Delaware Hayes High School junior Grace Floring is working towards earning her Girl Scout gold award.
This award represents the highest achievement in Girl Scouting and requires the completion of “a project that helps your community in some way and fixes a problem that’s there,” according to Floring.
Floring decided to focus her project on improving something that is very important to her: the Delaware City Schools’ orchestra program.
“I knew that a big problem in the orchestra program is that a lot of kids don’t practice at home,” Floring said. To combat this problem, she has organized after-school practice sessions that are led by high school orchestra students and are open to students in grades 5-8.
Floring, who has been involved with the orchestra since she began playing the violin in fourth grade, hopes that encouraging younger students to practice will help them to stick with the program. She said that orchestra has helped her to learn how to multitask and has helped her to do better in school.
She said she hopes that younger students will benefit from orchestra in the same way.
The practice sessions are held twice a month at different Delaware schools. Floring said that working with the high school students serves as motivation for the younger students to practice. The practice sessions also benefit the high school students because they earn volunteer hours and “because they learn to be teachers,” she said.
Floring said that she has learned many things through her work with her orchestra mentoring program. “I learned how to be dependent on others and not just rely on myself to get everything done,” she said. “I also learned a lot of communication skills.”
Floring said that she hopes to look back at her project someday and say to herself, “Wow! I’m really proud that I did that and that I impacted Delaware City Schools in that way.”
