fred johnson

Agreed. That was old school "tradition". Requirements and the advancement program were never structured that way.

Yeah. It's hard to accurately state how Cub Scouts has twisted and turned Tiger over the years. Lots of changes that can't be summarized as one simple line. I still remember in 2000 Tigers were to wear orange t-shirts instead of blue cub scout shirts. I think even Tiger was transitioning from a friend-of-the-pack to a real rank. - 1982 Tiger introduced (2nd grade) - 1986 Cub Scouts could register in 2nd grade - 1993 Pack charters extended to include Tigers ... date I used. - 2001 Tiger rank introduced. I don't fully remember the transition for Tigers to become 1st grade ... as 1986 was when Cubs could register in 2nd grade. http://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/CubScouts/Parents/About/history.aspx

I don't feel strongly about this, but I agree. I see relatively little harm though. I just don't see the point of a separate oath or pledge or charge. The ECOH is to recognize someone who already earned the award. The ECOH has no authority to award or to add another pledge or oath or anything. I like it when the ECOH is kept simple. I personally like it when it's kept to the scout oath and law. Those are the words we hope each scout remembers for the rest of his life. Personally, I hope by remembering the scout oath and law, the scout can think about those words; use them as guiding influences; and, use them when making decisions. I don't see value adding a one-time only oath or charge.

My question ... where is the Eagle charge and Eagle pledge documented ? I can't find official references beyond differing wording and different usages. Sometimes the charge is spoken by a "charger". Other times, it's a similar but different oath.

I was hesitant to reply earlier as I've been very negative toward the Lion program ... for your exact reason. I've seen many cub scout families burn out, repeatedly. IMHO, it started with the 1993 addition of Tiger Cubs. I fear Lion cubs will just accelerate the Cub Scout burn out. Just think ... before 1993 Cub Scouts was 3.5 years of heavy adult involvement. Then, add Tigers and it's 4.5 years. Now with Lions, it's 5.5 years of heavy adult commitment. Add multiple kids in the same family. Siblings see the program over and over again before even joining. So before siblings even joining Cub Scouts, the program is worn out. Families have too many opportunities these days to keep with a demanding program that will go for another five or more years of repeated activities. It becomes flat, boring but still requires heavy involvement. Three years of pinewood derbies might be interesting. Five years is not. Eight or ten years is bad. One reason boy scouts works is each boy scout experiences the program individually. Experiences are fresh and adult family commitment is light. Plus, the program keeps evolving. First years develop skills. Second and third years work on advancement and independence and leadership. Senior scouts work on adventure. It's a continually evolving program. Not so much for Cub Scouts. IMHO, lion cubs might prop up members in the short term at the expense of long term program health.

Communications - Scoutbook communication is internal focused as it requires using the scoutbook web pages to communicate. People need to be able to communicate from their native tools. Outlook. Android phone texting and email. As such, scoutbook needs automatically maintained distribution lists and unique addresses for the troops to communicate. - Need place to post announcements that are part of the troop home page. - Need ability to automatically group and send announcements, ideally weekly. Calendar mgmt - Listing it as "Beta" might be a reason I have not looked at it much. - We often update from computer web pages and the user interface from a web page looks overly cutsey and clumsy as it's laid out for a phone interface. - I mention the look and feel as it took away my confidence and did not investigate it as much as I needed to do. - Need ability automatically email calendar. - Need ability to print out a nice formatted calendar to hand to prospective members to show them our plans. Event mgmt - Features - Lacking reports. Need clean concise report that I can print and hand to trip leaders. - Features - Lacking reports. Can't emphasize this enough. Report useful for treasurer to archive with financial records. Report useful for trip leader to take with that has phone numbers and names. Even if the phone app workds well, trip coordinators will still want paper as the fall back. I would never leave on a trip without the attendee roster. Report useful to hand into camp or council as the roster of our attendees - Features - Need ability to record COMMENTS PER PERSON. Many people when signing up for event have comments related to when they arrive or special needs. Our current system we also use to record check numbers of payment - Features - Need ability to explain COST(scout cost, adult cost, guest cost, etc) - Features - Need ability to record GUESTS that are attending. - Features - Need ability to have an sign-up CLOSED date. - Features - Need ability to LOCK attendee list to only be updated by assigned maintainer. Easy data entry - I tried to pull up and enter data Monday night at troop meeting. It suffered from spinner of death. Seems like every click requires the spinner to come up and a full refresh. I had a parent waiting right next to me and all we wanted to do is see her training record. She said she completed training and we were stuck just viewing. I wanted to re-sync, but I could not get that far. It would not ever bring up the summary page for training. She left. It cost me credibility when I said I could pull that right up and ScoutBook just sat and spun. - My experience Monday re-emphasized that I need paper copies ideally or downloaded copies of everything minimum. - Advancement often occurs as a group. Everyone completed brown sea. Everyone did ... So low level requirements need to be able to be entered as a group. I have not found the ability yet to set low level rank or MB requirements for a set of people. We were able to do that in TroopTrack. ScoutBook looks really nice from my phone, but it's not as nice to use on a 24" computer screen.

