I have a BaoFeng and I have no clue how to use it. i can tune into my local FM radio stations but other than that I cant pick up squat and I have no idea how. I gave up and threw it in a drawer somewhere..
If you're just scanning it could be skipping over the local frequencies; you really need to find out what the frequencies for the local repeaters are and monitor those. You might start here:
http://txvhffm.org/repeaters/repeaters.php