Eagledad

Your situation is challenging because as you said, you don’t have enough adults stepping up. From my perspective, that is your highest priority or the other problems will drag you down. I’ve experienced the ASM who didn’t really agree with my vision for the scouts and the troop. The tension between us never went away because he looked for opportunities to show me up as the SM and prove his style better. The problem solved itself when the adult left the program. Had he not left, we would have had to eventually get our minds aligned. I understand your dilemma, but there may be an opportunity here to fix that problem. One of my biggest disappointments of being the group leader is that most adults will do anything to dodge conflict. Council and district would rather stay out of unit internal conflicts, but if you know someone of wisdom and experience that you can trust outside the troop, I would certainly use their leverage. A strong COR is certainly an advantage. Barry

Wow, that is really good. I will have to memorize that analogy. Barry

I have often wondered what 300 ft really means to you. Of course, that is a good parents responsibility with the information given to them. A Scoutmaster who keeps the parents in the dark deserves the respect that follows. ​ I never had that problem as a coach because we communicated with the parents a lot. I have seen a few Scoutmasters removed and I agreed with each one. However, I have never seen a Scoutmaster removed by only one or two parents. There was always consensus. I guess my point of all this is is the SM will only receive the respect from parents that he/she give to them. Barry

You are missing the point Stosh, parents have to grow as well as their kids to be the best kind of parent, or best kind of scout leader for that matter. You scoffed at me before when I said that a good SM spends 50% of their Scoutmastering working with the adults. If the parents and adult leaders don’t understand how the program works, then likely the SM will struggle to maintain trust as well as respect with the parents. They can’t read our minds. After a few years of summer camps we started to understand that on the whole, the scouts who suffered the most from home sickness where the ones where the parents struggled to let go. I don’t mean not let their son go to camp, they struggled with the idea of detachment. They inadvertently made their son homesick even before he left by telling him how much they would miss him and how they wouldn’t know what to do. Even rover was mentioned as missing that member of the family. Don’t you see, it’s not just the teenagers who are struggling for change, the parents have to change as well. In most cases their son has never spent more than one night away from their home. Now they won’t see him for a week. Parents need to change and grow with the changes and growth of their kids. Most parents feel the emptiness of change, but some deal with it better than others. So, I started preparing parents a few weeks before camp. I told them they might be struggling feelings of being away from their son and that it is normal. But part of the therapy (I didn’t call it that) was instead of dwelling on the negative, help their son look forward to the positive of all the cool fun things at camp. All the friends they will make and all the skills they will learn. Show some envy for their sons experience. Don’t talk about the dog, but instead tell him how excited they are for him. Send some letters, but while they admit they miss him, also remind him of his chores that dad is doing and cleaning up the mess the dog made on the carpet. Life at home is the way it was before he left and the way it will be when he gets back. Right now summer camp is the cool place to be and they want to hear every story. That kind of instruction made a complete difference in our scouts attitudes at summer camp. And I think it really help the parents as well. Parents aren’t bad people, they are learning life’s lessons just like everyone else. But when a friendly voice tells them what they are feeling is normal and that everything will be alright, they become a lot easier to work with when their son experiences get a little tougher. We are part of the team. Ya well a lot of us here including me on the forum get pretty judgmental about parents, but truth be told parents aren’t always dealt a fair hand with scout leaders either. We can't change the world, but we can make a difference to the little piece of culture around us. Barry

I am glad to read that you are doing OK LeCaster, God bless you and all your family. But I feel your story is representative of the problem, not the solution. Not that I have a solution, but we as a culture seem to justify harmful behavior with examples of surviving victims. Coincidently I just ran into a long time scouter friend at a café who I haven’t seen in about three years. I was the SM when his older son earned eagle. His younger Eagle son is now an ASM for the troop. When he noticed that I didn’t recognize the women he was with, he said, “You didn’t know? The boys’ mother left me for another woman. The boys are taking it very hardâ€Â. It seems to me that our culture has reached a level where we glorify parents making personal choices even when in the back of our minds WE KNOW that friends and family will suffer from those choices for the rest of their lives. I am floored that our culture not only supports, but encourages mothers to abandon their children for their own personal happiness. And I mean abandonment to the extreme of even killing their unborn children. We seem to support being happy even at the destruction of those around us. Can anyone really say it is anything less? How can a culture survive when the parents are willing to accept their children as casualties of their personal happiness? How? What hope is there for my kids kids? I know this topic appears pointedly judgmental, I don’t mean to make it so. I feel that our culture has an overall problem of feeling entitled to be personally happy and that feeling is being used to the extreme for political advantage. Divorce and parent abandonment is just a result of the much bigger problem. But it is a problem that feeds the monster and makes it worse. I do not think good parenting should be looked at as a noble, but it seems today that any parents who are willing to make a marriage work to the end are indeed noble. I don’t have an answer, but I just wanted to remind ourselves that the problem is out there and our children are suffering as a result. Barry

