Our Promise, September 2021

PAVE Inside (and Outside) the Classroom

Each year, Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri serves thousands of youth through community outreach programs. Primarily delivered in schools, outreach programs provide youth with leadership and life skills while promoting positive culture in the communities where they live.

For more than 20 years, Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri has delivered its Project Anti-Violence Education (PAVE) program to tens of thousands of students in elementary, middle, and high schools throughout eastern Missouri. The goal of this program is: advocate for positive mental health practices from an early age and give students a safe space and the communication tools necessary to discuss their experiences with bullying, peer pressure and violence. The interactive curriculum has been embraced by students and school administration alike. Year after year, PAVE’s outreach has steadily grown as the topics of mental health and social emotional intelligence surge to the forefront of adolescent education. 2020-2021 was a milestone year for PAVE and Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri’s approach to building strong, emotionally healthy and communicative female leaders. Local educators and Girl Scout staff saw the opportunity to increase and improve equity with the PAVE program by addressing the fundamentally different social and emotional issues facing students in urban, suburban and rural environments. Seeking the guidance of renowned experts in the field, Girl Scouts conducted a comprehensive PAVE curriculum rewrite. The resulting curriculum is comprised of three parts: 1. DISCOVER lessons focus on understanding emotions and feelings and how to regulate them; 2. CONNECT lessons allow students to strengthen their “empathy muscle,” and 3. TAKE ACTION lessons encourage student to speak up for themselves while also actively listening to others. The COVID-19 pandemic allowed Girls Scouts to simultaneously look at alternate ways to deliver PAVE “in” the classroom. The outcome of those discussions allowed teachers to choose their preferred method of delivery: 1). Live/Virtual presentations, 2). Pre-recorded sessions that could be integrated into the classroom schedule at the teacher’s discretion, or 3). A combination of live/virtual and pre-recorded. PAVE instructors work with school representatives to determine a delivery method and schedule for each individual classroom.

Amidst a global pandemic, Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri was able to reach an astonishing 14,081 students throughout eastern Missouri during this last school year. Moving forward, Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri anticipates greater outreach within the counties where PAVE already has a presence, as well as an increase in its collaborations with schools throughout the eastern Missouri region. If you know a school or teacher that would be interested in bringing PAVE to their classroom, please contact Lisa Beasley, Director of Membership, at lbeasley@girlscoutsem.org . “The students are able to mediate some of the issues themselves by using empathy. This was an awesome delivery of this program. It worked well with the situation we currently have going on in the world right now.”

- Meramec Elementary Teacher