Boy Scouts of America to change its name to Scouting America

The Associated Press reported over the weekend that The Boy Scouts of America will be changing its name for the first time in its 114-year history.

The new moniker will become Scouting America, marking what’s been a shifting focus in recent years to address a “more inclusive brand of scouting,” one that’s seen more than a few changes in the last decade as it slowly emerged from a bankruptcy fueled by countless court settlement payouts that emerged from decades of child sexual abuse claims that surfaced against the organization a few years back.

As to its changing focus on inclusion, the Irving-based organization steeped in tradition has made seismic changes in recent years the AP report said, from allowing gay youth and leaders to take part —a multiyear approval process that began in 2012 and saw other incremental changes made over the next three years—to its welcoming of girls into its ranks in 2018, which included opening their highest and most respected rank of Eagle Scout to girls.

Nearly 1,000 young women were in the inaugural class of female Eagle Scouts in 2021, the AP reported.

Although the last one was far more subtle, this is actually the second name change the Boy Scouts have seen in the past five years. The first came in 2019, when it went from Boy Scouts of America to the more abbreviated, tri-lettered title of Scouts BSA.

Technically, those three ending letters, much like KFC, FFA or HEB, now serve as the titles of their respective institutions; they are merely letters that aren’t short for anything anymore.

With their eye on several decades of flagging membership numbers, organization leaders announced the latest name change, Scouting America, at its May 7 annual meeting of Scouts BSA held in Florida last week.

In the next 100 years, we want any youth in America to feel very, very welcome to come into our programs,” said Roger Krone, who took over last fall as BSA president and chief executive officer.

Names weren’t the only things changing.

The organization began allowing gay youth in 2013 and ended a blanket ban on gay adult leaders in 2015. In 2017, it made the historic announcement that girls would be accepted as Cub Scouts as of 2018 and into the flagship Boy Scout program — renamed Scouts BSA — in 2019.

“You could see a change in the attitude of some of the doubters who weren’t sure and they realized, wait, these kids are exactly the same, they just happen to have ponytails,” said Bob Brady, a New Jersey attorney whose two daughters are now among the 13 girls in his troop and 6,000 girls nationwide who have achieved the vaunted Eagle Scout rank.

Like other organizations, the scouts lost members during the pandemic, when participation ceased for several months. After a highpoint over the last decade of over 2 million members in 2018, the organization currently services just over 1 million youth, including more than 176,000 girls and young women. Membership peaked in 1972 at almost 5 million.

One of the biggest downsides to their acceptance of girls into the organization came in the form of further strained bonds with the Girl Scouts of the USA, which sued, saying it created marketplace confusion and damaged their recruitment efforts. They reached a settlement agreement after a judge rejected those claims, saying both groups are free to use words like “scouts” and “scouting.”

But not everyone was receptive to recent changes. Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas in Washington, D.C., opposed scouts’ acceptance of gays when that happened. He wasn’t much happier with them opening to girls in 2018, or last week’s name change vote. He posted to X that the latest rebrand made “clear that boys are no longer welcome” within the organization.

FOXNEWS commented in one of its stories on the issue over the weekend that “there will be young boys selling Girls Scouts Thin Mints soon.”

Organization leaders say nothing could be farther from the truth.

In fact, while camping remains a central activity for the Boy Scouts, the organization offers something for everyone today, from high adventures to merit badges for robotics and digital technology, CEO Krone said.

“About anything kids want to do today, they can do in a structured way within the scouting program,” he added.

The Boy Scouts’ $2.4 billion bankruptcy reorganization plan took effect last year, allowing the organization to keep operating while compensating the more than 80,000 men who say they were sexually abused as children while scouting.

Angelique Minett, the first female chairperson of Scouts BSA, told AP she gets excited about the future of scouting when she sees the about 20-person youth council from across these United States guiding the program with issues like sustainability and things that they’d like to see changed, like the fit on some of the uniforms.

When we think scouts, we think knots and camping, but those are a means to an end,” Minett said. “We are teaching kids a much thing. We are teaching them how to have grit, and we’re teaching them life skills, and we’re teaching them how to be good leaders.”