Maria Orozco ’10, a financial aid advisor at U.C. Santa Cruz, has been elected to the Pajaro Valley Unified School District board of trustees. Having grown up in Watsonville, Orozco knows her community well. She is one of two Latinas on the board after a decade with no representative from the Latino community. About 80 percent of the district’s 20,000 students are Latino. She told the press, "Education is the key to everything, the key to reducing crime in the community, the key to improving the health of our community, even the key to reducing the pressure on local and state budgets because if kids get an education, they’re going to get better jobs."