Presentation on Literacy by Erva Denham
The Literacy Club!
Presentation by Erva A. Denham, Literacy Chair & Past President
July 30, 2014
Good afternoon! Seems like only yesterday when I had the pleasure of calling meetings to order, quietly organizing projects, and banging the bell with the gavel at the end of each meeting. Somehow, once you’ve been a Club President, each one of us seems to retain a slight sliver of ownership in the podium mike. It’s a lot like the proprietary feeling of coming home to be addressing you here today.
This time it is on the subject of Literacy and what the Club is doing that I have been asked to address. For the longest time, Rotary II has been referred to as “The Fun Club.” While the majority of what we do is really fun, when we consider our Club’s accomplishments, I’d like to think that Rotary II really should be called “The Literacy Club!”
So much of what our Club does is, in one way or another, related to Literacy.
MATH COUNTS
Let’s begin with the oldest and still very active project, headed each year by Welby Warner – Math Counts. With our annual sponsorship in that program, we promote numeracy which is the other major language we use each day. Don’t think so? Well, if you can still make change without the use of a calculator, your mastery of basic numerical principles is still pretty good.
BERRYMAN UVI SCHOLARSHIP
Probably the next oldest continuing project of our Club is the Macon M. Berryman Scholarship. For those of you who are newer members of the Club, it consists of a scholarship to UVI, and is open to any graduate of any high school in the St. Thomas/St. John District who will be an incoming freshman at the University of the Virgin Islands. There are no restrictions regarding field of study, and it’s good for four years’ worth of tuition, books and academic fees, or roughly $20,000.00. We award one of these each year. As of this year, we are changing the application procedure. In order to save on legwork, gas, postage and printing, the scholarship application is now available online at UVI, and is open for application to any freshman who meets the basic local high school graduation requirements. This eliminates several steps in the process because the applicants will have already been accepted at UVI. As in the past, completed applications will be mailed to the Club’s Scholarship Committee which will review the applications and choose the recipient. In addition, the application can also be posted on our Club’s website. Since we are now looking directly at a pool of freshmen already at UVI, the application deadline will be the 1st of November for selection and awarding at the beginning of the winning freshman’s spring semester. Pending approval of the Club’s Board, the scholarship can be made retroactive to the fall semester to pick up any unpaid 1st semester bills of the scholarship winner.
REACH
Another great literacy program of Rotary II is REACH, Rotary Educating and Caring for Humanity. Each week, our Club’s radio program informs Rotarians and the general public on Rotary programs, projects and precepts on the RI, District and local level, as well as serving as a forum through the program’s guests on community issues, problems and solutions. Another great service project with a major literacy component!
NEW GENERATIONS
As a sponsoring Club, Rotary II has contributed and continues to contribute directly to the teaching of Rotary principles and goals to the first community-based Rotaract Club on St. Thomas, to the Interact Club at Antilles School, the Interact Club at Addelita Cancryn Junior High School, and the Earlyact Club at Lockhart Elementary School. This represents the instilling of Rotary literacy at its best. How many other Rotary Clubs can say that they are the sponsors of not one, but four junior level Clubs?
CHESS CLUB
A few years ago, Rotary II acquired another educator among its membership, Sinclair Wilkinson. With him came another great literacy-related program which the Club continues to support – a chess club aimed primarily at middle school students, but which also invites younger and older competitors. Logic and strategy are key elements of the game – just as they are essential in expository writing. See another cross-over?
ADOPTED SCHOOL
Our Club has taken on Addelita Cancryn Junior High as its adopted school, and with that are two literacy-related projects that have been continuing for more than 10 years. First is the annual “Four Way Test Essay Contest.” If you have not visited the school, Rotary’s Four Way Test is posted in the main lobby. Each year we hold an essay contest based on the four way test. The basic theme may change each year, but it all comes back to our four guiding principles. For this we give a cash prize to the winner and the first runner-up.
Also at Cancryn, our former “Teacher of the Year” award has now been changed to the “Educator of the Year.” In this contest, the students make the selection, and by changing the name of the competition, not only teachers, but administrators, teachers’ aides, librarians, and other staff members can be included in the pool for selection. Who’s to say that you didn’t learn one of your most valuable life lessons in Junior High from the school nurse, guidance counsellor, or a member of the cafeteria staff? In a way, this can also be seen as a vocational service project. Traditionally, there is a cash prize for the first and second place winners, as well as a special cash donation to the school.
CAR RAFFLE
We have a major fundraiser each year – our signature car raffle. Even that is related to literacy since part of the raffle proceeds often go to the scholarship fund.
GIFT OF WORDS PROJECT
A few years ago, our Club started a basic Dictionary Project in cooperation with the Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands. That first year, the Club gave a dictionary to every third grade student at Lockhart Elementary School. At that time, the Dictionary Project was open only to third graders in public schools. Since that time, it has expanded to include every third grader in the territory. That first year, we delivered about 120 dictionaries to Lockhart Elementary School.
Within our Club, it is no longer simply “The Dictionary Project.” It is now called “The Gift of Words Project.” Last year, to show how the project has expanded, we gave a dictionary to the third graders at Lockhart Elementary School and to the third grade class at Antilles School. This rather makes sense since we have an Interact Club at the latter and an Earlyact Club at the former school.
Moving on with the “Gift of Words,” at Addelita Cancryn, we gave an atlas to each 7th grader, and a thesaurus to each 8th grader.
As if that weren’t enough, we gave a Webster Vocabulary Builder to each member of the 9th grade class at Ivanna Eudora Kean High School.
So, from a beginning gift of 120 books, last year we served 1,100 students, and it is my hope, with a little budget tweaking, that we can do a complete “Gift of Words Program” again this year.
PRACTICE PEACE INTIATIVE
Today, you’ve also heard about our Club’s involvement with the Practice Peace Initiative – yet another layer in literacy-related programs, especially when training is involved for special conflict resolution. How proud I am to be a member of this Club at this time!
It must be obvious to you by now, that as an old high school teacher of English, literacy is a subject about which I am passionate.
READING & TUTORING
While not a regularly “structured” program within our club, I’d like to add that there are a few of us who quietly promote literacy by reading stories to young children, or by tutoring older students with reading problems. These quiet and unsung Rotary heroes do this work for two reasons – because it needs to be done, and because those who do it love doing it. Among us, Merle and I are guilty of this wonderful little obsession. You too can quietly help children and young adults in the realm of literacy. If you have the time, and feel that you have the competency to work in this wonderfully quiet, and basically one-on-one way, please contact me. For a long time, Merle has been working with young children. I have been working, one-on-one, with 18 to 30 year olds with reading problems. Fix that, and the rest follows fairly easily.
GREETING CARDS
As you may know, I have set myself another goal of raising $1,000.00 for Polio Plus. If we have another good sea grape crop this year, I will make more sea grape jelly as an enticement for a $10.00 donation to Polio Plus. So what has this to do with literacy? Well, not being sure of a good sea grape season, as you may know I was not really well for several months, and during that “stay at home” time, I made some hand embroidered bookmarks and general purpose greeting cards – see? Reading and writing are necessary—which I’m selling for $5.00 each. Today, thanks to all of you readers and letter writers, I am happy to turn in my second installment in the sale of these items – another $150.00, to bring my total collected as of last Wednesday, to $250.00. So you see, because of good, basic literacy and numeracy, I have already achieved one quarter of my goal for Polio Plus.