LYNN — Four Boy Scouts from the city’s Troop 80 were presented with their medals Monday night at a Court of Honor ceremony at the Knights of Columbus Hall.
The scouts, Dustin Bloom, Tyler Generazzo, Arthur Herrera and Sean McDonough, each had to plan and execute an Eagle Scout project combining public service with managerial skills. The rank is also achieved after years of accumulating merit badges and climbing past numerous ranks prior to Eagle.
While most Eagle Scout hopefuls typically assume their ranks at the end of their senior years in high school, a number of this year’s honorees had their dreams deferred for a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bloom graduated last June from Lynn Vocational Technical Institute. His project consisted of blazing and cleaning up the Overlook Trail in Lynn Woods, with the goal of reducing the number of hikers getting lost. It will also help those trying to follow the trail in the dark. He is attending Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.
Generazzo graduated earlier this month from Lynn English. He made new pull-up bars outside the high school in the Junior ROTC fenced-in area and fully restored the old ones. He has been accepted into the U.S. Air Force Academy in Arizona, where he plans to study engineering.
Herrera also graduated from Lynn Tech in 2020 with a concentration in metal fabrication and jointing. He began working for Blue Atlantic Fabricators in Boston as a co-operative education student and is now employed full-time with the company.
Herrera chose the Lynn Special Needs Camp Kiwanis for his project, where — in tandem with Department of Public Works Associate Commissioner Lisa Nerich — he helped in such areas as staining picnic tables, repairing fences and latches and cleaning up debris. To do this he had to rely on much help from his fellow scouts as well as donations from parents.
McDonough, a 2020 Malden Catholic graduate, said his project aimed to find the diameters of underground water mains for the Lynn Fire Department so it could insert them into a database for the department’s use. That database would create a Google Maps-type system allowing firefighters to find the fire hydrant that would give them the necessary amount of water in an emergency. He attends the University of Massachusetts – Amherst.
