All together now: North Bay girls' den fights for inclusion in Boy Scouts

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When Danelle Jacobs marched her small den of aspiring Cub Scouts into her local official supply store asking for official Boy Scouts of America olive green pants, the staff was taken aback. The kids following Jacobs, after all, were not little boys; they were girls. But if you ask Jacobs, that shouldn't matter. Each member of the Unicorns, as the den calls itself, are just as worthy of badges as any little boy.

Lots of other community members would probably say that too. The Unicorns attend their Cub Scout pack meetings regularly, and are building their wilderness skills just like the boys.

However, they are not boys, and even after receiving numerous rounds of approval from local BSA leaders and officials since they were buying their own uniforms over a year ago, the Unicorns have been effectively terminated, primarily because, as the BSA told SFGATE, “the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts programs are designed for boys and young men.”

Nevertheless, while Jacobs’ 10-year-old daughter Ella probably knew she wasn't like the other Cub Scouts, she had still long been a fan of scouting. She frequently tagged along to her older brother’s pack meetings and family-friendly events, and eventually decided she wanted to become a Scout herself. As most young females her age might do, she joined the Girl Scouts. However, she quickly found that the program wasn’t a good fit for her.

"At Cub Scout camp during free time, everybody plays Capture the Flag, for example. They have full roam and they play Hide & Seek in the woods and run around and be kids," Jacobs explains. The Girl Scout camp, however, she remembers quite differently. "After lunch, you take a nap for an hour. You sit on your bunk and you can read or color or write a letter to a friend. You can't talk."

That was one of many instances that drove Ella's interest towards the Boy Scouts. Eventually she, along with four other young girls, formed their own group led by Jacobs in September of 2014.

With experience running both Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts troops, and a husband who is currently serving as Boy Scouts Council Commissioner for the Northern California-based Redwood Empire Council, Danelle Jacobs decided to make the Unicorns as official as they could be: by forming what is called a Companion Council, or a group of children loosely affiliated with the organization who are not officially registered Scouts.

“We were trying to come up with a way to allow girls to participate [by coming] up with a program for all the little sisters who are sitting in the back tagging along,” Jacobs says, adding that they knew the organization would not welcome them as official Scouts.

Still, the Unicorns aspire to be the model of what a Cub Scout den should be. Though most (but not all) of their uniforms are unofficial, they are just as serious as any other den. “They go to the pack meetings, they do the same curriculum, and they earn little patches that are available online to anybody.”

The Unicorns even went to Camporee, an annual regional gathering where official Scouts participate in a friendly competition using their wilderness skills. The five Unicorns joined their local Cub Scout pack (and their older sisters joined Jacobs’ son’s Boy Scout troop) to compete in this year’s event, which drew more than 200 young campers. It was, as Jacobs recalled, a huge success. For their age group, “they took second place overall; the older girls took third,” she says. “They just mopped the boys.”

The Unicorns had a great time. “I had one of my girls say to me, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done,’” Jacobs remembers. “That was fabulous.”

But despite Camporee’s existence as an event generally exclusive to boys, the Unicorns hadn’t attempted to attend the event in secret. Jacobs and her husband Brian took preemptive action to make sure the girls wouldn’t face any trouble for participating as a companion group. They called the Camp Director, Peggy Bimbi, who, luckily, responded positively to the idea of integrating a couple co-ed teams this year.

But less than six months later, the girls’ den would be suddenly forced to disband. After Camporee, Jacobs and her husband were asked on multiple occasions to present their program to Boy Scout councils. The Jacobs had always welcomed the opportunity to discuss the Unicorns, describing their female-inclusive program as a way to help revive the rapidly declining number of new scout memberships. The councilors’ responses had usually been very positive and encouraging.

“We said, here is our program, it has been going on for a year, and we’ve had these ten girls participating,” she says, referring both to the Unicorns and their older sisters. “This is something you might want to think about for your troop or pack because we all know the numbers of Boy Scouts are plummeting, and this is a way to represent Scouting as a family organization and something you can do with your entire family.”

As she remembers, the reply was again supportive — but not for long. Shortly after, Jacobs and her husband were again asked to present the Unicorns’ program in a formal capacity. On October 1, the Jacobs met with their area representative and several others. This meeting, however, did not go like the others.

