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@Summitdog Welcome to Scouter.com. Full disclosure, I've attended Wood Badge, will probably staff it in the next few years. I like @qwazse's list. We've actually recently discussed some support and objections to Wood Badge in a thread located here. https://www.scouter.com/topic/30580-wood-badge-roses-and-thorns/?page=1 . The value of the course is dependent on your local area and the culture created by your council and staff. I recommend talking to Scouters you know and respect in your council to get the scoop. If your council's program is not good, a neighboring council may have a c

I would not think you would need WFA at Summit as you ride the trams between the attractions...though I may be confusing Summit (sorry THE Summit) with the Goofy place in Florida

This could quickly turn into an I&P thread at this rate, but as a health professional, I am going to say that I also believe that the BSA should come out as pro-vaccination. High vaccination rates have kept these things from being an issue for a long time, but that may not be true for long. While I acknowledge that parents currently have a legal right to decide not to vaccinate, that doesn't mean that these families have a right to have their children around mine. Summer camps, winter camps, and all sorts of other BSA activities are high risk for disease transmission of all kinds.

I guess there were early adopters back in the day too. Girls were allowed to join Explorer programs as “participants” in 1969, while required to be members of Girl Scouts or Camp Fire. Explorers went completely co-ed in 1971. http://kdhnews.com/news/local/girls-part-of-boy-scouts-nothing-new/article_e7a4c73c-b3aa-11e7-b71c-836cc6416e8f.html In April 1971, young women became eligible for full membership in Exploring... https://www.exploring.org/about-us/ For months, the Girl Rangers operated as a kind of shadow Explorer troop, neither Boy Scouts nor Girl Scouts. Then,

I thought Wood Badge had some helpful offerings in how to run a unit, but they were incidental and part of other topics. It certainly wasn't the nuts and bolts of how to plan a program or run a unit. I think that's actually a huge hole in the training curriculum of SM Specific/IOLS --> Wood Badge. Conversations/presentations on Sample Troop/Patrol meetings, conflict resolution, coaching and mentoring of youth, servant leadership concepts. At least in my course, one of the five tickets could be a personal goal. One of the five needed to be related to diversity in scouting. The other thre

@Summitdog, I can't recall if I welcomed you to the forums and thanked you in advance for all that you'll do for our youth. So, pardon my redundancy: welcome and thanks! If you're new, I would hold off on taking WB. It really works best after you've had a few years applying the basic training you needed for your position. So the replies to your topic may be worth reading sometime down the road. What it offers (in no particular order): Networking: you spend a lot of time with other scouters. Two full weekends working on anything pulls folks together. Plus, there's time between w

Most the people I know in our pack that have taken Wood Badge in the last few years changed directions in scouting from helping with the local cub scout and boy scout unit to being much more focused to being a district level scouter. All the tickets that I heard about had something to do with district level activities. I can not think of any positive impacts Wood Badge has had on our troop. One friend that took the course told me that to him, "The course was mostly about leading and managing adults and how to get the most out of adult volunteers, by using motivational tools such as cre

Wood Badge teaches leadership skills. Things like techniques for effective listening and giving/receiving feedback and embracing diversity and handling conflict. It gives an introduction to the "others first" or "servant" style of leadership but it does a very cursory job at that. If you have had other leadership training, such as in the military or business world, you may or may not get a lot from it. I had never had any leadership training and Wood Badge was a turning point. Not because the material in Wood Badge is so great but because it set me on a path to learn about (study) lea

SSS, speaking up against power requires a great deal of courage. Not only for the 10 year old new scout vs. the 17 year old varsity scout, but for adults as well. In fact, most repeated abuses occur because our human nature doesn't want to risk personal harm for standing up. Most of us hope instead the bad behavior will not happen again. For a culture you describe to exist in the troop, the adults have to allow it and encourage the culture. Just saying "The Scout Law is-the-law", won't work. Actions set the tone of troop culture, not words. And that you don't fault the rest of the PLC is

I am a PM MB counselor and those boys that don't have allowances I deal with differently than most. What I have the boys do is budget the value of what they are "spending" during the course of a day. For example, if their parents have paid for their school lunch the boy notes in his budget/journal that $3.00 is marked down has having been spent for his lunch even if he never saw the actual cash. If he needs new socks, he puts it in his journal even if mom/dad pays for it. If he gets an allowance, he deals with that as well. This way the boy gets to know what it costs him to get from o

"Is there a BSA policy on how to discipline Adult Leaders? No there isn't. The BSA has however written a fair amount about the selection of leaders. While I don't know how it came to be that these adults were selected? I do know that very often when we allow positions to be filled with a warm body the end result is problems. Here in the forum, we can go on about Chartering Organizations and COR's. I'm not entirely sold on how active or involved these are? Back when I was the CM for a Pack chartered by the R/C Church I attend. I was left with filling and finding the people who would

a scout could attend my council's summer camp, hike to the maid gate and back for four hours and receive 100% credit for completing all required hikes and come home with the merit badge ;-)