The grandfather of a 2017 Harford County Public Schools graduate recently blasted the school board because his granddaughter could not read cursive writing.

"I am appalled that a graduate of high school in this county couldn't read a note I wrote," Jim Hudson of Aberdeen told members of the Harford County Board of Education at their meeting July 17. "You are on purpose graduated students who are illiterate."

A couple weeks earlier, Hudson told the board members, he had given a note to a young woman who graduated this year from Fallston High School. She looked at the note, written in cursive, and told him she would read it later. She didn't read it then because she was struggling with it, he said.

Hudson realizes this is the digital age, he said, but students who can't read cursive won't be competitive. If a job opportunity came down to two equally qualified candidates, the one who reads cursive and the other who does not, the one who does will most likely be hired, he said.

"I was dismayed. They are illiterate on purpose," he said. "Why are you doing it to these children?"

The Harford school system has "no formal component" in its curriculum that concentrates on cursive writing, "although through the use of primary resources and exposure to other publications, students are exposed to cursive writing," Joseph Licata, chief of administration for Harford schools, explained in an email.