I was also a Boy Scout, and an adult leader as well. I can tell you that big changes have indeed been made to the program since I was a Scout in the 1980s.
For one, the BSA Youth Protection program is very robust (and has been for at least the last 15 years). There is also no tolerance of hazing or bullying these days.
As for girls going on campouts, they are already allowed to do so in co-ed BSA Venturing crews for ages 14-21. BSA has strict rules about the adult leaders that must be present for overnight campouts, including the requirement for at least two adults to present. For a co-ed campout, one of the adults must be an adult female (>21 years old).
One difference is that girls in Venturing crews can participate in BSA activities, but are not currently permitted to earn Boy Scout ranks (like Eagle Scout). Under the proposed change, they could.
Emphasis added. That’s good to hear, and was exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of. Don’t get me wrong-- I really liked my time in the Scouts. I learned a lot about outdoorsy stuff, and I’ve been lifelong camping buff. But I was one of the popular kids in my troop, and was nor subjected to the kind of abuse that I saw a lot of kids get who were even just a little bit “odd”. This was in the 60s, and the kids were often cruel, crude, abusive and downright mean. The adults mostly turned a blind eye, with a “boys will be boys” attitude.
I was a Brownie and a Girl Scout. I would have stuck with it, but we had no leaders. after the fifth grade, there was no scouting.
Now, but the time I was in my late 20s, the Explorer Scouts, which I think were a branch of the Boy Scouts officially, were allowing girls, and that was a good thing. because there was no comparable program in the Girl Scouts, and probably never going to be one.
I have to say, my GS program was lacking when I participated. I got all the badges we worked on as a troop, but there was no encouragement whatsoever to work on badges as individuals, and when I tried, and showed all the evidence to my troop leader, I never got the badges. I ended up writing a protest letter to the Council (going over their heads), and I got my badges, but made myself unpopular. They may have gotten reprimanded, when what they were doing was totally volunteer. Which was not my intent, but I was 10, and just wanted badges for my sash.
I was not in Explorers, but I suspect that would have been very cool. Older kids/young adults getting to do some wonderful stuff. I did get inducted into Order of the Arrow, which was very cool in it’s own way, especially for someone who was enamored by everything “Native American” since I was in kindergarten.
The Gold Award is indeed HARDER than Eagle Scout. I say that as a Cubmaster and Eagle Scout. The Gold Award project has to be sustainable, which means someone has to keep it going after you’ve aged out. No building planters at school or benches at a park (which I consider weak Eagle projects, but that’s another thread).
As I’ve said in another thread, I don’t see a huge change with Cub Scouts. A majority of our events are family-based, where siblings participate along with the boys. At campouts and outings, I usually present a special patch to the sisters and siblings, but it appears I don’t have to now
My guess is a lot of the girls that will join our Pack will be sisters of current Cub Scouts. I don’t foresee many lone girls or girls leaving Girl Scouts… at least at the Cub Scout level.
My daughter is a 12-year-old Cadette Girl Scout in a very active troop (who does go hiking and camping). She asked if she could do both. Sure, why not (schedules permitting)?
Maybe, maybe not, but it’s not nearly as well known.
Get an Eagle scout people go “Ooooo!” Put it on a resume when you’re first looking for work, or on a college application it’s to your credit.
Get a Gold Award (back in my day it was called “First Class”) people go “Huh? Wuzzat?” Put it on a resume when you’re first looking for work, or on a college application whoever looks at it is likely to go “WTH is that?”
So, great,* you have to work harder and get almost no recognition for it*. Which might be why it never caught on the way earning an Eagle Scout did. Why bother when your efforts won’t be recognized and you get nothing for it? It’s not just getting something big deal special, it’s something as simple as people recognizing that you put a lot of effort into something instead of “Wut? I never heard of that - it’s not like it’s an Eagle Scout” (Actual thing said to me).
Outside of a narrow group in scouting there is no recognition, but “Eagle Scout” is something know to folks who were never involved with scouting.
Eagle and Gold both get you the same rank in the military, which is to say, mosquito wings-- which is nothing to sniff at for someone who had nothing but a HS diploma. It gets you more pay, and a little respect at Basic.
