A Gwinnett County mother has filed a lawsuit saying her twin daughters were expelled from their Girl Scout troop because of a project highlighting their family's involvement with the civil rights movement.
The Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta, located in Mableton, characterized the legal complaint on its website, as "... an unfortunate disagreement between well-intentioned moms in one of our troops," and said the mother has rejected its offers to address her complaint.
Angela Johnson said her daughters were in their fourth year of participating in Girl Scouts when they were asked not to return to Troop 1164. Troop leaders told Johnson the girls no longer seemed interested in participating, according to the lawsuit filed in Gwinnett County State Court.
Johnson, however, said that wasn't true. She said her girls have earned countless badges and sold dozens of boxes of cookies. Johnson said an email expelling the girls came after a March meeting, where the girls gave a presentation for the troop's cultural heritage project.
"In the two years that we’ve been in this troop, there have never been any issues. Nothing," Johnson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "So when I got the email from the troop leader, of course I was stunned.”
The cultural heritage project was assigned by troop leaders, and Johnson's daughters chose to highlight relatives who were heavily involved in the civil rights movement, Johnson said. The girls obtained several artifacts from their grandfather that they used in a presentation. Their project included articles on black and white Freedom Riders, voter rights activists and others who worked for social change in the 1960s.
It was the project, according to the lawsuit, that led to the email from troop leaders telling the Johnson girls not to return. The suit states that 70 percent of the girls in the troop are white.
The Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta contends in an online statement that the Johnson girls were not expelled from the troop, and that "it was Mrs. Johnson's decision to discontinue her daughters’ participation in Girl Scouts."
The Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta released a one-page statement to Channel 2 Action News on Wednesday that read in part, "We believe this is a disagreement between well-intentioned moms, including Mrs. Johnson, and are anxious to resolve the matter, but we believe a public discussion involving children is not the best way to do so."
In its online statement, the Girl Scouts said "...in the course of reconciliation discussions, Mrs. Johnson was offered three solutions for her daughters: having the girls remain in their existing troop, having them join another troop or having Mrs. Johnson become a troop leader. Mrs. Johnson has not accepted any of these options."
Johnson said she contacted troop leaders, the Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta office and the national office in New York, and then the Gwinnett chapter of the NAACP, which wrote a letter on behalf of the family. But it took several months for any response, Johnson said. The girls currently aren't part of any troop.
“A child that shows an awareness of a culturally significant aspect of American culture should not be subject to reprisal," S. Carlton Rouse, Johnson's attorney said. “To discourage, to disparage, to expel girls on that basis is absolutely wrong.”
Rouse said the suggested remedies were not acceptable solutions. “A reasonable and rational way to handle this would be to first acknowledge what they’ve done, and then institute training, monitoring and controls to ensure that this can never happen again,” Rouse said. “We all have an obligation to ensure that the learning and social environments for our children are safe and inclusive.”
The local Girl Scouts office said it not unusual for members of volunteer organization to have occasional disagreements, due to the number of people involved.
"We have 42,000 girls in our council, and we see an array of personalities, interests and energy levels," the organization stated online. "Girls switch troops for a variety of reasons. It is not unusual for a troop leader, a mother or a girl to consider changing troops."
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