BOALSBURG — Alek Masters put his arm around his twin sister, Sarah, telling her, “It’s OK,” that he had to wait a year for her to finish the service project that earned her the Girl Scout Gold Award.
Alek finished the project that helped him earn the rank of Eagle Scout last fall.
“I wanted a joint ceremony,” said their mom, Christine, as the family sat in the dining room this week to talk about Alek and Sarah’s achievements of their respective top scouting awards.
The two will be recognized together today at the Ferguson Township Lions Club in Pine Grove Mills.
At 17 years old, they are seniors at State College Area High School and both play percussion in the marching band. They started scouting around age 6, Alek in Troop 380 and Sarah in Troop 1213.
The rules require Scouts to earn the Eagle and Gold awards by age 18, in part by completing a project in which they demonstrated leadership for benefit of the community.
Alek, because he has Down syndrome, qualified for an extension, but didn’t need it. He finished his final project at age 16.
They displayed shirts, vests and sashes filled with badges and pins earned through more than a decade of learning and doing through scouting. An overstuffed binder contained copious notes and the report Alek produced during his final service project. A file box did the same for Sarah.
Alek discovered his project just across the street from the family home, the limestone kiln in Country Place Park. Frequent walks led Alek and his dad, Rob, past the kiln, which was barely visible behind trees and brush. Two brothers repaired and landscaped the site as part of an Eagle Scout project in the 1970s, and it needed help again, 40 years later.
After seeking expertise from a landscaper, a welder and others with the right tools, Alek directed his volunteers over two work days last spring, removing trees, planting thorny bushes to keep people from a hole in the kiln, and repairing the fence where a tree had fallen.
The heavy lifting and delegating were the hardest parts.
“I had to be the boss,” he said. A final touch was taking old rocks from the furnace and creating steps that lead visitors to it.
“You can see them up close,” Alek said. “In 3-D.”
Sarah’s project was to create signs marking three trails at the Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center. The 350 small, wooden signs feature cut-outs of a purple butterfly, green walnut leaf, and blue bluebird, offering visual and textural components.
While a routing machine at Penn State did the cutting work, Sarah and volunteer recruits sanded and painted the signs.
“I led girls in sanding because we had to sand all 350 signs,” she said. A group also helped her mark the trails, drill holes in the signs and post them.
She finished the project and had the signs up in August. She said she received good feedback, and that Shaver’s Creek may expand on her work.
“It’s really exciting,” she said. The siblings were able to help each other, too, Alek by sanding trail marker signs for Sarah, and Sarah by carrying logs from the kiln site when trees were cut.
Both look forward to Saturday’s ceremony, where they will receive the traditional Marine Corps K-bar knife from the Nittany Leathernecks, engraved with their names.
Sarah plans to attend college to pursue engineering and Alek will enter LifeLink PSU, which provides special-needs students with college experience. Both expect to stay involved in scouting at some level.
“I’m still going to be a scout for life,” Alek said.
Jessica VanderKolk can be reached at 235-3910.
