By Dean Vaglia
Leader Staff Writer
David Moore and Peter Burean, after waiting over a year and aging out of Boy Scout Troop 366, received their Eagle Scout courts of honor on Sunday, Aug. 15.
With kind-hearted jesting from troop members recounting the boys’ journeys and some technical issues involving battery-powered candles, the pandemic-delayed ceremony marks the formal end of the boys’ scouting careers.
Meeting in preschool, Burean and Moore began their scouting careers in elementary school as Cub Scouts.
As time went on and scouts graduated into the flagship Scouts BSA program, kids began leaving the troop. But Moore and Burean stuck around, citing friends in the troop as one of the reasons they stayed in.
“It was kind of like a social thing,” Burean said. “Being able to spend some weekends together and go to meetings and do fun stuff. As the years went on a lot of people started aging out or were getting Eagle or just dropping out, so at that point I kind of had a connection to the troop more, so I wanted to stay in and help support the troop and help fill leadership roles to teach the younger scouts.”
When obtaining Eagle came into sight, the boys shifted their focus to completing what needed to be done to earn scouting’s premier rank.
“I got Star and Life pretty quick; but the final life to Eagle [requirements] … there was a couple, two to three years there,” Burean said. “You get busier in school as you start getting higher up in high school. For me and David, I know we did a lot of AP classes and we were in other extracurriculars, so the time you have to put into scouting becomes smaller and your progress gets slower. Toward the end there it was kind of like ‘Oh, I really need to get working on this.’”
One part of achieving Eagle is completing a service project, which tends to involve building something for a community organization. Burean chose to build five owl houses and installed them along the Polly Ann Trail while Moore constructed garden beds and installed a bench for Daniel Axford Elementary School.
“I’ve always been connected to the school,” Moore said. “It’s actually where I first started volunteering when I was in like second or third grade. All the way up into middle school I used to collect the recycled paper from classrooms and take them to the recycling bins. I’ve always been caring for the school and I always wanted to do my Eagle project there.”
Both projects were completed by early 2020, but the rise of COVID-19 caused their final boards of review to be done back-to-back over Zoom. Once the boards were completed, the boys were officially Eagle Scouts.
With the rank of Eagle Scout in the bag, Moore and Burean are ready to close the books on their scouting careers. While they considered the possibility of helping out as adult leaders one day, there are more pressing concerns at the moment. Both are now in college and are beginning their sophomore years. Burean is studying business at Western Michigan University and Moore is studying chemical engineering at Michigan Tech University.