|
By JUNE KRONHOLZ Staff Reporter of The
WALL STREET JOURNAL
CHARLESTON, S.C.--To South Carolina
Kids Mrs. French Helps 3rd Graders Find Meaning of ‘Success’;
Also: ‘Ferocious’ and ‘Respect’ - Six
years ago, Mary French set out to give a dictionary to every
third grader in every school in South Carolina, every year.
Education “starts with learning how
to look things up,” Mrs. French says. It means a certain
rigor, uniform expectations, and “doing things properly,”
she adds. It means a dictionary, she decided.
There are 44 counties in South Carolina,86
school districts, 580 elementary schools,55,000 third graders.
The wife of a utility-company supervisor, Mrs. French works
alone from the family room of her Charleston tract home and
totes dictionaries in the trunk of her 1995Saturn. She prowls
charitable foundations for money, never asking for more than$1,000
and usually getting less. When a Columbia, S.C., school district
said it didn’t want her dictionaries, she delivered them
anyway and took along a U.S. Congressman to make the point.
A small wren of a woman, Mrs. French loses her car in a parking
lot, can’t find her way out of the airport and shows
up at the wrong hotel for a meeting of school principals,
all within an hour. Her conversation flutters from subject
to subject, never quite a lighting. “People think I'm
flaky she volunteers. “But what makes me eccentric is
that I care deeply about nobody being left out.”
This year, for the third year running,
no one will be. Mrs. French, who is 44 years old, expects
to reach every third grader in South Carolina, and to begin
spreading her Dictionary Project to seven other states as
well.
Last year, Americans gave $1.5 billion
to charities formed to help the Sept. 11 terror-ist victims.
Three people donated to various causes $1 billion or more
each. The largest400 charities raised $43 billion, says the
Chronicle of Philanthropy, the biweekly that covers the nonprofit
world. The Salvation ‘Army raised $1.4 billion, and $1.4
billion the year before that, too.
And then there are people like Mrs. French,
who work on their own philanthropic visions in their own smaller
ways. Last year, Mrs. French’s Dictionary Project raised
$75,000. That’s almost double its revenue for 2000. The
smallest member of the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 400,
its list of the year’s biggest fund-raisers, brought
in 407 times more than that.
A neighbor does the project’s bookkeeping
for free. Mrs. French’s husband, Arno, heads her board.
Their children, ages seven and nine, stay late at school to
give Mrs. French more time to hand out hooks and take care
of e-mail. She took a $12,000 salary one year, but stopped
because, she says, “I hated that it was taking money
from the dictionaries. ”In a state where 45% of the fourth-graders
can barely read, there’s no way to prove that Mrs. French’s
dictionaries are helping South Carolina’s third graders.
But Gene Huiet, principal of Merriwether Elementary School
in North Augusta, near the Georgia border, has received them
for six years and says he knows they help. “We’ve
got kids who literally read them, who never had a dictionary
in the house, and now they’re winners,” he says.
Mrs. French tells a complicated life story
that includes dropping out of college in Ohio to take a bike
trip across country and abandoning a flower shop in New York
because of an abusive business partner. She fled a job as
a school-board secretary in New Hampshire -her only paid job
in education— because she felt the bleak weather had
nudged her toward depression. When she arrived in South Carolina,
her five-year plan was to get married, buy a house, have children
and finish college, all of which she did. Her 10-yearplan
was to do something to help the South Carolina schools. That
was 10 years ago.
The Dictionary Project began, she says,
when she read a letter to the editor in a local newspaper,
asking for school dictionaries. Distributing dictionaries,
she decided, was a chance to do something for the schools
without “looking like you’re meddling.” She
scoured bookstores for cheap dictionaries that first year,
and delivered 6,500 of them —enough for the third graders
in three counties around Charleston. The next year, she doubled
that, and the year after that, doubled it again. Along the
way, she became known as The Dictionary Lady.
