Scouting the Web

Record retention laws vary not only from location to location, but also what type of record and the information on it. It can vary from 3 to 50 years, and some records longer. Our COR is a records retention guru. When we purged our records, he told us to keep everything 7 years and under. Anything 8 years or older could be purged.

A lot of the mainline Churches have sponsored Scouting for decades. As you note, many of them including our sponsor are contending with years of declining membership and face their own set of threats and challenges. We are hopeful that our 111 year relationship will survive this period. Our pastors over many years have noted that for many residents in our community, their association with and knowledge of our church came from their involvement in our Scouting programs.  Nevertheless, there is a high level of fear and trepidation among the area churches that Scouting today carries too high of a risk and the BSA is no longer a trustworthy partner.  I have been saddened by the significant loss of chartered organizations in our region in the past six months. Hopefully, your program will survive and continue to serve the youth of your community assuming that the BSA survives.

Depending on how far back they need to go, many recharters were still hand done.  That means hand written materials on carboned forms, at one time.  Reading some of our units very early charter lists is a study in patience and lots of guessing.  Printed rosters only were common going back about 25 years or less.    

The local councils and the national council have rosters of their members that are maintained.  That said, some records can be lost and a few councils have experienced fires.  Our council pays for professional storage and has for many years.  Membership fees, until very recently, all went to national so national has 'complete' rosters.  Youth can come to a few meetings without joining but being sure that everyone is covered by insurance compels units to require official membership.  Once again, in our council there are a substantial percentage where there is no record locally or nationally of membership and the claim does not list a unit ever known to have existed or accuses volunteers that likewise have no record of ever being in Scouting.  No doubt, a fraction of such claims may be legitimate, but one has to doubt that that a large fraction would be when the claim has little or no evidence that can be substantiated.   My estimation from our council would be 25% to 33% (and maybe as high as 50%) but no where close to 95% as stated.  This is just my estimation.   Seems to me that now is not the time to investigate the likely validity of the claims.  That should have been done nearly a year ago when there were allegations of poor vetting.  Everyone has proceeded based on the current number of claims.  

What I found very interesting was the following point.  BSA councils are saying that they cannot even find the vast majority of claimants on their rosters.  They are also saying they have so many rosters from that time period they cannot possibly scan them all in.     Century is preparing some big hits during plan confirmation