Leaderboard

I have no experience with other Venture crews, but ours is probably not much like any other out there. It is all girls, for starters; mainly sisters of Boy Scouts. The crew advisor quickly realized that while the girls wanted outdoor adventure, they had little interest in Venture advancement. We meet once a month for an hour and a half, and have one outing a month during the school year. One of those is a day of outdoor service. That’s pretty much it, but it has done really well. The boys’ troop our CO charters is about 30 scouts, the girls’ is 15, and the crew is 22 strong.

Good question. But maybe a better question would be what would make JTE better? In order to do that there's another question that needs to be answered: How do the methods achieve the aims? JTE does not measure any of the aims, or goals, of scouting. All of the suggestions above relate to digging down to how the methods help troops achieve their goals. Since the BSA does not mention how the methods achieve the aims there's very little knowledge of what makes a good troop. I mean, a good troop is one that achieves the aims with the largest number of scouts. Sure, character is subjective so it's

JTE is an artificial adult measurement. I'd bet that less than 5% of Scouts can tell you what JTE stands for.

Because brutal honesty is so unseemly these days.

The DFS fielded calls of non-actionable offenses of this nature on behalf of our SE when there were YPT issues but no evidence or accusations of abuse. As to PA's definition : I do not believe this is an exhaustive list. But as you can see, the definition of serious physical injury was left undefined. Bottom line, YPT violations are not abuse per se. But, they are the means by which predators may take advantage of children.

Sure, there will always be some units who act in an un-Scout-like manner. But not all. And district leaders have a pretty good idea about the accuracy of self-reported unit scores. Because unit performance directly impacts district JTE scores, there will be plenty of incentive to help any unit that wants help. The real problem units are those that are low-performing but aren't interested in improving and aren't interested in help or advice from outsiders.

I don't know, @dkurtenbach, if the point is to help units improve their program, to be a teaching aid, making it competitive will just encourage units to game the system. Councils clearly game the system and for those that are struggling there's no incentive to help the units.

My complaint is that JTE is used as a form of competition at the district, council, and national levels (thus the quantitative performance goals), but is not used that way at the unit level. It should be. Sure, the particular quantitative performance goals for units are few and crude. But they are something. If JTE score was actually competitive among units, JTE could get each unit thinking about its own program in comparison to both an objective standard and to what other units are doing. Put another way, treating JTE as a real competition among units would create a minimum performance s

It really is a pretty good system. You'll see the Adult driven activities like JTE, Scout Leader development account for a maximum of 15 points. The other 85 points are all about real things that the unit should be doing and 15 points alone are based on the fact that the youth prepare and give perspective to the application.

You are fracking me up.

Dino the brontosaurus is the Sinclair mascot ... chosen by ad men back when it was cool to brag about extracting fossil fuels from PA substrate.

I dunno, Woodbadge? IMO, Council should have clothed a velociraptor instead of a plant eater. My $0.02,

I agree with @Eagledad earlier comment about fudging numbers, so imaginary numbers might be another mathematical characteristic. 😃

No. 43 IS a Prime Number. 👍

I think it is too much, by one. The answer is 42. 😁

@DuctTape I didn't really mean to defend it. I was trying to give my thoughts after some others had responded without putting them all at the beginning. I help my units through JTE every year and don't get a lot of pushback so I don't have personal experience with the problems with it. @walk in the woodsI do wish that it was easier to track these things without a separate worksheet. Most of this stuff should be automatic. I like your idea for tracking camping and service hours. @ParkManTheoretically, Unit Commissioners are supposed to be the people working collaboratively

Maybe more than that. Your time as a coach, youth teacher, counselor, and school volunteer as well. You could loose your job and get asked to leave other organizations. Seems nobody really knows how far this can go. So to suggest that scouting is the only risk appears naive. Even you suggest you will report to National at the drop of the hat, I can't imagine volunteering around 3 or 4 Buggies. My time as a volunteer just a few years ago was far simpler. I'm not sure the risk is worth it with the new policies. And lets not get tunnel vision on the types of actions that could be considered

It's the targets. In short - JTE in is present form is too quantitative. Recruit N new scouts, send Y scouts to summer camp. It almost entirely ignore methods like Scout led & patrol method. This in turn creates a perception that adult led troops that are focused on numbers and metrics are more important than the quality of the program in those troops. This all creates a perception of what a quality troop is that runs contrary to why most people became volunteers. Most of us didn't become volunteers to worry about growth charts and retention rates. We became volunteers to

> kneejerk reaction I suppose it appears that way, and "tone" is a challenge in written form but there's more to it. Having spent four decades in the largest bureaucracy on earth I am used to putting with things i think are stupid. But if you build an organization around free labor you have a responsibility to nurture that labor force. We spent all of the Fall rebuilding our pack and raising money. My goal was that no parent would have to pay more than $30. This is a poor community. We almost lost the whole pack last year because we were led by higher income people who di