Five RV seniors are Eagle Scouts
Five students from Royal Valley High School’s graduating Class of 2024 have earned the Eagle Scout award, the highest rank offered by the Boy Scouts of America.
Fewer than 10 percent of Boy Scouts have earned the Eagle Scout award since the Scouts were formed in 1912, and Matt Tracy, Jackson King, Riddick Warton, Tyson Parks and Kaden Swain all earned that honor before receiving their diploma last Saturday from RVHS.
The young men are members of Boy Scout Troop 173, which includes Scouts from both Hoyt and Mayetta, and is led by Scout master Zak King.
The Scouts were required to earn at least 21 merit badges before they could begin working on a community project to apply for the Eagle Scout award.
The Scouts’ Eagle Scout projects centered on making repairs or improvements at two parks in Hoyt, as well as a local cemetery.
As part of the process for the Eagle Scout projects, many of the Scouts had to present their projects to the Hoyt City Council for approval, as well as raise funds for the project.
Matt Tracy
Tracy is the son of Jim and Rhonda Tracy and for his Eagle Scout project, he made several improvements to the Point Pleasant Stewart Cemetery, located just south of V4 and 126th Roads.
“Grass was up to my hips. Stones were broken and knocked over. One of the stones we found was just two little pieces, and then we started weedwhacking around there and found another four pieces on the ground,” Tracy said.
With help from his father and fellow Scouts, Tracy mowed the cemetery, cleared tree branches, repaired headstones and created a rustic looking sign with the cemetery’s name that’s held up by old hedge posts.
“It looks like it would have been made at that time,” he said.
New foundations were laid to erect some of the fallen headstones. Tracy also created a map and directory for all the plots in the cemetery, completing the project in the fall of 2019.
Tracy said he joined Scouts in elementary school and that its taught him about work ethic.
“It was something to do to keep me busy,” he said of joining. “It’s fun and all, but it is a lot of paperwork. The campouts are fun and hanging out with all your buddies.”
Jackson King
King also completed his Eagle Scout project in the fall of 2019 as an eighth-grader at RVMS by restoring the one-cell city jail at Hoyt’s Robinson Park.
King, who is the son of Zak and Kerri King, said he noticed that the city jail was “falling apart and getting overgrown.”
He did some research on the property at the Kansas State Library and determined what it would have looked like when it was in use.
“I tried to return it to the state it would have been in,” King said, adding a wooden cot, wood stove, an outhouse and hitching posts. “I’ve always enjoyed history so it was a fun project for me.”
King said he joined the Scout program in first grade.
“Once I started, I got pretty invested. I stuck with it and earned the Eagle Scout rank because we’d all talked about trying to get the group of us to become Eagle Scouts since we were little,” he said. “The camping was always really fun. I got to do a lot of things that I wouldn’t have done before like learning about foraging and welding, as well as taking electrical classes.”
He said that Boy Scouts has taught him how to be “innovative” when faced with a challenge.
“It’s been a really fun group to grow up and hang out with. There’s not really a lot of guys I know at my school better than these guys,” he said.
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