Rotary Dictionaries
Dear Editor: The Sitka Rotary Club is distributing free age-appropriate dictionaries to every Keet Gooshi Heen Elementary and REACH program student in the third grade, made possible through the club’s fund-raising efforts and a national nonprofit organization, The Dictionary Project.
Each dictionary has each kid’s first name inside – plus one for the teacher – and the dictionaries belong to the kids. The Rotary Club hopes the dictionaries foster a love of words and reading, in line with our other worldwide projects that support literacy and education. The dictionaries also contain other resources (e.g. geography information, American sign language alphabet, U.S. president biographies) which we hope foster kids’ curiosity.
The Sitka Rotary Club and Dictionary committee (Jeff Budd, Shannon Haugland, Sharon Bergman, Catherine Rogers, John Weitkamp and Karl Stedman) is grateful to the school district, KGH Principal Casey Demmert, his administrative staff and teachers, and the district REACH Homeschool (Ms. Eells) for helping make this program happen for the kids. And thanks to our volunteers outside the club, Asa Dow and Rianna Bergman, for shooting the video we were able to send into classrooms.
A special thank you to the community for your support of the Sitka Duck Race, which supports this and all of our projects in the community. (Duck Race tickets still available – fewer than 600 left – at 818-207-2993.)
We have extra dictionaries for students outside the district, and those interested can call the club’s dictionary coordinator at 738-0602.
Catherine Rogers,
President, Sitka Rotary Club
AmeriCorps Service
Dear Editor: This past Saturday, May 1, was the final AmeriCorps day of service for many of the current cohort. Days of service are opportunities for AmeriCorps members to branch out and serve in places besides their host site. This past day of service I was able to assist Sitka Trail Works as they began work on the new single track trail.
I’ve worked on trails before and was excited to see what building trail in a rainforest would look like. The answer, I quickly found, was lots of rock. If you’ve ever hiked or biked a trail in Sitka, I’m sure you’ve noticed all the gravel you’re traveling over. It makes sense, rock washes away slower than topsoil. It also makes sense that someone has to move all that rock. Luckily, I got the job of spreading the gravel rather than transporting the gravel. While I was busy spreading and smoothing, others were busy unearthing a small landfill of scrap metal and many, many feet of cable. The amount of garbage that was discovered was truly impressive; whoever buried it did not intend for Sitka Trail Works volunteers to dig it out.
By the end of our time we had a truck bed (and then some) full of trash and 20 feet of fresh gravel. It’s the aftermath of trail work I’ve always loved the most, you’re able to see exactly what you’d been working so hard on. If you’ve ever wanted to uncover small landfills or move piles of gravel around, I recommend a Sitka Trail Works party.
A 2020-21 AmeriCorps Member,
Emma Froelich
