A Scout is Honest
Westfall, Carl (Carl.Westfall@CBN.ORG)
Mon, 13 Oct 1997 09:32:08 -0400
I would appreciate everyone's comments and/or suggestions on how to
handle the following situation.
My son is in his first year of Boy Scouts after a full length stay in
Cub Scouts. I signed on with the troop as ASM. The last two months,
the tropp has been preparing for the District Camporee. The SM has made
a point to let everyone in the district know that he felt the judging in
past Camporees was rigged and needed to be changed. Our Camporees are
run entirely by the boys. A committee of 4 boys from 4 different troops
head everything up. Inspections are done by one member of this
committee and the SPL from every troop. This setup seemed acceptable to
everybody at the district level except our SM who insisted this was
rigged (don't ask me why). This year one of the boys on the committee
was from our troop as well as the one adult advisor to the committee.
The entire time that we prepared for the camporee, the SM talked about
nothing but winning. He never said "if" we win. It was always "when"
we win. He pointed out that we now had the deck stacked in our favor
with our SPL on the committe and another of our ASMs as the advisor. We
really pushed the boys to the limit on getting ready for this. When it
came time to setup camp, we made special arrangements not to camp in the
woods with the rest of the troops, but out in the open field by ourself
to showcase ourselves to everyone else. I feel we really missed out on
the comradery that Camporees are supposed to be about. I forgot to
point out that during all the preparations for this, I overheard a group
of the boys say they would be "happy once the adults got their stupid
trophy for this camporee, so we can go back to doing what we want to
do". I say all this to setup my problem.....
At the actual camporee, the SM went out to the site a number of times
during the week in advance to start getting things setup "for the boys".
Once there, I was thoroughly disgusted on how the boys were constantly
drilled "because judges were watching them". The worst thing happened
when it came time for the inspection. The inspection team was made up
as I said before by all the SPLs and one committee member. Guess which
committee member headed up our site's inspection. It was our own SPL.
He had been drilled in his head so much from the SM that they had to win
that he literally cheated on the inspection. He refused to write up any
of the infractions found by the inspection team. The team found that we
had patrols without patrol flags (we got the bonus anyway), an open
pocket knife on the ground (belonging to another ASM), two campfires
going unattended (no deduction for this), open food covered with flies
in a open food storage bucket (perfectly acceptable to our SPL), gateway
made out of freshly cut down trees (against BSA policy), and numerous
othe infractions. Somehow after all that, we won the trophy for best
inspection site, which then helped us to win Best Overall Unit and tie
for the Spirit of the Eagle award (awarded to the unit that best
exemplifies the spirit of scouting). I felt sick to my stomach at the
award presentation. What kind of spirit are we teaching by instructing
our youth to cheat and cut corners just to come out on top. My son has
decided he wants to go to another troop and I am following with him. I
told the Committee chairman of my dissatisfaction with what took place
and turned in my resignation. My question is ....Should I do anything
else in this matter? If you have any advice for the SM or the troop,
feel free to drop a line in their guestbook at
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/Rapids/3348/
Carl Westfall
Pack 53 C.O.R. / Troop 48 Asst. Scoutmaster / District Membership
Chairman
Elizabeth River District
Tidewater Council
Chesapeake, Virginia
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/3053/
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/Rapids/3348/
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