Here is an article that for many reasons is close to my heart. I know, I know, but I feel the truth of divorce shouldn’t be hidden by the pop culture veil that children don’t suffer. Not only is my observation that children suffer into their adult years, I also think divorce is the number one indicator of the present culture. “â€ÂIs divorce bad for childrenâ€Â†“The guilt is a burden I have lived with for years. I’m reminded of it every day as I look into my children’s eyes and see a hardness and pain that I never had as a child. I lived carefree in the comfort of my parents’ love. This is a gift I never gave my children. Instead, I showered them with the curses of a divorced life, the mixed loyalties of remarriage, and the travails of a blended family that never really blends.†http://thefederalist.com/2014/05/14/is-divorce-bad-for-children/ I have been asked several times why I don’t agree with the homosexual lifestyle. And while there are many ways of answering that, this article on the whole gets to the main point and could have just as well been written about gay families. Yes, I see one as bad as the other. That our culture encourages one and trivializes the other is why most of our kids have little hope in my opinion of growing up living carefree in the comfort of their parents’ love. Barry

And that is the point of the training, get it back on the discussion table and prove through the training that if anything, pocket or folding blade knives require more training because of their inherent of danger of non-fixed blade. I'm a pragmatic sort of person who tries to get folks thinking away from their emotions. It's just like the bow saw, most adults don't realize that it is the most dangerous woods tool the average scout or scouter uses. So they don't give it the respect it deserves and I think it is fair to say most users nick their hand with it. Barry

I would do a fixed knife safety training class for interested scouts and adults who might use these knives outside troop activities. It would be the exact same training that I use for the pocket knife making the point that there is no difference of safety between the two types. Barry

This is a favorite discussion with many of us, so I'm sure it will be very active. I think you have a good idea of a boy run program. But there are no two boy run programs a like because growth and maturity of both the scouts and adults require constant changes or tuning. So don't get fixated on a single method, get fixated on the objective so that you can identify when you are on and off track. Its more important know where you are going then how to get there. Start thinking pictures that you can help identify your goal. For example one of the pictures I taught our leaders was that we were trying to put the adults out of business. Another way I explained it was we want the scouts so confident in their skills that if the adults didn't show up, the activities still ran as planned. I would even test that when opportunities allowed the adults hang back or not show up. Do you really need adults at a PLC meeting? But you get the point. Your training has to be good enough to teach confidence of doing the skills in normal activities, and the activities need to give the scouts the expertise of the skill. And when I say skills, I am also talking about value skills like the law and oath, or leadership, management, character and so on. To something, we have to practice that something. So introduce them to the skills and give the freedom to practice. Barry

I am amazed what parents hold back from scout leaders about their sons health issues. It's as if they know their son is in a safe place, so they don't worry about it. I had been struggling with one difficult scout when in passing mom mentioned that let him come down on his medication during scouting activities. I kind of let them have it because dad was a very active ASM and knew what I was going through. After that, the scout was much better, but I several such stories. Enough that I started requesting full disclosure when scouts joined. I understand families want to give junior a break from meds on weekends, but that doesn't make any easier for the people around him. Barry

This was the part I wanted to point out as well, older scouts "Don't like change". It is rare for older scouts to go along with big changes in program, even if the change is just a merger. It can work, I'm just advising (warning) to consider the scouts 14 and older. The more involved they are at the begining, the better your chances of success after the merge. As for the merge, we found that only 25% of merges and splits are successful. Success meaning that the units continue to perform at least as well as before the change. Barry

More often than not the cause of a dying troop is burnout. They are a great opportunity for adults looking to start a new troop, but they need to contact their district to let them know. Our den of 12 Webelos was looking to start a new boy run troop when district introduced us to the burned out SM of a troop of five scouts. We took over and it grew from 17 to 90 scouts in seven years. Barry

