Pembroke Pines Girl Scouts create award-winning project to help save coral reefs
The water at Historic Virginia Key Beach looked clear enough to swim in, until students Sophia Garcia and Sofia Pestana dipped their testing tubes below the surface.
What they found that day changed the way they saw the ocean.
About two years later, the Pembroke Pines Girl Scouts, now freshmen at Cypress Bay High School, turned that realization into “Saving Corals is the Moral,” an award-winning environmental advocacy project focused on teaching their community about the fragility of Florida’s coral reefs and the urgent need to protect them.
Their project earned them the Silver Award, the highest honor a Girl Scout Cadette can receive. The duo, part of troop 14005 of the Girl Scouts of Southeast Florida, knew they wanted to tackle a project dealing with ocean conservation and a problem they felt wasn’t getting enough attention.
For this award, participants choose an issue they’re passionate about and created a project to help address it.
“Many people think corals are rocks,” Garcia told the Pembroke Pines News. “I think our main purpose was really to educate people so that they can help save our planet and keep our oceans clean and healthy.”
How it started
That curiosity first sparked about two years earlier at the Youth Environmental Action (YEA) Day, where the pair met marine biologist — and soon-to-be mentor — Adeline Nagle.
Nagle, 27, spent nearly three years with Miami Waterkeeper, working in their educational outreach program and science department. She now serves as an environmental consultant for an engineering firm but continues to conduct marine resource surveys and coral dives.
She shares that on a typical YEA Day, there were sometimes more than 100 Girl Scouts in attendance. One of the regular features of the events was coral skeletons.
“I feel like when we tell the kids that corals are an animal and this is their skeleton, I think a lot of them get really interested,” Nagle told the Pembroke Pines News. “Both of the [girls] talked to me after that and just said that they were super interested in corals.” The two girls kept in contact with Nagle after that event, chatting about corals and later setting up Zoom meetings to continue to learn and have a trusted mentor to ask their questions.
Nagle shared that she had a lot of fun with the girls.
“It was so fun … because they’re both really interested in corals and it’s fun to geek out over corals and talk about all the weird cool stuff going on in science with them,” Nagle said. “I think they took a lot of initiative. … I was like, in a backseat role, definitely and they were the ones that came up to me.”
The process
The girls spent months researching coral reefs, learning how they form, what threatens them and why their disappearance could devastate marine ecosystems. Their project, “Saving Corals is the Moral,” resulted in a series of three educational videos and a live presentation for their peers at Cypress Bay High.
They teamed up with Nagle, who introduced them to research from the University of Miami’s coral labs. The more they learned, the more they realized how much was at stake.
“It really stuck with me because honestly, I thought that these companies were doing a better job at protecting our oceans and keeping our seas and sea animals safe while they were doing construction,” Garcia said, recalling the PortMiami expansion project Nagle had told them about that permanently destroyed 278 acres of coral reef.
For Pestana, the experience of learning about coral disease and pollution hit just as deeply.
“We both talked to [Nagle] about the corals and she even told us how the disease was spread and it really impacted me, so then I realized this really is important to me,” Pestana said.
The partnership and mentorship is something the two girls found to be beneficial to their project’s success. Pestana spoke to the resources Nagle was able to give them such as websites, and Garcia spoke to how the open line of communication helped them navigate challenges.
The pair divided their tasks based on their strengths, balancing research, scripting and editing while juggling school and extracurriculars. But even with a clear goal in mind, the process wasn’t always smooth sailing.
“If we wanted to complete something, we really needed to focus on our goals and finish it. And in the end, I really do think we persevered and we made it through,” Garcia said.
From research to presentation
When it came time to take their project to their community, Garcia and Pestana organized a presentation at Cypress Bay High, where they stood in front of a crowd of their peers to present what they had learned.
“Other than technological skills, we also taught a group of girls in our community about corals, so we did a live presentation at our local school, Cypress Bay High School,” Garcia said. “I think there we gained a lot of skills, for example, the ability to be able to teach in front of many people, and it was very fun.”
Garcia also noted how much they learned about organization.
“We had to make a flyer to be able to invite people to come to the event, we also bought cookies … so I think we got a lot of organizing skills and it was overall a very life changing and enriching experience,” Garcia said.
She added that they also struggled in the beginning to know where to start.
“I think we didn’t really have an idea of how to make a video, and it was at first, really rough, because we had to do research on how to make videos … and how to post,” Garcia said.
The event drew more than 30 attendees, many of them younger scouts and families who learned for the first time that coral reefs are living organisms vital to the ocean’s balance.
It also reinforced what both girls had come to understand through their research — that education can be one of the most powerful tools for environmental change.
Their educational videos collectively garnered almost 400 views as of Nov. 13.
When the two finally completed the project on Sept. 29, the relief and pride they felt was almost immediate.
“I was really proud of myself and of Sophie P. because it was a really big project, and most of the time, we stayed up really late at night, and we had to wake up early in the morning to meet up, and I was really proud of myself … and of everybody that had helped us achieve this big goal of ours,” Garcia said.
For Pestana, the recognition was secondary to the awareness they’d sparked.
“I feel like it’s about the issues that people aren’t educated about,” Pestana said. “Some people don’t help, just because they don’t understand what’s happening and don’t realize the importance of this situation.”
Garcia and Pestana were among 74 young girls within the region to earn the Silver Award during the recent seventh annual Silver Award Showcase.
This story was originally published November 13, 2025 at 12:24 PM.
