[j2kun]

As a Boy Scout we often had sisters of scouts come along on our outings. Half the time one or more parents would come, and it just makes more sense. "Admitting" them as full members is just a formalism on top of the core experience, so why not?

Also, it's a shame that these girls don't feel like girl scouts does enough for their sense of adventure and play. The girl scouts should also step up to accommodate them. And I think the girls are right on this one, the Girl Scouts websites in all regions I've checked in the last ten minutes have the primary events being "fun-filled festivals" and "leadership conferences" and "arts and crafts workshops." The images are girls holding rainbow parachutes instead of hard hats, fish, and model rockets like on the BSA websites.

[ja27]

There's no reason a Girl Scout troop can't do all sorts of adventure activities. My wife led a troop that did all their meetings at a GS camp where they usually cooked over a campfire as part of each meeting.

The biggest blow to Girl Scouts is how they're organized. They're almost always single-age troops, which means there's no scout-to-scout mentoring and there are a lot less scouts per unit. It's much harder to keep a troop alive as the girls get older and there's a lot of consolidation. It's hard to grow new leaders when you only have a dozen parents involved in each unit. Then when a troop breaks up or ages out, the leaders almost always leave scouting.

I've been told it's possible to have a single Girl Scout unit with multiple ages, but I've never seen that. The best I've seen is a couple individual troops that share a common meeting time and place.

For example, my daughter's been in two Girl Scout troops. One is "huge" especially for high school aged girls and has maybe 15 girls from 13 to 15. That troop has had 3 official leaders in the 8 or so years it's been around. Her other troop folded once it dropped to three girls. My son's Boy Scout troop has over 100 boys from ages 11 to 17 and has at least a dozen adults in leadership roles and dozens more registered + background checked "at large" leaders to draw from.

[dctoedt]

>>> The biggest blow to Girl Scouts is how they're organized.

My wife has expressed the same sentiment. She was a leader in our daughter's Girl Scout troop, which had maybe a dozen or so girls and fell apart as the girls got to middle school and high school.

In contrast, our son's Boy Scout troop is currently over 80 years old and has some 250 to 300 registered Scouts and maybe 50 fully-trained adult leaders (including a number of moms).

My wife said that the biggest difference she saw between the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts was that Boy Scout troops are chartered to an organization (typically a church), whereas GS troops are all formed ad hoc.

[kaitai]

I tried to join the Girl Scouts and did some similar group activities through 4H. I wanted to learn about fire and camping, and after a session of gluing plastic rhinestones to cups or something and then the promise of learning how to do my hair I quit. How boring & frustrating, and not at all what I'd read about in my mom's Girl Scout Handbook. It was full of information on trail signs and semaphore and how to build a fire and waterproof your tent and Morse code and knots.