Thousands of girls are becoming Cub Scouts

DURHAM, N.H. — Ten-year-old twins Tatum and Ian Weir aren’t about to let matching, minor injuries deter them from their goal of becoming the first sister-brother pair of Eagle Scouts.

“I cut myself, too!” Tatum said, pausing only briefly during a recent Cub Scout meeting to touch her thumb to her brother’s before continuing on with a woodworking project.

New Hampshire’s Daniel Webster Council, which includes Durham’s Pack 154, is among more than 170 nationwide participating in an early adopter program as the Boy Scouts of America begins welcoming girls into the organization in new ways.

The soft launch followed the Boy Scouts’ announcement in October that it would begin admitting girls into the Cub Scouts starting later this year and would establish a new program next year for older girls based on the Boy Scout curriculum.

“We heard from our families, ‘OK, you’ve made the decision, can you please give us a way to do this right now because we’ve got families and daughters that are just really excited about it,” said Boy Scouts spokeswoman Effie Delimarkos.

“We heard that so much that we decided to kick off this early adopter program with the understanding that a lot of the materials we’re working on, in terms of uniforms and handbooks and so forth were still in development,” she said. “But folks were very understanding. They just wanted to be able to start.”

About two-thirds of councils nationwide signed up, bringing roughly 3,000 girls into the Cub Scouts so far, she said. Under the new plan, Cub Scout dens — the smallest unit — will be single-gender, either all boys or all girls. The larger Cub Scout packs will have the option to remain single-gender or not.

Scouting leaders have some leeway, particularly in smaller communities.

In Durham, for example, den leader Tuck Pescosolido recently led a group of four girls and four boys as they built wooden toolboxes. As the project got underway, the girls raised their hands and waited to be called on, while the boys were somewhat silly, cracking jokes about flying airplanes when asked about drilling pilot holes. But once they settled into the activity, things leveled out.

“I didn’t want to stereotype. But yes, I did expect perhaps the girls would be a little bit calmer, would be a little bit perhaps easier to manage in my role as the den leader, and to a certain extent that has played out,” Pescosolido said.