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Some good news from my neck of the woods, son's Eagle Court of Honor was today. Weather held up and we had more people attending than anticipated. I think this COVID mess had a ltoto do with it because it gave an excuse to see friends, even if wearing masks and being socially distant. Ceremony went well, and lots of stories shared about him after the ceremony. He plans to stick around until he hopefully moves to college next fall, or turns 18 and becomes an ASM. Life is good.

Moving forward post bankruptcy I can envision all remaining camps being moved into "corporations" , separate from councils legally and functionally.

You bring up some good points. The culminating activity could be a huge benefit as it would provide focus for the patrol. Something which currently is lacking. Not sure if the yearly planning would need to be a part. This could be done as I said by patrol in the first week of the season. As far as how much could the scouts do? I was imagining the scouts meeting significantly more to accomplish their goals. Idea being is hypercompresses a year into a season. They could meet every week day like they do for practice during sports' seasons. I also imagine that the scouts would likely do this

Seasonal Scouts is an interesting idea, although we'd need something with a different acronym. Maybe the program could work something like this: We'd divide a geographical region into chunks, maybe we'd call them Districts or Councils Each District or Council would have to recruit a few Counselors to work with the Seasonal Scouts The Counselors could coordinate occasional events to introduce the Seasonal Scouts and their parents to each other Rather than have the Seasonal Scouts join and move in/out of a traditional unit which could be disruptive to those units, they c

I think it needs to account for something else that just about every other youth activity has: a culmination. Sports have playoffs, theater has a play, robotics have competitions, band has a concert, 4H has shows. They all have something everyone works towards, new skills to learn, there's inherent teamwork required. And scouts has just 3 more campouts. Seasons are certainly a good idea but there would have to be a lot more planning. Rather than one high adventure trip a year there needs to be something special each "season." There might be one week long high adventure trip a year but may

Clarke Green at ScoutmasterCG had a similar solution. I cannot find the Podcast/Blog Post that had it, you're welcome to look: https://scoutmastercg.com/ More or less, he had patrols in his troop sign up in 3 month increments. Still one meeting a week, one outing a month. Patrols would form based on attendance, interest and availability for outings. This would ensure that the active scouts always had a cohesive patrol to participate in. Scouts who needed to be away from the Troop for sports or another activity would be in a "inactive" patrol. His troop had modeled this based off the academi

The 6th edition is the one I used when I was a new 11 year old scout. I have had and used every version since. I also have several older versions, the oldest originals in my collection being the 1924 handbook for boys and the 1929 handbook for scoutmasters.

A council with a functional structure? Where would you find such a magical creature?

(continued) Big City Council sells its camp to the Big City River Band of the Miami Tribe. It gains federal recognition as a Indian reservation. This gives it significant liability protection from bottom-feeding lawyers. It not only survives, it doubles in size after buying the neighboring boy scout camp, the Gerard Bored Scout Reservation, named after the most boring president the country ever had, at trait that continued for decades at his namesake scout facility, which totally focused on advancement and merit badges. The new Indian Reservation/Scout Reservation restores all of

Bringing a few of these thoughts together and adding a few tweaks: Signup/registration is with a district or other organization covering a geographic area Signup/registration on a quarterly (seasonal) basis Signup/registration by grade or age Each season, Scouts can sign up to join a patrol working on a particular specified program with a set time commitment and schedule, or a "general" program working with one or more counselors on the Scout's own schedule, or both The youth can express preferences for friends to be in the same patrol with, neighborhood or town t

Our "council" camp is in fact not owned by council, just managed. A wise decision done years ago not because of lawsuits but for fear council would sell it. I expect our camp will become a totally separate business. Now whether the camp will run summer camp itself or contract with a scout council is a good question. I suspect the former.

This would be interesting in that a separate management company would have no incentive to service only Scouts BSA units during the summer. Nor would there be an incentive to focus on Merit Badge work. They wouldn't be bound by BSA camp standards or the G2SS. They might cater to Scouts BSA units for a year or two but that wouldn't last long.

That is a really interesting idea. In our small troop, we have a subset that essentially did this, a set that committed to “scouts first, everything else as they could,” and a set juggling the two. I wonder if the juggling set would have dropped out for half the year if this was an explicit model, meaning a net much smaller troop during that ‘season’ though. It would align with six month leadership terms, and annual planning could move to two six month terms — with a ‘pre-season planning’ period before each season started. And summer ‘season’ would be open to everyone. An interesting thin

My wandering mind... One of the difficulties over the last decades has been the increase in other options; whether it be youth sports, theater, clubs, etc... Scouts has pretty much said "we understand your other things, so show up when you can". I wonder if this has had a cascading effect over time. Regardless, what if... and I am just spitballing an idea here... what if the structure of scouting was changed from " once/week meeting and 1 weekend/month campout for the whole year" to "a single season; meetings 3x/week, 1 day every weekend for "day activity" and 1 long weekend campout/month

I found out the local camp is no longer in a trust, but outright owned by the council. Ditto two other camps. The one camp that is not owned by the council is the one least used. All infrastructure, waterlines, shelters, building, etc, were done by individual units and volunteers. Troops are very protective of their campsites there because the unit dug the ditches, laid the waterlines, and paid for connection to the water main. I know of 2 troops that had a long time arguement over a campsite. The original unit disbanded for a few years, and a new unit took over the campsite. When the or

Yes, we have had a conditional charter for several years now (no one seems to know how many) and Dec. 31st is the deadline to fix all issues or merger talks begin with several councils. Council is large geographically, but has a small population .