Capacity
Audit the buildings.
Walk every campus. Publish utilization by classroom, not by school. Parents see the spreadsheet. So does the board.
Maria Salgado-Whitman · PVUSD Governing Board
Audit the buildings.
Redraw the lines.
Hold the bond.
32 kids in my son's third grade. 18 in a third grade eight miles south. PVUSD doesn't need another bond fight. It needs a clipboard, a class roster, and a board willing to redraw the map.
Ninety minutes. Once a month. From a lawn chair. We'll bring the clipboards.
Tatum Highlands
· Cave Creek · Pinnacle Peak Sunset Canyon
The wedge issue
PVUSD has empty rooms south of Bell — and 32 kids per class up the Tatum corridor.
That's not a money problem. That's a map problem. The current board's answer is a $385M bond on the November ballot. Maria's answer is the one nobody on the dais has tried: walk every campus, publish the utilization audit, redraw the attendance boundaries for 2027–28, and freeze new bond questions until parents can read the numbers.
She's not against funding our schools. She's against asking twice.
Read the full plan105%
Tatum corridor
Six campuses at or above design capacity.
82%
South of Bell
Six campuses with empty classrooms.
$385M
November bond
What the current board wants. Before the audit.
The plan, three steps
Verbs over nouns. Numbers over slogans.
Boundaries
Redraw the lines.
Smart-zone the 2027–28 school year. Pair north-corridor campuses with under-enrolled south-of-Bell schools. Grandfather siblings. Run two rounds of parent input.
Spending
Hold the bond.
No new bond question until the audit and the rezone are public. PVUSD parents shouldn't fund a problem the board hasn't shown them.
About Maria
A paraprofessional. An ops manager. A PVUSD mom.
Maria worked her way through ASU at a Sunnyslope Walgreens. She spent five years as a special-ed paraprofessional in Glendale Elementary before moving into operations at a Phoenix HVAC contractor. She's managed a 180-person crew through three monsoon seasons and one recession.
She's run a Desert Cove PTA. She's translated parent-teacher conferences in two languages. She's coached 8U softball at Cactus Park. She knows where the bottleneck is — at home, at work, and in her son's third-grade classroom.
Read Maria's storyEndorsed by parents, principals, and coaches
Not a single party chair on this list. By design.
School-board endorsements should come from inside the school community. These are the people who walk PVUSD campuses every week.
Janet Crowley
Retired Principal · Mountain Trail Middle (1998–2019)
Coach Aaron Begay
Boys' Basketball Coach · Pinnacle High School
Dr. Priya Ramaswamy
Pediatrician · Honor Health Pediatrics, Tatum
Will Henderson
Owner · Henderson Hardware (Cave Creek, est. 1976)
Theresa "Tess" Olague
PTA President · Desert Cove Elementary 2023–2025
Sgt. (Ret.) Mike Doolan
Retired Phoenix PD School Resource Officer
Ninety minutes a month
From your kitchen table. Or your lawn chair. Either works.
We're not running a phonebank with a quota. We're asking neighbors to talk to neighbors. Pick your campus. Pick your week. We'll hand you the clipboard and the talking points — in English or in Spanish.
- ●Greet at PTA night
- ●Door-knock your block
- ●Translate (Spanish/English)
- ●Drop a yard sign
Coming up
Find Maria at a campus near you.
-
May
14
Tuesday · 6:30 PM
Coffee with Maria — Desert Cove cafeteria
Desert Cove Elementary
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May
18
Saturday · 9:00 AM
Campus walk — Mountain Trail Middle
Mountain Trail Middle School
-
May
22
Wednesday · 7:00 PM
Parent town hall (Spanish/English)
Pinnacle High library
From the campaign
News.
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May 02, 2026
Salgado-Whitman calls for PVUSD facility audit before November bond
-
Apr 24, 2026
Why I'm running: a third-grade classroom of 32, and one eight miles south of 18
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Apr 11, 2026
Six PVUSD parents, three coaches, one principal: an endorsement reel
Chip in
$20 buys a yard sign.
$50 prints 200 door-hangers.
No bundlers. No PACs. Lawn-sign donations are how a school-board race actually gets paid for. Every dollar past the legal max gets refunded — we'd rather you knock doors anyway.
- Maximum individual contribution: $6,600 (AZ school-district race).
- Disclosed quarterly to the Maricopa County Recorder.
- Not tax-deductible. Political contributions never are.