A total of 10 young men – eight from Ripon and two from Manteca – left their mark on their respective communities over the last several months to earn the highest honor that Boy Scouts offers.

The Eagle Scout Award.

Bestowed to less than four percent of all young men who sign up for the program, the award symbolizes dedication and mastery of the skills and the traits that Boy Scouts of America aims to instill in the young men that participate.

Here are the young men who were honored this past week at the VFW in Ripon and the projects that they performed for their communities:

*Landon West – Landon’s project was for the Ripon Community Garden and he arranged for a 30-foot gravel path lined with railroad ties. He also put in a butterfly garden with irrigation and used the remaining gravel to level out the parking lot.

*Maika West – Maika’s project was the restoration of the Ripon Founding Monument – replacing the existing grass and sprinkler lines with drought-tolerant planys and drip lines.

*Kai West – Kai’s project was making smocks for premature babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of a local hospital. Kai led a youth team that cut out the material for the smocks, organized a team to sew them, and then delivered them to Doctors Hospital.

*Ty Herrin – Ty oversaw the making of owl boxes for the City of Ripon to help control the gopher population at Stouffer Park and the Community Center in order to make the field used for soccer, football, and baseball safer for the children playing there. Generally considered a safer option for controlling rodents than the use of chemicals, the owl boxes allowed Ty to do something to help the sports-playing youth of the community while following in the footsteps of his older brothers who did their Eagle Scout projects at the community center.

*Bryce Eldredge – Bryce completed a human sundial for the Ripon Community Garden. The idea was to enhance the garden and create more areas of interest for people in the community.

*Aaron Wood – Aaron added benches to and repainted the Ripon High School boy’s locker room – helping save the school district money while at the same time providing something practical for the young people in the community.

*Spencer Ogden – Spencer provided service at the East Union Cemetery by cleaning headstones, repositioning headstones that had come off of their base, and cleared out weeds that had overgrown the headstones themselves.

*Grant Ogden – Grant provided service at Manteca City Hall where he sanded and stained the existing benches and put bark inside of the planters that adorn the city’s government campus on Center Street.

*Matthew Gravina – Matthew decided to serve the community by providing meals for the homeless population in Modesto – which until recently had been concentrated below the 9th Street Bridge in a temporary tent encampment.

To contact reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.