PHOENIX — A West Valley school superintendent and his district are under increasing scrutiny over allegations of misusing taxpayer funds and other misconduct.
In the latest development, a former principal testified about Tolleson Union High School District (TUHSD) Superintendent Jeremy Calles during an Arizona Joint Legislative Audit Committee hearing on Tuesday.
“Some of the allegations raised by this principal would cause Republicans, Democrats, independents, vegetarians to pause at what we heard,” Rep. Matt Gress, the committee’s chair, told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s The Mike Broomhead Show on Wednesday.
What is Tolleson Superintendent Jeremy Calles accused of?
Felipe Mandurraga spent eight years as the principal at Tolleson Union High School before resigning after the spring 2025 semester.
In his nearly hour-long testimony, Mandurraga accused Calles of misusing taxpayer funds by handing out $20,000 worth of vouchers to teachers during a staff meeting with no rules for how they could be spent. The former principal also alleged that Calles pushed school enrollments past capacity and tried to purchase a charter school so the district could get funding to build a new school.
But that was not all.
Mandurraga also accused the district of allowing a teacher accused of having a predatory relationship with a student to resign with full benefits.
He said the incident happened during the fall 2024 semester, when Tolleson Union High School officials were alerted about a teacher who had sent a student a message containing a topless photo, which Mandurraga said he saw.
“We involved HR,” Mandurraga said. “HR came (and) escorted the staff member off campus.”
However, he said TUHSD never filed a complaint with the State Board of Education about the incident and it was never investigated.
Mandurraga said he learned that the teacher was nearly hired two weeks later by another district “and would have been working directly with students again.”
Calles told Arizona’s Family on Tuesday that he was not aware of the incident until Mandurraga’s testimony.
Gress said it is unclear if that teacher is currently working in an Arizona school and was surprised that the incident was not reported.
“Presumably, Superintendent Calles, the head of the organization, should have known about this,” Gress said. “I do believe that this is right for mandatory reporting and the auditor general will be determining whether other state law was broken in this case.”
Why has the Tolleson Union High School District come under scrutiny?
The bipartisan Joint Legislative Audit Committee wound up voting unanimously to open an audit into TUHSD during Tuesday’s meeting.
Gress said the district must provide two years of records to Arizona Auditor General Lindsey Perry, who will lead the audit.
The Republican lawmaker previously requested records from TUHSD in August to follow up after a July committee hearing. However, the district allegedly refused and demanded over $26,000 in fees to produce them, Gress said.
Officials began looking closely at TUHSD after it agreed to a lease-purchase deal with Phoenix’s Isaac School District earlier this year, helping pull Isaac out of a financial crisis.
“That immediately raised questions for the Legislature because this was incredibly unusual, buying real estate and then making a land arbitrage play here with taxpayer dollars and another school district,” Gress said.
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