Worth a Thousand Words

Education has always been a core value of Freemasonry, with roots going back centuries. In the United States, Masons like Horace Mann were at the forefront of the common-school movement. DeWitt Clinton, a New York Mason, led the formation of that city’s first public school system in the 1800s, and in California, John Swett, the “father of public schools” and the first state superintendent of schools, was a proud Mason with Phoenix № 144. In the mid-19th century, Masonic grand lodges in the U.S. launched 88 public colleges in 11 different states—many of those among the first universities in the country to accept students without regard for religious affiliation.

Ismail credits that to Masonry’s historic reputation as a “thinking man’s fraternity.” With its focus on the liberal arts, Freemasonry has always advocated for literacy as a cornerstone of democracy. As a result, Masons have long been aligned with the free public school system.

That’s certainly been the case in California. Beginning in 1920, with the advent of the fraternity’s Public Schools Week, the state’s Masons have advocated for and volunteered time and money on behalf of public schools. Today, the California Masonic Foundation continues to build on that vision through scholarships for first-in-their-family college students and others facing financial burdens, support of the state Teacher of the Year awards, and a growing portfolio of career, technical, and green-energy vocational programs. But the mainstay of that work remains its partnership with Raising a Reader.

Over the years, the program has adapted and changed in certain respects. For instance, in 2024 the foundation helped Raising a Reader introduce a new Farsi-language component to its book-bag program in West Sacramento, which is one of the country’s largest ethnic enclaves of Afghan immigrant families. During the summer of 2020— when student academic scores plummeted around the country—the Masons brought in other partners, including the Los Angeles Dodgers Community Foundation, to distribute Raising a Reader bags to disadvantaged students all over Southern California, part of an effort to stop the “summer slide.”

Today, in addition to its red book-bag initiative, Raising a Reader provides families with several other resources to support an early love of reading. Among those is a Super Summer Learning Adventures program and a home library program that provides kids with storybooks they can keep in order to establish their own book collection. “

Thanks to the Masonic Foundation, we can see the full impact of what a long-term investment in kids’ literacy can make over time,” Torgerson says.

Ismail sees the partnership as a model for how Masons around the state can focus their collective fundraising and community service efforts in a single area to make a meaningful difference.

Back at Central Elementary School, the celebration of the 1,000th classroom was a full-circle moment for Ismail and Torgerson. But rather than it representing the end of the road, both said there was still work to do. (There are about 40,000 classrooms in California.) In other words, despite the storybook ending, there are still many chapters left to write.