BSA Membership dropping for first time since Vietnam

[tjhammer]

This was originally a post buried in a separate thread. However, I think the topic (membership slipping) is signficant enough on its own that I wanted to start an off shoot thread. Many of you have questioned why this debate over Scoutings gay policy is relevant... here's yet another answer to that question.

 

I've done some further research now, and can expound on the 1996 statistics I first provided...

 

Scouting enjoyed about twenty years of consistent membership growth following the Vietnam War through 1997.

 

The growth in membership started to slow in 1998 and worsened again in 1999. In 2001, for the first time in more than two decades, membership actually decreased (though this fact is very hard to find, it is in annual reports).

 

2001 Membership--------Members------------Units

Cub Scouts.............. Lost -3.6% ....... Lost -1.6%

Boy Scouts.............. Lost -1.2% ....... Lost -1.2%

 

The changes above are the loss of members in just one year, from 2000 to 2001. But the pattern since 1998 coincides with Scouting's very public battle against avowed gays, and while no survey or poll is likely to conclusively prove a corollary, I would ask if anyone can come up with another possible explanation.

 

The decline last year and slowed growth since 1998 has happened despite an increase in Total Available Youth (TAY) that could have joined the program, according to the US Census.

 

I suppose BSA Inc. looks at the slight loss (if you can call 1% to 3% in a single year slight) and considers it better than losing the 12.7% represented by the Mormon Church (behind the gay policy) when they abandon Scouting (I wonder if that's inevitable or just an idle threat, regardless of what BSA Inc. does on this policy).

 

I personally believe we're lucky, and the only reason the membership is holding steady (or slightly slipping) is because of the continued support of people who know the real value of Scouting.

 

I worry that the most important demographic out there should be the young parents of kids approaching the age of five, who have had no prior contact with Scouting and only know it from its positions in the news on discriminating against gays. Difference of opinion on the morality of homosexuality is very generational; you can assume that many of the young families that will be BSA Inc.'s market of the future don't agree with BSA on this issue, and without any other knowledge of the value of Scouting, I am greatly concerned that membership trends could turn dramatically south over the next five to ten years (are we already seeing this in the loss of so many more Cub Scouts than Boy Scouts in 2001?). And undoing that public image will take decades to repair.(This message has been edited by tjhammer)

[eisely]

The controversy over homosexuality has probably had some negative effect on membership. How serious this might become is anybody's guess. I have not looked at the census data, but I wonder how much the composition of the age cohort of "available youth" has shifted away from caucasian towards immigrants and other non caucasions. I tend to assume that non caucasian youth are growing more rapidly than caucasian. Maybe scouting should do a better job of reaching out to such youth.

[tjhammer]

Well, I can not disagree with the fact thatScouting should reach out more to minorities. I'm not sure that's the culprit for drop in membership, because Scouting launched an aggressive inner-city out reach nationaly in the later part of the last decade. So they're already trying to reach out more, and while I'm not sure how successful those efforts have been, I don't think we can blame our lack of action in that arena as why TAY is outpacing Scouting membership.

[Bob White]

TJ

 

You are incredible. There is (maybe) a very small reduction in membership, I notice you didn't give an information source, and you determine that there was only a single cause.

 

Then you say it must be that cause unless someone else can prove it was something else. Wait a minute! You never proved your guess!

That is really a weak premise.

 

My own district had its lowest membership gain in many years. It was caused by the loss of 8 units due to poor program, untrained leadership, and poor adult leader recruitment at the unit level.

 

We also had an unussually large number of scouts age-out of the program. WHAT? No cries of injustice toward gays or atheists? Sorry to destroy your conspiracy theories, but no not a one.

 

They were all related to mundane things like training. I don't suppose any of these elements occured to you since they are not "controlled" by the LDS church.

 

Stay focused on serving the unit TJ you really don't understand the administrative side yet.

 

Bob White

[k9gold-scout]

Recently while on the official Canadian Scout website, I read an noteworthy fact; their membership is down more than 15% over the last few years and they now accept gay scoutleaders. Is there a connection, I wonder?

[sctmom]

Bob,

Let me answer for TJ, if I may.

 

Here is the link to the official BSA website page of the Membership Numbers from 2000.

 

www.scouting.org/nav/about.html

 

I found it by going to "About BSA", "Media Center", "2000 Annual Report", "Annual Membership Summary"

 

Someone mentioned non-caucasian youth. I live in an area where the percentage of blacks is growing at a high rate, the whole population is booming. Five years ago there was 15% non-white at the elementary school, now there is over 30% non-white. The Cub Scout pack at that school has more than 70% whites. At the Boy Scouting level, the number of blacks drops even more. I know the scoutmasters are scratching their heads as to why. Our area also seems to have a growing population of mixed-race children.

 

Money? Nope, the blacks live in nicer houses and drive nicer cars than a lot of the whites. The kids are involved in the traditional sports, band, ROTC, etc. Maybe Scouting is seen as a "white" activity? Black "role models" tend to be athletes? Most of the famous Scouts we point to are white?

