A sophomore at Saratoga High School, 15-year-old Katie has been involved in Girl Scouting since she became a Brownie, which is the Scouting level for girls generally between the ages of 6 and 8.

"My older sister was a Girl Scout and I always wanted to do stuff with her, so my mother started a troop for me and my friends in the first grade," recalls Katie, who says she is the only member of that original troop to still participate in Scouting.

She is now a Cadette, a level for girls generally between the ages of 12 and 15. Together with Chloe Thorn and Lisa and Julie Menezes, three of her fellow members of Saratoga Cadette Girl Scout Troop 62, Nakaji chose to pursue the Silver Award this year.

This accolade, which requires a major community service commitment, is the highest honor a Cadette can earn and is the second-highest honor in Girl Scouting. The top honor is the Gold Award, which can only be pursued by Senior Girl Scouts who have already completed all their Cadette prerequisites and are usually in the 10th through 12th grades.

For their Silver Award, the four friends planned and implemented two projects to benefit students attending Argonaut, Foothill and Saratoga elementary schools. They presented the fruits of their labors this October during the monthly meeting of the Saratoga Union School District Board of Trustees. After that, their projects went into the classrooms.

The girls named one project Reading Books on Tape for Special Education Classes. It involved gathering volunteers from the community—including themselves, their friends and their parents' friends—to record all of the district's Core Literature program novels onto cassette tapes. These range from easier reads like Frog and Toad Together and The Tale of Peter Rabbit to more advanced books such as Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Sign of the Beaver and My Brother Sam is Dead.

Along with the job of recruiting and training their readers, the Cadettes also obtained 103 cassette tapes, which were donated by All Ears Audio Books, a store in the El Paseo de Saratoga shopping center that buys, sells, rents and trades audio books on tapes and CDs. Chloe was in charge of artwork for the tape covers and for the bags used to hold the tapes, Katie says.

"Children with learning disabilities can have difficulties comprehending the text, sounding out longer words and completing the reading within the time allowed," explains Katie's mother, Sue Nakaji, who helped the Scouts. "The students should now be able to keep pace with the class as they read and listen to the text on tape."

Katie says she knows firsthand about reading problems, which is why she chose books-on-tape as part of her Silver Award project. "I am dyslexic myself and had trouble reading in class when I was younger," she reveals.

The second part of the Silver Award involved crafting finger puppets representing characters from many of the Core Literature books. Using materials donated by D & J Hobby in Campbell, Demco (an educational supply company) and Home Depot, the Cadettes and girls from local troops 157, 473 and 525 fashioned 36 puppets for use by first- and second-graders. The Menezes sisters took the helm of the puppet-making project.

"I've talked to some of the resource teachers at the elementary schools, and from what I've heard thus far, they think it's great!" says Katie, who likes Scouting so much that she says she plans to stay active throughout high school and even work as a Girl Scout camp counselor.