In our troop ... Family pays for ECOH (or from scout account) Troop buys a small gift for scout.

Fully agree. MBs should be about exploring things and developing interest. Too often it's just drudgery these days. I don't think it's the merit badge clinics either that do that.

I agree with most of your points. I don't want to remove content or meaningful interaction. I just really think we are way way too chatty with the way the requirements are worded and organized. First class rank requirements 2004/5 - 499 words. 2016 - 1144 words. Well over double in just over ten years. Second class requirements 2001 ... 489 words. 2016 ... 1189 words (or so). Well over double. I just think we are losing our way with the publications. The GTA and Advancement News were huge improvements. Huge!!! That team should be congratulated. On the flip side, we are moving the wrong direciton with requirement wording and useful content for the scout. Perhaps I'm not adjusting to change. Personally, I still find the 2005 handbook more useful thant he current handbook. I also find the 1950s / 60s handbook even more useful as it was a size scouts could actually bring with them. We need the detailed legal verbage to guide the adults, but we need to simplify what the scout sees.

Perhaps, but I see it different. BSA has made a huge effort to make things more consistent. BSA rewrote the "Advancement Committee Policy and Procedures" as the "Guide To Advancement". The GTA now answers many of the questions that created inconsistency and abuses. BSA also now publishes Advancement News quarterly to further clear things up. ... BUT ... if you look at the Eagle project workbook, things were greatly simplified. IMHO, this is happening because there is no parallel for merit badges and ranks. Perhaps, BSA should re-write the annual "2016 Boy Scout Requirements Book" with similar guidance that was added in the GTA. What does 20 nights of camping mean for the camping merit badge? What does scout spirit mean for each rank? We need to keep what faces the scouts simple and sweet. But we do need further guidance for the adults. The more I think about it, we really do need a re-write of the annual requirements book. IMHO, right now it's the most worthless book as it just restates the current requirements. Perhaps it's useful to find the latest greatest, but I go online for that. Or treat what the scout has as sufficient as it was the BSA published version the scout had. I'd buy the requirements book ... IF ... it has more useful content such as specific guidance on a specific rank or MB, etc.

Catch a baseball game in Miami. Visit Key West.

Glad to hear. Plus glad to hear about the Boundary waters. The advancement is nice and his to earn. But it's the adventures, activities and fellowship that shapes character and develops life long memories. Good luck!

I just visited the Troopmaster web site to look at their mobile app. It sort of hits the sweet spot between too basic and too much of an app. I like it. ... but then again ... I swore years ago that I'd never get caught updating a TroopMaster database again. Been there. Done it. Moved on. Tempting though. I like the idea of having the troop roster at the push of a button and then a push a button to dial the phone from the roster. Nice feature. It really seems like we are stuck. ScoutBook has a huge opportunity because they can tap directly into BSA ScoutNet data. That's huge. The graphical presentation is "cute" too. So I could honestly see using ScoutBook to manage advancement. But scoutbook lacks many key features like good summary reports to help run the troop. ScoutBook lacks key tools for communication, calendar management, event management and financial mgmt. It also lacks easy data entry. There are dozens of apps that can deal with those issues really well such as Soar, TroopMaster, TroopWebHost, Quicken and many more. So it seems like for years to come we are committed to using multiple solutions. Argh.

I used to be a big "use the handbook" advocate, but recent handbooks seem more like coffee table books than reference materials. My son's 2005 book was good as an educational tool.

Agreed. My old pack switched fairly quick and easily to ScoutBook. The hardest part they had was making the roster right with contact information and dens and ranks. Otherwise, it helped with advancement tracking. But then again they used ScoutTrack before. That worked too.

Maybe. For now and the next ten years, I really hope we keep using paper as the first and in-work official record. By the time physical sign-offs go away, we need a lot more improvement. ... AND then scouts won't need the paper BS handbook. I would be more sad for that, but the book has been moving away from a great reference tool toward a coffee table picture book. So maybe we are in a slow progression toward online sign-off and no handbook. I agree it's useful. It's just that the amount of work to keep those details recorded is way disproportionate to the amount of work to re-create the records. Usually a destroyed blue card or a lost handbook can by re-created fairly quick. The amount of effort to keep all the requirements up to date for many scouts is a lot of work and a lot of asking the scouts to hand in their handbook. I think that's the best feature of ScoutBook ... and it has it's pluses and minuses.

We use it combined with other tools. Recommend Great for viewing actual BSA advancement records. Gives parents an exact view of what BSA ScoutNET has. We sync every month or so. Great for the advancement report. Use that all the time to evaluate merit badges and rank progress. Nice summary of training records too. On the fence "Our troop" doesn't use it for detailed advancement as that's in the scout's paper book. We just don't care to double record and we don't care to record at that level. "Our troops" view is it's busy work to record the lower level requirements and it's the scout's job to keep their book and drive the details of advancement. Not recommended Calendar - Not usable. Missing features. Doesn't scale beyond five or so events. Collapses when you try to add troop meetings, activities, monthly camp outs, service projects, eagle projects, special holidays, etc. Communication - Email sending tools require you to be in-the-site. No way to send email from your own email to automated list members. Event management - Not usable. Existing features miss the use case of how it's used in the field. Roster - Clunky to update information. User interface - Looks nice but slow for repeated data entry. Reporting - Lacks concise reports for all things except the individual advancement report. That report alone makes the system worthwhile to have. The lack of the other concise reports prevents ScoutBook from being a solution. No printable calendar. No printable roster. No printable event summary. No printable individual histories for camping and service. Summary ScoutBook targets individual advancement and misses most of the key features needed to run a unit.

