Troop 360 has record year of Eagle Scout candidates

Earning the rank of Eagle Scout is no easy feat, yet four local Boy Scouts of Troop 360 did just that following years of personal growth, hard work and dedication to their troop and to their community.

In July, the boys were awarded their Eagle Scout medals at a Court of Honor ceremony. Scout Troop 360 treasurer Jann Smith said having four Eagle Scout candidates in one year is a record for the troop.

“One percent of youth that join scouts will attain the rank of eagle, so four of them in one year is amazing,” said the troop’s Scout Master Chris Crain. “I’m really happy to see it. They’re all friends, so they all drove each other to get to it.”

To attain eagle rank, youth must meet a variety of requirements. One of which is to earn 21 merit badges that range from achievements in personal fitness, family life, personal management, citizenship in the community and more.

Crain said some of the tasks youth must do to earn these badges are relatively quick to complete, while others take longer. Another major requirement is they must plan, develop and lead a service project.

“They have to come up with a project that does not benefit scouting itself,” Crain said. “It has to benefit someone outside the (scouting) community.”

For his Eagle Scout project, recent Los Lunas High School graduate Caiden Walls assembled a playground for a church in Aztec, N.M.

“It was my grandparent’s church. I was working with their nursery up there during the summer and the need for the playground was very obvious,” said Walls. “Their old one was falling apart and we happened to have one they could use, so we took it apart and made the trip up to Aztec and rebuilt it for them, and they are loving it.”

Walls said it is an honor to attain the Eagle Scout ranking as it’s something he’s been looking forward to and working toward since sixth grade.

“I’ve learned a lot of leadership skills I don’t think I would have learned anywhere else,” he said of his time as a boy scout.

Looking to the future, Walls is planning to attend the University of Wyoming to study fish and wildlife management.

One of the benefits of being an Eagle Scout, Crain said, is a lot of colleges acknowledge it because “it shows that they can attain very difficult things.”

School of Dreams Academy graduate Michael Szymanski said it feels good to have accomplished his goal of becoming an Eagle Scout and to have made life-long friends along the way.

For his service project, Szymanski helped to fix many flag poles for the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Albuquerque.

“They set up about 200 flagpoles about five times a year and I helped fix them all up and put new clips for the flags,” he said of the project, which took him about a month and half to complete.

Szymanski said he will now be attending a trade school with a focus on automotive and diesel machines in Dallas, Texas.

Benjamin Smith, who also graduated from SODA this past school year, said it’s been a long road to earn his Eagle Scout rank but he has certainly enjoyed the journey to get to it.

“I love going out and camping in random places and being able to be alone in nature; it’s really calming,” said Smith of things he enjoyed most about scouting. “There are also plenty of things you do in Boy Scouts that are otherwise not taught in other places.”

For example, Smith said he learned how to weld and do metal work through scouting, and this contributed to his service project which was to fix up the trailer that transports flag poles for the VA hospital.

“They’re skills I didn’t really think I’d need, but it turns out they’re skills I’m glad to have,” Smith said. “That eventually went into me welding the frame in my Eagle Scout project and doing some more upgrades (to the trailer) like redoing the flooring, giving it a roof and that kind of stuff.”

Smith has been a scout for 11 years and the skills he learned along the way are skills he can utilize and build upon in college, more specifically Eastern New Mexico University, where Smith is studying computer science and playing for the university’s soccer team.

Smith said this is likely not an end to his involvement with Troop 360 because you can register as an adult to be a scout leader, which he plans on doing eventually when he has the time.

“I loved every second of scouting,” said Smith. “Boy Scouts has taught me a lot of valuable lessons and it’s also taught me to be resilient.”

LLHS junior Darien Garcia was originally going to be among the four recognized at the July 21 Court of Honor ceremony, but due to illness among troop leadership he was not able to pass his board of review in time to join the other three. The troop’s treasurer said he will be honored at a later date.