AMY POULTER

WINDSOR
Brianna Peterson, daughter of Ellen and Byron Peterson of Windsor, has earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest honor and achievement a girl can earn in Girl Scouting. Brianna has been a Girl Scout for eight years. She is a 2017 graduate of Smithfield High School and currently attends The College of William and Mary.

For her project, Brianna developed and ran Band Ambassadors, a student-led mentoring program between Smithfield Middle School and Smithfield High School, for the past two years. Brianna arranged for members of the band at the high school to go to the middle school to work with band students there in order to encourage them to keep up with their music education. Through her project, Brianna created new relationships between the groups of students that led to more students staying in band once they transitioned to high school because they already knew students in the high school band.

“I chose this project because I love playing music, and I wanted to share that live with other people,” Brianna said. “I also noticed that there were a large number of students dropping out of band programs throughout their school career, and I wanted to fix that problem within my community.”

Brianna also gave an educational presentation to students and parents about the benefits of music education.

Brianna’s project will be sustained through the relationships that were built through Band Ambassadors. Many of the students who participated in Band Ambassadors in middle school have become mentors in the program after starting high school.

The Gold Award requires girls to identify an issue in the community and carry out a Take Action project to address the matter through leadership work. Nationwide, less than six percent of eligible Girl Scouts earn the Gold Award, which adds Brianna to an elite group of female leaders across the country with the honor.

Amy Poulter is the public relations manager of Girl Scouts of the Colonial Coast. She can be reached at 549-0747 or amyp@gsccc.org.