‘She made it happen.’ LaGrange teen shows girls can reach highest Scout rank with project
Tasha Brawner participated in Girl Scouts for a few months when she was 7 or 8. She grew up watching her brothers go through Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, all the way to Eagle Scout, so she wanted to follow their path.
When the Boy Scouts started allowing girls to be members last year, she joined the first cohort in February 2019.
Boy Scouts are “more into teaching life skills,” she told the Ledger-Enquirer.
Now, the 13-year-old member of Troop 31 in LaGrange is on the verge of matching her brothers’ achievement, culminating in an Eagle Scout project benefiting a Troup County school serving students from predominantly low-income families.
Tasha is among the three girls in the Chattahoochee Valley Council on track to become an Eagle Scout, the highest rank in the Boy Scouts of America, now called Scouts BSA, council executive Juan Osorio told the L-E. About 13% of the council’s 3,005 youth members are female, he said.
Scouts BSA comprises 2.2 million youth members ages 5-21, according to its website, including more than 77,000 girls in Cub Scouts. for children in kindergarten through fifth grade. Scouts BSA didn’t provide the L-E the number of female Scouts before this story’s publication, but the New York Times reported that number as more than 8,000 in March 2019.
Tasha expects to go before the Eagle Scout review board the week of Dec. 14.
The project
In August 2019, Tasha, now a ninth-grader at the online Georgia Connections Academy, started visiting Berta Weathersbee Elementary School with the Good Sam Ministry, donating food bags for children who live in food-insecure homes.
One of the Berta students confided to Tasha that she was unhappy at home and didn’t have her basic hygiene needs met.
“She inspired me to help all the other students,” Tasha said.
And so began her Eagle Scout project in June.
In the room that stores the food bags, Tasha made a shelf for a hygiene closet. She started reading books to the children.
“They didn’t really enjoy the books because they’d read them multiple times or the material wasn’t very interesting,” she said.
So she built an extra shelving unit for books she would collect through donations. She organized the existing books and the language arts and math activity kits. She cleaned up the room, which also has school uniforms and other clothing for students, to make it more usable. Then she organized the book room upstairs.
The hardest part of the project, Tasha said, was sticking to her plan.
“It was such a mess,” she said. “There were times that we would spend hours in here, and it felt like we didn’t make any progress.”
But with help from her family and fellow scouts, more than 100 people donated their labor, books or other items to help her vision come to fruition in two months. They have collected and categorized by reading level more than 3,000 books for students, and Tasha estimates more than 100 have been taken home.
The impact
Berta Weathersbee Elementary School principal Willie Cooks, in his fourth year leading the 300 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade, explained the impact of Tasha’s project.
“We have the media center, but this area is a different genre of books,” he told the L-E. “Kids can come in here, feel relaxed, don’t feel pressure. The books are leveled according to their reading ability. … The teachers are very happy. The kids are happy. It was an awesome thing.”
At a school where many of the students don’t have books they like to read at home, Cooks said, “We want to make sure they’re exposed to different vocabulary, different things in the stories and the books, so they can have intrinsic motivation to want to read more.”
Seeing the school benefit from her project, Tasha said, “sends a sense of joy through my body to know people are appreciative of the work that we’ve done.”
And seeing folks volunteer to improve the school, Cooks said, also boosts the outlook of the students.
“The more of the community I can bring into the school, the more that bond in families is presented to our students,” he said. “Those kids remember. They remember you. They remember those connections.”
Eddie Moone, a scoutmaster in LaGrange and a member of the Troop 31 committee, called Tasha’s project and her two months of dedication to the effort “very impressive.”
“She had this vision of this room, what she wanted it to look like, and she made it happen,” he told the L-E. “With young people, that’s not always what you see, the carry-through, the follow-up.”
The history
Only 8% of Scouts earned an Eagle badge in 2019, according to Scouts BSA. Their average age was 17 — four years older than Tasha.
Sure, she likes being among the girls making Scouting history, Tasha said, but that special feeling quickly wore off. She appreciates the troop treating her like any other scout.
But she did receive backlash from a man who was “rude to us,” Tasha said, when she and another female scout tried to sell him popcorn for a BSA fundraiser.
After he answered their knock on his door, Tasha recalled, he told them it’s “disgraceful” for them to be in Boy Scouts and they should quit.
“We said we were sorry if we had offended him in any way, and we politely left,” she said. “… There will be rough patches in everything you do, you just have to focus on the happy parts. While the journey to Eagle is hard, the harder things in life are what make us stronger and more prepared for what our future holds.”
Other negative feedback came in comments readers of a LaGrange Daily News article about her wrote online.
“At first, I was very hurt because we should all be able to do the same stuff,” she said. “But then I used that backlash as sort of motivation to keep going, to ignore the fact that people were being rude.”
Tasha noted the standards for female scouts to earn merit badges are the same as the males:
- Progress through the ranks in the following order: Scout, Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life and Eagle.
- Earn 21 merit badges. Tasha has earned 75 of the 136 available merit badges in 18 months.
- Serve six months in a position of responsibility.
- Plan, develop and lead others in a service project helpful to any religious institution, school or community.
- While a Life Scout, participate in a Scoutmaster conference.
- Successfully complete a board review.
“Scouting builds more than campfires,” Osorio said. “Scouting teaches character, teaches leadership, teaches perseverance and, above all, teaches selfless behavior. For Tasha to do a project that would benefit so many underserved youth, it shows scouts who go through our program have the ability, the character and the discipline to be future leaders of this country.”
How to donate
To donate a book to Tasha’s project, go to the Troop 31 Facebook page.
