By Clint Thompson

Special to The Thomasville Times- Enterprise

THOMASVILLE – A Thomasville Troop 306 service project had three local boy scouts fulfilling life rank requirements while serving the community in the process.

Asher Jackson, Brady Smith and Connor Delius, all 13-year-olds, spent last Saturday in Thomas County completing conservation related service projects. They coordinated with Hands on Thomas County and Thomas County Beautiful to mark storm drains while also cleaning up trash on Millpond Road.

Allyson Delius, parent leader for the troop and mother of Connor, talked about the boy scout requirements the trio had to achieve.

“In each rank, you have various things that you have to learn or do or achieve. For the rank that they’re at, which they’re moving to the second to last rank, they have to do things like complete a certain number of merit badges. They have to serve in a leadership role. They have to do community service hours. To achieve this next rank, which is the Life Rank, your service hours have to include something that is environmentally focused or conservation related,” Allyson said.

“We reached out to Hands on Thomas County and said we’re looking for a project that would be helpful in the community. That was one of their suggestions.”

Marking the storm drains serves as a reminder to prevent illegal dumping in storm drains and prevents trash, debris and chemicals from being dumped into creeks and rivers.

“These storm drains that you see along streets, anything that goes in there does not go to the sewer to get cleaned and processed into drinking water. Whatever gets put down there goes directly into creeks and streams and rivers and the Gulf and the ocean. The idea behind putting this little sign on each storm drain is to help educate anybody that may think, ‘I’m just going to dump this down here.’ It’s for them to realize, this isn’t a good idea,” Allyson added.

Jackson and Delius attend Brookwood, while Smith attends Thomasville City Schools. The trio also learned about themselves by being willing to serve on a Saturday.

“There’s a little bit at first of, ‘Do I have to do that on my Saturday, my day off? Football season has just ended, and I don’t have that much free time.’ But by doing it with friends and once they understood what it was that they were doing, to be honest, they felt important,” Allyson said. “They felt like they were doing something. They left a mark, so to speak.”