Scout inspired to lift spirits of Holy Rosary students

SEATTLE – “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” “Every winner was once a beginner.”

Those are among more than 150 handwritten messages that can inspire Holy Rosary School students and staff when they gather on the school playground.

“Sometimes you need that extra pickup or motivation to get you through the day,” said Noah Gauyan, an O’Dea High School junior who transformed the playground’s chain-link fence as part of his Eagle Scout project.

In late January, with the help of Holy Rosary fifth and sixth grade students and fellow members of Boy Scout Troop 282, Gauyan covered a section of the fence with handwritten notes and pictures drawn on tiles with special markers.

The initial idea of the project, titled “Hands of Hope,” was to make hand castings, but the COVID pandemic stalled the project, Gauyan said. Conversations with Don Bazemore, his scout leader, and Anna Horton, Holy Rosary’s principal, steered him toward tiles.

“I love that idea much more than hands,” Gauyan said, although he kept the project’s name.

The tiles also remind Gauyan of the special messages his father would tuck into his lunch for him to discover midday when he was a Holy Rosary student — notes that always “made me smile,” he said.

“I wanted to share what I had as a kid in my lunch box. I wanted to lift kids up,” he said.

Gauyan also hoped the fence tiles would serve as a conversation starter, to bring students together. They can be updated with new messages or redone as they fade. And there’s a bench (created with the help of scout members) where students can “meet up” to sit, talk and hopefully create friendships, he said.

Gauyan said he wasn’t sure how the project would be received, but he recently heard that students were using the bench and enjoying the tiles.

“That brought so much joy and happiness to me,” he said.