By-Laws

Scott,
Good Luck on coming up with troop by-laws. My troop tried to write a
set that suited everybody, and quite frankly, the process itself
caused so many problems that after 6 months of looking at other
troops' by-laws and "policies", and arguing over such things as how
to define "active" in the context of serving actively in a position
of responsibility, and in the context of "how much is enough to be
considered an active member of the troop" when Eagle time comes
rolling around, we dumped the project.

Instead, we recommitted ourselves to use the Scout Promise and Law to
guide our decisions, and we have a few "policies" like:
A Scout cannot be more than 1 month behind in his dues if he wants to
participate in outings or advance.
A Scout must wear a complete Class A uniform for Boards of Review.
etc., etc.

Are these written down? Well, we tell new Scouts and parents about
them, and we continually "enforce" them, but we do not have a
collection of papers that spells it all out.

If your troop is having a specific problem with someone/something,
figure out how best to deal with _that_ situation. It will be
different the next time it comes up, and if you are too rigid in
being able to deal with it ("Well, it's written into the By-Laws, so
it has to be that way" can backfire when extenuating) you can hurt
people badly.

Scouting has plenty of rules and regulations - sometimes cleverly
disguised as "guides" (...to Safe Scouting, ...to Advancement, etc.).
See if what you want to cover is already covered - and if you do
finally write out a set of By-Laws, amke sure you have a mechanism in
place to change them (vote of committee, PLC, etc.), and also have a
District Exec, or other professional look them over to be sure you
have no conflicts with existing BSA policies/rules/regulations.

Good luck, Good Scouting

Tray

________ ______ __________ ___
|__ __| _ \| _ | \/ /
| | | |_) /| _ || |
|__| |___|\___\__| |__||____|
Tray Murphy
Scoutmaster, Troop 891
Robert E. Lee Council, Richmond, VA
mailto:jgmurphy@richmond.infi.net
http://www.infi.net/~jgmurphy/

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