- Associated Press - Sunday, January 5, 2020

MURPHYSBORO, Ill. (AP) - In February, four girls from Holly Wolfe’s Murphysboro Cub Scout pack will walk across a ceremonial bridge marking their transition into the Boy Scouts of America.

It will be the first time Wolfe has ever promoted females within the program.

Since then, Southern Illinois has inaugurated three girl troops alongside its dozens of existing boy troops: one each in Christopher, Marion and Carbondale.

The Murphysboro troop, which Wolfe hoped to have enrolled and organized before the New Year, will be the fourth.

Her immediate priority is bolstering its numbers.

In a traditional promotion ceremony, Cub Scouts are met by their new Boy Scout troop when they cross the ceremonial bridge.

Wolfe doesn’t want her girls to step off that bridge alone.

“We want to have someone there to say: ’Welcome,’” she said.

On Dec. 16, she and the other future leaders of the Murphysboro girl troop, Laura and Drew Mifflin, visited every P.E. class at Murphysboro Middle School, spreading the word to girls 11 and up.

That evening, about seven young women came back to school with their parents to sign up, giving Wolfe confidence she’ll have a troop up and ready to welcome her girls.

“This program wasn’t offered to me” as a young woman, Wolfe said. “Now, me seeing both sides of this, I’m able to tell them: ‘You can do the same things they can.’ I don’t want them ever doubting themselves.”

The announcement that Scouts would welcome girls wasn’t a big surprise in Southern Illinois.

It had been a topic of discussion and debate for years, said Chuck Wiese, scoutmaster of the Marion boy troop 7042B and a co-leader of the Marion girls troop 7042G, which began in May.

Wiese joined Scouts for his son over 20 years ago. No other activity, he felt, instilled the same blend of leadership, teamwork and citizenship development.

“I always felt our program would be valuable to girls just as well as boys,” he said. “I know other scouters that are still coming around, so to speak, to seeing we’re part of a scouting movement - that worldwide, most scouting programs are coed.”

There had long been interest from girls, Wiese and other local leaders agree, especially the sisters of scouts who tagged along to BSA activities and family campouts.

“We’d have the girls, they’d come with their brothers and we’d allow them to participate in all the same things, but they could not earn the same recognition,” Wolfe said. “It just felt wrong.”

Madison Bell, 14, who showed up to the Murphysboro sign-up night, remembers following her brother on scouting hikes and camp outs for years.

“I’ve always been outdoors person so I loved going camping and building the fires and watching them do all of it, and I learned myself,” she said. “I couldn’t do some of the things that my brother got to do, and so now I can, and I want to take the opportunity.”

Some European countries have fully coed scouting programs, but in Boy Scouts of America, girls are organized into separate-but-equal troops with the same tasks, standards and merit badges as boys.

Troops may do occasional events together, said Rick Morse, the district executive for the Big Muddy District, which oversees scouting in Perry, Jackson, Johnson, Union, Pulaski and Alexander counties, but the girls are their own unit, with their own female leadership, their own planning and their own meetings and activities.

The separation is about safety and comfort, but also largely about helping the boys along, local leaders said.

“It’s about who’s going to step up and run over each other, and unfortunately, studies have shown that in those early scouting years, the girls are going to step up and take the lead, and that’s going to leave the boys behind, and that’s not what we are wanting,” Wolfe said.

Ten months after girls were integrated into the BSA, they represent less than 1% of all the 38,850 Scouts in the Greater St. Louis Area Council, which covers 63 counties including Southern Illinois, according to the council’s marketing director, Dave Chambliss.

Meanwhile, new-Scout enrollment and total enrollment are down overall this year.

However, at the Cub Scout level, girls are having a much bigger impact on numbers. For every girl that has joined the BSA in the council’s coverage area, about eight more have joined a Cub Scout pack.

The inclusion of girls has substantially grown the Murphysboro pack (which also serves girls from De Soto and Ava), and today girls represent about 25 out of Wolfe’s 60-strong pack.

As Murphysboro prepares to have its own girl BSA troop, girl troops are also in the works in Carterville and Anna.

Morse expects that growth to continue.

“I think in the next couple of years, we’re going to see in every community where we currently have a scout troop, we’re going to have a girl troop as well,” he said.

Girls are not the only new entrants into Boy Scouts, an organization steeped in tradition that has been forced to reexamine its own morals in recent years.

It drew widespread criticism for its ban of homosexuals, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, a 2000 lawsuit brought by a troop leader who was expelled for coming out as gay.

Facing pressure from leaders including then-President Barack Obama, the Scouts’ National Council removed all sexuality-based restrictions on youth membership in January 2014. The ban on homosexual adult leaders was removed in late July 2015. In early 2017, the BSA’s Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh released a video declaring the acceptance of transgender members.

Some, like the organization Scouts for Equality, continue to push the group to broaden its religious acceptance by revising its Declaration of Religious Principle, which requires “recognizing an obligation to God.”

Morse supports the changes that have been made to open scouting to more families.

He and other local leaders look forward to awarding the first female Eagle Scout in Southern Illinois.

Considered the highest achievement in scouting, the rank requires years of dedication and at least 21 merit badges, earned in everything from camping, to first aid, fitness and community service.

In Southern Illinois, that trailblazer might well be Emily Kucharski, of Marion.

After years of tagging along with her older brother, Kucharski joined Venturing, a coed outdoors program separate from scouting that the BSA created in 1998.

Now, the 18-year-old is the oldest girl in the Marion girl troop.

The BSA has made special accommodations for older girls like Kucharski, recognizing that some are joining scouting without a fair chance to make Eagle Scout before turning 18, the traditional deadline.

Kucharski applied for and received an extension, and now has until June 2021.

Since her troop was founded in May, Kucharski has already earned five merit badges, a pace that has her well on track to meet her goal.

Personally, she said, she’d like to see more integration between boy and girl troops.

“I think it would be fine,” she said. “Boys start looking at us and saying, ‘OK they really are supposed to be doing this.’”

Mostly, Kucharski said, she and other local girls have felt welcomed by the Boy Scouts in Southern Illinois.

But she has also faced resistance, including a confrontation with an adult volunteer at a scouting summer camp, who told her over and over that he hated the idea of girls in scouting.

“That’s the world we live in right now, and I’m not going to let them push me down.” she said. “I can’t wait to see the look on their faces when I achieve Eagle.”

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