Anything but a follower
Stratford Girl Scout to be featured on iconic cookie box
STRATFORD — Samira Tanko is one busy 10- year- old.
The Eli Whitney School fifth- grader plays hockey, softball, violin, clarinet and piano.
She rows, swims, codes and builds robots.
And if you buy a box of Tagalongs Girl Scout cookies anytime soon, you’ll see
her smiling face on the box.
Samira was one of three Girl Scouts from Connecticut chosen to be featured on the packaging beginning this year.
She applied for the honor in July 2018 and found out she was selected last August at an event in New York City.
“I was really surprised and I wanted to tell everyone I knew,” Samira said.
However, after a photo shoot at a high school in Montclair, N. J., she had to keep the whole thing a secret — until last month.
“What was remarkable to me was how you could keep this secret so long,” Girl Scouts of Connecticut CEO Mary Barneby told
Samira Wednesday during an interview at the organization’s museum in North Haven.
The scouts were selling the new boxes — on which Samira is pictured seated behind a drum kit as other scouts play instruments of their own — on Election Day, her mother, Laura Clark, said. The new boxes were in circulation for several months by then, but Samira couldn’t talk about her picture on the brand before January.
Luckily none of the politicos or voters patronizing the scouts’ booth made the connection.
“Everybody was about the cookies, which flavor they want,” she said.
Samira eventually broke the news to her friends at school.
“At lunch, I told some of my friends, and then during snack time my teacher let me talk to the class and I brought in the box and I showed my whole class and told them I was on the cookie box,” she said. “They were really excited.”
Now when people see a red box of the Tagalongs — crispy cookies with peanut butter covered with chocolate — they exclaim “You’re on the box!” to her.
Friends and relatives across the country have been sending pictures and selfies.
“My Uncle John in California saw some girls outside selling the Tagalongs,” Samira said. “He said ‘ That’s my niece on the box!’”
“I have a cousin in Las Vegas who sent a picture of the box,” Kathleen Clark, Samira’s grandmother and troop leader, said. “Someone else sent a picture from Florida.”
Word will spread even more over the next month.
“There are 200 million boxes of cookies sold by Girl Scouts all over the country every year,” Barneby told Samira, listing Tagalongss as the third or fourth most popular, behind Thin Mints and Samoas. “I don’t know what percentage, but it’s a lot of cookies. It’s a lot of boxes that you’re going to be on.”
In Connecticut this weekend, troop leaders will pick up cases of the iconic cookies — including a new variety this year, Lemon- Ups — at locations across the state.
Girl Scouts will deliver pre- ordered cookies before setting up booth sales during March at events and businesses. Most booth sales will also give customers the opportunity to donate boxes of Girl Scout Cookies to service women and men overseas and at home through the organization’s “Cookies
For Heroes” program.
But before that, Samira, who said she wants to become “some type of scientist” someday — after getting a PhD in astrophysics — and her fellow scouts already paid forward some of the money they raised through paidfor orders.
They marked Fairfield County’s Giving Day Thursday by making donations to Discovery Museum and Planetarium, Beardsley Zoo and Stratford Library, as well as sponsoring a piece of the new fence at the underconstruction Stratford Dog Park.
“It’s really social entrepreneurship,” Barneby said. “Every box of cookies they sell, money goes back to their troop. When they do get they money back, that’s what they use it for, to do really cool things for their community.
“Not only is it a wonderful way to get these delicious cookies out to the public, but girls like Samira are learning life skills through this whole process, learning how to set goals and make decisions, manage money and deal with the public, and then also business ethics,” Barneby said. “The box is really how we tell that story.”