Leaderboard

The SCOUTER.com virtual campfire has been lighting our community now for more than 25 years. It's hard for me to imagine that so much time has passed, and the thousands of Scouts and Scouters around the world that have learned and shared together. These are obviously incredibly trying times for Scouting and enormous transition for the organization. But I have always believed that the very best of Scouting was at the grassroots, found in the mentoring relationship of a leader and young Scout, honed on cold winter campouts and sharpened by the lessons of leadership and service. And these fo

The project isn't finished yet, he has one more "feature" at the end of the trail. Also a missing hand rail at the start. He hopes to have it completed by next month. It started as total woods, so the project started as making the trail. The rest was to make the downhill Slopestyle mountain bike course. He built this for a local mountain biking non-profit. The community responded to his fundraising efforts (raised almost $4000, wood prices went up exponentially this year) and calls for help on workdays Before: After (almost complete)

It's a bankruptcy. A demarcation line. Liabilities before bankruptcy would be gone. There would be no compensation for victims of 2010-2020 abuse. For BSA to keep a fund, BSA would need to acknowledge a continued liability for debts previous to the bankruptcy. If funds need to be reserved, it would need to come from the current pending settlement reducing payments for the currently listed victims.

I would expect the TCC and the future claims rep are not willing to bet on future payments from BSA. It seems like it would be best from all parties to arrive at a final number, write the check and move on. For future claims, my understanding is that there would be a bucket of money that would pay out for those claims not submitted by the bankruptcy filing deadline. I tend to agree with @David CO that parents and donors (and I expect COs) will want to have a hard line in the sand that future dues, fees, fundraising are all going 100% to the current youth activities and not past

Nobody associated with my troop will want to pay a dime towards any settlement, because none of us participated in the abuse. We're here to invest in scouts today, not to bail out scouters who were not held accountable decades ago. Making scouts sell popcorn, etc for such bailouts to keep the program running is just wrong.

Uh, no..... this is stealing the opportunity from the scouts to actually learn from doing the requirements for the merit badge. I am so tired of Merit badges that are just hand waved, Eagle projects that are just a bench, and positions of responsibilty where the scout doesn't actually do anything for six months. My scouts know that I am "a hard grader" but they also know that when I sign of on a requirement, they know it and are proud that they earned it. There are too many people that are awarded merit badges and ranks that they don't deserve.

By now, scouts that have had school in-person a couple of days a week should have mastered mask management. They certainly should have been doing it at meetings. Hopefully the SM has taken them on some hikes and camp outs to observe their behaviors. Hopefully they've learned what materials survive a wet pack. Often times, when we say masks are mandatory, it means inside or working in close quarters. And we call our scouts on it "on the fly." Ours have not pushed back. I'm quite proud of them. This year will be different than last year and SM's will need to adjust accordingly. And they nee

I thought the 4th law of motion was "a scout is always hungry". Hmm, I can't seem to google it..

The best studies I was able to find put the transmission rate of COVID at around 5% for a close contact (and 10% for a household member). They've also reviewed studies and concluded that the apparent transmission rate outdoors is about 18 times lower than it is indoors. So that puts the outdoor transmission rate for a close contact at about 0.27% (about 1 in 37,000). And even then, that 18 times lower number includes gatherings that were primarily outdoors, but that included indoors components and didn't factor out actual physical contact or surface related transmission. Given that mat

I was asked to be be a Camping mB counselor for a Merit Badge U. The director said it would be focused on first year scouts with little/no experience. She asked me if I wanted a 2hr or 4hr morning session for them to get the badge. After explaining that I would be happy to do an "intro to camping mB" session but that camping mB for new scouts could not be done in that time frame. She then asked if another session in the afternoon would suffice for them to get the blue card signed off. Grrrr.

There has been outdoors transmission even at outdoors sports practices so I think continued mask wearing for the time being is prudent. Kids forget and don't realize they are standing too close or they are downwind of someone who is infected. By the fall, it sounds like we'll have at least one vaccine available for kids 12 and up so that will also help.

If patrols were in fact pods spaced a hundred yards apart, you could relax mask wearing. But, that’s probably not your reality. Cov-sars-2 seems perfectly content with half as many targets in which it may flourish. Your state needs higher numbers. 80% of adults vaxxed is a passing grade. Let your SM be the SM in this case. Have him talk to other SMs in your district and observe how the scouts behave. This is not a committee decision.

To make that work, you would need to have a scouting public who is willing to pay in perpetuity. I don't think the parents and donors are collectively willing to do that. They'll quit.