The Scouts of America is a prestigious organization that showcases young teens’ leadership, organization, and character. Scouting, specifically at Lake Highland Preparatory School, helps foster young teens’ mindset and drive to build themselves as the leaders of the next generation. With meetings held weekly, the Scouts are encouraged to be active and engage in their civic duties. Even Scouts from other schools have been encouraged to join the LHP Scouts due to how strong the system is.
The ranking system in Scouts is a huge factor in the drive and motivation of these individuals. The system showcases not only how dedicated a Scout may be, but it also helps foster major lifelong skills such as tying knots, ways of teaching like the EDGE (Educate, Demonstrate, Guide, and Enable) method, personal fitness, and leadership skills. The road to each ascending rank is a journey that ends at the summit of a mountain. To look back on your pathway and see your hard work, while simultaneously seeing other Scouts climbing to get to the same summit, is extremely rewarding. An accomplished Eagle Scout from LHP, Zane Rimes, specifically talks about how his journey affected him in his lifelong goals, “Becoming an Eagle Scout has opened many doors for me. It has allowed me to speak to people, gain recognition, and even a pay raise…it has taught me about persistence and doing the right thing.” This peak of accomplishment is the esteemed rank of an Eagle Scout. As an Eagle Scout, one has chosen to reach the highest accomplishment as a scout and complete a service project that helps the community. The Project Includes fixing benches, creating a memorial, or cleaning out coral reefs, the task must be completed by the Eagle Scout and his or her troop. The responsibility of funding comes from potential Eagle Scouts, who have to either ask for donations or fundraise and provide their own money for the materials needed for the project. Adam Wayne, a current lifescout can speak to finishing his Eagle Project, saying “it took a few months and required a huge amount of time and effort to buy the materials and fundraise the money.” Which simply shows how dedicated you have to be to finish your project. The rank of Eagle Scout has a high and respected value that not many other things can measure up to in life.
Merit Badges are also required for the rank of Eagle Scout, yet serve as a completely separate experience to obtain. These badges Scouts specific lifelong skills that they can individually choose to further develop their skills as a Scout. Scouts participate in things like chess, hiking, camping, cooking, and hundreds of other survival or educational skills they could use in their everyday lives. The ones required for the rank of Eagle Scout are among the most tumultuous and hard ones to get. With badges such as hiking requiring participants to hike over 30 miles in total, and badges like personal fitness taking from a few months to half a year to complete, it is a long process. Shiva Sambamdam, a current lifescout from LHP, says “Merit Badges always seem like a major challenge, but after putting in the work and learning the skills I realized how important these skills are like First Aid.”
Scouting, especially at LHP given our amazing roster, is an amazing way to have a variety of lifelong experiences that cannot be matched in any other activity. Whether it be from trying to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout or simply earning as many Merit Badges as one can, the benefits from the amount of time one spends as a Scout make the struggle that is required extremely worth it. Joining LHP scouting as a whole is worth it not just for your life, but for your mindset. It will help you build your driven mindset that lets you achieve anything in life, regardless of what’s stopping you. As LHP’s wise Scoutmaster Wayne always says “be prepared and never give up.”