I agree with others about deciding if you want to pick a fight over this or just roll with the punches because your son is having a good experience in the troop. With that said ... You can't fail a SMC. It's a conversation. No pass. No fail. The requirement is complete when it happened. Scout spirit ? I strongly encourage reading the section in the GTA on scout spirit, GTA section 4.2.3.2. http://www.scouting.org/filestore/pdf/33088.pdf Scout spirit is about how you lead your life and treat others. It's not about a presentation.

The title ... "Advancement SMC" ... there is no such thing as an advancement SMC. It's just a scoutmaster conference. Just a conversation. Friendly. I'm harping on the title as it can create the view that the scoutmaster has to bless advancement. He doesn't. That's not his job at that point. The requirement exists to make sure the scoutmasters and the scouts are regularly talking to each other. That's it. No retest. No quiz. No extra work. Just a friendly sit down and chat. No need to even schedule it. Similar for scout spirit. It exists so the scouts and scoutmaster can talk about it. That's it. Sounds like people are looking to create work and put their own twist on making scouts earn their Eagle.

We use ScoutBook to view ScoutNet data. Every few months we sync the data and it shows every scout's advancement. It's extremely useful.

The "interactive digital MB" pamphlet. No. Never tried. The stopping point is you have to pay and it's pretty much setup for a one person use. Hard to reuse. My experience these days is that most scouts do not use or have the pamphlet. If they do have it, it rarely gets opened. Personally this generation expects this to all be available online. And so do I. Why buy the packet when you can google stuff that is very similar and that fulfills the requirements. BSA needs to move into the 1990s and put all these MB phamplets online as PDF files.

This January we were camping with a high of -3F and a low of -23F, about -30 celsius. Sleeping was done in quinzees. http://boyslife.org/outdoors/outdoorarticles/2992/how-to-build-a-quinzee-snow-shelter/ Shelters kept everyone nice and warm. But to be honest, it was still dang cold especially with the wind.

Ohhhh ... what a juicy topic. My thoughts and what the troop I guide does. Thoughts The ideal scout communication is face-to-face. Scouts communicate how they want to communicate but ... Scouts communicate with scouts. ​ Adults communicate with adults. My youngest son does not have a phone yet. And, I don't want to get him one for as long as possible. does not check email or have email or have Facebook. I do not want to do anything that accelerates it. I'll let it happen when it needs to happen. Pleasing adults Adults will complain if you send them too much or too little information. Adults need accurate information when they receive it. It's almost better to not email / text adults than to regularly send error prone information. Teaching behavior I'd really like to communicate with my son on the up-and-up. If there is something he needs to read, I'll tell him that. If there is something he needs to know that I learned, I'll share. But I won't share small bits of info as a teaser to get him to read his email. I do not like when it's done to me and I know the words I use to describe those people. Either tell me or don't. But don't tease me with part to get me to jump and go find the rest. Our Troop Our troop email is from adults and to adults. If scouts want to tap in, fine. Scouts can communicate in any channel they want to communicate. Our adults will not successfully define how scouts communicate.

I'm glad to see earlier comments asking about the troop program. IMHO, that's the right question. Lack of participation is more often an issue of the troop program. I get worried with discussions like this ... because the discussion can easily reflect the wrong attitude and can reflect adults working their own agenda. Never hold hostage a scout's advancement. As for which ones to count? Don't be legalistic. Have the scout tell you his list of activities. If they seem reasonable first to the scout and secondly to you, then they count them. The key point is we need to keep advancement a positive experience and an exciting reward. Advancement is not to be dangled in front of the scout to make him more active.

Yeah ... sometimes what is good for one scout is not good for another. What some parents look for in the program is the opposite of what I look to have for my sons. I fully believe scouts is a great program and it continually gets better as scouts mature. But there are always bad matches. What do you think is the main issue? This specific troop? Would a different troop help? A lot of what you say leads me to think you wanted your son to have another year to mature before Boy Scouts. That could be very true as he's your son and you are the best judge. Boy Scouts does take more self-confidence and ability function on one's own. As a side note, I can understand webelos wanting to cross early. Packs now have Lions. Tigers were added not that much earlier. Most 4th and 5th graders don't want to do activities that are also suitable for Kindergarten and 1st graders. ... BUT ... they are not really ready for Boy Scouts either as they grow alot during the 4th and 5th grade years. Now that we pushed Cub Scouts as a younger kid program, we really need something targeting the in-between years better ... AS A SEPARATE PROGRAM. Webelos are too mature for kindergarten and 1st grade activities, but not quite ready for the independence of Boy Scouts. I wish you the best.