One of our most meaningful traditions—and a true point of pride for the Rotary Club of Lynn—is the Dictionary Project. This year marks Year 18 of the program, which began in 2008 thanks to Lynn Rotarian Jim Harris. Since then, this effort has quietly (and powerfully) strengthened literacy across our city.
Every single third grader in the City of Lynn receives a brand-new student dictionary—and this week, it all happened citywide at the same time. Rotarians deployed across Lynn, visiting each and every school, so students throughout the city were learning, exploring, and celebrating words together.
By the numbers:
• 20 schools participated (18 public, 2 private)
• 54 cases of dictionaries purchased by Reading Cooperative Bank and McGrath Enterprises
• 1,276 dictionaries distributed in a single day
• 37 Lynn Rotarians, 8 Lynn Public School administrators, and 7 Reading Cooperative Bank team members supported distribution
• 22,000+ student dictionaries have been given to Lynn third graders since 2008
Pictured here are Katherine Burns, Executive Director of the Lynn Senior Center, and Alicia Reddin, Director of Learning & Development at Vinfen, who took time out of their day to visit Connery School. They showed students how to really use a dictionary—beyond just definitions—diving into pronunciation, parts of speech, guide words, and the bonus pages packed with fun facts and tools that make words come alive.
The visit wrapped up with a fast-paced word hunt to see who could find words the quickest (a reminder that third graders take vocabulary very seriously).
This is Rotary at its best: strong partnerships, deep roots in the community, and a long-term commitment to literacy—one word, one student, one school at a time.
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