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Langley Sunrise Rotary has provided over 22,000 dictionaries to Langley’s grade four students.  Rotary member, Grant Gilmour, brought this literacy opportunity to the club with the plan to hand out 1600 dictionaries each year.  Fourteen years later the electronic age has taken its toll and teachers find paper dictionaries aren’t as useful as they once were.  Continuing to support the Langley School Foundation, the club has opted to help fund the Summer Reading Program. Surveys have found that students’ reading skills drop during their absence from school. This funding gives deserving grade four students their choice of 10 books to keep and enjoy during their summer break.  Coordinators for this program tell of students who pick out books to share with their siblings.  One recipient exclaimed “this is the first book I’ve ever owned”.

This morning we handed over $1300 to BLT (Basic Life skills Training) program from the proceeds of our Dodgeball Tournament in April.

These guys (James on the left and Kerry on the right) run an amazing program working with at-risk youth and youth with mental health issues here in Langley.

Thank you for the great work you do and thank you for working with us to host a fun event benefitting your kids!

For more information on this program, visit: http://www.yrc.ca/services/basic-lifeskills-training-blt/

A group formed to examine Child Youth Mental Health in Langley.  The original plans changed once the group actually met with the youth needing the services.  It was clear the various agencies providing services to youth in the mental health field in Langley did not share information with each other, and it was sometimes difficult for the youth in need to access information.
A website was developed with information on how to access the various services available for youth mental health.  In addition, a wallet card was created since many of the youth having issues were not able to access the internet.  Doctors and school councilors were contacted to educate them as to where to refer youth to.
The Langley School District has five councilors to help students with mental health issues, which occur as early as  kindergarten.  The councilors are overwhelmed and look to 
outside agencies for assistance.  It takes an average of six months for a your diagnosed with mild to moderate mental health issues to get looked at.  
Posters have been created to place around the community to help educate the public and hopefully catch the eye of kids.

The expanded reach of the idea came with its costs.  Lluvia checked Google and found a grant application from B.C. Athletics.  With the $1.000 grant as a start, her organization has continued to grow and she has had over 300 women pass the finish line in 5k and 10k events.  The fact they can complete the race gives them confidence they can do other things inn their lives, and the group is very supportive and encouraging to each other.  Lluvia plans to expand to include women from other ethnic groups

 

 

 Ted Schaffer has been in local politics for over 22 years and is serving his first term as Mayor of Langley City.  Projects underway currently include work on 200th Street for upgrade of a sewer line and  the construction of the new Timms recreation centre that will be a completely new building that includes a track running around the inside perimeter of the building so people can walk indoors during inclement weather.  Linwood Park has a new dog off leash area and 26 community garden plots.
Homeless people are an issue in Langley City as in most other areas.  A Homeless Task Force has been looking into the problem and has just merged with the Crime Prevention Task Force under the new heading of the Public Safety Task Force.
Upcoming projects include a clock to be erected a 204 Street and Fraser Highway in memory of Reg Easingwood, to be funded by Rotary.

In this age of Google you might think that a dictionary is an old fashioned out of date object. Big and clunky it is not modern. So why would the rotary club of Langley sunrise give away 26000 dictionaries since 1999? The whole logistics of getting 1600 to 1800 dictionaries to 33 schools on the same day in September year and personally handing them to students and teachers is daunting.
 
The reason is that before we can walk we must crawl. Before we can use Google and really use Google well we must learn to search with trial and error and we must learn the alphabet and language in a way that helps us understand and view the world of information around us in a special way. That is really what the value of dictionary is. If you can learn to spell well enough to find it in a dictionary and if you can learn that Too, Two and To are all in the dictionary but with different meanings you can take that knowledge and really use Google well. Try this for example: If you type “Too many twos to” you get a much different result than “two many to too” or “too many tutus”. The difference in the results from Google is a result of where your spelling lead Google to look. If you learn to spell and how to use a dictionary you become a much better user of the “modern” tools we have today.
 
So who gets the dictionaries? Grade four students get them because grade 4 is the year that the dictionary is in the curriculum.
 
If you stop and think about it if we have given away 1600 dictionaries each year to grade 4 students we have reached about 25% of the population of Langley! That is a lot of people who have been impacted by Rotary. A lot of people who have the rotary message.