Severna Park Brothers Make Eagle Scout

Two Severna Park High School graduates are giving back to their community while moving up the ranks. Eighteen-year-old brothers Caden and Jase Tetrault have now received the highest honor in Boy Scouts: Eagle Scout rank.

The pair achieved this rank by completing community service projects. Jase partnered with Kinder Farm Park to make mourning dove nesting shelters, and Caden worked with MorningStar Senior Living to clean up its patio space for senior residents to enjoy during the spring and summer.

The Tetraults have been involved in scouting since they were in second grade, starting with Cub Scouts before they graduated to Boy Scouts after elementary school. As Boy Scouts, the brothers were members of Troop 993, which meets at Severna Park United Methodist Church.

Inspired by their friends’ involvement with Boy Scouts, the brothers explored the possibility of joining Troop 993 because they were told that the group had great success helping boys become Eagle Scouts.

“Eagle Scout (status is) a really hard thing to earn, but I think once Troop 993 got you to Life Scout, it had like a 93% success rate of (members) becoming an Eagle Scout,” Caden said. “So it was just really impressive how they moved their scouts up the ranks. So that's why we chose 993, and we chose to stick with it because a lot of our friends were doing it, and because we had a really good time.”

While that long-term goal was always in mind, the boys credit Troop 993 for keeping them engaged over the years with a fun schedule of activities.

“We were camping every month, and we were doing a lot of activities with our troop,” Caden said.

With such a difficult-to-achieve rank came a lot of time-consuming work that both Caden and Jase had to complete before becoming Eagle Scouts. The Tetraults had to fill out a 40-page worksheet as well as complete more than 100 hours of community service each to ensure their plans were foolproof. Overall, the projects took over six months to plan.

Caden chose his Eagle Scout project after MorningStar Senior Living reached out to his troop asking if anyone could fix a rock garden. Ready for the challenge, Caden rid the space of overgrown bushes, planted flowers and built an art storage box so that residents at the nursing home could continue to paint rocks, often painting them as memorials for former residents who died.

Jase opted for a more personal project with his mourning dove shelter boxes. He recalled always being woken up by mourning doves during his childhood, and since he could no longer hear them, he decided to partner with Kinder Farm Park to create the shelters. Since the project’s completion, birds have been nesting in the shelters. Tetrault even saw a cardinal and a dove building nests.

“Ultimately, the project is really the kind of final challenge, so to speak, in scouts and it's to show how far you've come and what the skills have taught you,” Jase said. “And also, just how committed you are to a project, and I'm pretty grateful that we were both able to do projects that were really meaningful to ourselves and the community.”

Even with the completion of their Eagle Scout projects, the Tetrault brothers feel that their involvement in the program is far from over. They want to help the next generation learn the practical skills that helped them become Eagle Scouts.

“This is the beginning of the end because scouting is a lifelong journey. It's not really something where, ‘Oh, I earn Eagle Scout; let me put this away now,’ because you always have to end up giving back and continuing the legacy of all the scouts before you, essentially,” Jase said. “And one of the ways I've done that is I've actually gone back as an adult leader, and I've helped out the new scouts by reading them their books and teaching them little skills. Like, I taught the other day how to navigate using the moon and sun and stuff like that. So, you know, it's always nice to give back, especially after you've graduated from scouting. And I think I'm going to continue doing that in the future.”