Simple idea has changed the world

Every third grader in Jay County heard this story last week, so it’s worth sharing with a larger audience.
The story goes something like this: Back in the mid-1990s, a cleaning lady in Georgia decided she wanted to help the kids in her neighborhood school.
She focused on third grade. Why? Because the words “learn to read, then read to learn” are a fundamental truth about education. The woman in Georgia — her name was Annie Plummer — knew that if kids became better readers, better writers, and better spellers with better vocabularies, the rest of their education would be more successful.
Her answer was to save her money and buy dictionaries for a third grade class. Then the next year, she added another class. Then another school. And before you knew it, the Dictionary Project was born, led by South Carolina’s Mary French, who took the idea national.
Service clubs, foundations and philanthropists knew a great idea when they saw one and jumped on board.
By now, the Dictionary Project is active in all 50 states.
But Indiana was a little slow to get involved.
That’s where the local part of the story begins.
Back in about 2002, I happened to read an article about Annie Plummer and her dictionaries in The Wall Street Journal. I stuck my head into the office of The Portland Foundation that afternoon and mentioned it to Doug Inman, the foundation’s executive director. By the time I had made it back to my office, Doug had gone online, learned about the project, priced the affordable student dictionaries and found out how many third graders there were that year in Jay County.
What do you think? He asked.
I think we should do it, I told him. The Commercial Review picks up the cost of the dictionaries, making a pass-through donation to the foundation for their purchase. The foundation takes care of ordering the books and working with Jay Schools for their distribution.
That took place last week for the 12th school year. By our count, we’ve now provided about 3,000 dictionaries to Jay County third graders since we started. Other parts of Indiana have followed suit, but Jay County was the first Dictionary Project in the state.
Teachers were quick to adopt the idea. They set the rules on when the books are used. Usually, they are kept in the classroom rather than getting lost at home.
But use isn’t limited to third grade. The kids take care of the books and use them all through their public school career. Many Jay County students take them along when they head off to college.
To say it’s been a success would be an enormous understatement, and the payoff is tremendous when you see the look on the faces of third graders as the dictionaries are passed out.
Last Thursday and Friday, Doug and I made the rounds to all Jay Schools as well as the Christian Academy.
And at every stop, we told the story about that cleaning lady in Georgia and how with a simple idea and lots of hope and determination she set out to change the world, one third grader at a time.