Oriental Rotary Club

Dale Elks
The Project in Chacala, Mexico

Welcome to ORC Dale. Dale, member of the New Bern Breakfast Rotary Club, is a past District Governor. He is a self employed financial planner and independent insurance agent. He has been in the insurance industry since 1977 and is a Chartered Life Underwriter. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in forestry from Chowan College. Dale enjoys hunting and fishing. He and wife Kathy have two grown sons.

Chacala, a village 60 miles north of Puerto Vallarta, is on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Less than 10 years ago Chacala was a sleepy fishing village that came alive around Christmas/New Year, Easter and several Mexican holidays.

In 1996 ORC member Dale Reinhardt enlisted his club and Rotary International to build a library in the village. Over the years, many volunteers have contributed their time, energy and cash to expand the library and bring educational opportunities to the children of Chacala. Today that Library is the Dale Reinhardt Learning Center. The Center honors Dale’s memory, contributions and faithful support. The Center has grown to embrace programs for children at all levels-from sports to handicrafts, from theater to summer school, from math tutoring to English lessons.

The Mentoring Program in Pamlico Schools
During last week’s meeting Jim Coon notified members that the Pamlico Schools will be offering a mentoring program to students from primary through secondary grades. Student mentoring is a one-to-one relationship between a youth and an adult that occurs over a period of time. The mentor provides consistent support, guidance, and concrete help to a student who is in need of a positive role model. An adult interested in becoming a student mentor must be someone who will be a positive influence in a child’s life. The adult who mentors a high school student will emphasize the opportunities available to the student to pursue higher educational/training opportunities.

Your editor was reviewing the New York Times online several weeks ago and read an editorial by Bob Herbert (9/28/09). I’m quoting it at length since it is appropriate to the subject of education both on the local and national level.

Visiting classrooms is like peering into the nation’s future. Right now the view is somewhat frightening. American kids drop out of high school at an average of one every 26 seconds. Only about a third of those who graduate are prepared to move on to a four-year college. And in the savage economic downturn that has gripped the U.S. for the better part of the past two years, retrenchment in public schools and colleges is widespread. For a country that once led the world in educating its citizens, we are now moving decidedly in the wrong direction.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is investing billions of dollars and much of their considerable energy in an effort to spark not just change but a transformation in the way American youngsters are educated. It’s an overwhelming challenge, and not all of their early efforts have borne fruit. Educating children in the U.S. means engaging issues like poverty and homelessness, racial and ethnic transformations and entrenched, outdated ways of doing things. But the Gateses seem determined to master this issue and do what they can to help reverse the current dismal trends. Mr. Gates points out: “Our performance at every level — primary and secondary school achievement, high school graduation, college entry, college completion — is dropping against the rest of the world.”As Melinda Gates notes: “America’s long history of upward mobility is in danger.”

As they met over two days with students, teachers, administrators and community college executives in Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, the intensity of their focus and concentration was striking. “You can read about all of this stuff,” Bill Gates told me, “but it’s important to come out and see it, to spend time talking with the people involved, and to visit the bad schools as well as the good schools if you really want to understand and make a difference.”