It's hard to throw out anything to a scouter who has been there and done that FOUR times. I imagine there isn't much you haven't done, seen, or tried. But you did make me think back and smile on some memories. I had two dens of Webelos and I ran them each completely different. With my first den, we planned all the activities so that the scouts knocked off a few requirements. All 12 of those Webelos earned all 20 Activity Badges, Woohoo! I also planned the activities with my 2nd den under activity badge themes, but this time with the primary objective to have FUN. Whether or not some of the boys boys already knocked off the requirements was in inconsequential because they all had fun. Only one of my 16 Webelos in the 2nd den got all 20 badges, but all of them including the den leaders had a lot more fun. I don't hardly remember any of the activities in the first den. But I still remember a lot of the cool stuff we did with the second Den. Barry

As I said, unless you understand the course, it's unlikely your scouts would use much of what they learn. And unless the SM understands the gaols of the course, the scouts themselves might not understand what they learned anyway. It's not as if they get a lot of time on how to apply their lessons. NYLT might be better than the old course there, but experts tell us that at best we come home with 15% of everything thrown at us. As I said, quality of a program set by expectations. Expectations always come from a higher authority, whether that be the SM or council. If the council isn't setting expectations on the units (adults) of NYLT or even Junior Leadership Develop, then the council as a whole deserves the quality of junior leadership that it gets. I had once wrote a Council Junior Leadership Development Guide for the troops that expressed the council's expectations for leadership development from a scouts first day all the way to NYLT director. Well it was JLTC back then. But we even included course staffing as part of leadership development. I guess I could have even included Wood Badge, but I can't imagine scouts getting better training than our youth leadership program at the time. LOL Barry

We did some research in our council and found that the scouts who got the least from the course were from troops with scoutmasters who didn't have a clue what the course was teaching. Of course there are the few SMs who just think they know it all, but most SMs are in the dark because the course didn't do much to bring the troop leaders up to speed. How can a SM support new ideas when they don't really know what those new ideas are? Our council started requiring each troop to provide an adult for day of orientation that explained the intent of the course and then help the adult and the scout build a plan to work the three main gaols (ticket items). The council got a lot of praise by the troops after tha because they could see the scouts making a difference to the program. Performance is a direct result of expectation and development. As result quality of units in a council can be raised by the expectations of the council. Training programs set the expectations and the quality of a whole council or district can be raised or lowered by the quality of training of the higher level. And while I think our council did a really good job of raising troop performance through our JLT program, I have concluded that it's the adults who could really benefit the most from taking the NYLT course. Barry

I agree LeCaster, I think you basically repeated everything I said. The problem with SM Specific is not just anybody can present it and keep it interesting for 12 hours. The challenge for Councils is not every district has skilled presenters, or even Training Committee Chairs that recognized the need for good presenters. By the way, I met one of the writers of the course and asked him why there was some inconsistencies with the material and he said because the course was written by three different authors who never met each other. They had set of objectives and when they were finished, they sent their material to National to be put together. They didn't know how long the course was going to take until the final version was tested. It helped me understand better why the course was a little jumpy. The way I helped our course move better was provide 3 SKILLED presenters over two days. Changing presenters every couple of hours helped everyone stay fresh. Oh, we also brought a lot of snacks. Our Council also experimented with a three night course but in the end the two day course was the most accepted. And I agree with what you say about IOLS, but the problem is the number of weekends scouters are required to attend to be a scouter. Not that many adults really enjoy several weekends of training, and that is the big issue we are dealing with. I also agree that mixing in Webelos training wasn't a good idea. I certainly agree that stuffing the two courses together isn't the right approach. However, how about three week nights (tue, wed, thru) of three hours before the weekend of camping. That way the courses could be combined in such a way to make it flow better right from thursday night into Friday night when when everyone meets at camp. Can you see I enjoy writing courses? Our council had a two weekend advanced skills course that was designed for Troop leaders with about two years experience. It was a backpacking course where the participants hiked from session to session. They didn't hike very far, it was just a way to each minimalist type of camping. The course was designed by one of the original WB course writters and it is by far the most enjoyable and educational skills course I've seen for adults. But it requires six "full" days (two weekends including a full day friday), which not many scouters are willing to give up. If you have some good ideas, you should call Council and ask if you can be part of the team writing the course. I found that once Council or district recognizes talent, they won't let go. Barry

