Margaret Blume is awarded a gift during the opening of the Blume Literacy Center on the Brenda and C.P. Medore Campus. Brenda and C.P. Medore are at left. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
By Ron Hayes
As a child growing up in small-town Waxahatchie, Texas, Brenda Medore used to visit the Carnegie library and marvel at the beauty of the building, and the magic of the books.
“I just thought that library was so wonderful,” she remembers. “I’d go in and look up, and my mouth would fall open.”
Medore lives in Gulf Stream now, but she brought her love of reading with her. And now she’s put her money where her mouth is.
On June 20, she and her husband, C.P., were among the happy crowd of donors and friends gathered at 3651 Quantum Blvd., Boynton Beach to celebrate the opening of the Blume Literacy Center on the Brenda & C.P. Medore Campus.
“C.P. and I have always shared a great love of reading,” she said, “maybe even taking for granted our ability to read. Now we want to help children and adults have every opportunity to learn to read.”
When Founding President Gale Howden established the Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County in 1989, its headquarters consisted of a desk and phone in the United Way building. For 20 years, the coalition pressed on from a crowded office in a bank building on Federal Highway in Delray Beach.
Now, the coalition has a permanent home —12,000 square feet in a brand-new, $3.5 million building just north of Gateway Boulevard.
At the evening’s open house, CEO Darlene Kostrub told the throng that she’d been cleaning out her files recently, preparing for the move, when she happened on a 2006 email from a staff member. A Boca Raton woman named Margaret Blume had called, wanting to know more about the coalition’s mission. Blume’s pledge of $2 million gave birth to a capital campaign, and the Medores’ major gift of $500,000 financed the campus. In the end, 525 donors have allowed the new center to open debt-free. And they weren’t all grown-ups, either.
Dorothea Zarcadoolas, 8, and other local children were also honored for their fundraising. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
Dorothea Zarcadoolas is an 8-year-old book lover from Ocean Ridge, a third-grader at Gulf Stream School who loves the Diary Of a Wimpy Kid and Dork Diary books.
“We have to go in at night and tell her to turn off the reading light,” says her dad, Paul.
When she heard about the coalition’s capital drive, Dorothea started working her phone. “She called me up and asked for money for the Literacy Coalition,” recalls her aunt, Anthea Hancock. “I said, ‘What’s the Literacy Coalition?’”
By the time she finished calling relatives, young Dorothea had raised $1,000.
And she wasn’t alone.
Young readers Caroline Calder, Sophia Dickenson and Maya Kumar also raised $1,000 each. Their names are listed on the donor wall, too, along with Blume and the Medores.
As caterers moved through the crowd with hors d’oeuvres and young violinists added subdued background music, Kostrub described what a new building will mean for the coalition’s mission.
“This is going to expand what we can do,” she said. “In the past, we could only tutor children who attended the schools where we had an after-school program. Now we have a place where we can both train our tutors and invite children from anywhere who need some extra help.”
Since those early desk-and-phone days, the coalition has distributed more than 794,000 free books to poor children. Now they have a “book distribution center,” shelf after shelf of children’s books ready to be handed out in pediatrician’s offices.
The AmeriCorps volunteers who have tallied 494,000 hours of tutoring over the years have their own training space now.
There are offices for training adult readers, including the Family Education Program in Belle Glade, where migrant parents and their children gather to learn English together.
As Margaret Blume said, “There’s something so simple and pure and beautiful about teaching someone to read.”
And then she asked Darlene Kostrub to step outside once more.
A shrouded figure had appeared beside the building.
The cloth was pulled away to reveal a statue of a familiar woman reading to a small child.
The sculpture, by Delray Beach artist Frank Varga, is called Reading With Darlene, a tribute to the woman who has led the coalition since 1992, helping men, women and children in Palm Beach County learn to read.
If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you know someone who can’t, visit www.literacypbc.org or call 800-273-1030.
Comments