By now, you've probably heard that the Boy Scouts are going change their name and they are also going to start accepting young women into their program. Both of these statements are true, sort of.

First of all, the national corporation is called the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). That name will not be changing. The BSA offers five separate programs. Three of them, Venturing, Sea Scouting, and Exploring, are co-ed programs and have been for many years. In fact Exploring (or Explorers) started accepting young women in 1969. Exploring accepts young men and women 10-20 years old and the other two accept young men and women 14-20 years old. The other two programs are Cub Scouting and Boy Scouting. This is where the big changes will occur.

Cub Scouting is now open to young men and women who are in grades K-5. They just started allowing women to join this program. However, this is not a fully integrated program. Cub Scouting has Packs usually sponsored through a local church. The Pack is split up into Dens. The young men will have their Dens and the young women will have their Dens. This will allow the young women the opportunity to attain leadership roles within the Pack.

Boy Scouting is now open to young men ages 11-18. This will change most likely in February 2019 when they start allowing young women to join. This program will also change its name to Scouts BSA at that time. Boy Scouting now and Scouts BSA later has Troops and Patrols. It is assumed that they will have separate Patrols for the young women.

With all the changes going on, the BSA has developed a new Youth Protection Training program called YPT2. Regardless of when you last completed YPT, all BSA Registered Adults need to take this new program no later than October 1, 2018. The training is accessed at www.my.training.org. The training does take an hour and a half to two hours to complete so it is best if you reserve a large enough block of time to complete the program.

Thanks for all you do for the NMRA and the BSA.