Curtis will be reviewing visitor's questions weekly about cooking, meal planning and other food related topics. If your question is selected you will receive a personalize e-mail response from Curtis as well as has have your question and answer posted here! Also, we will be selecting one question per month as our "winner" and the contributor will receive one of Curtis' great cookbooks!
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Congratulations to our Name: Cindy D. I had the extreme pleasure of watching your live presentation at the Valley Forge Convention Center in Philadelphia yesterday. While I thoroughly enjoyed the show, I was pleasantly surprised to learn about your interest in adult literacy. In my professional life, I am the Executive Assistant to the Lieutenant Governor of Delaware. Our Lieutenant Governor, Ruth Ann Minner, while not illiterate, did drop out of school at age 16 to get married and run the family farm. She and her husband were blessed with 3 boys. Unfortunately, when she was 2 years old, her husband died of a massive heart attack out in one of their fields, leaving her a single mother with no education and three young boys to raise. Like you, with sheer determination, she went back to school and earned her GED while working full time and even went on to college. Her political career began humbly as a page for the Delaware General Assembly. From there she moved on to be a receptionist in the Governor's Office and in 1974 she became the first woman elected to the Delaware House of Representatives from her Milford district. She then went on to serve as a Senator for her district and in 1992 she was the first woman ever to be elected Lieutenant Governor for the State of Delaware! Under a previous Governor, an executive order was signed ordering that an Interagency Council on Adult Literacy be formed from the various state agencies that in any way affect adult education. The executive order stipulates that the Lieutenant Governor's Office provides the leadership and staff for this group. ICAL, under the direction of Lieutenant Governor Ruth Ann Minner has flourished because of her own personal devotion to adult education and adult literacy. Ten years ago, ICAL hosted a Delaware literacy
summit, where every organization devoted to working on adult literacy worked together to
set goals for the upcoming decade. This year, we are re-convening the group in
another summit to assess what has been achieved, what still needs to be done My boss, Lieutenant Governor Minner is running for Governor this year. If elected, she would be the first woman Governor of our state. However, she feels so very strongly about adult literacy that she specifically asked the ICAL group to wait until after the election to host the summit. She did not want the event to focus on politics, but rather on the importance of the issue. We also felt it would be important to use the summit as a way to brief all the newly elected officials on Delaware's illiteracy rate and the services that are available - and to garner their support for these programs early in their tenure as elected officials. We are confident that Lt. Governor Minner will be attending the summit as Governor-elect, but win or lose, her devotion to this issue will be unwavering and she will continue to work for bi-partisan support for literacy training in Delaware. Thanks again for your wonderful demonstration yesterday and for your inspirational words. Keep on Cookin'! Sincerely, Cindy D. Click Here for Curtis's response |
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