AGAWAM – High school senior Rachel Sills recently received the highest Girl Scout achievement, the Gold Award.  

“It feels really good to receive this award. I’ve put in a lot of work towards it in all of the years that I’ve been in girl scouts, I just couldn’t wait until this time came,” Sills said.

Sills was born and raised in Agawam and has been a Girl Scout since the second grade.

She loves hiking and being outdoors with her friends, including fishing which is what inspired her focus and pitch for her project. Growing up, she frequently went fishing with her family.

“You go through a process pitching your idea to the girl scout council and you go through steps like fundraising for materials and getting your project approved, when it’s approved you receive the award. You have to get a silver award before you get the option to be able to get a gold award,” Sills said.

For her project, she built and placed receptacles for depositing stray fishing lines at multiple fishing spots to protect the environment and wildlife living in it.

Throughout her years fishing with her family, she learned that fishing lines can break, get tangled and need to be cut and replaced during an outing.  

“Her research found that today’s fishing line is often made of monofilament which is non-biodegradable meaning if left behind will pollute our environment for hundreds of years. The effects of the line being left behind also include wildlife ingesting or becoming tangled in the line. Her proposal was to create receptacles that could be placed at popular publicly accessible fishing spots where lines could be easily deposited solving this problem,” Co-Leader of Girl Scout Troop 20559 Michelle Salva stated.  

When visiting some of the receptacle locations she found that more fishing line than she expected had been deposited into the receptacles.

After graduation, Sills plans on getting her degree in physical therapy at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, starting this fall.