Departments

The Foundation for Public School Children of Charles County

McGuffey's Club

The McGuffey's Club members are people, businesses, and civic organizations who donate money to the Foundation's My Library book endowment program so that elementary school children will have books to read during the summer when they are away from school. Research has shown that one of the most critical ingredients for a child's success in school is the availability of books in the home -- leisure reading at home builds the foundation for a child's success in high school and college.

The McGuffey's Club buys interesting books (six to ten chosen by a panel of reading experts) and puts them in an especially designed My Library Bookbag for the child to keep at home. The book bag encourages the child to read and collect more books with a sense of personal ownership and respect.

McGuffey's Club members believe that books are the building blocks of literacy, and they want our children to read as well as they hop, skip, and jump!

The Verizon Corporation has become a McGuffey's Club Founder with a $5,500 donation that will purchase over 1,500 My Library Bookbags for every First Grade student in Charles County Public Schools. Thank you Verizon!

If you want to help a child to read join the McGuffey's Club today at one of these three levels of participation:

• $15 to $499 - will place you on the McGuffey Honor Roll.
• $500 - will make you a "McGuffey's Regular"
• $1,000 or more - will honor you as a "McGuffey's Founder"

Send your check to the Foundation for Public School Children of Charles County, 5980 Radio Station Road, P.O. Box 2770, La Plata, MD 20646.

The McGuffey's Club was named after William Holmes McGuffey who compiled the First Eclectic Reader in 1836 which stimulated wide-spread literacy in the United States. The McGuffey's Club is only a symbolic name for those who support public school literacy and is not a source or a distribution point for original McGuffey's texts.

The original McGuffey's Club
Port Tobacco School, circa 1918

McGuffey's Regulars receiving book bags from the My Library book program.

Reading at home is as important as reading in school.

The exploration of space will not be limited to just a few exceptional engineers and scientists.  It will pervade our common experiences, color our language and our thinking, and dramatically alter the way we live.  Our successful transition to the space age will depend on the preparation of our children -- one book at a time.