Scout follows the gold trail to helping others

The importance of hygiene and eating well were major parts of the program she organized and ran March 1 at Calvary United Methodist Church in Mount Airy.

Danielle said she was interested in sharing the health information and ‘‘teaching young girls while they can still make a difference” to help them ‘‘get into the habit now...while they’re still young.”

The Gold Award is the highest achievement a Girl Scout can earn and requires 65 hours of work, plus additional badge and career requirements.

‘‘I’ve always just known I was going to do a Gold Award,” said Danielle, who has been a scout for 13 years.

Danielle also decided her program, because it interests her.

The South Carroll High School senior would like to pursue a career as a nurse, and is well on her way to doing so.

Through the Carroll County Career and Technology Center’s allied health program, she has earned her nursing assistant certification and solidified that she wants to be a nurse, adding she hasn’t decided exactly what she wants to do within the field.

‘‘I know I wanted to be in the health field,” she said. ‘‘I like helping people.”

Becoming an obstetric or shock trauma nurse are possibilities and after the success of her event, she said a career as a pediatric nurse is on her list. ‘‘I kind of liked watching the girls have fun.”

Karen Siebel, a registered nurse and Danielle’s allied health instructor last semester, has no doubts that Danielle will be successful in whatever she chooses.

To earn her certification, Danielle met strict attendance requirements and kept her grades up, said Seibel, who was also Danielle’s advisor for her Gold Award.

She is also organized and thoughtful, she said.

‘‘She had a plan already formulated,” said Siebel, who was a Girl Scout for 10 years. ‘‘She asked my opinion or if I had questions. I didn’t do things for her.”

How a nurse interacts with others is just as important as having the education, Seibel said.

‘‘You always want your nurse to be smart but you need them to have that bedside manner. Things you can’t teach in a book,” she said.

Danielle said she enjoyed what she learned in the classroom and wanted to share her knowledge by setting up activity stations that showed the girls how to make a healthy snack and taught them about body awareness, among other things.

Girl Scouts from her sister’s troop helped her run stations.

‘‘They’re all about exercising, eating healthy and being healthy,” Danielle said. At one of the stations, the girls used a special lotion to identify areas that were missed after they washed their hands.

Though she used a Brownie Girl Scout handbook to develop the stations so scouts could work toward earning badges, Healthy Choices Day was open to any girl in first through third grades and she said some of the participants weren’t in scouts. ‘‘Girl Scouts is about helping people and helping the community,” she said.

As an entry fee, Danielle asked the participating girls, of which she said there were somewhere between 12 and 20, to bring in a canned good for the girls to look at the labels to read the nutrition facts. The canned goods will be donated to a local food bank, she said.

She said she was glad she organized the health education day and would be willing to work with someone in the future who was interested in doing something similar in order to make it a yearly event.

‘‘[It] taught me how much work and effort goes into planning something like this,” she said, adding that next she has to submit a final report on her project to the Girl Scout Council for approval.