The Girl Scout slogan urges its Scouts to “do a good turn daily.” Seventeen-year-old Sarah Herman has taken that to heart.
Sarah, a senior at the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy, has embraced the Jewish and general communities with her many and varied extra-curricular activities.
She plans to channel her interest in recycling toward her Girl Scout Gold Award project to make a rain garden.
“It’s a garden that collects (excess rain run-off) and instead of going into the sewer, which kind of ruins the sewer water, it makes a garden out of it. It’s really pretty,” she said.
A Gold Award is the highest honor a Girl Scout can earn. Herman got her Silver Award two years ago for teaching younger Girl Scouts about Judaism to help them earn their Bat Or Award.
“I taught them in five sessions about Jewish events and discussed them, and we had to do an art project,” she said.
Her favorite part of Scouting, however, is going to camp.
Sarah attended Camp Winding River from the seventh grade, and since then, she has volunteered as a horse wrangler in training, teaching safety to the younger Scouts, and as a riding instructor.
“I’m not a water person, and all the other Girl Scout camps were mainly water-based, so when I heard there was a horse-riding one, I wanted to do that,” she said. “I mainly like it to hang out with the little kids, but I like the horses too.”
The daughter of Congregation Beth Torah members Vickie and Mark Herman, Sarah has applied her love of helping younger kids as a madricha in the congregation’s Hebrew school for the last three years.
“I use what I learned at the Academy, all my Hebrew skills to help them there. That’s really fun, because at first the kids are like, ‘I don’t really want to go to Hebrew school,’ but we help make it fun. We play games and make it into competitions. The kids really like it,” Sarah said.
Sarah also worked at the Barney Goodman summer camp last year at the Jewish Community Center as a junior counselor for fifth- and sixth-grade girls.
“The best part of being a counselor is giving the kids as good a time as I had when I was a little kid. When I was a kid, the counselors made it awesome,” she said.
This year, she’s changing things up and spending six weeks in Israel with the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program. While there, she’ll earn high school credit as well as six college credits.
“What Muss teaches you is that one day you learn in class about sites and history, and the next day, you go out and see it. I think that’s really important that you’re not just seeing the sites to see them. You’re actually learning about them,” she said.
At school, she’s co-president of the Go Green program, which encourages recycling, in addition to being on Academy teams for soccer, basketball and cross-country.
Sarah has also been the Op-Ed editor of the newspaper and the people section editor for the yearbook, while also managing to balance being student council secretary last year. She’ll be the vice president of service on the 2012-13 student council.
As a member of the National Honor Society, Sarah makes weekly group trips to Roesland Elementary School in the Shawnee Mission School District during the school year to work with the kids as a community service project.
“We play with them and read with them and (are) their mentors. We went almost every Wednesday, and they loved us. I hope we’re going back next year,” she said.
Laura Hewitt, the Academy’s NHS sponsor, was impressed with how Sarah interacted with the children.
“Sarah worked with first-graders. Every time she walked into the room, the kids were so excited to see her. First-graders before lunch can be restless, but she could keep her group contained and on task,” Hewitt said. “What I really admire about Sarah is that she does everything and demonstrates leadership in such a quiet way. Everything she does the other students admire and respect and want to emulate her.”