North Hills junior Ella Niemi earns Girl Scout Gold Award

It seems most people are aware of what it means to be an Eagle Scout, the highest achievement or rank attainable in the Boy Scouts of America program. But not as many seem to know about the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest award a Girl Scout can earn.

However, Ella Niemi, a Ross Township resident and North Hills High School junior, is heightening interest in the award because she has just earned it.

As with becoming an Eagle Scout, winning the Girl Scout Gold Award culminates with a student-led and designed community service project.

Ella’s project, begun in February 2022, emphasized student diversity, focusing on cross-cultural communication — particularly IDEA: inclusion, diversity, equity, and access — for immigrant and refugee students at Baldwin High School.

She organized a full-day, student-led event providing a platform for English as a Second Language (ESL) students to share insights and information about their cultural heritage to more than 200 students. Ella’s mother, Holly, is an ESL teacher at Baldwin and lined up fellow ESL teacher Katherine Musselman to be Ella’s project advisor. Though North Hills High School has an ESL program of its own, Ella chose to work with her mother’s students because she had already been doing so for many years. Among the countries the students emigrated from were Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Venezuela, Columbia and Burma.

“I knew I wanted to do something with my mom’s ESL students. They had a cultural day at (Baldwin), but it was just wearing cultural clothing. There was no interaction or conversation. So I thought we could take the concept and expand it to an interactive experience,” Ella said. “Baldwin has a really high ESL population, and … it’s a good opportunity for the ESL students to share their cultures with the American students.”

More than 200 10th grade students from Baldwin’s World Cultures classes attended. Based on questionnaires they filled out, Ella said the students enjoyed the experience.

“I definitely think the interaction helped build empathy towards the ESL students’ situation, immigrating to the U.S., (the American students) didn’t know the (ESL) students and hadn’t really had conversations with them before. I think it helped the ESL students with their conversation skills and it helped the general population of the students with making connections,” she said.

And Ella said through her time volunteering, she was inspired by the strength and resilience of the immigrant and refugee students.

“They’ve struggled so much to get here and get where they are. And they’ve been in an environment where they don’t speak English, or people don’t speak their language, being a teenager in an American school. So I think it was good for them to just share that,” Ella, 16, said. “It definitely helped me develop different skills that I can use in the future: project management, organization, public speaking.”

Ella’s mother said she and Ella’s father, Matthew, are extremely proud of their daughter and how she carried the project off.

“Not many Girl Scouts reach this level of achievement. I’m very happy she decided to do this only because she’s been such a big part of my ESL students for many years,” Holly Neimi said. “When she was little, we would go to football games and organize stuff for our ESL students to attend, and she would come with us.

“Hopefully, this is just the start of things that she does. One achievement that we’re proud of, but not the end.”

Ella said she has always been interested in math and science. She has a 4.1 GPA and is planning to become an engineer.

Ella has many other interests as well, including participating in North Hills High School National Honor Society and La Societe’ Honoraire de Francais, as well as French Club, Hilltop Heroes, choir, drama club, the International Thespian Society, and North Hills High marching band as a majorette.

“Some days it’s definitely rough and I’m at the school from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., but it’s definitely really fun and I love all of the activities that I’m in,” Ella said.

Her Girl Scout Gold Award will be celebrated this spring at a ceremony for new Gold Award Girl Scouts in the Girl Scouts Western Pennsylvania Council.

“I think it’s definitely really cool that I get to have this achievement,” Ella said, “and that I came all this way since I joined in, like, third grade.”