Wednesday, November 4, 2026
Two scouts from Rockville Centre’s Troop 40, Michael Riomao and Joseph Kozlik, have recently completed significant projects for the Rockville Centre Historical Society as part of their journey to becoming Eagle Scouts.
Riomao, a senior at South Side High School, worked with the historical society to enhance the visitor experience at the Phillips House Museum. His project involved creating QR codes for various displays throughout the museum, offering detailed descriptions of items such as a vintage wind-up phone and record players.
Riomao collaborated with the trustees at the museum, including historian and co-president Debbie Fehringer, and he enlisted the help of his fellow scouts to write descriptions and produce the QR codes.
“[Debbie] had a lot of information on the house that I compiled into easy descriptions,” he said about the project, “but then also I did some outside research on more specific things.”
The project, which took approximately 90 hours over six months to complete, culminated in a Jan. 19 open house, where the museum showcased the new QR codes, now placed throughout the exhibits. Riomao achieved his goal with the project, which he said was to “get stuff a little bit up to speed.”
Fehringer has also expressed her appreciation for Riomao’s Eagle Scout project and what it has done for the museum.
“It really has helped us kind of bring the museum a little more future forward,” she said. “Hopefully when we get more visitors in the spring, which tends to be a high season, they’ll be able to use it.”
Kozlik, also a South Side senior, focused on the museum’s outdoor area. His team of fellow scouts and other volunteers spent the summer of 2024 refurbishing benches and cleaning stone structures in the museum’s garden. After discovering that two of the wooden benches were beyond repair, Kozlik and his team built new ones, as well as stabilized the stone benches by adding concrete to prevent them from sinking into the ground.
“I think the best part was probably the concrete, because that’s not something a lot of people really get to do in their lives,” he said. “And I worked with my dad with concrete before, but a lot of kids probably don’t really do something like that very often.”
Kozlik’s project took a total of 101 hours to complete over the course of July and August. He was aided by a group of about 10 scouts each day, completing the work through a combination of physical labor and problem-solving.
“They literally cleaned the ground and the yard of a lot of garbage that had blown back there and generally made this space a lot more aesthetically pleasing,” Fehringer said, “made it somewhere that you might want to sit and spend an hour just sitting amongst the pretty greenery. So, we really appreciate everything he did for us.”
Both Riomao and Kozlik’s projects exemplify the leadership skills central to the Eagle Scout rank. Mike O’Hare, the Troop 40 leader, explained that the required Eagle Scout project must benefit the community, showing the scouts’ ability to lead peers and manage significant tasks.
“It has to be something that will benefit the community or church or something similar, and it shows having the commitment to stay with it and organize help that they need,” he said. “They’re supposed to be leading the younger scouts or peers and sometimes adults, having them help and showing them what’s needed and getting the job done, almost like a little project manager.”
Both scouts are aspiring to achieve the Eagle Scout rank, which they will earn in the summer, as part of their big plans for the future. Riomao is applying to colleges to study business, while Kozlik will be going to the University of North Dakota for aviation.
“I just really joined Boy Scouts to hang out with my friends, but after I got a few ranks in, I was convinced more and more to go all the way to Eagle,” Kozlik said. “It was a really big goal, and it would be helpful for my future.”
