First Meeting Planning Failure

The girls’ Junior Girl Scout troop leader decided she couldn’t be the troop leader for this year. Our girls still wanted to be Girl Scouts so I stepped up to take over the troop. Another mom offered to be my co-leader. We’re a small troop with five girls from four involved families. We decided to have summer meetings to finish a couple of badges. This would free up our fall meetings to work on the Bronze Award, which is the highest award a Junior Girl Scout can earn. Our first meeting was today. Our plan was to go on a nature walk, talk about animal communication and write fun facts about animals. We arrived at the Little Red Schoolhouse to find yellow construction tape everywhere. We went into the beautiful, new learning center to be told that the main path was closed. The forest preserve district was paving it. I have to admit that in all our summer meeting planning it never occurred to me that I needed to call the nature center to make sure we could walk the path. I realize the forest preserve district needs to do some work, but in the summer? There were dozens of other people standing in the learning center building annoyed that they couldn’t walk the path. As one woman said, “Do you know what it took to sunscreen and bug spray all these kids?” We managed to fulfill our badge requirements by walking through the learning center, talking about the animals on display and taking notes. The afternoon wasn’t a complete waste of time. In the future, though, I will call to make sure we can do what we plan to do – even if it is a free, public activity.