Online petition for Bright Beginnings

Will e-mails from around the country crank up pressure for Mecklenburg County commissioners to save Bright Beginnings prekindergarten seats next year?

Michelle O'Reilly of Charlotte hopes so. Early this morning, she created an online petition at change.org asking people to lobby commissioners in favor of the spending plan proposed by Commissioner Vilma Leake. As you may recall, Superintendent Peter Gorman has proposed cutting just over $10 million from the Bright Beginnings budget, which would reduce participation by more than half next year, because of projected budget shortfalls. Leake has proposed a "grant" that would provide county money to cover that gap and specify that it must be used for pre-K.

Commissioner Bill James isn't impressed. He warned his colleagues to expect "e-mails by the bushel full" and put his own spin on things: "Why someone from Boulder, Co or some other place would know the details of BB’s failure I can’t say."

As of 2:30 p.m., the online petition had 17 signatures, including two from Charlotte and others from around the country, including Boulder.

If you're new to this issue, search this blog for previous, more detailed posts about the Bright Beginnings debate. And if you're trying to read the petition, here's a tech tip: I couldn't get change.org to do much on Internet Explorer, but it responded well on Mozilla Firefox.