WESTFIELD – Third graders in the city schools – and beyond – are getting dictionaries thanks to a program of the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks.
John Pellan, the district deputy to the Elks’ Grand Exalted Ruler for the West district of Massachusetts, visited Franklin Avenue School recently to personally present the dictionaries to the third grade pupils there.
Before he presented the dictionaries to the children, Pellan told the Franklin Avenue third graders about the youth programs that the Elks offer including the Hoop Shoot contest (which he said would be starting soon at the Boys and Girls Club), Americanism essay contests and the Rag Shag parade and Halloween celebration.
He also told them about the dictionary project which, he said, was started in 1995 by Mary French of Charleston, South Carolina. The Elks joined the program nationally in 2004, he said, and since then, the Elks have provided almost 15 million dictionaries to school children.
Pellan said that the dictionaries will be given to all the third graders in the city schools. “We do the hilltowns, too”, he said, along with West Springfield and Agawam. He said that last year the local lodge, Westfield/West Springfield Lodge 1481, distributed about 1,500 dictionaries to school children in the area.
He said that, for the past ten years, the Westfield/West Springfield lodge has been one of the 600 Elks lodges participating in the program.
Pellan said that the dictionary program is “a way of giving something to the children for the learning process.”
He pointed out that the Elks, both locally and nationally, have a history of very strong support for education. He said that the Elks are second only to the U.S. government in terms of the amount of scholarship aid provided to students across the nation.
