LYNN — Each January, third graders in the Lynn Public School system get a gift from the Rotary Club.
The Rotarians, in conjunction with corporate sponsor Coastal Heritage Bank, distribute dictionaries to the students in public schools through the Rotary Dictionary Project. And Wednesday was the day they came to Lynn, as volunteers from the organization went to all 18 of Lynn’s public elementary schools to give the kids their dictionaries.
“This is huge,” said Lynn School Superintendent Dr. Patrick Tutwiler. “This has been going on now for 12 years.
“For me, to have an event, or a day, on which every third-grader receives one of the foundational tools of education, for free, is beyond words to me. It’s a wonderful experience, and a wonderful day.”
Dick Ruth, president of the Rotary Satellite Club, was on hand at Sisson School along with principal Jane Franklin, Tutwiler, and Coastal Heritage representatives Don Gill and Bob Terravecchia. He said that since 2008, at roughly 1,200 dictionaries a year, the Lynn Rotary is closing in on having distributed 16,000 dictionaries to third-graders who attend Aborn, Brickett, Callahan, Cobbett, Connery, Drewicz, Fallon, Ford, Harrington, Hood, Ingalls, Lincoln-Thomson, Lynn Woods, Sewell-Anderson, Sisson, Shoemaker, Tracy and Washington S.T.E.M. elementary schools.
The Lynn program is part of an international program by many of the 32,230 Rotary Clubs worldwide to help teach young children to read. It has become a major part of Rotary International’s literacy goals in several countries, including the United States.
“The program was undertaken by many, if not all, in Rotary International as an effort to improve literacy around the world,” Ruth said.
Ruth was a high school math teacher at both Classical and St. Mary’s, and said seeing the third-graders receive their dictionaries gave him a different perspective.
“To see the smiles on the faces as we distributed these books was priceless,” he said. “Those kids were thrilled to be getting their own dictionaries.”
“I’d call it the joyous noise of kids getting something new,” he said. “They were going through the books looking at words, the tables and graphs … you could tell they were happy to be getting their own dictionaries.”
And it’s not just any dictionary either, Tutwiler said. It’s geared toward a grammar-school student’s age level, but its use doesn’t begin and end there.
“They’re not like the dictionaries like you and I had back in the day,” he said. “There’s information about presidents, periodic tables, the state capitals, foreign countries around the world …
“It’s not your grandfather’s dictionary. This is something that will carry our kids through their tenure as Lynn Public School students and beyond. And I hope they see the value of it that way.”
Coastal Heritage Bank provided the funds so that the Rotary Club could purchase the dictionaries.
“We couldn’t do something like this without the help of Coastal Heritage Bank,” said Jim Harris of the Rotary Club in Lynn. “We appreciate them coming through with the money for this.”
