Scout launches “Quarters for Cookies” drive

All Bayleigh Schroeder asks of you is a quarter. If you want to give more, she’ll gladly accept.

Bailey, 11, of Mooresville wants to collect 16,000 quarters over the next couple of months to buy 1,000 $4 boxes of Girl Scout cookies.

She’ll distribute the boxes to departing and arriving troops at the USO centers at the Charlotte/Douglas and Raleigh-Durham international airports.

“They can eat a box of cookies before their flight,” Bayleigh said.

The Mount Mourne IB School sixth-grader also intends to donate boxes of cookies to the nursing home for veterans on the W.G. Hefner Medical Center campus in Salisbury.

Bayleigh is the daughter of Scott and Dottie Schroeder. Her dad is co-leader of her Mooresville Girl Scout troop.

Bayleigh launched her Quarters for Cookies initiative last year, when she donated about 100 boxes to the USO at Charlotte/Douglas.

She and her dad also attended last year’s 100th anniversary celebration of the Girl Scouts in Washington, D.C. She placed a wreath in Arlington Cemetery.

Last year, Bayleigh raised money for her cookies initiative at the N.C. Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Raleigh, where she led the Pledge of Allegiance. She and her dad plan to attend this year’s convention, scheduled for Feb. 1-2 in Greensboro. She’s also speaking at meetings of Mooresville area civic groups.

At the VFW convention, she intends to reach members of the N.C. VFW’s Ladies Auxiliary, of which Scott Schroeder’s sister is past president. If each of the 17 Ladies Auxiliaries in North Carolina can raise just 950 quarters, Bayleigh said, that would exceed her goal for the troops.

At last year’s convention, Bayleigh gave a gift to people who donated $5 or more to her cause: cell phone cases that her grandmother Katherine Schroeder fashioned from towels. Bayleigh will give away more of the cases at this year’s convention, along with paracord bracelets that Bayleigh made.