In order to achieve her Gold Award, Junior Bethany Locke is in the process of creating a children’s book drive for elementary school kids that don’t have opportunities to have books.
“I want to promote independent reading and give all kids the opportunity to have children’s books in their homes, even if they can’t afford it,” Locke said.
As well as starting this book drive, Locke is creating a pamphlet for the VOICE Mentoring program with the Issaquah School District. Locke is a mentor with the program and volunteers every week.
“This program is so helpful to younger students,” Locke said. “More people should really get involved with the youth in our community. They’re going to be leading all of usone day, so we need to help them as much as we can.”
Locke has only done her entry-level paperwork, so the book drive won’t be occurring until later next year.
“It’s actually really difficult to find a good time to have the book drive,” Locke said. “However, I’m still really excited and I can’t wait for all of this to happen.”

Gold Awards are service projects completed by Girl Scouts that must be sustainable, measurable, and target the root cause of a global and community issue. The Gold Award is the highest award that a Girl Scout can earn.
As an active member of the Robotics Club at Liberty, junior Mai-Linh Tran has started two robotics teams at Newcastle Elementary as her Gold Award. Each team is made up of about 20 students.
“Everything is going really well,” Tran said. “All of the kids are really hyped about the competitions. It’s so great to see kids getting excited about these really complex and difficult challenges that are given them.”
As meetings begin for the teams, Tran has found difficulties in the “project.” The project this year is to make a robot that can help humans and animals interact and improve the lives of each other.
“It’s not very easy to talk to fourth graders about how to fix these problems,” Tran said. “They say things like, ‘What if everyone in the world stopped eating animals?’ and I have to tell them that a lot of their ideas don’t work.”
Tran also found difficulties in actually beginning the programs.
“There were a lot of hoops and hurdles to jump through with the school district, but it was definitely worth it,” Tran said.