Some kid in the town where I was in HS, for his Eagle Scout project, erected a flagpole at his church. Lame-o. Another kid did something I considered really worthwhile-- there was a nature trail near my aunt and uncle’s home that had been set up in the 1970s, for the kids in the nearby elementary school, and it had been severely neglected. He had restored it, AND raised a fund to upkeep it. This was around 2000, after 20 years of neglect. I visited it once before the restoration, and after, and the kid had done something truly valuable for the whole community, not just symbolic for one church.
Girls happened pretty fast after gays (and transgendered), so I would expect atheists to be next.
Note, however, that atheists have long been able to participate in many units that are not chartered by a church, and I am sure I have pinned an Eagle or two on a boy that did not believe in God - but was good at not talking about it.
My daughter, who is a senior in high school, has been a Girl Scout since she was in kindergarten. Her experience with the GS has been so completely different from that described by many of the posts in this thread that I simply don’t recognize the organization other people are describing.
I think one thing that’s important to understand is that each Girl Scout troop designs their own programs and the troops my daughter has been involved with both as a scout and as a leader vary far more than similar Boy Scout troops I’m familiar with through my son. There’s one that focuses on camping, another which is more social and craft focused, and another which exists solely to facilitate the girls going on international travel together.
The Girl Scouts run an excellent summer camp program. My daughter first went to a Girl Scout week long sleep away camp when she was in Kindergarten and continued to go for weeks every summer until she joined the staff of one as a counselor. She paid for many of her weeks at these camps with the money she earned from cookie sales. They included all the standard summer camp things you think of like boating, archery, horseback riding etc… Many include programs which take the girls away from the camps for more strenuous adventures. For my daughter that included a week long self-supported hiking / camping trip on the Appalachian Trail and another trip which was a week of white water rafting & camping. Cookie sales and fundraising keep these camps affordable to girls of all income levels. Because the Boy Scouts in the states we’ve lived in offer nothing similar it costs us roughly five times the price for my son to have similar experiences as it did for my daughter.
While her home troop isn’t as focused on camping they always took a few trips a year for overnights in the woods. Other troops which are more focused on it take far more.
She is a Gold Award recipient. I don’t know how the numbers compare to Boy Scouts earning eagle scout, but I attended banquets for Gold Award recipients where the girls gave speeches. Our local council had over a dozen recipients and our county had roughly 30 the year she received hers. I think that’s pretty good. Her project was far more involved than the sorts of things I see with Eagle Scout plaques on them and included working with wildlife conservators to create a common core applicable curriculum for a class she delivered at many local schools and our state zoo, and creating a book distributed at the same. After she received the award she received congratulatory letters from the president (I thanked her for hurrying to get hers done so it was Obama signing that one and not his successor), our Senator who included one of the traditional “flew over the capital” flags, our governor, two branches of the military, and NASA. As she’s preparing for college we’re discovering there are many scholarships for Gold Award winners and college admissions officers absolutely know what it is. I’d like to think, however, that one of the things girls learn in the Girl Scouts is to be proud of their accomplishments and not give a damn what other people think so who cares if it’s less recognized than Eagle Scout.
It’s a shame that some girls didn’t find what they were looking for in the Girl Scouts, but the organization as a whole makes a myriad of incredible opportunities available to girls.
My only experience with either of the Scout organizations is minimal. (My nephew is an Eagle Scout and my son went to one Cub Scout meeting last year to see if he wanted to do it; he didn’t.)
That being said, I feel like a good solution to this would be to have the two organizations merge, combine the positives of both organizations, and call it “Scouts of America.” Let the troops decide if they want to be co-ed or same sex, and parents (and kids) could decide where they’d like to be. This would let girls become Eagle Scouts, and if the Gold Award is more rigorous and meaningful, change the requirements for Eagle to be more like the Gold Award.
Keep the cookies, keep the camping, have all the badges be available to everyone, have national same-sex events (because that’s still important) and a national co-ed jamboree or whatever, etc.
