If the BSA were to provide services to girls, whats the best way?

[BDPT00]

I agree with Hobcaw regarding the "boy craziness" comment. The boys do the same. "Girl craziness" makes them act very differently than if it were just the guys hagin' around. The question then becomes "Is this good or bad?" These kids hang around each other all the time in a co-ed setting. I believe the kids need a chance to just be boys and/or just be girls without the other gender infuencing their behavior. I remember many years ago, my wife took several younger Scouts (12 & 13ish) on a week-long trip. One night they camped next to a group of girls. The mood of the entire group of Scouts changed. They became squirrelly and totally focused on the girls. The were no longer the Scouts she'd seen for several days. Now they were individuals, competing for the attention of their new-found interest. It's for this reason that I'm against co-ed NYLT and co-ed Boy Scouts. The program works. Leave it alone. If you want co-ed activities, keep trying to cooperate with Girl Scouts or Heritage Girls, 4H, or whatever. Ask educators what they know about same vs mixed gender learning environments.

BDPT00

[sheldonsmom]

I have one son and 3 daughters. We are very active in American Heritage Girls. We used to do USGSA. My son earned Eagle.

The last thing I want is to enroll my daughters into BSA. Girls and boys are different and deserve different programs.

 

My oldest DD is cooking for a BSA camp this year and is in a venturing crew. I am often uncomfortable with the co-ed nature of the venturing. It introduces elements into scouting that don't need to be there.

 

AHG works very well for my younger daughters. They florish in an enviornment that is uniquely suited to girls. They go camping. They go cycling, fishing, high adventure (just starting that!), first aid, home repairs.

 

My son would not have done well in a mixed gender group. He grew so much in a guys only situation. I cannot think that it would have worked for him as a young teen to have to compete with girls who mature fasted than he did.

 

It isn't just the LDS that would balk at combining boys and girls. Many parents of sons are tired of boys getting the short end of the stick. Schools today are geared for girls, sports teams are often co-ed, college admissions are weighted toward women. There are plenty of places that are girls only or women only. Besides BSA, what is BOYS ONLY????

[Basementdweller]

Never thought my views were that progressive.

 

I am surprised YOU let him join venturing knowing women were about.

 

People have faith in your sons and scouts, I am disappointed in the group for the lack of respect for our boys. The girls mature faster and will bully my scout not giving him the boy experience. PLEASE.

 

Did it ever occur to you that competition will make our youth better??

 

So how does a single sex program reflect and help our youth?

 

Sheldon I disagree that everything is skewed to women. I will say that if I was an African American Female in my Engineering program I could have gone free..... But I was not prevented from attending. Women are just starting to get equal opportunity.

 

(This message has been edited by Basementdweller)

[Eagle92]

There are arguments for and against going coed. And yes there is research out there on the benefits of single gender education. That's why lots of private schools are single gender.

 

I personally like the local option approach the UK did when they went coed.I saw plenty of mixed troops, and 2 male only troops. Only female only troops I encountered were Girl Guides, although one GG troop did split in half to create a girls only Scout troop a few weeks after leaving my camp

[packsaddle]

"...college admissions are weighted toward women."

I can't speak for all colleges but I think this school is fairly normal with regard to admissions and I know the criteria. There is no weighting "toward women" in any of the programs. Some programs do have a greater proportion of women but that reflects either the gender ratio of the applicants or a gender-associated ratio of academic qualifications. The dominant weighting is for well-prepared, smart people.

[sheldonsmom]

I never said the girls "will bully" my son. My husband and I gave him the choice of joining venturing when he was older and was better prepared.

As far as admissions be weighted....my son had a higher gpa in high school and a better resume but my daughter was courted by 3 schools and offered many scholarships where my son was told by one of the same colleges that they were looking for female students, not males.

 

Single sex can allow for more focused learning. As someone else pointed out, boys act squirelly around girls and vice versa.

[packsaddle]

Sheldonsmom, Without knowing ALL of their qualifications or seeing their application materials I couldn't make a good judgment with regard to your son and daughter. And, like I wrote, I can't speak for all colleges. I can say that a college that turns down a better-qualified applicant because of gender alone tends to weaken that program.

As for scholarships, it depends on the nature of the scholarship. Private ones can target whoever they want. Athletic scholarships are indeed often aimed at certain students, sometimes specifically women, and some of this is due to Title IX which was specifically aimed at bringing women's sports into some kind of parity with men's sports (which, I add, still get most of the attention among those whose idea of college is centered around sports). The athletic scholarships at this school are privately funded so they have complete discretion during recruiting.

Purely academic scholarships at this school only take academic qualifications and financial needs into account. Targeted scholarships do exist for the purpose of recruiting minorities, for example, into programs like engineering. However, those applicants must first compete for admission head-to-head with others without regard to gender or ethnicity. If they are accepted, THEN they get access to financial assistance.

If your son was the superior applicant, he will have no trouble being accepted to even better quality programs than those to which he applied. Congratulations to your daughter.

 

I add that in the past I have noted in these threads that after reviewing scores of competing projects for special recognition in the sciences (the process was blind to student names or any person information), and the selection committee having agreed on a hierarchy of merit, when we then attached names and gender to the hierarchical list, the list was almost perfectly sorted...with all of the best ones completed by females, males having been eliminated early in the competition. We were shocked the first time this happened. But over the years, we have seen this pattern each year with an occasional exceptional male (usually from another country) making it into the top group.

This is a pattern that I also observe in my classes. Women are not necessarily the best of the class but they are consistently more represented in the top group.