You means something like Fast Start. Like Position Specific course (Scoutmaster Specific) [quote=mozartbrau;n409519and have the advanced course for those who can use that. IOLS Well, as I said, we have to respect the problem. I was on the district and council training committee and had a pretty good big picture of the problem. For one, not very many adults want to put that much time into training. While I'm not a big fan, more adults will do on line training than when it is presented in person. I don't know who does all the whining these days because I got out that side of the program, but when I was sent to units to help fix problems, practical skills was never the issue. It was organizational skills that was hurting the programs. After personal experience of teaching the old course and the new courses, I think the new courses do a much better job of getting adults to understand their goals and skills required to a minimal job than the old courses. But you need to understand, the old courses were appropriate back when 70 percent of the volunteers had a scouting experience as a youth. Its a whole demographic now. And please don't think I'm taking up for National, while I respect their challenges, I have little faith that they have the ability to do the job expected of them. My opinions are from my observations of working in the system. Scoutmaster Specific is one of the most dry boring courses I have ever had to give. To present it properly, we went out to find skilled presenters as well has divide the syllabus up into manageable sections. The information is good and important, but it is so long. And I don't see how it could be any shorter. And yet, that course doesn't even talk about practical skills, much less teach them. It is a difficult challenge. I am glad councils are trying to fill the holes and I wish them luck. I'm not sure I would want National trying to do it. Barry

I'm not sure they are wondering that. If you can get enough experience to understand how unit leaders are trained and who the unit leaders are, you may start to respect the problem of how much training is required to run a program. Give or take only about 25 to 35 percent of new volunteers had any kind of scouting experience, and not many more of them has an outdoors camping experience. So you get confronted with how much training does someone who is totally clueless of scouting need to have to run a unit program? Even worse, is it possible to give that adult enough training so that they can do an acceptable job without making them take a semester of courses? One problem I kept seeing with female Bear Den Leaders was they were terrified of camping and they wanted out before becoming a Webelos leader. If at best only 35% of adults have some kind of camping experience, you can imagine the challenge of getting adults at least comfortable with running a youth camping program. Like I said, walk a mile in Nationals shoes, and maybe we can at least respect the challenge. What exactly is the goal of IOLS? Is it to turn adults into skilled leaders? Can the course even do that? Are we reaching a point in our society where scouting will have to change to be safe for the adults? Barry

Yes you are right Stosh, that is the syllabus I was suggesting Kudu use to design a walking WB type course. It is interesting how councils are trying to fix these courses. The old SM Fundamentals course Stosh is talking about was broken up into the present SM Specific and IOLS course because there was so too information for one weekend. Let us know how it turns out. BArry

Yes, experienced troops eventually learn the system and dodge the problem areas, but new troops or new adult leadership seem to always fall in the traps. I was always trying to encourage our district to provide Eagle Project training so the units would understand what is expected of them and also give the units a chance to give comments. I suggested each unit be to send at least one adult once a year. In our council every district is different and it's hard even for the Council Training Committee to know the different expectations. Our troop had one family transfer in from another state who had a son ready to do his project. In her previous district, scouts attended two approval meetings, one to learn the expectations and the other to get the approval. I actually like that idea. But without asking anyone in our troop, mom and her son attended our district Eagle Project approval meeting and she ended up leaving in tears. When I heard about it, I called the District Committee Chair and eventually had the person who caused the problem removed himself. I know the leader well and it was a misunderstanding, but he knew he handled it wrong and voluntarily took himself off the board. In their effort to be fair, members of boards tend to get too set in their ways without understanding the justifications for policies set by previous members. I saw the problem across our council. A little training would go a long way to helping everyone understand the system. Barry

Your troop has a few boys talented in playing sports and they are still in scouts. Hmm, Randy, you ask a question but don't seem to like the answers. You keep supporting my point. Boys go where the fun is. If the BSA is losing scouts, it needs to look into its program to fix the problem. I admit the gay issue has taken the BSA down to its knees. That should have been no surprise, it has been said many times over the years that youth scouting organizations in North America that changed their admission policies to accept gays have never had the numbers they had before the policy change. And the PC activist aren't through, just ask Merlin. But at some point when all the political correctness chaff is separated and the BSA is beat down to where program determines its membership numbers, National will have to hold itself accountable. Families will go where they have the most fun. Barry