“He basically told us to shut down the program, because, and he said [this], because they are girls,” Jacobs recalls.

“We said to Al [Westburg, the Boy Scouts’ official area representative], you need to tell us who is going to call these parents and tell them because they’re girls they can no longer participate in what they’ve successfully been doing for a year. I’m not making those phone calls. And we have never heard from him.”

Herb Williams, the current vice president of district operations (and former president) of the Redwoods Empire Council, remembers the presentation in a different light. Careful to state that he is a proponent for inclusion in programs like Venturing for older girls, Williams says his objection was due to a lack of insurance safety precautions in place, not due to the fact that the Unicorns are girls. “I feel sorry for the girls involved because they’re not protected,” he says.

Jacobs, however, maintains that the girls’ safety was accounted for due to their involvement with Learning for Life, a program affiliated with the BSA that, among other things, offers children this sort of insurance when it comes to the sorts of activities they were doing. The BSA has, as of press time, has not confirmed that the organization received Jacobs' paperwork or that in 2015 liability insurance was included for Learning for Life events, but a file obtained from the official Scouting website infers that insurance was at least offered as lately as 2013. The organization’s official response to this inquiry was a reiteration that “insurance coverage is important,” but that the key point it would like to make is that “the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts programs are designed for boys and young men, ages 7-18.”

Williams also maintains that he told the Jacobs family on that day to take their program to the Boy Scouts of America administrators and that “whatever National approves, I will approve.” Jacobs admits that while that statement was posed to her and her husband, she understood that to be a lengthy process. “The feeling we got was we were told to discontinue the program, but that that might be something to pursue in the future,” she says.

It seems that that journey might have been fruitless anyway. In a response to SFGATE about this story, the Boy Scouts of America stated, “we understand that the values and the lessons of Scouting are attractive to the entire family, however, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts are year-round programs for boys and young men in the first grade through age 18.” The organization acknowledged that the unit “was not following the Boy Scouts of America program and eligibility requirements,” and that it is “currently working with the families involved to review the BSA’s policies and procedures and discuss alternative programs available.”

Still, from a global perspective, the whole ordeal seems to warrant confusion. The United States is one of only a few countries that don’t allow little girls to become Cub Scouts, like Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, and more nations around the world do. It may be partially because of this exclusion that the BSA’s number of Scouts are floundering. The organization suffered a 7.4% decline in memberships in 2014 compared to 2013. Compare that significant fall to the numbers recorded the same year by the U.K.’s co-ed Scouts, who have seen a massive uptick in registered members over the last ten years and you might see where Jacobs and the Unicorns are coming from.

“At some point, it kind of begs the question: why isn’t the Boy Scouts of America co-ed like everybody else?” Jacobs asks.

Two members of the Unicorns.

In the U.S., Jacobs and her daughter Ella’s plight isn’t a new one. In 1991, an 8-year-old girl named Margot Mankes and her family sued the Boy Scouts for gender discrimination when she was told she couldn’t join after slipping through the registration process. There are more too. The Nevada 7, Marystephanie “Toffie” Constantikes, and Carrie Crossman have also all labored against the Scouts’ “tradition-oriented” exclusive membership rules. Jacobs and her daughter Ella’s group are just one example.

Like some girls before them, the Jacobs family is quick to note that they don’t have a problem with the Girl Scouts. Danelle Jacobs, who is a former Girl Scout, says that they just feel that at this point, the Boy Scout program is a better fit for her family’s interests, and that the program they’re designing is a smart alternative to the rank-focused model of the Scouts — for girls and boys. “This would be a good option because it doesn’t focus on rank. We do the fun stuff,” she explains. “It’s not necessarily just a girl program — it could easily be for girls or boys — I just happen to have five girls at this point in time.”

And by now, the girls are ready to become fully-fledged Scouts come Spring — if the BSA will have them. “Mid-March is traditionally when Cub Scouts would bridge into a Boy Scout troop,” Jacobs says. “I know my daughter really thinks she’s headed to Boy Scouts, so those are some bigger issues. For now, we’re just going along.”