Alexis Levorse “earned her Gold Award, the Girl Scouts’ highest honor, in the spring for completing a leadership project of her own design—researching and building 20 bat houses, which were then hung throughout the community,” reports Parsippany (N.J.) This Week on Aug. 4 in an article on “Local hero: Alexis Levorse, goes to bat for bats.”

Levorse “is a recent graduate of Parsippany Hills High School where she was a member of the Italian Honor Society, the National Honor Society and the Art Honor Society as well as the varsity field hockey and swim teams,” Harper reports. “She hopes to study abroad in Italy during college and will attend Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa. She plans to enroll in a five-year program to earn a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in forensic science and hopes to work in a crime lab.”

“When I was trying to figure out what to do, I knew that I liked to build things and that I liked bats,” she explains. “My grandfather had built a bat box for my mother and I thought, ‘I could build a few of these.’ Levorse got permission from the town council to hang the bat boxes in Parsippany.

“They give bats a spot to go over the summer so they’re not crowding into places where people want them out of,” she said. “I also had seen articles in the paper about White Nose Syndrome (a fungus which prematurely awakens bats from hibernation and often causes them to die for lack of food or because of low temperatures) so I knew that was definitely what I should do to help,” Levorse told reporter Matt Harper. Read more.