An observation from a troop leader in one Girl Scout Council Council- When my daughter was a brownie 10 years ago, every camp sessions with horses was full by mid-March -- there was a lottery for what order they opened the registrations received before March 1st, and there were sessions that were full before they finished opening those registrations. In January of that year, council sent out a videotape recruiting for camp that was passed around the troops and we watched it at our meetings. Think about the costs and logistics of THAT -- compared to what you could do now, which is post your recruitment video on youTube and its easy to play at a meeting. Then we had years where they didnt want the expense of mailing camp books to all the girls, so they put them online and sent a flyer. Nobody from Council ever mentioned camp at a Service Unit meeting. (And then there was the year after the merger when we didnt have service unit meetings.) Last February when they announced the selling of all the camps a few days before the cookie sale started, my co-leader was talking to a troop leader who was in her second year as a leader. She said, Really? We have camps? I didnt know we still had camps! One of the huge differences between boy scouts and girl scouts is that troop numbers go with a group of girls, and then they are gone. Boy scouts (real scouts, not cub scouts or webelos) are in troops that continuously bring in younger boys and then move them through the ranks. When it works the way it is supposed to, every fall there are tenderfeet coming in, and every spring boys aging out, but the troop has structure, traditions, property, and the boys naturally progress through the leadership roles and the older ones naturally mentor the younger ones as they were mentored in turn. But the older boys have their own stuff to do, its not just being helpers for the younger boys. Girl Scouts have very little of this -- multi-aged troops are the odd gal out (trust me -- Ive had girls in 4-6 age levels all along) and now with redoing the badges so that C, S, and A badges are all separate its even harder. At every step of the way we have to make up our own traditions, and we dont have that unbroken stream of older girls modeling for the younger girls so that they know what to do when they become older girls. Camp used to be the one place where this worked for Girl Scouts. Camp is self-contained, and has its own (perhaps peculiar) rules which everyone has to follow, but then girls are given lots of authority and responsibility inside those rules. And camp was the place that little girls could see what big girls do, and aspire to do it when they got older. I have watched this fall apart from that first Just the Two Of Us that I did with my rising 2nd grader in 2004. I came back to a service unit where none of the other leaders or parents seemed to know that girl scouts have camps, and I have watched the whole council turn that way. Girls grow up in the blink of an eye, and the only way that you have a continuous program is through passing down the traditions from one group to the next, and you lose it all with even a short interruption. That GSUSA is articulating hostility to the idea of tradition -- wow -- they say that out loud? And its not like they have any vision of anything to replace those traditions. Or maybe it really is that they want something which is strictly about the girls getting money for them to spend -- somewhere between Amway for little girls and little girl Hare Krishnas selling flowers in the airport. Im becoming more and more convinced that they are just waiting for our daughters to age out and go away so that well go away... (BTW, this just happens to be my Council: GSEIWI...but I wonder if it could be said by Troop Leaders from other Councils across the USA.) What do you think?
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 19:25:59 +0000
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