The Wallkill East Rotary makes an annual trip to all four Pine Bush elementary schools to present dictionaries to every third-grade student in the district. While they couldn’t deliver them in person to the students this year because of COVID-19 restrictions, the group still made the donation.

Dr. William Bassett, a member of the Rotary and a former superintendent of Pine Bush Schools, instead sent a video to the schools explaining why this project is so important to the Rotary. One of the group’s service areas is the community’s youth; another is literacy. This project hits both of those boxes. With the dictionary program, the group is contributing to the development of education and literacy for our young people. He encouraged the students to use their dictionaries often and to be sure to look up the word “service,” which best exemplifies what the Rotary Club does, he added.

That’s just what they did in Seth VanGaasbeek and Rosemarie Lindsay’s classes at CES. After writing their names in the new dictionaries, they looked up the word “service” and read the definition.

“We are grateful to the Wallkill East Rotary for their generosity to our students every year,” said Acting Superintendent Donna Geidel. “This year, the donation is even more special because so many things have changed for our students. Not this. Rotary has come through again for the children of Pine Bush.”

Wallkill East Rotary has been participating in this dictionary program since the spring of 2008. That year, they distributed dictionaries in spring and fall and have stuck with fall ever since. They’ve distributed nearly 5,000 dictionaries to 14 third-grade classes thus far.