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It's not every day a student makes a teacher's life easier.
But Makayla Jones spent about 1 1/2 years doing just that.
The Grand Island Central Catholic senior earned her Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest award offered by the club, for organizing the school's speech scripts. The project included alphabetizing the paper scripts, scanning each page into a computer, creating a portable document format (PDF) and saving each one on a flash drive. The flash drives are divided into the nine speech categories, such as duet acting, poetry and humorous prose, she said.
Jones' speech coach/teacher, Pam Krall, said the paper files weren't user friendly before Jones took on the project.
"She was just one of those students who got frustrated because of how disorganized all our speech scripts were," Krall said.
The scripts were separated into labeled manila folders that were kept in a plastic tub. Jones took the paper files, tossed duplicates and organized them into a two-drawer filing cabinet.
The files include cuttings from stories, previous speech scripts and possible topics for future use, she said.
Jones' mother, Sherma, said her daughter researched different options for converting paper files into digital documents and chose one that would be easy to access. The digital files are saved on one computer but each category is also copied onto a separate jump drive.
"The people who will most benefit from my Gold Award project will be the speech students at Grand Island Central Catholic," she said. "However, I have also realized that it's helping my coach because she can now e-mail scripts to students or other schools."
Krall said Jones also came up with a system for checking out the drives so speech students can take the files home and decide which ones they might be interested in presenting at a competition.
"I'm really just so appreciative of her," Krall said. "She has a lot of technological know-how. I'm basically technologically impaired."
Jones said the organization skills she gained during the project and the ability to show a new way of thinking will definitely help in college and beyond. She plans to attend Hastings College and major in public relations or marketing.
Krall said Jones takes speech very seriously and it has been a large part of her high school life. She believes Jones wanted to give back to the school in a way similar to those of the Boy Scouts' projects. A number of students, who were active Boy Scouts, have earned their Eagle Scout awards by making improvements at Central Catholic. Krall said that, as far as she knows, Jones' is the only Gold Award done to benefit the school.
"I'm absolutely thrilled," Krall said. "She really gave it her all. I'm hoping she'll update it with this year's scripts before she leaves me."
In order to earn her Gold Award, which she will receive in a ceremony in April, Jones had to file out a variety of forms, send a budget to Girl Scout officials and document her work. She finished the project in November.
Jones has been a Girl Scout for 12 years. She stuck with the organization even after many of her peers quit because she knew there were scholarships and internship opportunities.
"It just seemed like something that would be valuable in the future," she said. "It's a great organization that has taught me and treated me well."
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