By DON FLETCHER
News Staff Writer
Local Cub Scout and Boy Scout leaders are upset that an article in last week’s Atmore News labeled the organization’s September 19 open house as the “unveiling of the ‘new’ Scout hut,” which recently underwent a major renovation.
The event was actually not to show off the refurbished building, they said, but to try and convince boys and girls to take up Scouting and join either Cub Scouts Pack 275 or Boy Scouts Troop 26, depending on the youngster’s age.
“The article in the Newspaper and Facebook is incorrect about our Troop / Pack and the ScoutHut,” wrote Wanda Gibbs, who serves as Committee Chairman, Advancement Chairman of both the Troop and the Pack, and Arrow Of Light leader for the pack. “Our open house was for recruitment. It had nothing to do with the renovation of the building.”
(Arrow of Light is the top rank a Cub Scout can achieve, making it the rough equivalent of an Eagle Scout. Gaining the designation readies a 5th-grader for the move up to Boy Scout level.)
With only one potential recruit attending the September 19 event, local Scouting leaders talked extensively about the renovated building and only sparingly of recruitment of Scouts.
Mrs. Gibbs said the local Scouting presence has grown, although the trend over the past five decades among international Scouting organizations has been the opposite.
“This year we gained four youth and one adult,” she reported.
According to Scouting America’s website, membership in Scouting peaked in 1972 at almost 5 million boys. Girls have been allowed to join since 2019, but membership that stood at 2 million in 2018 currently stands at slightly more than a million youngsters, including more than 176,000 girls and young women.
Mrs. Gibbs bemoaned the scheduling mistake that set the open house for the same night as one of the community’s most popular events.
“Every year in September we have two or three open houses trying to recruit youth and adults to join,” she explained. “The council prints fliers for us and we distribute them to the local schools. This year we made the mistake of picking the same date as Taste of the South. By the time we realized it, it was too late to cancel; fliers had been distributed.”
She added that the local Cub Scout pack and Boy Scout troop, which are chartered by First United Methodist Church, still plan to show off the work done on the building.
“We will have an open house to show off the renovations soon, but last Thursday was not it,” she said. “We have had many calls and texts as to why we did not invite parents, friends, etc. to the open house.”