Alexis Kuiper, Heidelberg High School junior and a top Girl Scout, was honored in Washington, D.C., in April for the conservation project she completed to earn her Gold Scout award. (Nancy Montgomery / Stars and Stripes)
HEIDELBERG, Germany — Alexis Kuiper loved animals and nature, but she wasn’t all that interested in science or math until her father cheated death on Sept. 11, 2001. He was in the Pentagon, just one floor above where the hijacked jumbo jet hit.
“The plane went under his feet,” Alexis said.
That section of the building had been remodeled before the attack and strengthened with thicker, more protective building materials. Kuiper says that’s what saved her dad, and she developed a sort of reverence for the things science could do.
“That Plexiglass saved his life … It was the appropriate use, the good use of science that saved him,” she said.
Four years later, Alexis, 17 and a junior at Heidelberg High School, has won a prestigious award from a leading conservation group in the United States: the National Wildlife Federation. She was lauded at the awards conference last month in Washington, D.C., alongside Lady Bird Johnson, U.S. Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who exhorted her to run for office when she was a little older.
“I felt so insignificant compared to what they had done,” Alexis said. “There’s so much a person can do to contribute.”
If Alexis sounds like a Girl Scout, it’s because she is one. She is, in fact, a Gold Scout — the highest level in girl scouting, just like the better-known Eagle Scout for boys. The big, multifaceted project she completed to earn her Gold award — including a conservation expo that drew 700 people, training programs for girls in science, math and technology, and getting the community to plant a butterfly garden on the campus of her then-high school — was also the project that won her the National Wildlife Federation award.
So why people think scouting isn’t cool is beyond her.
Her younger sister, Bria, 13, who’s also a scout has an idea.
“They think it’s only arts and crafts, and they don’t want to sell cookies,” she said.
Au contraire. Being a Girl Scout has taken Alexis to study the Costa Rican rain forest and the Virgin Islands’ coral reefs. One winter, she went to Minnesota to ride on dog sleds. This summer, she’ll be off to Honduras to study coral reef biology, archaeology and ecology.
She’s also passionate about girls becoming more accomplished in science, technology engineering and math, or, as she calls it, “STEM.”
“In middle school [math] gets hard, and girls drop out,” she said. “I think if girls were given a lot of encouragement and pushed a little harder, I think a lot more people would come to love it. Because I think it’s really fun.”
Alexis enrolled in Heidelberg High School this year after her father, a colonel who works in military intelligence was assigned to Heidelberg.
It’s the first Department of Defense high school she’s attended, and she says the teens there are “more open and accepting” than in a civilian high school. Still, she said, she’s faced pressures from other kids who might not appreciate her taste for big, ethnic jewelry or actually enjoying math or scouting. But she can deal with it.
“I found that more and more I’m really just comfortable being me,” she said.
