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Some time ago, I read a book titled \u201cIs Marriage for White People?<\/a>\u201d which used that clever title to entice readers into a book on the decline of marriage among blacks.\u00a0 As I recall, it was not trapped in the accusations of \u201cblack women are welfare queens who want Uncle Sam to provide for them\u201d but had a lot of food for thought.\u00a0 I thought I had blogged about it, but it seems this was a pre-blogging book.<\/p>\n I\u2019m reminded of that because of another \u201cfor white people\u201d item:\u00a0 Scouting, and Cub\/Boy Scouting in particular.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what has me thinking about it:\u00a0 I am the committee chair for the Cub Scout pack chartered by our parochial school.\u00a0 To the east and the west of us are two packs nominally chartered by churches but in practice operating for the benefit of boys from the public schools.\u00a0 It\u2019s all very middle class; the apartment-dwelling families exist but are pretty few in number.<\/p>\n To the south is another school, in an upper-middle-class neighborhood just like ours.\u00a0 Their school has no affiliated Cub Scout pack, and the question arose of whether we, as a smaller pack, should invite these families to join up with us.\u00a0 I did some looking into this over the weekend, and found out from the leaders of the west-of-us and the east-of-us packs that they had invited boys from this school, but got little to no response, and the pack that had been at that school, had folded some years ago due to lack of volunteers.<\/p>\n So I looked around on the internet, and I looked at the school itself.\u00a0 Although it\u2019s located in a middle-class neighborhood, it has little in common with the east\/west schools.\u00a0 It\u2019s in a wholly different school district, due to the fact that, around here, school districts have little to do with city boundaries.\u00a0 Our school district has 3% of children in poverty.\u00a0 The south school\u2019s school district has 59% of children living in poverty, and at this particular school, the rate is 66%.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, the school is 59% Hispanic, and has a large number of recent immigrants.\u00a0 (No links intentionally.)\u00a0 Looking at the school attendance boundaries, the immediate neighborhood is only a small part of the school\u2019s population and the school is at the very edge of its attendance area; the remainder is primarily a long stretch of apartment complexes along a stretch of road populated with Hispanic and Polish shops.\u00a0 If I look at the overall boundary map, the schools\u2019 boundaries are very quirky; perhaps they were\u00a0drawn to \u201cfairly\u201d allocate poor and immigrant families among the various schools in the district.<\/p>\n So it immediately makes sense to me that an invitation to an immigrant family to join a Cub Scout pack in what amounts to the next town over would be a hard sell.\u00a0 Why more parents from that \u201cgood\u201d neighborhood didn\u2019t take up the invitation I don\u2019t know, unless it\u2019s a matter of those parents being disengaged from the school and its activities because they feel like, in the school environment, they would have to carry the entire volunteer burden.<\/p>\n But that context led me to look at the overall issue of scout recruiting.\u00a0 How does one provide scouting opportunities to these boys? \u2014 and I\u2019m speaking not just of this particular school, but of immigrant kids in general.\u00a0 After all, part of the reasoning behind the new \u201cgirl Cub Scouts\u201d is the outreach to Hispanic and Asian families, based on an understanding that, at least according to their analysis, they wanted activities that the whole family could do together.\u00a0 In the presentation we viewed at our \u201croundtable\u201d the specific example was given of Cub Scout meetings that took place with the whole group, and with different dens splitting up for den-specific activities within that larger meeting.\u00a0 (At least, that\u2019s how I understood it.)<\/p>\n But even with this model, there have to be adult leaders.\u00a0 Cub Scouts isn\u2019t just a \u201cthing\u201d that happens on it\u2019s own, nor is it like civic leaders nagging a grocery store chain to open up a location in a poor area.\u00a0 Scouting needs volunteers.\u00a0 In fact, while a Girl Scout troop can set up shop with a single White-Savior woman coming in as a good deed, say, to an immigrant community center, as described in this 2016 Atlantic article<\/a>\u00a0(which features just a lone troop leader leading the girls in crafts projects and citing\u00a0hopes for summer camping), a Cub Scout pack needs an assortment of leaders:\u00a0 Cubmaster, Committee Chair, Treasurer, den leaders, and enough assorted adults to meet two-deep leadership requirements at all activities.<\/p>\n Summer camping, too, in Girl Scouts is managed at the council level:\u00a0 sign your daughter up for a session and you\u2019re set \u2014 which makes it possible for some charitable organization or another to \u201csend a girl to camp\u201d with donations.\u00a0 At the Boy Scouts, boys go camping with their troops, which, again, requires leaders\/parent volunteers to make it happen.<\/p>\n So take a look at these maps:<\/p>\n The first is our general suburban area.<\/p>\n The second is\u00a0the west side\u00a0of Chicago:<\/p>\n And the third, the south side of Chicago:<\/p>\n Because, yes, if you know me, you know that I can spend way too much time studying maps.\u00a0 In the first case, the \u201cvoid\u201d is due to an area with lost of nature areas, commercial areas, and very low density zoning.\u00a0 In the second and third maps, there is, so far as I can tell, no such convenient explanation, except that these are poor\/immigrant areas.<\/p>\n But what do you do about this?<\/p>\n The BSA national organization is trying.\u00a0 After all, they think that they have an organization that meshes with the values that Hispanic families want for their children.\u00a0 \u00a0In an undated publication<\/a>, they say,<\/p>\n The Boy Scouts of America is fortunate to have a mission statement, Scout Oath, and Scout Law consistent with the values and principles cherished by most Hispanic Americans. The concept of \u201chelping others at all times\u201d reinforces the Hispanic cultural belief of caring and showing respect toward others, especially those who are less fortunate. \u201cDuty to God and country\u201d is another Scouting ideal consistent with the qualities that Hispanic Americans expect of their young people: God-fearing, patriotic, drug-free and gang-free, responsible young citizens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"Scout](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2017\/10\/Scout-map-1.jpg\")
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