported a lot of the members of the new board probably saw this coming. The thing is, I don’t think anyone, including myself, thought that it would happen so quickly.

As you know, EPISD initially planned to close eight schools, which has now been reduced down to seven as part of a plan known as Destination District Redesign. The main purpose of the plan is to address declining enrollment and falling birth rates. You know, we’ve been hearing it a lot in some of our boss’ reporting, Bob Moore, that birth rates have been declining and that there really hasn’t been very many people coming to El Paso. So, the plan is to close schools and try to improve some of the ones that remain open.

Now, trustees Leah Hanany, Jack Loveridge and Alex Cuellar were pretty vocal about their concerns with the metrics used to decide what schools they would close. And they were trustees at the time, back in October, November, when a lot of these meetings on Destination District Redesign were happening. Hanany was particularly concerned about Lamar Elementary, which is in her district. And, in fact, one of the first decisions that this new board took was to reverse the closure of that school and keep it open.

Now, Mindy Sutton, though she is new to the school board, she has been an actively involved parent in the community. Way before taking office. She actually brought some concerns to the district with the potential closing of Park Elementary School and you know, some of her criticism and other members of the community played a role in getting that school taken off the list of potential closures. So, with all this background, I think it became apparent to Superintendent Saavedra that some of the members of the board would not be able to work well together going forward. So, I think that that just kind of led to where we are today.

Diego: Yeah, that makes sense. Appreciate you kind of laying out this sort of collection of issues, right? But trustees and, particularly board President Leah Hanany, have explained their silence on the why involving Sayavedra by saying that laws prevent them from discussing personnel matters. Is it true that trustees of a school district can’t share their opinion publicly about the superintendent of the school district they oversee?

Claudia: Well, there is some truth to what Mrs. Hanany and the board members who are saying that they can’t comment on the situation. Sayavedra is an employee of the district, and all employees are afforded certain privacy rights. The district and trustees can’t share her personal information, and that often could include performance reviews or disciplinary records. So, they may see these discussions as personal information that is subject to privacy rights. Now, sharing some of that information can open them up to civil litigation. So, I definitely see why they would be so quiet about things.

But on the other hand, trustees should be able to share their opinions on the superintendent, and they should be able to give some indication of what their plan is for district leadership. One of their main roles as board members, and the main jobs of the school board, is to hire and fire superintendent. They also need to set goals for the district and I think a lot of people are wondering what has Sayavedra done that maybe didn’t align with those goals? Did she ever get a chance to correct? And if she didn’t, why? What kind of changes are going to be made, and what can we look for in a new leader? And a lot of those discussions just haven’t been had yet.

But the truth is, it’s likely we will ever know exactly why Sayavedra chose to resign, unless she decides to speak about it herself.

Diego: Yeah. And we saw a lot of El Pasoans, including some EPISD school principals – I believe the principal of Douglass Elementary spoke – and many other district employees, and they showed up at this board meeting this week and spoke in favor of Sayavedra. And there weren’t really a lot of detractors, right, or opponents of Sayavedra there. So, I just wonder what you made of the public show of support for her?

Claudia: Yeah, I think the people who spoke in favor of Sayavedra clearly cared a lot about her, wanted her stay, and liked the direction that the district was going in. I think that there were also many speakers who were simply concerned and wanted to know why this was happening so suddenly. Some probably saw this as a political move, and they were unhappy with the prospects of that.

But I think it’s also important to note that there were a lot of people in the district who maybe didn’t like Ms. Sayavedra and probably didn’t speak publicly about it. She hasn’t exactly been the most popular superintendent. Even Ross Moore, the president of the El Paso (American Federation of Teachers), was very critical of her prior to Destination District Redesign. So, she’s definitely been a controversial leader.

I think there were also some concerns about what this would cost the district. At the time, we didn’t know if she would get any sort of severance payment or payout. But now we know that she’s going to receive a total of $348,000, a little bit less than that, actually. But it’s about 11 months worth of salary and benefits. The district will also have to pay for a superintendent search firm, which we don’t really know how much that will cost yet.

