Today at 51, she is a professor at Southhampton College of Long Island University of New York. Peters attributes her success to the Head Start program where she enrolled her daughter, then 4 in 1971. She found the program is as much about bolstering the self- esteem of poor mothers as it is about giving children a head start on school. But Head Start doesn't approach things that way. It is an amazing social service program because it takes its clients and turns them into volunteers.
Parents become part of the solution.
Through her work on the local Head Start Parent Advisory council, Peters started to change. She stopped using corporal punishment, and became active in community affairs. She fought for and won government relocation assistance for herself and other tenants who were to be evicted from their apartments in a building scheduled for demolition. Peters wrote her dissertation for her Ph. D on her Head Start experience, and Garland Publishing just published her book based on that research.