Last month, during a sunset ceremony at the West Windsor 9/11 Memorial located in the Ron Rogers Arboretum, the 18 girls of Brownie Girl Scout Troop 217 became Junior Girl Scouts of Troop 70217. Members of the Village School-based troop completed the requirements necessary for the girls to fly up from Brownies into Juniors.
Troop members include Alison Schwartz, Amanda Hu, Anisha Amurthur, Arohee Mittal, Christina Rancan, Jade Rowland, Kaylyn Hung, Madison Sloan, Nanaki Singh, Natalie Porfido, Pia Rizzo-Wittlin, Samantha Quinlan, Sarah Wu, Shannon Radey, Sonia Kapil, Vandana Gollarhalli and Victoria Xu. Troop leaders are Stacey Porfido, Helen Rancan, May Rowland, and Susan Schwartz.
Selected by the girls themselves and presented during a troop crest ceremony in October, members were presented with the Waterfall Crest, a symbol of preservation, redemption, and cleansing. In the early days of scouting, troop crests, not numbers, were used to identify a troop.
For a fall community service project, each girl collected at least two gallons of acorns in support of the state’s Today’s Acorns = Tomorrow’s Trees program. The Division of Parks and Forestry collects acorns for the purposes of growing new oak trees for planting across the state. Because of the girls efforts, several thousand acorns, of different varieties, were collected and will eventually become trees.
