Eagledad

You nailed it, the scouts simply don't know how. Sending a scout into leadership without some skills is like sending them in the cave without a flashlight. They are just going to bump their heads feeling their way around. We developed "plannng" skills by teaching a few simple steps. First Make a list of monthly themes for meetings and campouts. YOu know fun things like fishing, backpackingand rappelling. Ask each patrol to contribute three different ideas. The adults get to throw in three as well. Write them an the wall for all to see. Then have the scouts vote on the best suggestions. Next, do camping locations. This works best if you can bring in some vacation books with camping sites. Let the scouts ponder through the and throw out some ideas. Then set dates on big calenders that everyone can. In everything scouts do, break up large task like planning, into a few simple small task so scouts don't focus on the mountain they have to climb, just the steps that get them there. Get scouts to use agendas for every meeting. Our SPL runs and average of 100 PLC meetings every six month. Patrols leaders should run at least 25 to 30. Those meeting go alot easier and faster when the scouts use the agenda as a quick guide. Agendas should be simple: Officer reports, old business, new business and sometimes a closing. Twocubs ban of poptarts isn't really so much a ban as it is teaching healthy lifestyle. A scout is clean, teach them how to be clean. Scouts will buy into health and safety, they just don't like adults making up rules because they are adults. Our scouts could have poptarts, but they still had to cook and include the three food groups. I never had to ban anything, I just asked them if it was healthy and to change the policy if wasn't. We had the same issue with pop. It got out of control, I asked the PLC if it was healthy and they discussed it and change the policy. Teach them, trust them, let them go. If you did it right, they will come back to you asking for more. Why, because learning skills of life gives them indpendence and they love independence. I love this scouting stuff. Barry

Excellent post Twocub, excellent. Your post also applies to those troops that don't cook breakfast on Sunday so that they can break camp faster and get home sooner. The meal is scouting's best activity for developing character growth. Don't skip a single opportunity. It is so powerful infact, some troops refuse to attend a summer camp with a dinnng hall. Barry

Then she probably doesn't have insurance and she should be in jail. Asking about insurance makes us aware of the responsibility and whether we want that responsibility or not. And training is keeping a lot of adults out of the program. Scoutmaster Specific was a 24 hour class. Ssometimes adults just can't fit a course in their schedule which prevents them from participating at all. I redesgined our District training program just so we could provide more training for the average working person.

Hi LH, I been there and have the shirt. I have a few shirts in fact because I helped a few other troops in your situation. MattR gave an excellent post which describes the direction our troop went, so I will give a few words on the older scouts. My advice is if you want to keep the older scouts, let them have their program because they will not change much. What boys learn up to puberty is what you are stuck with after. It's human nature that you need to understand for your young scouts. But just give in to the idea that your new program will have to be built from the young scouts. Use the older scouts best as you can for teaching skills and leading hikes, but don't push them so hard they don't come back. Just let them do their thing so they get some growth from the program. YOU focus on building the habits of a boy run troop with the young guys. Older scouts will be frustrating at first, but you will get used to blending the two programs until they age out. Just make sure the younger scouts are using the program you want so they teach it to the younger scouts when they get older. It's a lot of work, but I promise the rewards are great. Our troop went from 12 to 100 in seven years and we had the reputation of the most boy run troop in the council. We didn't want to be a big troop, but we coudn't turn them away either. We averaged 2 older scouts a month transfering from other troops because they wanted to have more fun then the troop they where in. So there is hope, just as MattR keeps pointing out with his troop, if you build it, they will come. I love this scouting stuff. Barry

Normal in that reference is a heterosexual sexual relationship. More mature meaning that sex with another person of the same sex is considered healthy while the desire for sex with the horse is not.

Which one? My editor is a real pain, so just pick one.

Hey, you were the one that made accusations of my personal relationships to counter my opinion, I think it's relevant that you can't particpate in a discussion without trying to attack someones character. It seems you just make up the rules as you go along in these discussions.

Parceling words doesn't change what you implied Pack. You can't have an honest discussion when accussing people of actions that you no nothing about. The best you can do is agree to disagree, but trying to discredit my words with hyberbole is bad acting.

I agree with everything you siad Moose, but it doesn't change anything I've said previously.

Im saying that your self righteous to think that only your are capable of treating all people equally even when you don't agree with everything about them.

I don't buy it Pack, just because folks don't agree that homosexuality is normal doesn't mean they aren't accepted and treated as equals in every other way. That's pretty self righteous thinking.

You're stereotyping, I don't recall commenting on gay marriage. My opinions are of the health and morality of homosexuality.

It amazes me that some people consider the desire for a mate of the same sex as more mature than the desires of any other kind of relationship. Folks keep wanting to equalize homosexuality as a normal healthy lifestyle when my observations of friends and family are anything but. Oh sure, some gays find a stable relastionship, but that isn't normal for that lifestyle. On the whole, gays are some of the loneliest people I know.

