Town of Babylon Supervisor Rich Schaffer recently joined with Councilman Tom Donnelly for the launch of the Babylon Rotary Club’s Dictionary Project at William E. DeLuca Jr. Elementary School in North Babylon. As part of the Dictionary Project, third-graders at the North Babylon elementary school will receive dictionaries, thesauruses and grammar usage guides. The event also served as a tribute to the memory of former Rotary President, and namesake of the school, William E. DeLuca Jr. At the event, Supervisor Schaffer and Councilman Donnelly presented William E. DeLuca III of West Babylon’s Strahl & Pitsch, who serves as the project’s corporate sponsor, with an official Town Proclamation in honor of his father and for his organization’s contribution.
The Dictionary Project is a nationwide initiative to encourage students to increase their reading and writing skills while learning critical thinking skills by providing them with their own personal dictionaries and reference materials. The materials are usually distributed in the third grade due to that being the age when students are taught to use the dictionary and begin to read for knowledge. The initiative, led by local businesses and community organizations, has distributed dictionaries to over 18 million children nationwide since the start of the program in 1995. The Babylon Rotary Dictionary Project Committee will be distributing the same materials to all third grade students in the remaining schools within the North Babylon School District in the coming weeks.
Pictured from left to right are Supervisor Schaffer; Frank Seibert, Babylon Rotary Club Literacy Chair; William DeLuca III, President/CEO of Strahl & Pitsch; William France, Past Rotary President and CEO/Chairman of Strahl & Pitsch; and Councilman Donnelly.