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Hudson Teen Earns High Honor

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By KLINT LOWRY | The Suncoast News

Published: June 17, 2008

Updated:

HUDSON - Back when she was in kindergarten, Mandy Nagy became a Daisy.

Daisy is the youngest age division of the 3.7-million-member Girls Scouts of the USA. That was 13 years ago. Having just graduated high school, Nagy technically is at the end of her Girl Scout career.

She has gone as far as a Girl Scout can go in every sense. On Saturday, Nagy was at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Tampa. She was one of 32 girls to receive the Gold Award from the Girl Scouts of West Central Florida.

The Gold Award is the Girl Scouts' highest doesn't have the same name recognition, the Gold Award is for young women the equivalent of earning the rank of Eagle from the Boy Scouts of America. The Gold Award recognizes outstanding accomplishments in the areas of leadership, community service, career planning and personal development.

"To earn the Gold Award, a Girl Scout must take all of the knowledge, leadership and networking skills she has developed over the years and set forth to complete a service project that will benefit her community," said Linda Babb, president of Girl Scouts of West Central Florida.

Earning a Gold Award has been a goal Nagy has had in her sights for several years. A Girl Scout must be 15 before she begins her Gold Award project. When it came time to come up with a project, Nagy knew she wanted to do something where she could work with children.

Nagy called her Gold Award project "Books for Kids." She collected books to donate to Northwest Elementary School, her old school. She picked books that were age appropriate. Being children's books, she inspected them to make sure they were in good shape, no scribbling or torn pages.

"I ended up getting 267 books from just friends and family," she said. "If I could change something, I would have gone out more into the community and tried to get more books."

She left it up to the teachers at the school to decide what to do with the books, and the teachers opted to give the books to the children in the summer reading program. Fresh reading material might help motivate the students, who were all there because they were having a tough time reading, the teachers reasoned. As part of her project, Nagy spent eight weeks last summer as a volunteer at the Northwest Elementary School summer reading program.

"I remember when I was younger I had a reading specialist that helped me," Nagy said. "Then when I was in high school, she worked at my high school. I thought that was really neat."

One of the requirements of a Gold Award project is to log at least 75 hours working on the project. Nagy put a lot of those hours in at the summer reading workshop, spending three or four hours a day, four or five days a week for eight weeks.

"I read to them, they read to me," Nagy said. "We played games related to reading. I like working with children."

Though she's aged out, there are ways Nagy can remain a part of Girls Scouts. By becoming a "lifetime member," she can remain active in Girl Scout activities.

"I still want to work with Girl Scouts. It's been a part of my life 13 years out of 18," she said.

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