girl scout breakthrough

It looks like Evangeline is going to be in Girl Scouts after all.

After a year of frustration with the area Girl Scouts council, I finally got a break last week when the mother of one of Evangeline's classmates contacted them about starting a Daisy Troop at the charter school. My wife happened to overhear her talking with the teacher about finding other parents who might be interested in helping, a co-leader being necessary for the troop, and put us in touch. We met Tuesday with a representative of the council, and voilá! It happens.

If all goes well -- meaning I get two people to write me references, and the troop leader does the same, we should have a troop up and running by March.

As a guy, I (surprisingly, I'm sure) know little about Girl Scouts, so the next few months are likely to be full of surprises. It's been informative so far. The troop is limited to 10 to 12 girls, unless we get more parents to volunteer, in which case we can add five or six girls per regularly present adult. The meetings will run one hour, probably biweekly, with membership costing $10 a girl.

Usually the troop turns to parents to ask them to support the troop financially, like buying its supplies and funding its outings, but we're also allowed to turn to nonprofits in the community and ask them for one-time donations. This keeps us from nickel-and-diming the girls out of Scouts, since there's usually some cost associated with meetings, above and beyond the stuff like getting uniforms and merit badges, or whatever the Girl Scout equivalent is.

In hindsight a lot of this makes sense and explains why there were no troops in the area that Evangeline could join. Since a troop needs a sponsor, such as a church or civic organization like the Rotary Club, the sponsors usually are going to put some sort of limits in place on membership, either because of a volunteer shortage, or because of liability issues. A student at the charter school already is covered by the school's insurance when its clubs meet; someone from outside the school would lack that protection, putting the school at tremendous risk if something happens. (And you know it will.)

Growing up in the Cub Scouts, I always thought of Pack 412 as the Saunders Station troop, and I suppose it was, but we had pack meetings at the Lions building, because the Lions Club (I presume) was our sponsor. Of course, that was also a different era, when we were far less litigation-prone, so the rules might have been a little different.

Angela, the council liaison whom we met, said she's known other men to be involved with Girl Scouting, but it's still a relatively rare phenomenon. I'm sure with the dearth of volunteers they're glad just to have someone stepping up to the plate, though to be sure, if that's the case I have no idea why they didn't respond to my offers to help lead a troop earlier. Maybe it's because I didn't have an institutional sponsor behind me? Could be, although it would have been nice to have been told that.

So there you have it. I'm the first member of my family in at least two generations to become involved in Girl Scouts, an innovation keeping in line with my being the first one in my family to get my ear pierced, and the first to have a woman on my side of the wedding party.

This will be a good opportunity, not only for Evangeline to deepen her friendships with her classmates, but for me to deepen my ties and understanding of the city where we live.