LogFAQs > #900674189

I wish they had girls in Boy Scouts while I was in it. It would have made for more fun 12 years of my life.

That said, I did appreciate a boy's only place growing up. It sounds like a lot of the activities will still be gender-divided though with the boys and the girls largely sharing infrastructure and organization, which sounds fine.

Personally, I think this is an overall good change. BSA as it currently exist isn't sustainable. It's never been "cool" but its numbers are dropping off. Adding girls will give it a new pool of people to recruit. It's also great for girls who wanted to do scout activities because although Girl Scouts is a perfectly decent organization, it really isn't a Boy Scout equivalent from an activities perspective.

And I know that BSA always had its Venture Scout branch that allowed girls to join but that never had the same popularity and was always an after-thought. Hopefully they can re-absorb that back into BSA proper. Some consolidation would be good to keep the BSA from getting stretched too thin.

Assuming most decent size troops operate with the standard one meeting a week and one camp-out per month set-up, I think the best scenario would be for weekly meetings to be co-ed. Since that's where the shared organizational structure and leadership would come in. From a camp-out perspective, I'd say every third camp-out should be co-ed, with the other two being split by gender. Camp-outs are where most the activities take place anyway, so you could have some boys or girls only bonding time, but still enough joint camp-outs to feel like a unified troop.
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S*** I have to stop doing that," Gheb said, as he lay back down and died again. - Forgotten Love
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