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.
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 – the leadership team who are among the district’s highest paid employees – going back to 2013, according to a report obtained by El Paso Matters under the Texas Public Information Act.
The Texas Education Code requires annual evaluations of administrators and says school district funds “may not be used to pay an administrator who has not been appraised under this section in the preceding 15 months.”…