The Scottish Rite Masons provide financial support for the five-week day camps, which help children develop and enhance their communication and literacy skills; it also offers graduate student clinicians invaluable training and experience. As they have in the past, on June 27 the Masons donated $33,000 to Radford’s program.
If anyone ever needed general evidence of the positive impact of Radford’s RiteCare Clinic Summer Camp, they only had to walk past the entrance of Kyle Hall’s third-floor conference room at about noon on June 27.
On that day, the expansive wood-walled chamber – a frequent venue for board meetings, visiting lecturers and job fairs – was filled instead with the sounds of children laughing, playing and chattering.
The joyful noise stood to reason because it was coming from a celebration, one that both marked the conclusion of another RiteCare camp, now in its 29th year at the university, and commemorated the more than three-decade partnership between Radford’s Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic and the Scottish Rite Masons of Virginia.
The Scottish Rite Masons provide financial support for the five-week day camps, which help children develop and enhance their communication and literacy skills; the program also offers graduate student clinicians invaluable training and experience.
As they have in the past, the Scottish Rite donated support to the program, this year with a check for $33,000.
“The Scottish Rite has given well over a million dollars to Radford University and to our department over the years,” Waldron College of Health and Human Services Dean Ken Cox told the crowd during the luncheon, whose theme was “Going for Gold!”
“Hundreds of university students have benefited over the years from the funding that you guys have provided in the form of scholarships and research,” Cox said to the Masons. “Your generosity has impacted and improved the quality of life of… tens of thousands of students, children and families.”
Chair of the Department of Communication Science and Disorders (COSD) Diane Millar coordinates the camp, and she thanked the group for its support as well.
“The Scottish Rite very graciously provides research and service scholarships for our graduate students, they help provide free services to all of our families, and they keep our materials room very well stocked,” Millar said, offering a nod to Patty Reynolds, who curates those supplies, and to the young scholars who participated.
“We have an exceptional group of 24 graduate students this year … some of the most compassionate, creative and inspiring women I have been fortunate to meet,” she said. “They are amazing.”
Millar also recognized this year’s Radford University RiteCare faculty supervisors – Brandi Holland, Kate Leeper, Angela Obst and Maggie Turner – and the 2024 summer scholarship recipients Lauren Bledsoe, Lauren Cornett, Natalee Deaton and Meredith Gwinn.
Gwinn told the audience her group of six pupils ranged in age from 7 to 12 and said they targeted pragmatics and other social aspects of language.
“Working with these children has been so rewarding, and we have seen several members of our group not only thrive but also independently start and hold conversations with others,” she said. “We are so proud of the progress that all of these children have made.”
Bledsoe described the results of working speech sounds, language and literacy with 6- to 9-year-olds and said they “learned to share, take turns and work together during group activities.”
According to Cornett, whose subjects were between 3 and 5, “a lot of them learned how to say their names.”
Alan Adkins, Scottish Rite’s Sovereign Grand Inspector General of Virginia, and numerous other Masons toured the camp during their visit. They got a chance to interact with the children and faculty and witness firsthand the progress to which they were contributing.
“We’re looking forward to continuing this relationship for many years to come,” Adkins said.
Neil Harvey for Radford University
