Dictionary giveaways ending after 19 years

A project to provide every Bartholomew County third grader with a dictionary is ending after 19 years.

Heritage Fund: The Community Foundation of Bartholomew County is announcing that the annual Dictionary Project giveaway is ending. Since it started more than 20,000 dictionaries have been distributed including public, private and homeschool classrooms. The project also provided dictionaries to adults in literacy and English language programs.

The organizers have decided that technology improvements in the nearly two decades since the start of the program means there is less need for paperback dictionaries.

The program was funded through annual grants from Heritage Fund and the books were distributed by Bartholomew Retired Teachers Association with support from the IUPUC Center for Teaching and Learning. It was based on a national program investigated by Lyn Morgan, the former grants manager at Heritage Fund.

Heritage Fund will continue to support students in the community as part of its youth development strategic impact goal.