Wood Badge and Adult Leader Training

I love where you want to go with this; trust me I do. My troop finally enacted a cell phone policy. I am no longer the A-hole dad telling his scouts to put the phones away or they get locked in the car while everyone else does wtf they want; however, I am not sure if this is a national level issue for a couple of reasons. If national were to introduce a new policy, how would they enforce it? As an example, the new safeguarding youth (not the name, but the whole new process) program is mandated from the bankruptcy and settlement and national is absolutely impotent in the means of enforcing it at the council level let alone unit level. This is a legally enforceable mandate where everyone with a functioning brain agrees it is important and it still can't get enforced.  We know that the entire country is a patchwork of (at sometimes) weird laws and judicial rulings. Does national want to weigh in and get forced to navigate all the various laws? For example in my state it is illegal for schools and other organizations to take cell phones away from youth who have medical conditions, educational need, or if they have an IEP at their school of enrollment that states they should have access to a cellular device due to their condition(s). The only reason why my troop has a cell phone policy is because the COR basically came in and said, agree to it or your family hits the bricks. 

1) Exactly, You were lied to.  2) See my original explanation, you have someone off program screwing things up and blaming everyone but themselves.  3) I grew up in an area like what you describe; somehow never had the problems you are straw argumenting on.  4) That is a lot of districts; it is because the DE's are not properly trained to recruit a functioning district committee. The areas that do not have popoulation for a district committee are almost guaranteed to be an area that is too small to be a district. A district is supposed to be based on population and not geography.  The warnings do go out at 90, 60, 30, and day of from national. The commissioner corps in my district personally called every single person which led to some spicey responses. Personal opinion, we need to cull the weak leaders right out of the program. 

This would never happen in my council; it would shift the power balance away from a small group of power mongers.  EG: A few years ago we had a windstorm come through and knock down hundreds of trees at camp. The camping director of the council was complaining to me about the cost to get 1 campsite backup and running. Me, having experience and professional certification in logging operations offered to come and clean up all of the windfall for free and told the camping director to just pick a weekend for me to roll in and do it at no charge. I got ghosted. 

UNDERSTATEMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!   (Yelling in agreement) The local council camp ceased summer camp operations in the 1960s. Up until the time it was sold, it was used for events and Scout camping. It had minimal facilities, and a caretaker. While the caretaker did maintenance,  a lot of it, as well as camp improvements, were made by volunteers over the years. I still remember when a hurricane hit the camp, and a call for volunteers was made to get the camp ready for 2 events within a month, otherwise they would be cancelled. Over 300 people showed up to work on the camp. So much was done, that the caretaker started giving us stuff to do on his longterm wish list. We had professionals in their fields ( plumbers, electricians, lineman, etc) fixing and improving the camp in 1 day. And that camp, despite not being a resident camp, was profitable. Almost every weekend, troops were using it. Another council used it to host events, because it was closer for Cub families to go to than their own camp. That camp subsidized the summer camp.

Not necessarily. I have lived in small, mostly urban councils, large mostly rural councils, and everything in between. The urban councils were MUCH better off,  despite being smaller. The extremely large rural one is doing extremely poorly.  I think it is a combination of things that make successful council. First and foremost is customer service. Pros gotta be seen at things, outside of FOS, and actually listen to volunteers and act upon suggestions. Even if only a temporary solution to a problem is made, that shows concern. One of the best SEs I ever met, when confronted with a problem, made a note of it, said it cannot be solved properly this year, but could this temporary measure  work until we could fix the problem permanently. Another SE made lots of camp improvements. He listened to the SMs at the camp, as well as the SPLs of the camp. Improvements have been made. He had signs made stating XYZ project funded by 20XX FOS dollars or Popcorn money. He showed where the money is going. That council has a lot going for it.