10-year Scout earns highest honor

Often when the phrase Girl Scout comes up in conversation, it's because the annual cookies sales have begun.

Shake the hand of 17-year-old Rosiland Baccus and forget for a moment about Girl Scout cookies.

She could also make you forget about the ills of Nevada's youth, given the state's highest teen pregnancy and teen death rates in the country, according to the latest Kids Count national survey.

Baccus has a firm grip, she makes eye contact and speaks in a polite tone unusual even for the typical honor student. She is professional, cool and collected, and in that brief moment it is possible to see her future as chief executive of her own company.

She makes and sells her own jewelry, she is editor of the Meadows' high school newspaper, a member of the National Honor Society and a varsity member of the school's forensics team.

In addition to her many accomplishments is the Girl Scout Gold Award. Baccus has been a Girl Scout for a little more than a decade, and she recently completed the arduous process of earning the highest award in scouting.

But she says she rarely discusses this accomplishment with her classmates, who probably don't realize she spent two years earning the award.

"People in my peer group generally show no interest in Girl Scouting, and the subject is rarely raised," she said.

Hard work

Her hard work was recently recognized at a ceremony at the Regent Las Vegas.

Baccus is one of seven Senior Girl Scout members -- girls who are in high school -- of the Frontier Council to earn the award this year.

Compare that to the number of Boy Scouts -- 302 last year, according to the Boulder Dam Area Council -- who have earned the Eagle Rank, the highest honor in that organization.

Typically it takes three years for a scout to earn the award, which involves a number of requirements and a Gold Award project, Patricia Miller, executive director of the Frontier Council, said.

On average it takes a boy three to five years to earn the Eagle, Mike Miller, spokesman for the Boy Scouts, said.

A girl's project must be approved by the council's Gold Award Alliance, the body that oversees the process.

Part of the process includes earning four interest patches related to the project, the Career Exploration pin, the Senior Girl Scout Challenge and the Senior Leadership Award.

While completing those requirements, the girl plans and begins implementing her Gold Award project, which must, among other things, involve 50 hours of work and have a lasting impact on the community.

Most are surprised

Girls who earn the Gold Award often don't even get the chance to tell people they are a recipient, because most people are surprised they're still involved in the organization as teens.

"The Gold Award? I don't even think I get to that point. Most people are surprised that I'm a Girl Scout," Lesley Pena, a 21-year-old UNLV student and Gold Award recipient, said.

Pena has continued with scouting and maintains a 4.0 grade point average in international business. She is co-leader of a Cadette and Senior troop in North Las Vegas.

One of her main responsibilities in her troop is to help the girls who are working toward the Gold Award. She says three girls are on track to earn the award by next May.

Often girls don't even talk about being scouts because, while they may enjoy scouts, it may not be cool among their peers and they may be embarrassed to acknowledge being a scout.

Pena says she and four other friends she went through Girl Scouts with in high school had no shame.

"But I know other girls are embarrassed," she said.

Pena joined when she was in 10th grade and decided immediately to earn the Gold Award. She says it taught her that she could take on a major project and work independently, something she had never done for school.

"I just remember being up all night toward the end," Pena says.

For her Gold Award project, Pena and her friends wrote a book called "Girl Scout Recipes for Life," aimed at younger girls, to teach morals with stories that emphasized Girl Scout law.

"We wanted to do something we were really good at, so we decided to write a book," Pena said.

Reading-oriented

Baccus also selected something reading-oriented for her project.

She developed a booklet that focused on helping parents learn and teach basic phonics to their 4- to 7-year-old children. The booklet was translated into Spanish after being written in English.

"The idea for my project came from the realization that a great number of Hispanic parents do not speak English but have a burning desire to help their children," Baccus said.

"If illiteracy is addressed early enough, children not only learn to read with ease, but realize the joys of reading," she said.

Baccus said working on the project taught her to be flexible and patient.

"I believe I am a better person, because during the experience I was forced to see through other people's perspectives."

Baccus, who wants eventually run her own business, will attend Kenyon College on a scholarship worth more than $100,000. She says she plans to focus her studies on marketing or advertising.

Pena will be a senior at UNLV this fall. She plans to go to law school after graduation.

Other recipients of the Gold Award in its various forms -- initially known as the First Class award, later as the Curved Bar before it its current name was settled on about 30 years ago -- include women who have become doctors, lawyers, prominent businesswomen and politicians.

Seven women who serve in the United States Congress are recipients of the Gold Award in one of its various incarnations.

One woman, Lisa Moore, who grew up in Las Vegas and earned her Gold Award in 1990 as a member of the Frontier Council, is now a member of UCLA's department of internal medicine.

Moore helped collect books for the then-proposed Ronald McDonald house in Las Vegas. She gathered nearly 900 used books and magazines for children.

She decided to become a doctor during the process of earning the Gold Award.

Setting high goals

"The Gold Award taught me to set extremely high goals for myself, how to work really hard for those goals and that it was possible to reach those goals," Moore said.

She went on to become a doctor and is working on a fellowship in endocrinology at UCLA.

It also taught her about delayed gratification, because it took her four years to earn the Gold Award, including the time it took her to earn the prerequisite Silver Award while she was in middle school, she said.

Miller said that when a girl completes the award, she has the personal satisfaction of knowing she's done something significant.

But there is more than just a sense of satisfaction to be had from earning the award.

"Girls who earn the Gold Award will find that there will be a lot of opportunities available to them. It really opens a lot of doors for girls," Miller said.

"These kids have avoided all of the pitfalls. They're going to make it," she said. "You know these are the kids who are going to succeed."

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