Three area Girl Scouts have earned their organization’s highest honor: The Gold Award.
Gold Award recipients are described by the Girl Scouts organization as “the mark of the truly remarkable—proof that not only can she make a difference, but that she already has.”
The three Gold Award earners are:
Rebekah Platz. She worked to clean up and refresh Lincoln Memorial Cemetery for her Gold Award project. Rebekah noticed that many of the trees in the cemetery were dead, as were many of the flowers. She plated ten new shade trees and multiple flowering shrubs.
“This cemetery is on the historic register for being a place where African Americans could be buried, so I wanted to honor this site in the best way I could,” Platz said in a statement.
Alyssa Love. Alyssa restored the Elm Springs Cemetery. She noticed that many of the tombstones were covered in moss, lichens, and molds that made the words unreadable to visitors. She used a special cleaning solution to remove the growth and allow people to see the text on the stones.
“Elms Springs Cemetery holds many generations of family history and heritage. This Green County historical site has been left to weather in the many different seasons of Missouri, so cleaning it up would pay respect to those buried there and their families as well,” Love said in a statement.
Sara Schmidt created a project to educate elementary school youth about butterflies. She taught the children about monarch butterflies while also creating a butterfly garden that could be enjoyed by future groups of students at Willard North Elementary.
“I enjoyed bringing in the newly hatched Monarch Butterflies and seeing how fascinated the children were when they were interacting with a butterfly on their fingers. As I was working on the project, I learned the importance of teamwork,” Schmidt said in a statement.