“Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve…. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

John Butler and Leslie Stack spoke to us about John’s children’s literacy program in Philadelphia. John is a teacher in Philadelphia and Leslie is a member of Broomall Rotary. John’s project “3 books in a bag”, provides three books to Philadelphia first graders who live in book deserts. John defined a book desert as a neighborhood where there is no library in the school and no public library within a child’s walking distance. John said Philadelphia has a lot of locations with this problem. His other concern is that there is a shortage of children’s books featuring African American characters. John said a child’s early years are very important in their learning to read. Reading is not taught in schools after the fourth grade. Children who can’t read at grade level by the fourth grade will have a difficult time catching up later on if they ever do. John sees many children in his seventh-grade classes who can’t read at grade level.
John’s program provides three books featuring African American characters to 50 children last year. John believes that with three books the children will be more likely to share the books with other children. The children are also given a backpack in which to carry the books.
John would like to expand his program. The cost of providing 50 children with three books each last year was $1200. Heather said the club was likely to donate money to this cause.

House prices soaring? Blame it on the pandemic. And the booming stock market in 2022. That’s what our own Perri Evanson told us about the housing market.
Perri said the six-month shutdown in house sales during the pandemic created a backlog of buyers. The market soaring in the period following the pandemic gave buyers the resources to purchase. Although rising interest rates have cooled the housing market somewhat, Perri said it is still very hot in the Swarthmore area. She offered data about average sale prices going up more than 50% in just a few years.
To demonstrate the frenzy of the market, Perri told us the typical sequence for new listings. When a house is first put on the market, the For Sale sign is put up on Thursday, the house is shown on the weekend, and the sale is finalized on Tuesday. Buyers must act quickly. They typically put in five or six offers before they succeed in obtaining a house.
As has been much publicized, Perri said there is a shortage of lower priced houses that first time buyers could afford. Developers are building only large houses because they are more profitable. Editor note: this topic was addressed by a recent speaker at Rotary. It was also discussed in last week’s Swarthmorean article on the report of the Development & Affordability Task Force.