A few weeks ago my daughter brought home a bunch of her artwork from her head-start "preschool" in Holyoke MA. Under her pictures "teachers" had written in captions explaining what each picture was meant to depict. To my horror the "teacher/s" had misspelled the word "dolphin" as "dolpling" and "mirror" as "mirro".

Before I brought this to anyone's attention I decided to investigate how indicative this instance was of a larger literacy problem amongst her "teachers". I observed one of my daughter's "teachers" attempting to read a children's book at story-time. It soon became apparent that she was not reading the story but rather paraphrasing the pictures, and doing so in a grammatically incorrect manner, saying things like "look now he got the ball".

I then spoke with the substitute site manager who assured me that "teachers" would be asked to not write on children's papers unless they could spell the words correctly. This really didn't address the larger issue, however I decided to wait until the permanent manager returned from her vacation to push further. Before I got a chance to do so, my daughter brought home another piece of artwork with a misspelled caption. The word "favorite" was spelled "favoritie".

When I brought this to the managers attention she said "the picture was probably hanging on the wall and recently taken down." This didn't comfort me at all. If that is the case, I must infer that not only are they misspelling basic words but they are displaying them for weeks without any staff or faculty members calling it to their attention?!

She denied that this was indicative of a larger problem and said "imagine how hard it is for these teachers to learn English as a second language". I countered "Imagine how hard it is for THE KIDS who have no one equipped to help them learn it."

This petition isn't meant to humiliate any head-start teachers; rather it is a call to break the cycle of illiteracy in our community. I am asking that Holyoke Chicopee Springfield Head Start Inc. to help the current staff acquire the skills they need to be able to teach and to implement new hiring process that guarantees that teachers are literate in the languages they are trying to teach. This doesn’t just mean English either. Currently Head Start does no evaluation of Spanish speakers’ literacy in Spanish. They say they hire Spanish speakers because they represent the community but have no mechanism in place to measure their Spanish skill and along with not really teaching any English pre-literacy skills-they teach no Spanish pre-literacy skills. My daughter DESERVES literate teachers, who can read children's books and spell basic one and two syllable words correctly. All children deserve this. We all pay for the head-start program in our tax dollars. We all reap the benefits when disadvantaged children are given the tools they need to succeed and likewise, we all stand to lose when the next generation is denied what they need to become engaged citizens.

My daughter and her classmates have enough obstacles in their way, unsafe neighborhoods, crumbling tenements, poverty, violence, racism, failing schools and a lack of job opportunities-PLEASE DON'T LET ILLITERACY BE ONE OF THEM.