Is this possible, or is my relative ignorance of the two organizations showing?
Definitely, depending I suppose on what your particular Explorer Post was focused on. Different strokes at all that.
Shortly after I made Eagle, a chance encounter at an Order Of The Arrow event led to my joining the Sea Scouts (San Diego). I kept up my involvement with my Troop for another year (no rule against it), spent my final year of BSA with the Sea Scouts. It was everything a late teenage boy could want.
Well, almost everything.
BTW, the posts (from others) regarding the Girl Scout Gold Award have been most enlightening. I had no idea.
As a boy scout, I think that the co-ed scouts, especially in America, would be a little bit contradicting, Pointing out that Lord Baden-Powell himself created the Boy Scouts ot be a boy led activity, and ruinight the idea of “only for boys” would make the a lot of people, especially boys my age, outraged that a group of girls had the need for Boy-Scouts activities and did not decide to change their system, but to joing the boy-only system and cause a controversy.
If you thought this was offensive or contradicting, please comment this and state why.
It would probably be easier to convince the US and Canada to merge “taking the best parts of each” than it would to convince GSA and BSA to merge though.
You know how on SD if you bring up the Boy Scouts one of the first things people bring up is their bans on homosexuals and atheists? Well, that’s what all the older Girl Scouts I know think about as well and they don’t approve of it any more than your average doper does. The organizations have very different values. I know many homosexual and atheist girl scout leaders who would only merge “over their dead bodies.”
That being said, for a long time the values of the Boy Scouts as an organization were heavily influenced by the Mormon church, members of which held many positions on the BSA executive council and provided much of its funding. The LDS has recently started to sever many of its ties with the BSA and if that continues I could see a merger of GSA and BSA being “less impossible” a few decades from now.
Following up on a post I made yesterday about how different Girl Scout troops can be I was talking to some Girl Scout leaders who agreed that that point isn’t very well communicated and many girls bounce off Girl Scouts because the first troop they encounter isn’t what they are looking for. Personally I think they need a directory where troops can list themselves along with their individual mission statements to make it easier for girls to find the troop that’s right for them. I do hope if GSA is worried about losing members it will be the impetus to improve their own organization.
I can understand the Girl Scouts not wanting to get involved. I was a Boy Scout, and loved the experience, but in recent years I’ve learned things about the BSA that I don’t really like. It bothered me quite a bit to learn that they didn’t want atheist or agnostic scouts. To my mind, this ought to have been a good and easy thing to incorporate into the Scouting experience. But the leadership wants nothing to do with it, so that’s that.
In the modern age, you’d think that they would have accepted gay and transgendered scouts long before they actually did.
as for Girl Scouts, there has long been antipathy between the groups, going back to the founding – the boy Scours organization didn’t even want the Girl Scouts to be called “Scouts” – they figured they had a lock on the name. There were legal battles over this. Girl Scouts weren’t deterred, of course, and continued on, evolving in their own way.
In an ideal world, I could see the groups merging (Boy scouts aren’t all about camping these days, either, and have branched out), but the current BSA proposal is to allow girls first into Cub Scouts, then into other tiers, and the Girl Scouts see this as “poaching”, with Boy Scouts expanding their falling ranks by stealing their constituents, without necessarily taking their traditions and practices. I can see why they’d be mad.
The cynic in me says this is also to drive down the GSA’s numbers, so the BSA can negotiate from a position of strength as they meld into a Youth Scouts of America or whatever, thereby getting unfettered access to Scout Cookie sales.
Well to be honest , a lot of changes have already been made.
For example women are now allowed to be Scoutmasters. Women can attend scout camps as leaders. Most scout camps are coed as girls in either Venture crews or Girl Scout troops use them also.
Girls have been Cub Scouts “under the table” for years. Basically doing family events and being apart of pack activities. At our sons Pinewood Derby girls could participate and as I put in the my header, girl scouts have now added the Pinewood Derby.
Many girls join Venture crews at 13-14 and Venturing has its own ranks and achievements.Video on Venturing.At every scout event I have been at there have been plenty of girls there also.
