news-record.com

A Northwest High School graduate’s quest to stop her peers from smoking in the school’s bathrooms may earn her Girl Scout Gold Award.

Rachel Harless , 17, said her school has had a problem with smoking in the bathrooms and she wanted it to end.

“I’m just really against people smoking because it’s not really the answer to any of their problems,” Harless said.

The Gold Award is the highest award for girls ages 14 to 18. To receive the award, the Girl Scout must display organizational, leadership and networking skills in her chosen project.

“I decided that by painting murals in the bathrooms, it could dissuade students from smoking,” Harless said.

For the project, she enlisted the help of her school’s Student Mentoring Awareness and Resource Team to help her paint phrases and statistics on the school’s bathroom walls.

“Some of them say, for example, '1,000 people stop smoking everyday by dying,’ ” she said.

“Another says, 'The boys really love it when you come out of the bathroom smelling like smoke — yeah right.’ ”

Harless, a Girl Scout for 10 years, is also a member of the SMART Club.

She and the club members painted 10 of the school’s bathrooms on Friday afternoons after school.

“I talked to my principal not too long after we started doing it, and he said he’d noticed a difference,” Harless said.

As another part of the project, Harless set up a table during lunch to get more people and more clubs to volunteer to finish painting the school’s bathrooms.

Now that the school year is finished and she’s completed the required number of hours, Harless must create a scrapbook and do a writeup about the project.

Harless will find out this summer if she will receive the award.

Contact Tiffany S. Jones at 373-7157 or tiffany.jones@news-record.com