| Pekin Dictionary Project was an idea that came to club member, Dennis Green one day while reading with the students at C.B. Smith School, as a participant in the Rotary Readers Program. During his visit, Dennis was invited to attend the book fair that was going on at the school. Among the books were dictionaries priced at $8.50. He thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to provide each student with a copy of their own dictionary". The thought stayed with him as he knew the promotion of literacy was a district priority for Rotary.
Plans really began to take shape when he attended the Elks Grand Lodge Convention, later that summer, in Orlando Florida, in his capacity as Exalted Ruler of Pekin Elks Lodge #1271. There he visited a booth staffed by the Elks Association of New York State where he found dictionaries for sale as part of their project to distribute dictionaries to school children. There he learned about Mary French, a lady in South Carolina who was determined to provide dictionaries for every third grader in the state. She had arranged for book publishers to provide dictionaries at low cost to organizations who agreed to sponsor distributions in area schools. As the word of Mary's program spread to other states, the number of students served began to grow exponentially.
Dennis arranged for local partners to share the cost of purchasing approximately 600 dictionaries a year for distribution to third graders in all of the schools, public and private, that feed in to Pekin High School District 303.
Schools and programs served are: District 108 Schools: Dirksen, Jefferson, C.B. Smith, L.E. Starke, Altman, Willow and Wilson. Public School Districts: Rankin, South Pekin, Spring Lake and North Pekin/Marquette Heights. Private Schools: Good Shepherd Lutheran, Faith Baptist and St. Joseph's Catholic. Programs served: Adult Literacy at the YWCA and the Pekin Public Library for home-schooled students. Program sponsors in recent years have been Pekin Elks Lodge, Pekin Rotary Club, Grace United Methodist Church, First Church of the Nazarene and Pekin Knights of Columbus. The Dictionary Project has distributed 4,872 books during its 8 years in existence. Distributions this spring will take the total well over the 5,000 mark. The cost of the student dictionaries for years was less than $2.00 each, shipping included. This year the cost of the same books has increased to $2.50 each.
The Pekin Rotary Board has agreed to support the project again this year, so Dennis would like to extend an offer to any Rotarians who would like to participate in the distribution of the books with him. Let him know if you have a favorite school you would like to visit. He is preparing to place the order as soon as a count has been established for this year. Dennis said experiencing the reaction of the students when they receive their very own dictionary is priceless. He continues to receive reports from parents and teachers about children who have taken their books home and slept with them under their pillow and those who carry them everywhere they go, reading as often as they can. He said he even had to replace a copy for a teacher who reported that her high school age son had snatched hers. Some have wondered "In this day and age of electronic devices, why continue to distribute books?" To that, Mary French responds "You look up words on a computer but you learn by reading a dictionary". |
Who to invite:
