2008 Report to the State
Commemorative Banquet
Boy Scouts of America
Red Lion Inn
Olympia, Washington
February 6, 2008

Scouting: Doing a good turn for Washington state

I would like to start my remarks tonight with a tale of two storms. The Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm of 2006 hit Washington with hurricane force winds the night of December 14 and rattled us scared throughout the night. 

Millions of Western Washington residents were left without heat and electricity, many for days. Eighteen people throughout Washington, Oregon and British Columbia lost their lives, and property damage amounted to billions. 

Mount Rainier National Park was one of the areas hit especially hard by that storm. In one night fierce winds fell thousands of trees. Raging waters washed away trails, roads and campgrounds that people have enjoyed for decades. The popular Ipsut Creek Campground was itself left largely intact, but was no longer accessible by road. What had been a drive-in campground was now a five-mile hike from the Carbon River Ranger Station.

Boy Scout Troop 438 in Bellevue was one of the many organizations that jumped in to help. Nathan Youmans, the son of a man I know, made it his Eagle Scout project to organize a cleanup operation within that park.  

On a drizzly day in June, 2007, young Nathan and about 20 scouts and scout leaders from Troop 438 made the 10-mile round-trip hike to the campground. Their path along the road was cut off in many places, with makeshift trails providing detours around sections that were washed away.  The bridge across Ipsut Creek to the campground was now gone, with a large log now in its place for pedestrian only access.  

There were several dozen garbage cans still filled with trash from the previous season. Nathan’s project was to carry that trash on their backs and stack the cans out of the way to keep future visitors from filling them again.  In doing so Troop 438 did a great service to the park, and marked another instance where scouts have done a good turn for their state and community.

Less than a year after that storm hit, in fact on December 2, 2007, another major storm pummeled western Washington.  In its aftermath the Chehalis River broke its banks and overflowed across the Southwest part of our state like never before. A stretch of I-5 in Lewis County was closed for several days. Once again property losses to families, farms and businesses will be measured not in the millions but billions of dollars.

 Almost immediately Scouts stepped in to help. The actions of Troop 835 of Auburn were widely reported in the news. Troop 835 had spent the previous year rebuilding an old bus into a mobile kitchen unit so they could help out with disaster relief.  So when the floods came, these scouts were very prepared.  

The very next day the troop was on the road. After loading up with food and supplies, the troop drove their newly renovated bus to the coastal town of Westport where they were able to serve a warm spaghetti dinner to hundreds of flood victims without power. 

Locally, the good scouts of Troop 373 in Chehalis helped the United Way sort food, clothing and toys in a warehouse during the floods.

This troop also went to work on the Chehalis Airport, which was littered with debris.    Between 15 and 20 scouts spent their entire Saturday removing stuff that had floated across the runway. This included boxes of golf balls, household appliances and, according to one report, someone’s crock pot with dinner still in it.  I know scouts sometimes practice their survival skills by eating things they find in the wild, but I doubt this became lunch for even the heartiest of our young volunteers.

This latest storm also wiped out another campground, causing an estimated $6.5 million in damage to Rainbow Falls State Park along the Chehalis River near the community of Doty in Lewis County. This pleasant roadside park was left covered in tons of mud and debris.

When the State Parks and Recreation Commission organized a clean-up on Martin Luther King’s Day, once again the Scouts were among the 200 or so volunteers. They picked up branches and mud and did damage assessments on both the park and on the adjacent Willapa Hills trail, a popular path for Boy Scout 50 mile hikes. This trail will also need a lot of work – presumably by Scouts - before it is passable again. 

People in the rural community of Boistfort Valley along Highway 6 where the South Fork of the Chehalis passed through had long thought they were safe from flood waters. After all, some homes there had stood high and dry for nearly 100 years.  

Boistfort Valley didn’t escape nature’s wrath this time. The drenching rains rerouted the river across the prairie and water roared through homes.  

In the weeks following this devastation, Scouts teamed up and tore out sheet rock and insulation and did other cleanup work. They did this not for personal reward, but to show that the Scout slogan, Do a Good Turn Daily, is alive and well in scouting today. Okay, to be fair I’m sure their salvage mission was strongly suggested by some caring adults in Scouting too.

I used these two storms to illustrate how scouts helped in their aftermath. I could relate hundreds more stories of how scouts are doing good turns daily for Washington state and for the United States.  Scouts have been doing good turns ever since the Boy Scouts of America was founded by Chicago publisher William Boyce on February 8, 1910 – almost 98 years ago to this day.

Earlier tonight Doug Dillow talked about the Boy Scouts as a working example of an outstanding mentoring program and I cannot tell you how much I agree. 

One of the things I do as lieutenant governor when I’m not presiding over the state Senate is to serve as co-chair of Washington State Mentors. Washington State Mentors is a statewide organization dedicated to helping other organizations that match caring and responsible adults with our youth.

It is plain to me in working within our communities that those youth who are fortunate enough to have a mentor in their lives are being gifted an extraordinary chance to grow and turn into successful adults.

You do not have to open your eyes too wide in our state to see the terrible devastation to families and communities caused by substance abuse. Addictions and abuse of alcohol, opiates, prescription drugs and meth are commonplace. Teen violence and crime is pervasive.

Kids today – and especially boys – are subject to influences and peer pressure of an entirely different nature than when I was growing up in the 50s and early 60s.

Newsweek Magazine, in an article published in 2006 entitled “The Trouble with Boys,” reported a downward trend in the success rates of boys in America.

The article asks: “What’s wrong with Danny? By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic are falling behind.”

The article goes on to state: 

• In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes.
• High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests AND

• The number of boys who said they didn’t like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study.

 This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of Education, “has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy.”

These are real problems facing our country.  I submit to you as evidence of the success achieved by Boy Scouts and other mentor-based organizations that if more adults would step forward to volunteer their time and experience these problems would literally go away.

There is research that tells us what has worked with other youth with all of the normal negative factors in their lives.  One such study is called the resiliency model. 

The resiliency model shows that there are three common denominators amongst these kids.  They have had care and support by at least one person.  They have been given high expectations and then help to meet those expectations and finally the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to their social environment, in other words, to do something good.

I think Scouts is an example of an organization that truly passes the resiliency test.  

David Workman, a Boy Scout leader in the Sasquatch Council in Thurston County and an executive with our state Department of Ecology, points out just that in a recent paper he prepared.  In that paper Mister Workman reminds us that the Boy Scouts provide active mentorship, safe, wholesome and active events, the development of character and leadership and developing the habit of self-discipline of setting personal goals and achieving them.

These are all great ideals and worthy of the attention from us all.

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of speaking at the Museum of Flight in Seattle on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of NASA. In researching this speech and looking at the biographies of many of our astronauts, including the 15 with close ties to Washington state, I was not too surprised to see the rank of “Eagle Scout” included on the list of their many distinguished accomplishments among most of the male astronauts.    

Most Scouts I know are not involved in substance abuse – they are doing things like backpacking and camping, canoeing and participating in other adventures.   

These kids learn life skills through their merit badges, volunteering in community service and teaching other scouts their own skills.  All you have to do is look at kids like Andrew Hou of Troop 266 in the Sasquatch District. Andrew made Eagle last September, making it his project to replace the aging boardwalk at Millersylvania State Park a little south of Tumwater.

Another member of Troop 266, Preston Maguire, earned his Eagle by ripping out non-native ivy from an Olympia park.  If you look through the lists of activities and accomplishments of these young men – music, sports and academic diligence are recurring themes - you will see that they are too busy having a good time in a very positive way to get into trouble.  

Yesterday may have been Super Tuesday for producing election results, but scouting results in producing super kids every day of the week. 

Giving our boys the tools for success is what Scouting is about. Some people may say scouting is something our fathers and grandfathers did, and it is no longer cool to be a scout. I suggest that we need scouts in our state and our country today like never before.

We need more kids like the kids I have mentioned from Troops 438, 835, 373, 266 and troops within all of the councils represented here tonight.  We need more programs like the Inland Northwest Council’s Scoutreach, which earned the National Quality Council Award in 2007 for reaching out to youth in low income neighborhoods in the Spokane area. 

Most importantly, we need more parents and adults to step into scouting and other worthy organizations for both boys and girls as a way to guide our youth.

This week there are a number of celebrations in the international community around the Chinese Lunar New Year. A traditional Chinese expression is “When you drink the water, remember its source.” This, of course, is another way of reminding people to give back to the community that has brought them success.

The Boy Scouts of America and our Boy Scouts of Washington are in fact doing their good turn. They are giving back and showing others how to give back. They are showing the rest of us who drink the water how to remember the source. 

May the Scouts and the adult mentors within scouts serve to inspire us and lead us for at least another 98 years. We will all live in a better place by living the scout motto and following the scout law. 

I would like to add my congratulations to everyone in this room for your involvement and participation in scouting. As you are seeing tonight, the rewards for your investment of time are self-evident. 

More storms will come.  We will all be a little safer and more secure knowing the Boy Scouts will come with them. 

Thank you.