 

What I saw with the black boys in my Webelos den was they were more "street savvy" than the white boys. They knew more slang, much of it about "adult" subjects. They were more aware of the popular clothes. They listen to different music and watch different TV shows. The white kids didn't know what the blacks were talking about sometimes. For example the day the 4th graders were talking about "pimping".

 

TJ's original point is worth considering. I went to a private school that was created when integration was forced on the state. About 12 years later many of those private schools closed because even the people who were brought up in them, no longer saw that as a priority. My own sister is so against the BSA's gay policy, she tries to tell me to take my son out. I keep telling her that BSA does a lot more good for my son than bad.

 

 

 

[Bob White]

tj, and sctmom, thanks for the location of the stats, I'll take a look. however neither of you have offered a shred of evidence linking the membership fluctuation to the gay/atheism issue. to just say it is because it reaches the conclusion you want is not proof that that was the cause. As has been pointed ou there are other membership factors that could just as easily come into play. There is also the large canadian drop that was mentioned that took place after gay members were welcomed. Using your own logic TJ... what else could possibly have caused that other than the change in membership rules?

 

Bob

[tjhammer]

(I have no idea why Scouts Canada's membership is dropping... I know nothing about their Total Available Youth or any other possible causes... I do know that their acceptance of gays is not particulalry new, and like the British Scouting Association and most of the world, there's never really been a "ban" to overturn.)

 

Bob, I have not said that the drop in membership (for the first time in more than 20 years) was conclusively linked to Scouting's very public battle... I just said that it coincides with the timing of that battle (1998 through 2001), and I observed that younger parents may be supporting Scouting less than those with prior experience with the program. It certainly could be coincidental, but I have not yet heard another reasonable explanations.

 

Frankly, I believe Scouting's membership statistics are a complete embarrassment, and not just because we're slipping a little bit. We should be serving many, many more kids than we have been, and we should be retaining more kids for sure. The turn over rate in Scouting is high, and to maintain the membership at 3.3 million or there about, we have to rely on a huge number of new recruits every year. We brag about how our membership has climbed steady for twenty years, but in reality I wonder if it has even outpaced the population of available youth. Scouting does a poor job (and has, long before the public battle over banning gays) of getting its point across to those outside our organization. We're the finest youth development program in the world; we teach leadership, citizenship, character, personal reliance and a host of values and we do it better than any other group in America. Yet we can never manage to keep the attention of the majority of our current members or reach out to the vast population that doesn't even consider Scouting. (And Bob, before you respond and say that's not true in your unit, or your neighborhood, realize this is not a personal attack on you, just a fact, and it's supported by the numbers. And before we say "well, Scouting's just not for all kids"... surely we can agree that it ought to be for at least a much higher percentage of kids than we reach right now.) We should all be ashamed out how poorly we attract and maintain membership (the "success" we claim now is just not good enough, by any stretch of the imagination).

 

I'm very uncomfortable arguing about membership statistics and using that as a justification for correcting the wrong policy. Frankly, those that support the policy have wrapped themselves in a "well, Scouting's just as strong financially and in headcount as before" position, and I wanted to at least show the real facts dont support that.

 

However, wrong is wrong, regardless of what membership statistics tell us. The BSA policy to kick out kids and adults who avow that they are gay is harmful to Scouts. It tells a Scout who is gay (or is coming to grips with this fact) that he's the only type of human that BSA feels necessary to have a specific national expulsion for.

 

It also tells the millions of boys in the program that it's OK to discriminate against gays (I know I said this before, but we should all agree that sometimes kid don't understand the nuances of what we say and do, just the underlying message). Did you know that one of the two killers of Mathew Shephard, the boy brutally beaten in Wyoming a few years ago that got so much national attention, was in fact an Eagle Scout? Is the BSA policy teaching our kids to hate gays so much that we encourage brutal murder? No, of course not, but it is teaching that some degree of viewing gay kids as second class citizens is acceptable, and it can be a slippery slope to more profound hatred.

 

So, we can continue to review the membership statistics (which regardless of their linkage to this gay policy or not I think are worthy of concern). And we can explore all sorts of suspected causes. But in the end, I feel no more comfortable hiding behind a drop in numbers as reason for correcting a wrong policy than I am in allowing others to hide behind an increase in numbers as justification for maintaining that policy.

 

[SagerScout]

I don't know why the numbers are dropping nationwide. I DO know of ONE scout whose parents decided not to encourage continuing in Scouts in favor of youth sports, because they do not wish to teach their son that hating gay men was OK. But one scout does not a trend make.

 

Talked to one of my older son's friends about it yesterday. He quit a couple years ago, in 10th grade, was I think a Life Scout and OA member. Why quit, I asked? His mother is still active in Venturing. Well, says he, it just wasn't the same anymore. We couldn't haze the new kids anymore, we used to be able to play "catch" with the Tenderfoot Scouts (the Tenderfoot being the ball) and we could have secret meetings and tie up the new kids, and make them run and do pushups until they puked, and stuff like that. Those were just great memories. But now they won't even let us make them sing for stuff they forgot.

