GILBERT, AZ (AZFamily) — The newly hired Higley Unified School District superintendent is coming from a job at a school in west Texas, where he was just put on paid leave.
The district hired new superintendent Dr. Nate Carman in February, with a scheduled start date of July 1.
Dr. Carman was placed on administrative leave Monday with a few months remaining at his current superintendent position in El Paso after school board members said an audit found he was involved in a potential conflict of interest with a company the district was in business with.
Higley Unified says it is aware of these allegations.
Carman’s seat was empty Monday night at the Socorro Independent School District board meeting as board members unanimously voted to place the outgoing superintendent on leave.
Travis Casner with Weaver, an external auditing company hired by the district, said they reviewed months of emails between Carman and an Arizona-based architect vendor ADM. Casner said it appeared Carman swayed the district to hire ADM for several projects back in 2022 around the time he started his job. He said the audit found Carman changed the scoring criteria they use to hire companies to make it easier for ADM, who had not worked with them before, to be selected for a project but did not specify why.
“We also identified a potential conflict of interest pertaining to an employee and vendor,” Casner said. “For him to implement that, changing the scoring criteria such that the 20% of the points awarded to firms to have worked with the district in the past, by removing those points, that would give the firm to have not worked with the district previously, an opportunity to win that work.”
The audit also found the board voted to have Carman lead the district’s committee that chooses construction firms. The board president said Carman requested to lead that committee.
In February, Higley Unified chose Carman to be its new superintendent starting in July. They said this was a nationwide search and a months-long selection process to find Carman, who has 11 years of experience as a superintendent.
Carman responded to the audit findings with the below response:
This news comes as the district is also dealing with a multi-million-dollar budget deficit.
