William “Bill” King is a 25 plus year Rotarian and the current president of the Warrenton, North Carolina Club. He retired from Allstate Insurance after 34 years as an agent and agency owner. Bill, and his club, are championing the ADR program in his local school system to provide a path for long term success for the underserved children in his community.
It is reported that 40-50% of the homes in metropolitan divisions do not have a literacy fire. All the Rotarians I have spoken with want to help light these fires in their communities.

The research is undeniable that family literacy is the silver bullet of all literacy.

Mike Poore, a Rotarian, in Little Rock AR he was hired as their Superintendent. He partnered with his Rotary Club and instituted One Rock, One Book program.  Previously his club was regularly in the schools handing out dictionaries to 3rd graders.  This program allowed them to be involved with all the elementary age children and develop a partnership between the school and the community.  In 5 years the Little Rock school system went from one that had been taken over by the Arkansas DOE when Mike was hired, to being recognized as Arkansas Superintendent of the Year!  Mike contributes part of his success to this program and partnering with the community.

HOW ROTARY CAN GET INVOLVED

• * Help fund the program
• * Read to the children
• * Participate in reading celebrations at schools, like distributing books
• * Local business involved during the book reading period

Recently, Kelli Cedo, Ph. D. initiated this district wide 1Book in Hampton City Schools. Here is her report after 3 years.

This program works every time because we have excellent public schools across our great nation. These schools are staffed by the highest trained level of teachers and administrators that one can imagine. The missing piece of the puzzle is consistent family literacy home fires across the school division. That’s what we provide is a common sense approach to start literacy fires in all the students homes in a division at the same time.