Update: Council led troop… neglected?

In my previous post, I shared how we have a council led troop and I felt that the leader was really phoning it in for the girls. The response was mostly that expecting anything more from a council led troop was unrealistic.

Sooo I went and was able to find several people from the community who are willing to be the leaders! I was also planning on assisting as a 3rd co-leader/assistant to at least manage things like parents, logistics for transportation, field trips, forms, etc. seemed like we had options! Yay!

…Except then we were told that actually we are NOT a “traditional” troop, we are explicitly a community troop and therefore do not have the option of having our own volunteers run it. Volunteers can help but they cannot be leaders.

I also did some self analysis and realized that what bothered me so much about the situation was the way the leader acts about disability. I tried to be more vague before — but essentially, I’m deaf and the majority of the girls are deaf or hard of hearing and a couple are hearing children of deaf adults. All of the children are fluent in sign language, as am I and all of my staff. Our leader is not and so we have an interpreter.

But I realized — she goes out of her way to only talk to the interpreter or the one hearing staff (never me or other deaf staff), she only talks to the hearing kids, and she doesn’t even know the names of some of the deaf girls…. And last minute planning for things often means we can’t get interpreters in time for events or camp or whatever and that excludes the deaf girls. Which… not ok. She has not learned a single sign — not even hello. (Which is literally just waving.)

Anyways. This is mostly just frustration and I’m leaning towards entirely disbanding our Girl Scout troop if we can’t make changes, but hoping perhaps there are some suggestions here on other avenues I can try first. Thank you.