PEOPLE OF INTEREST
The LITERACY ADVOCATE
Mary Silva, executive director of Literacy Services
98
of Indian River County, read Leo Tolstoy’s War
and Peace when she was in high school and she
later became a lawyer, even though she had been
dismissed as borderline mentally retarded years earlier.
Silva’s birth parents were illiterate; she never saw a book
until she was 5 and a new couple was about to enter her life.
“It was probably just before I was adopted,” she said. “I
saw a kid who had a book in his hand and I didn’t know
what that was. I went up to him and said, ‘What’s that?’ He
said it’s a math book and I said, ‘What is math?’ The caretaker,
or whatever they called them back then, grabbed me by
the shoulder and pushed me into the kitchen and said, ‘This
is where you belong and don’t ever do that again.’ I have
never forgotten that.”
Silva said someone told her adoptive parents she’d be
lucky to find work as a waitress someday.
The couple didn’t believe that. They asked Silva what she
wanted to be when she grew up.
“I said, ‘Lawyer.’ I could barely say the word, but I knew
instinctively that I wanted to help people. I must have known
lawyers are supposed to do good things.”
Silva’s parents made it their mission to teach their little girl
how to read.
“My parents were literate and engaged,” she said. “It was a
struggle, but my mom was persistent.”
Once, at a park while other children were playing, Silva’s
mom was trying to drill her reluctant learner in words that
began with the letter w. Silva remembers her mother phrasing
her questions to include words beginning with that letter,
which helped her catch on. When Silva named five words
correctly, she got to play with the other kids.
“By fifth or sixth grade, I was definitely reading,” she said.
“Always, I was one of those nerdy book readers. Back then,
I loved reading biographies and about people’s struggles,
historical novels.”
She was a good enough reader by the fifth grade to help a
boy who was struggling with the printed word.
“I thought he was a heck of a lot smarter than me, but
he couldn’t read,” she said. “I asked him why his parents
weren’t helping him,and he said, in a very matter of fact way,
‘Oh, they can’t read.’ ”
Silva’s parents, now deceased, made sure she had a library
card and she was a frequent visitor to Indian River County’s
public library when it was on 20th Street.
“I pretty much lived in the library,” said Silva, whose office
is in the newer library building on 21st Street in downtown
Vero Beach.
By the time she was attending Vero Beach High School, she
was reading noted Russian classics, not only War and Peace
but also The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
After graduating in 1980, she went to the University of
Florida, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English
in 1985 and a law degree in 1988. She practiced labor and
employment law for about 15 years, working for the state and
ED DRONDOSKI
Mary Silva has served as executive director of Literacy Services of Indian
River County for more than a decade.
then in the private sector. Her first firm represented employees
and the next represented employers. She became executive
director of the literacy services program in 2005.
The nonprofit agency, founded in 1971, matches volunteer
tutors with adults — 300 last year — who want to learn to
read. It receives no government funding, so it’s not bound by
regulations regarding testing or teaching styles.
Adults who can’t read are so embarrassed anyway that
requiring them to take a test upon enrollment “would make
them walk out the door,” Silva said.
“That’s one of several reasons why we don’t seek or accept
government funding,” she said. “We focus on what the student
needs rather than what the government says they need
to learn.”
Some students just ask for help in applying for a driver’s >>
BY JANIE GOULD