claim: The Trump administration sent a letter to recipients of the President's Education Award, misspelling the word "success."
origin: The Trump administration is not known for accuracy when it comes to spelling; from the names of contemporary world leaders, to historical figures,Â to innocuous words like â€œeducation,â€ the administration has repeatedly made headlines with embarrassing mistakes. So a 7 June 2017 Facebook post claiming that the Department of Education had misspelled the word â€œsuccessâ€ in a letter to parents seemed plausible. Castro Valley, California parent Kendra Galordi Frautnick shared a copy of a letter on Facebook that the Trump Administration purportedly sent to her daughter, congratulating the eighth grader on her receipt of the Presidentâ€™s Education Award: We spoke to a representative from the Department of Educationâ€™s Presidentâ€™s Education Awards Program, who told us that the letters of congratulations were not intended to be distributed to individual students, but to be read aloud at an awards ceremony by a school administrator. The representative said 2017 was the first year in which the letter was not physically mailed to participating schools, but made available for download on the PEAP web site. The official version of this yearâ€™s letter [PDF], doesÂ not contain the purported typographical error spelling â€œsuccessâ€ as â€œsuccuessâ€: Although a separate person claims that a friend received the version with an error on the same date Frautnick shared the photograph, that account was secondhand and might have referenced Frautnickâ€™s Facebook post. Aside from that copy, we were unable to find any versions containing the spelling error. Frautnick sent us additional photographs to show that she had not doctored the image of the letter that she posted to Facebook. She told us: < Itâ€™s the actual letter my daughter received with the presidential award. I took a picture of it when she pointed out the typo. I posted it and it went viral. She received it from the white house through her school. > The official published Presidentâ€™s Education Award letter for 2017 lacked the â€œsuccuessâ€ error present in Facebook shares of the document. We rate this â€œmostly falseâ€ because a copy of the letter with the spelling error exists but was not reproduced across the country. We have so far unable toÂ determine whether the typographical error was only regionally distributed or simply fabricated.