 

So that's why that older scout left. MY thought was that if those things were HIS fond memories of scouting, it's no wonder there aren't many young boys lining up to join.

 

[Quixote]

tj said:

"However, wrong is wrong, regardless of what membership statistics tell us. The BSA policy to kick out kids and adults who avow that they are gay is harmful to Scouts. It tells a Scout who is gay (or is coming to grips with this fact) that he's the only type of human that BSA feels necessary to have a specific national expulsion for."

 

No tj you are incorrect - there are others who are not welcome to join scouts as boys - atheist boys are not welcome in scouting either - neither are liars, theives, or others whose actions or beliefs are not in line with the scout law and oath.

 

tj also said "It also tells the millions of boys in the program that it's OK to discriminate against gays" No it doesn't - it says that avowed homosexuals are not appropriate role models for scouts - nothing more.

 

YIS

Quixote

[LongHaul]

SagerScout,

Where did you hear that the National Policy was to HATE gay men? I constantly hear about; DISCRIMINATION (negative conotation) HATEING someone with opposing view points

AN LDS "CONSPIRICY" indicating intent prior to or in conjunction with chartering troops. I frequintly find that when someone lacks solid facts or when their positions is based primarily on personal belief that they tend to attack the person(here National) when they cannot attack the argument. I never have nor would I ever allow anyone to suggest to the boys in our troop that they should HATE, DISCRIMINATE (negative conotation) AGAINST, or CASTIGATE, anyone for their lifestyle or personal choices. I also wouldn't allow telling them that they had to ACCEPT everything someone tries to force upon them.

[tjhammer]

there are others who are not welcome to join scouts as boys - atheist boys are not welcome in scouting either - neither are liars, theives, or others whose actions or beliefs are not in line with the scout law and oathYou are correct on atheists being not welcome in Scouting, that's been a fact from the very early days, when we determined a Scout was reverent. That's been a "policy" that has been very clearly expressed and is fundamental to the Oath and Law and is really not open to misunderstanding or interpretation.

 

As for Scouting banning liars, etc... you are wrong. There's no specific national policy that automatically rejects members who lie or steal. The expulsion of those members is left up to the local parents, leaders and CO to be handled on a case by case basis, factoring all the circumstances. And while I agree that liars and theives as a rule are not conducive with Scouting, there are obvious exceptions to those rules, and we've got a good mechanism for dealing with those (local control). I suggest no less of a mechanism for dealing with gay Scouts and leaders. See, here is a fundamental difference of opinion... I do not view a gay Scout as any less moral than a heterosexual Scout. I also believe that both gay and heterosexual leaders can be bad role models, and there is already a mechanism for dealing with them on a case by case basis. No it doesn't - it says that avowed homosexuals are not appropriate role models for scouts - nothing moreUnfortunately, the subtlties of that message are unclear, as is the policy itself. I assure you that the Eagle Scout who killed Matthew Shepard thought he was killing a lesser human, and it's unfortunate that Scouting reinforces that idea, even if just in a small way.(This message has been edited by tjhammer)

[Bob White]

TJ

I have not seen myself or other posters use numbers as a reason for the policy, only as proof that the devestating loss, predicted by some after the BSA vs Dale decision, has never actually occurred.

 

The BSA has always maintained that this is a private organization that has a constitutional right to set its own values and determine its own membership according to it congressional charter. It has never been a numbers game. When its membership plummeted during the Vietnam War.

It never changed its position on patriotism or the importance of the uniform. It stood by its values and waited patiently for the nation to return to scouting. Which it did.

 

If you look at the strings that discuss program rather than politics you will read several stories of scouts leaving the program due to poor leadership and poor programs not because of the BSA stance on gays. If you want to see why some scout units are always growing, while others fight to maintain membership, look inside the units NOT at national membership regulations.

 

As a side note, why hasn't anyone talked about Learning for Life, a branch of the BSA that does not require the members to subscribe to the moral values of traditional scout programs? Why is that not an acceptable option for gay and non-gay members who want to embrace the values of scouting that they agree with?

 

 

Bob White

[tjhammer]

Because Learning for Life is not the glorious game of Scouting invented by B-P and is yet another attempt by the BSA to inflate it's numbers through a watered down, semi-related program, often based in classrooms.

[eisely]

Numbers matter, but they are not the whole story, nor necessarily accurate. If I recall correctly there was a huge scandal in the 70's in the Chicago area where local leadership was pumping up membership numbers, that is, lying, to look good in national's eyes.

 

I am less concerned about the gay issue than I am about the overall quality of the program and reaching out to non-caucasian youth. Current demographic projections indicate that California will be majority latino in a few years. Scouting should find a way to make itself more interesting and relevant to these people. The conservative values of scouting are quite compatible with the world view of latinos and immigrants in general.