On a rainy morning recently, Mrs. French
arrived at Stono Park Elementary in Charles-ton to hand around
her abridged Webster’s Classics to the 92 third graders,
then faded into the background. Big words began flying. “Is
ferocious’ in here?” asked a boy named Kyle. On
the way to page 137 to find out, he stopped at page 110 to
announce, “Hey, I found ‘diploma:’ His classmate,
Chase, pro-posed that everyone look up “circuitous”
(it’s not in there, but “circuit” and “circular”
are on page 79). Across the room, Rohan topped that with “photosynthesis,”
on page 253.
Mrs. French then hurried off for the two-hour
drive to Columbia, where 42 children waited at Carver-Lyon
Elementary School. They raced each other to look up “community”
and “perhaps” and “immediately. ”Then
it was Gadsden Elementary, a half-hour into the piney woods,
where 24 third graders competed to find motivate,” “procedure”
and “library.”
When the Dictionary Project began, Mrs.
French made all the deliveries, but volunteers do many of
the school visits now. Politicians love to help and school
districts take direct delivery of some of the dictionaries.
Still, she visits 50 to 60 schools a year.
A dictionary must include the words ‘courteous”
and “respect” for Mrs. French even to consider giving
it away. She believes it should be lightweight enough for
small children to want to carry home at night, use type that’s
neither too big nor too small, and be neither too hard nor
too easy to understand.
For a time, Landoll Inc., an Ohio publisher,
supplied Mrs. French with its paper-back Webster’s Classic
Reference Library Dictionary for 50 cents a copy (“courteous”
is on page 95, “respect” on page 274). But in 2000,
Tribune Co. sold Landoll to McGraw-Hill Cos. and, nine months
later, McGraw-Hill announced a new price—S1.49 for a
dictionary that retails for $2.49 on Landoll’s Website.
Mrs. French says she badgered Landoll and, when that didn’t
work, wrote McGraw Chairman and CEO Harold McGraw III, who
assigned two deputies to the issue. She and McGraw-Hill settled
on$1.12 a dictionary, shipping included. (A McGraw-Hill spokeswoman
calls the first quote “a misunderstanding.”)
Foundation grants and small gifts cover
most of the Dictionary Project’s costs. Richard Hendry,
vice president of the Community Foundation, which helps people
identify charities and manage their giving, calls the Dictionary
Project “an easy sell among donors, in part because the
schools all know the Dictionary Lady, and in part be-cause
Mrs. French asks for so little money. Charmed that Mrs. French
asked for only $500, Harriet McDougal, a Charleston resident
whose husband writes fantasy fiction under the pen name Robert
Jordan, says they decided, “Let’s give her some
money and see what she can do with it.”
A meticulous, three-page accounting shows
that, at $5,000 each, Ms. McDougaland an order of Catholic
nuns were the Dictionary Project’s biggest donors last
year. At $10, an Ohio doctor was the smallest. In between
are sums from dozens of Rotary Clubs that adopt a few schools
each, help hand out the dictionaries, and now have helped
spread the project to New Jersey, Ohio and five other states.
Mrs. French knows all of the clubs’
names and locations. On another meticulous three-page accounting,
she records how many books each has given away: 2,160 dictionaries
from the Cheraw Rotary Club in South Carolina, which has given
the most among the clubs; 31 dictionaries from a club in Phillipsburg,
Ohio, which has given the fewest.
As Mrs. French sees it, the Gates Foundation,
the biggest U.S. philanthropy with $24 billion in assets,
operates not much differently from the Dictionary Project,
with no assets at all. Microsoft founder Bill Gates “sits
at his dining-room table” with his family, she imagines,
and “plans his giving. I do too.” Mr. Gates’
vision is huge—finding an AIDS vaccine, improving teacher
education, inoculating Third World children against infectious
disease.
In its way, Mrs. French’s vision
is no less grand. “We are putting words in the hands
of children,” she says.
|