Diego: So who’s going to replace Sayavedra while the district looks to hire a new superintendent?

Claudia: So, the board appointed Chief Financial Officer Martha Aguirre as the interim superintendent, and she’s going to be starting on June 16th. So, the CFO is basically in charge of the budget department and is the main one you would probably go to when you have questions about a school budget. She’s been the CFO since 2022. So, I think that it’s safe to say that she has a good idea of the district’s financial situation.

Now, notably, the district does seem to be in a better financial state than we previously thought. Right now, documents that were shared – and they were supposed to be presented Tuesday before this vote – but that meeting was canceled. But those documents show that the district expects to have an $11 million deficit for the next school year after the Texas Legislature approved a bill that allocates $8.5 billion to public school funding now. Previously, without that funding, the deficit would have probably looked closer to about $22 million. And, even before then, before making budget cuts – and you know, the budgets are a constant moving process, so they’re always changing – before then, the district was looking at a deficit that was closer to over $30 million.

So, I think now EPISD is looking like they’re on much better footing. The governor did just sign that public school funding bill. And the district also, from those documents that were supposed to be presented Tuesday, It looks like the district has about $119.6 million, so close to $120 million in its reserves. So, it actually does give it a little bit of wiggle room. Now, I wouldn’t say that they’re in the best situation, they do still need to try to do something to address that deficit and try to start bringing in revenue so they can make sure that they maintain their reserves. But, it’s definitely much better than some of the other districts in the area, like Socorro and Canutillo, who are facing much bigger financial problems.

Diego: Yeah. And now that we’ve seen the superintendent is going to be on her way out, what do you expect from EPISD school board trustees going forward? Could we see them look to reverse other planned school closures, right, like we saw them do with Lamar? Or any other major actions in the near term?

Claudia: Yeah, at this point, I haven’t heard any indication that there’s going to be any more school closures that are going to be reversed. But I think that there’s still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the future of EPISD. I’m really unsure of what Sayavedra’s departure means for Destination District Redesign. The board says it wants to shift to the direction of the district to focus more on a student-centered approach, and we’ll really have to see what exactly that entails when it comes to dealing with declining enrollment. I know that there were some concerns with test scores and student performance. And I think that’s going to be a greater focus of the board. But a lot of it is still really unknown as to what that means for the decisions that they’re going to make.

Something that we probably can look forward to is a bond election this November to improve air conditioning in some of EPISD’s older schools. That’s actually been a main focus of one community organization who supported the newly elected trustees and took a really community-centered approach to that last election: the Amanecer People’s Project. I think we’re probably going to hear a lot more from them when it comes to this bond. And we’re probably going to be hearing a lot of discussions about bringing improvements and modernizing schools.

Diego: You kind of touched on the financial situation of some of the other districts in town, but EPISD isn’t the only school district in El Paso that’s going to be seeking a new superintendent, right?

Claudia: Yeah. So, two districts who are notably in a really tough financial spot, Socorro ISD and Canutillo ISD, are currently going to start looking for a new superintendent. Socorro, actually, I think that they’re closer to the tail-end of their search process. They have been working with the Texas Association of School Boards to find a new superintendent. They did pause their search for the election cycle. There were two trustees that were essentially missing from the board and one that was not going to run again. So, there really was going to be a new makeup on the school board and the district wanted to wait for that new leadership to come in before making a decision. So, we should be seeing some superintendent finalists soon there.

Now, Canutillo, they’re probably just going to start their superintendent search. The Canutillo ISD superintendent resigned. And a lot of it there, he openly did say it had a lot to do with complications and the relationship with the board. So, now the district is going to have to find a search firm and  start their search process, which, a lot of times, involves getting community input, holding meetings and obviously having this search firm advertise for the position.

Diego: So, there’s a lot of tumult in the public education system in El Paso, and a lot of things in flux, but we’ll look to you to keep us informed about all this, Claudia. Thanks so much for joining me.

Claudia: Yeah, I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it. Thanks.

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