Boy Scouts council sells Joplin-area camp

John Feick: Ozark Trails Council had more camping capacity than needed.

The Ozark Trails Council Inc. of Boy Scouts of America completed a sale of the Frank Childress Scout Reservation near Joplin to a not-for-profit agency, the Frank Childress Reserve Property Committee, on Oct. 4.

According to a news release from the Ozark Trails Council, the local chapter of Boy Scouts of America, the sale of the 175-acre wooded property was at a cost of $500,000, roughly 28% of the property’s assessed value of $1.8 million. To help the committee with the purchase, council officials say they assisted in the committee’s fundraising efforts.

Ozark Trails Council Scout Executive and CEO John Feick said the decision came down to maintaining a focus on mission.

“Our mission is to serve kids and have them be Scouts,” he said. “That group’s focus is going to be on managing the camp for multiple camp users.”

Eric DeGruson, chair of the Frank Childress Reserve Property Committee, described committee members as Scouters who were involved in the Frank Childress Reservation prior to the sale.

“Our primary goal was to keep the property available to Scouts,” he said. “One of the terms that we were happy to agree with was that if we did not make the property available to Scouts, ownership would revert back.”

Scouts will pay a fee to camp at the Childress Reserve, now known as Camp Childress, just as they do at Camp Arrowhead, the century-old council-owned property in Marshfield. The Ozark Trails Council website shows that in 2023, the seven-day summer resident camp at Camp Arrowhead cost $295 for Scouts and $140 for leaders.

The Property Committee also aims to serve other organizations, such as sports teams and church groups, at Camp Childress, DeGruson said.

Before the sale, Ozark Trails Council had been managing four camp properties, Feick said. In addition to Camp Arrowhead and the Childress Reservation, there is the Cow Creek Scout Reservation, on Table Rock Lake near Blue Eye, which the council leases from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Camp Plagens Conservation Area, located south of Pittsburg, Kansas, and owned by the council.

“We’ve got more camping capacity than we can really make use of,” Feick said.

He added that Ozark Trails had been subsidizing the Childress Reservation.

“There were expenses above and beyond the income that we were getting – that was a big part of it,” he said.

He said the sale eliminates that subsidy expense for an estimated savings of $25,000 per year.

He added that the council also subsidizes Camp Arrowhead.

“The difference is our summer camp programs and most of our year-round programs are at Arrowhead,” Feick said.

The Marshfield campground has shooting and archery ranges, a rappelling and climbing tower and a boathouse, and in 2023, Feick said it hosted 800 summer campers. But counting non-Scouting groups and other Scout uses, over 7,000 people used the Camp Arrowhead facilities.

The camp – which is used by Scouts from 31 counties, including three in southeast Kansas – will celebrate its centennial in 2024.

Larger picture
The Joplin Globe reported that an unsolicited offer to buy the Childress Reservation was made to the Ozark Trails Council in July 2021. The amount was not specified.

As the Globe and other news outlets reported at the time, when the offer was made, the Boy Scouts of America national organization was being sued by some 60,000 people who said they were sexually abused by troop leaders as children. The organization offered a settlement of $850 million, with all of its 272 local councils paying into a survivors’ compensation trust fund.

Subsequent court action has brought the settlement to $2.46 billion on behalf of more than 80,000 people, Reuters reported earlier this year. That amount has survived appeals from insurers and claimants.

The Ozark Trails Council has not disclosed its exact share of the settlement, though Feick was quoted in the Globe as saying the amount was below $3 million.

The council’s board rejected the 2021 offer from a potential buyer for Camp Childress. At the time, Feick told the Globe, “One thing we do not want to have to do is sell properties.”

Feick told SBJ no court cases were brought against the Ozark Trails Council.

In addition to the financial pressure from the national settlement, Scouts have faced other pressures, Feick said.

“The pandemic was hard for a lot of membership organizations,” he said. “It had a big negative impact for really any youth-serving organization like Scouting.”

He said Scouts who were already in the program stayed on, for the most part, but very few new Scouts were added during that time.

“Since the pandemic’s been gone, recruitment has been great,” he said, adding that membership was up by 10% in 2022. The council serves over 4,000 members and has 1,000 volunteer leaders, according to its website.

He noted girls are now part of Scouts BSA, formerly known as Boy Scouts, and have been permitted to join since 2019. About 33% of new recruits locally are girls, and about 22% of Scouts overall, he said. Girls have also been permitted to join Cub Scouts, the organization for grade-school members, since 2019.

Plans for Camp Childress
The Frank Childress Reserve Property Committee registered with the secretary of state’s office in February. Before that, the members had operated as the Boy Scouts Property Committee, running the camp for the organization, DeGruson said.

DeGruson added the Ozark Trails Council had a paid caretaker for the site, and his committee is looking to hire that person back. He declined to disclose the caretaker’s salary.

Camp Childress has a pool, a climate-controlled dining hall with a commercial kitchen, cabins, hiking trails, campsites and a trout fishing pond. It is located in Newton County, east of the interchange of Interstate 49 and Route V.
DeGruson said a number of improvements are planned as the committee expands the property for general-purpose use.

“We have some improvements planned to make it more applicable to a more diverse group of people,” he said.

That includes the addition of an air-conditioned dormitory and more bathrooms.

“Church groups are not much into camping,” DeGruson said.

DeGruson said the committee successfully raised the $500,000 needed to buy the Childress Reserve, and it is now raising $600,000 to build the dormitory and make other improvements.

He said by opening the reserve to more groups, it will log more days of camping and bring in more money.

“The rentals will cover our cost,” he said. “We’re not looking to make a profit. We want to be able to sustain it and make improvements with what we bring in.”

He added that Scouts remain an important part of the plans for Camp Childress.

“It’s very important for us for Scouts to feel like it’s their camp,” he said. “That’s an integral part of the community.”

DeGruson acknowledged he and the rest of the committee – experienced though they might be in camping, hiking and other Scout skills – are entering a new frontier.

“We’re really excited about the new opportunities this opens up, but to be honest, we’re a little nervous, too,” he said. “This is a pretty big task for a bunch of volunteers.”