Yes, I saw a picture of a two headed snake once, but that isn't normal. All things being equal, a healthy family starts with a mom and dad. Barry

A healthy family relationship, which is mother and father. Barry

The question is how many were kicked out?

My editor doesn't work well with the Scouter site, so I will keep the answer short. Please forgive the bluntness of the answer. I have much better answers to the question buried somewhere in the archives. I have seen no evidence in my life time that the homosexuality behavior is any more natural than humans who desire sex with animals. Their is the mental and physical health issues of the person who desires to participate in the behavior as well as the the health issues of continued behavior. That being said, I have close friends and relatives who are gay, so I'm not ignorant to the behavior and lifestyle. I have a lot of compassion for them because I see them suffer greatly. Barry

""I learned a few years ago to do my best to avoid the garbage that comes from our local council all the way up to National. I feel if we bring that stuff to the troop level, we are doing a dis-service to those we serve."" Agreed, but this has gone way way above National into the limelight of the national media and political process. Every person (youth and adults) who considers going to a scouting activitity (recruiting?) is wondering which side of the "us against them" they are on. And there will constant reminders by the media and politicians of just who side you should be on. We the people (sheep really) let the Pop Culture take our program away from us. Barry

We will just have to agree to disagree. Barry

Yes, even Packsaddle couldn't keep focused on the orginal intent of the subject. The media and BSA dissenters has stigmatized the organization enough that the average Tiger parent isn't going to want to hassle with it. Barry

One of the differences of today is parents are a lot busier. Sure Den leaders are hard to find, they have been working all day long and we ask them to take on another dozen young boys for a couple of hours when they come home. Moms didn't work in the 70's and early 80's. The added complexity of running a pack over the last 30 years hasn't helped either. By adding the Tiger program, adults can see themselves stuck for five years. I'm personally amazed that we get as many adults as we do. I am a pretty good recruiter, but I do it by getting them to commit to just one small step and hope they get hooked for climbing the whole mountain. Climbing a mountain isn't so hard when you look at one step at a time. The problem I see with troops is adults have a hard time seeing their participation in the big picture and there is very little incentive to put out the effort. Unless they are one of three or four key leaders, they simply don't see how their time makes a difference. They either do way too little or sufficate the program with way too much. I've said before that 50% of my Scoutmastering was working with adults just trying to get them to see the mission and where they fit in that mission. Troop programs are attractive to narcissists who want full control of steering the program. You see a lot of them even here on the forum. Twocubdad and MattR types of leaders are rare.

Nine out of ten parents want to work with the scoutmasters, expecially with their sons behaviors, or misbehaviors. I found that most SMs want to go it alone thinking they have something special that parents don't have. And maybe the title of Scoutmaster does give some extra power, but we only see these kids a couple hours a week on average, the parent a lot more. So I worked with the parents as a team working together to build a man. I hid nothing from the parents and usually kept them up to date on their son's performance in the troop. In fact while the scouts are usually loading or unloading their gear for camp, I walked around bragging to parents about their son. Usually they take bad news pretty well when they get good news most of the time. Base did very well. Barry

I think there are many classes of adult leaders, I know my Eagle Scout neighbor who was arrested for making and selling adult pornographic movies was turned down by the BSA. He didn't even have kids. I know of a drug dealer older brother (bad one) that was turned away as well. Should we be afraid of stigmatizing the kids by those behavior classifications? What you are really saying is the BSA legitimized homosexuallity as a dangerous behavior, which you don't agree. Is homosexuality a dangerous behavior? I think it is, so we agree to disagree. Barry

Was always my number 1 fear as a SM. Oklahoma is well known for its energetic storms, but so were all the areas we seemed to do our high adventures. Barry

It's a lot more complicated than just a changing program, the BSA had more scouts after their big changes in the 60s and 70s than before. All the Scouting organizations in North America are suffering from the same problems of money, membership and camps. The Girls Scouts have struggled the longest but Campfire Kids wasn't that far behind them. The Canadian Scouts (largest Scouting orgnization in the world in 1990) is 30 percent of what they were of the early 90s. The one common event with all these organizations that marks the start their dramatic program decline is changing to a more progressive membership policy. Canadian scouts was most dramtic, but they all have the same trend. Take that as you want, the data doesn't lie. It's been said for several years that the BSA would follow the same decline as other organizations if it followed the same path. I attribute the BSAs slow membership decline the last 15 years to a top heavy Pack program that has become so complicated for average parent to manage that it burns out its members in three years. I could show graphs at the time that predicted todays deline based from big changes in the pack program. I don't think we have seen the real decline of the BSA yet, but we are about to. After watching all these other organizations decline the last 25 years, I personally conclude that Scouting is a values program which makes it a concervative organization. Once it gets away from concervative values, it's just another after school club. If you want to camp, join scouts. Otherwise go play chess. It will be left up to the churches to support the kind of scouting we have today. But without support from National, it will just be local.