Wallkill East Rotary Club donates dictionaries to Pine Bush students

By Kerry Butrick Dowling
Posted 11/18/22

During the Tuesday, November 8, Board of Education Meeting, the Wallkill East Rotary Club presented the Board of Education with dictionaries as a symbol of the donation made to third grade students …

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Wallkill East Rotary Club donates dictionaries to Pine Bush students

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During the Tuesday, November 8, Board of Education Meeting, the Wallkill East Rotary Club presented the Board of Education with dictionaries as a symbol of the donation made to third grade students in the district. The annual donation is now in its 14th year according to Dr. William Bassett of the Wallkill East Rotary Club. “We’re just under 5,000 total dictionaries. It’s always an exciting project, and one that we get a lot out of. We are part of something called the Dictionary Project that was started by an elderly woman in Savannah, Georgia, who went to her neighborhood elementary school and discovered they didn’t have dictionaries. She was appalled, so she bought 50 dictionaries in 1990, and since then, 35,420,313 dictionaries have been distributed in the United States and Canada,” he explained.

In addition to giving the students dictionaries that they can carry through the years and into college as a personal item, Dr. Bassett shared that the Wallkill East Rotary also teaches students how to shake hands. “There’s a real art to receiving something and shaking hands. It’s always confusing and what hand to go with. So we try to teach the third graders that it’s important to take with your left hand, and shake with the right. Because in nine years, you’re going to be getting your high school diploma from the Board President and you want to make sure you take with the left and shake with the right.”

The 35-year-old Wallkill East Rotary Club is comprised of 49 men and women with the main mission of service according to Dr. Bassett. “There’s several priority areas in Rotary, and one of them is education and literacy. Thirteen years ago we didn’t have a literacy education project in mind, and the dictionary project was adopted. So that’s how that got started and we’ve been doing it ever since. We get great cooperation from the Pine Bush Central School District,” he shared.