Girl Scouts Troop 2744 - Oklahoma Environmental Championship Finalist!
- sombra
- Mar 28
- 2 min read
Our local Girl Scouts Troop 2744 earned a top 5 finalist position for this year's Keep Oklahoma Beautiful Environmental Champions Award. From January to April of 2024, Girl Scouts Lillian Menchaca, Elena Safe, Amy Buford, Haidyn Lyon, and Keelyn Leonard (pictured left to right) worked with the Durant Sustainability Coalition to develop Durant's 2024 Earth Day event.
These girls,who were the only youth involved in planning this event, attended and participated in weekly planning sessions. During these meetings, they actively contributed to developing fundraising ideas, formulating general plans for the event, and designing entertainment and educational activities. These experiences provided them with important insights on how large-scale community planning works.
They provided three activities during their time at the event. The first activity was "earth cookies” - sugar cookies that children decorated with small items representing pollution. As they tried to remove these decorations, they learned about the difficulty of cleaning up environmental contamination, including microplastics. The second activity involved a stock tank filled with water, rubber ducks, and plants to simulate a clean waterway. Children practiced removing "pollution" from the water using nets and buckets, learning how to clean polluted waterways without disturbing wildlife. The third activity was a recycling sorting game where kids learned to differentiate between plastics, cans, paper, and other items, specifically tailored to Durant, Oklahoma's Choctaw recycling program.
Troop 2744 Leader Janell Buford states,
“I’m really proud of them, I'm exceptionally proud of the community leaders they’re becoming."
After all of their hard work and dedication to their cause, the girls' effort did not go unnoticed. They were nominated for the statewide Keep Oklahoma Beautiful Students Environmental Champions Award, recognizing their exceptional work and commitment to sustainability. Their efforts culminated in being placed among the top five finalists for group projects in the state competition.