Sonia Diaz, who was fired last week from her job as superintendent of the Las Cruces Public Schools, told the Connecticut Post she won’t appeal, though New Mexico law gives her 20 days to do that.
“I’ve got a lot of options,” the newspaper quoted Diaz as saying. She added that she doesn’t know whether she’ll be entitled to a severance package.
“I’m not thinking about that. I’m looking ahead,” she said.
The newspaper reported on Diaz’s firing because she was a controversial leader of the Bridgeport schools in Connecticut until that district’s board let her go in 2004.
Diaz, in the interview, called her firing “a difference of style and opinions.” She also told the newspaper that two men she brought to Las Cruces as part of a transition team, John Marsillio and Clarence Tolbert, won’t stay in Las Cruces.
Diaz has refused to speak with me or other area journalists on-the-record about her firing, so her interview with the Connecticut newspaper is the first since the Las Cruces school board made the decision last week.