 

I repeat these things because again, I think that if the males were isolated from these excellent young women, I doubt their academic performance would improve. On the contrary, I think it is good for them to know they just got their academic butts kicked by the women. Maybe they'll grow up, leave the skate board and games at home, and learn something from the women who DO take learning seriously.(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

 

Naaaaahhhh!(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

[LIBob]

Sheldonsmom wrote:

"Single sex can allow for more focused learning. As someone else pointed out, boys act squirelly around girls and vice versa.

 

 

Bing bing bing bing

 

An since going co-ed can sometimes cause major (and not always positive) changes perhaps it wodl be a bd idea to force every troop, even those that are working to go co-ed.

 

Perhaps it would be a bad idea to prohibit future scouts from joing a fully-functional boys troop.

 

Heck even if making scouts co-ed change NOTHING about scouting proper, it woud certainy be a really major and irreversible marketing makover.

 

 

There used to be ~2 million boy scouts, and a commensurte number of families camping in and visiting naitonal parks. Now BSA enrollment has dropped 10% (while outdoor-oriented families have dropped 20-30%.)

 

I just don't understand the folks who look at that and start and start clamoring for a radical re-do of scouting philosophy.

 

 

Gee my son's troop's membership is UP 20% in recent years.

 

If a 10% drop calls for a radical makeover what does a 20% increase mean? Instead of outlawing troops like my son's perhaps we should outlaw every other kind of troop.

[Mr. Boyce]

If the girls were allowed into the Boy Scouts, you would find that troop leadership would become mostly female, with boys kicking cans, starting fires and getting into trouble at the periphery.

 

Big developmental differences at that age. Check out the studies that have been done.

 

I'd keep with the approach we've always had. I think it was set up for the right reasons, and those reasons still make sense today.

 

I'm sympathetic, though, to girls wanting a serious outdoor program. I don't have a good answer for that other than maybe knocking on the doors of the Girl Scout headquarters.

[Pint]

One of the problems with the BSA going co-ed is in with name Boy Scouts.

In the UK we have (had?) been slowly drifting towards going fully co ed for some years.

first there was a name change in the late 1960's from the Boy Scout Association to just the Scout Association with Wolf Cubs, Boy Scouts and Rover Scouts being replaced with Cubs, Scouts, and Venture Scouts, then the upper Venture Scout section went Co-ed sometime in the 1970's, not much changed on that side of things until the early 1990's when Scout groups could allow girls to join, although this was optional and depended upon the Scout group.

However in 2007 all Scout Groups had to accept girls , and the option to remain boy only was removed, Leaders who refuse to allow girls to join are no longer welcomed.

[qwazse]

Have the fun of being a crew advisor is handing out membership cards to young women, shaking their hand, and saying, "Welcome to the Boy Scouts of America."

 

I don't think any name change is necessary. The young women who join this program (through the few channels they are permitted to do so) are proud of the association.

 

 

 

[MarinesWife]

We would not be interested in a co-ed program for Cub Scouts. Boys are different. They're goofy and funny and silly and are interested (generally) in different things than girls. Yes, the boys are all even different from one another, but in general, they are all different and act different than the girls.

 

We are part of an American Heritage Girl Troop. In 2009, BSA and AHG signed a Memorandum of Mutual Support. That's your answer to co-ed packs...start an AHG troop and get the girls outside and busy!

[IM_Kathy]

having been involved with GS for going into 12 years and BSA for going into 9 years and being a leader with both I'm alllllllll for it - though it won't happen in time for my kids.

 

best way to do it IMO is to have packs co-ed, but allow for dens to be gender specifc... and then when they cross over the patrols can be gender specific. And allow the small towns/troops/packs to have co-ed dens/patrols if needed. They all have same rank/advancement requirements. They all have same merit badges.

 

To answer the question of why your daughter is welcomed into cub den/pack meetings, but your son isn't in return... the biggest reason is that GS is not a "family program" like cubs and we have to pay extra insurance for "tag-alongs"

[Eagle92]

I am now coming up with reservations for going coed after this past week. We had 2 female youth staff members, both of whom had their dads also working camp. While one girl was with her dad all the time and some challenges were nipped in the bud, the other was working with her Venturing AA, and there were some issues of the male youth staff hanging around her and not doing their jobs.

 

In reference to female leaders, I had 2. One was awesome, worked with the youth and really made an impression on them. Also got them pumped up about camping. She didn't have kids and was the closest to their age on the adult staff, being in her 20s. The other female leader was older, had kids at camp, and when the kids came to her station, she mothered them. She actually wanted the DCs to build all the projects for the CS,letting the Cubs only paint the projects, b/c it would be 'too difficult for them"

 

So right now I am starting to have some reservations again.

[Eagledad]

You remind me of my first year as a scouter when we took our Webelos to summer camp. One of the mothers of anther Webelos den was very attractive by the opinions of most of the males and very comfortable with the attention she was getting from the Boy Scout age male staff. It created enough of a stir that a complaint was given to the camp director of the less attentive life guards in the swimming area when this den leader's den was down there.

 

I also had a friend who quit their Venture Crew because he was tired of dealing with scouts sneaking to other tents in the middle of the night. He kept his tent between the boys and the girls to stop the late night visits, but he never got any sleep. And then finally, I was talking to a professional a few years back joking about such problems in coed programs and he told me that there are what they call "boy scout babies" in our Council.

 

Its not as easy as it sounds. I found volunteering at church youth camp a very exhausting job for the same reason.

 

Barry