Leaderboard

When my financial advisor found out I was a scout leader and taking other people's kids in my car and out camping, he recommended I carry umbrella liability insurance. I have done so for 30 years now. It is very reasonable in cost. You can be perfectly innocent and not at fault, but if you get sued or accused, it can cost you everything to defend yourself. Such is today's litigious society that feels if my kid gets hurt, SOMEONE has to pay, no matter the reason.

This was the BSA version I am familiar with.

What can we say, other than good for her. https://richmond.com/opinion/column/hanover-hypocrisy-book-censorship-girl-scout/article_ca2c06be-fde7-11ee-8aea-939bb71a3f14.html

Scoutlike discussion? Locking for now. @Eagle1993 @gpurlee @T2Eagle @MattR

No, I do not expect apologies from parasites, I expect an apology from a scout who called a large number of other scouts liars based upon unfounded accusations. (That would be YOU.)

I'm surprised we don't hear about more issues with the YMCA. Perhaps my BSA training has made me hypersensitive to compromising situations. When taking my son to swim lessons, I skip the family changing area and opt for the men's room where they still have a dedicated wing for parents of young children. The locker room is partitioned for privacy (seriously, it's like a maze), but that also would make it difficult for a staff member or well-meaning bystander to intervene if they saw inappropriate activities. We always try to get in and out as fast as possible (you can shower at home, kid).

It looks like this ill-fated program was rolled-out during my 15-year Scouting hiatus between the time I worked at my local council camp in college and when my son was old enough to join Cub Scouts. I'm guessing the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis put an emphasis on marketable degrees and the BSA (already suffering from membership declines), tried to prop themselves up by attaching themselves to the STEM movement? And people actually voted to turn Scouts into night school? 😂

@fred8033, one of the first Google hits I came across suggested that Girl Scout membership declined from 2.8 million in 2003 to ~1 million in 2021. This would be a point-to point decrease of ~65% over an 18-year span. According to a table I pulled from Wikipedia, BSA membership went from 3.2 million in 2003 to ~1 million in 2021. This would be a point-to point decrease of ~69% over the same period. While some of the BSA's issues have been self-inflicted, I do think the membership challenges are part of a larger societal trend - kids just have a lot more choices these days (and that's

@jumpingjoj, I'm not too familiar with the bankruptcy process. How exactly did a scout leader get roped into this? Aside from someone getting physically hurt under my charge, this is pretty much my worst nightmare as a scout volunteer. Unless the accused wanted to lawyer-up to clear their name (with a limited success rate and drawing more attention to themselves in the process), their efforts may be better spent elsewhere. We're only given so much time on this Earth - why spend it on an organization that would turn on them so quickly?

My suggestion is to love the past and the involvement. Then, move on. Find the next place to volunteer. Scouting is not the end-all-be-all of life.

It is my understanding that yes it is. One would think they would keep the domain and just forward it to scouting.org forever. The lab coats aren't on scoutshop.org any longer. After I wrote the above, I realized that it used to be on beascout.org and isn't there. I used the waybackmachine to see that sometime between April 2022 and August, the option to search for STEM Scouts was removed.

Heretic!

Poor forecasting is an understatement. A big problem is location. Not near a major airport, so using it for training opportunities is pretty darn tough. We've got municipal airports in the northeast that dwarf Raleigh County Memorial Airport, and you can't get flights to it without zig-zagging around the US from some destinations. I suspect that is why things like the annual meeting, OA national committee meetings, etc. are not often making the rounds to be held there. There is limited onsite hotel accommodations at the Summit, but to me, we are in a camping-oriented program, so use it for NOA

That's not an apology, bud.

Where do you get your information? Are you part of the settlement trust? When you say "many cannot", how many are you saying, what is the percentage? Have you read the claims? Except for what you have read do you know the lawyers? Do you actually even know a claimant? Have you walked in any of our shoes? As a survivor who was well vetted by a law firm who has filed 1600 claims I am disturbed by your constant attitude of trying to make the BSA look like the victim in all of this. It was the BSA who filed the Bankruptcy and ran their own ads for survivors to come forward. I know this becaus