Two Girl Scouts from Chopticon going for the gold

After-school program created at Dent Elementary

Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2008

Click here to enlarge this photo Staff Photos by Jesse Yeatman Girl Scout Amanda Raley dances with Lettie Marshall Dent Elementary School fourth-grader Ashley Wright during an after-school program as Raley and Merissa Abell started to earn the Gold Award from the Girl Scouts. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story Click here to enlarge this photo Lettie Marshall Dent Elementary School fourth-grader Faith Sloper watches as Girl Scout Merissa Abell, right, as they work on small ornaments they made in an after-school program. Abell and Amanda Raley started the program to earn the Girl Scout Gold Award. Click here to enlarge this photo Lettie Marshall Dent Elementary School fourth-grader Makayla Burkheiser dances during the after-school program put together by Gold Award candidates Amanda Raley and Merissa Abell.

Chopticon High School sophomore Amanda Raley and senior Merissa Abell started the program as part of their quest to earn the Girl Scout Gold Award.

The Gold Award — equivalent to the Eagle Scout of their male peers — is the top honor a Girl Scout can receive. Few girls stay with the Scouts long enough to earn the award — Raley and Abell will be the first from their troop.

‘‘There’s not too many girls down here in Southern Maryland that stick it out from the Brownies to seniors,” Amanda’s mother, Marbeth Raley, said. She is the troop’s leader, and helped oversee their project.

As older Girl Scouts, the two help lead the younger troops and have the chance to go on a number of excursions, including helping run the annual summer program at Camp Winona.

‘‘Basically you just build off of what you learned,” Amanda Raley said.

They will also become lifetime Girl Scout members upon completion of high school and the Gold Award.

Both girls said they stayed in the Girl Scouts because they like the community services they can provide.

‘‘You get the chance to help the community and pass out your knowledge” to others, Amanda Raley said.

Abell agreed.

‘‘We really help out the community a lot. I like that feeling,” she said.

Abell, who plans to go to High Point College next year, said the $1,000-a-year scholarship she will get after earning the Gold Award is another incentive.

The two high school girls developed several classes for the students to sign up for after school, including dance, pottery and arts and crafts along with science, math, Spanish and French.

‘‘They’ve never done anything like that at Lettie Dent before, so this is a pilot for them,” Marbeth Raley said. ‘‘The school’s been champing at the bit” to get it started.

Barbara Eddy, who was principal at Oakville Elementary School when Marbeth Raley’s children went there, is now principal at Dent. Raley contacted Eddy to see if they could start the program there.

‘‘We haven’t had an after-school program here since I’ve been here, which has been five years,” Eddy said. ‘‘I hope our PTA will pick it up.”

For now the two Girl Scouts provide instruction for a little over an hour a day, five days a week after school.

‘‘Our plan is to try and hope that there will be a volunteer in the PTA, an adult, to keep it going,” Marbeth Raley said. ‘‘Once you’ve got the volunteers in place, it pretty much runs itself.”

The program, called LEAP for Learning Enrichment After School, also counts on teachers opening up their classrooms or other school rooms to the children after school.

‘‘They did get some participation from some of the teachers,” Marbeth Raley said.

Art teacher Wendell Campbell stayed once a week in December to assist with a pottery class.

‘‘They put a lot of effort into it. The kids love it,” Campbell said.

If the Girl Scouts get the award in May after completing their project, Amanda Raley and Abell will be the first in Troop 190, which covers the area of the county roughly from Loveville to Lexington Park, to earn the honor.

The first session of the program was in December and they will follow up with a second session later in January.

‘‘It’s going pretty smoothly. We were pretty prepared so we really didn’t have any bumps along the way,” Abell said.

To qualify for the award, a project must involve at least 60 hours of work; Amanda Raley and Abell easily each put in 100 hours or more for the after-school program. They will send a final report outlining the project and the results to the Girl Scout council in Washington, D.C., later this winter in hopes to hear back by May if they earn their awards. ‘‘It lets the kids realize there is life after school. The things that you’re learning in public school do have real-world applications,” Marbeth Raley said. ‘‘It seems like the kids really like it.”

E-mail Jesse Yeatman at jyeatman@somdnews.coM.