Wrangell Cub Scouts look to reinstate pack

Shirley Wimberley has no shortage of adults willing to say they’ll volunteer to help re-form the Cub scout troop in Wrangell.

“We get people who say ‘Oh yeah, I’d like to help,’ but then you give ‘em the paperwork and never get it back,” she said.

Pack sponsorship has always been a delicate proposition. Sponsorship for the pack by a community organization is required by the Boy Scouts of America. Parents have become less involved with the junior scouting organization — which focuses on students from the first to the fifth grade – as students aged into the older Boy Scouts program, Wimberley said.

“There hasn’t been any actual activity in the pack level since May or June of 2012,” she said.

Wimberly currently serves as the Scoutmaster of Troop 40, and would like to see the Cub Scout pack reinstated in order to help swell the numbers in the older program, which focuses on high school-age children, Wimberly said.

“Cub scouts are often the ones that come up and then transfer into the Boy Scout troop,” she said. “Once in a while, you might get a boy or youth that is in middle school or high school and then sees what’s going on with the Boy Scouts and may want to join, but it’s getting to the point that there’s lots of other activities going on and some kids might not think Boy Scouts is cool or whatever, so if they’re brought up in the Cub Scouts, you have a better chance of retaining them in Boy Scouts.”

That connection is something Wimberly misses, in part because her own children are approaching the end of their involvement with scouting. Her youngest son is a Life Scout, the next-to-last rank before the Eagle Scout rank, the effective end of the scouting program.

“We’ve been through this all the way from Tiger Scouts,” she said.

Wimberly is trying to set up a public meeting this upcoming week in order to gather potential adults together and get the program re-started.

Readers interested in volunteering – the program requires 10 adults to have the optimal number of adults and children – should contact Wimberly via e-mail at sbwimb@gci.net or call (907) 305-0338.