fred8033

You encountered yet another rule that's really just a personal preference / opinion. Let the scout decide. It's his project. Seems 100% appropriate as it's part of getting the job done. ... and there's no rule against it. QUICK CORRECTION - The wrong thing is to expect the parents to pay. A scout pays his own way. So the real scout decision is to feed or not to feed. If the project plan includes providing food for volunteers, funding it is part of the project. ... Of course, it could be funded thru a donation to the project ... by the parents ... or by the scoutmaster ... or b

(duplicate)(This message has been edited by fred8033)

Again, JMHawkins wrote a reply much better than I can say it. But I spent the time writing ... so here's my comment. ... jblake47 wrote: "I find it difficult to accept the vs. in the title Citizenship and Leadership are one and the same." I can understand but I agree with the topic in that I'd rather see scouting focused on citizenship and stop hearing people say scouting teaches leadership. IMHO, saying scouting teaches leadership is destructive for the same reasons listed by JMHawkins. Leadership should be at the same level as teaching skills, teaching responsibility, teac

JMHawkins: Nicely written and agree. I'd love to see scouting emphasize citizenship at a higher level then leadership. And your points are very good. Great statement ... "Citizenship includes leadership, when leadership is needed and you're the right person to provide it. It also includes being responsible for your job when being responsible for your job is what's needed." ... "Passively following whoever is declared boss isn't the same thing at all. It's the difference between citizenship and serfdom." ... I've seen several troops that solely focus on leadership development bey

Twocubdad ... You hit it on the head. I've had many of the same thoughts but never put them down. ... EVERYONE - Read TwoCubDad's Jan 17th post. What a great statement! I wish BSA would realign with the approach TwoCubDad wrote. - Drop the Cub Scout "graduation" idea. It's just an excuse to leave. - Make Cub Scouts / Boy Scouts a continuous progression. - Drop the need to fill out a new form to join a boy scout troop. It's just the next step. - Drop the Arrow Of Light being the Cub Scout highest award, instead it's just the award at the end of the Webelos year.

Fehler wrote:: "You have too much information, its starting to no longer be useful. District meetings and special trainings 6 months out? Why do non-PLC scouts need to know when PLC meetings are? Simplify a printed "Parent's Information" calendar, and then tell the SM/ASMs/MCs to look it up on-line and print their own if they need it." We are just trying to show a similar amount of info to what we showed when we authored it in Microsoft Word. - PLCs are included because roles change. Elections are every six months. We want the scouts to get used to the same calendar because they w

Okay. Thanks. Sounds like there is no "rumor" or other initiative. Just something in our own council or district. Hmmmm.... I know there was an inquiry last year or the year before on how to improve scouting locally. I know one idea was to focus on troops supporting their CO's pack. Maybe it is just the local full-circle result of that suggestion.

I understand the debate. I'm just wondering if someone has heard of something coming out of national within the last year emphasizing the alignment between same COR units.

For our troop, we have two or three troop meetings a month, a camp out (two to seven days), an activity, district meetings, special training and other extra stuff. It's usually six entries minimum a month. Some months have ten entries. Each Google calendar entry takes five lines plus one blank line (six total). Twelve months * 8 entries average * six = 576 lines. Add more for multi-day events. Assuming 60 lines per page, that's ten pages. For our pack, it might be workable as we only have two or three pack events per month. BUT ... for committee meetings... , it's useful to have

I should mention that my city has six troops and seven packs. One troop has never successfully recruited a cub from the aligned pack. Two troops don't have a pack as the ones with their COR closed down. Our pack doesn't "officially" have a troop as we're chartered by an elementary school PTO and it's a relatively new elementary school. We all want each other to succeed, but it doesn't always feel that way. Recruitment time can be like a feeding frenzy.(This message has been edited by fred8033)

Has anyone heard of a national or other initiative to get units from the same COR to align together? I heard something at a district meeting about it. But I was not sure if it was just the idea of an individual, district, council or national? The idea being that a packs, troops and crews chartered by the same COR should work together. It read to me like the old "feeder pack" concept being resurrected. Just curious if anyone can point to any news article or other publication.

Custom Access DB .... But then I'm back to either #1 - Maintaining data in two places (custom DB and SOAR) ... and confusion as we email the "printable" version between people to get it updated and printed as necessary. We so much wanted to move away from that as we have with emailing Excel files of email addresses. #2 - Deleting the SOAR calendar data and not having available for use. I'm sort of in a stuck position with SOAR and the calendar stuff. Not sure what to do. I think I'll try the custom programming Google scripts suggested earlier. But the whole frustration is

basementdweller wrote: "We also print it as an agenda." basementdweller... Is it nice and compact or sort of clunky looking? How many pages does it take to print out your yearly calendar?

Importance... - for open houses - for prospective parents - for during PLC meetings - for during committee meetings - for parents that just don't read email or browse the web - for scouts to keep in the handbook Just thinking about it. It's really really needed. As much as our scoutmaster likes our web solution, he's grumbled for years at not having a good printed calendar to refer too after stopping maintaining a second version in Microsoft Word.(This message has been edited by fred8033)

FehlerI'm not sure how you got the Google web site to print six months of calenadr on one page. I can't see that option. With Google Agenda layout, our calendar is printed as 10 pages. The web page Google "Agenda" calendar is close when viewed on the screen. Each date is one line. If we could remove the horizontal line separting dates, it would compact futher. There are other issues too such as all the surrounding junk and multi-day events taking multiple lines. But the Google "Agenda" - PRINT - result is bad. It creates five lines per entry. One for the date and only the

I should admit I'm disappointed in the SOAR vendor. I've asked for this feature for four years and every request has been blown off and instead the new feature sets have to do with pretty colors or other esoteric stuff.

Does anyone have a good solution for producing a printable calendar? As much as I like our web vendor, SOAR, and had been in the past a huge proponent for them in our area, the web vendor has been a total failure for providing a printable calendar. Our unit (both troop and pack) views our web sites as far more for the parent then the scout. In fact, the last thing our troop wants to do is send the scout to the internet for any troop related activity (registering for camp, checking attendance lists, ...). For our Boy Scouts, parents and prospective parents, we'd like to be able

Twocubdad wrote: "From the troop's point of view, we need to consider that Eagle projects are now fully troop functions, with the leaders ultimately responsible, two-deep leadership and tour permits required, etc. That was not necessarily the case with the old guidelines. As such, the troop leadership has a responsibility to know what is going on. Certainly health and safety is a concern, but I'm not necessarily going to commit troop resources to an activity without some plan in place. " Hmmmmmm. I need to think thru this. In our troop, Eagle projects have never been coordinated or eve

AvidSM: I just re-read section 9.0.2.8. I had scanned it before without absorbing it. Wow. Nicely worded. I love the admonition to keep focus on the eagle requirement intent (lead a project giving service to others) and avoid technicalities and avoid making "object lessons". Incredibly well worded sub-section. I've seen way too much scouting enthusiasm killed by "object lessons" that declare failure from successes.

Mad Max: I'm just learning too and had to re-read that section a few times. I think AvidSM's interpretation is correct and not loose at all. The "only" applies to using the official BSA eagle workbook. Districts and units can't say ... oh we've thought thru it and made changes that we feel are necessary. So here's the workbook you will use on your project. "Only the official workbook" is the key phrase. The wording following "only the official workbook" backs that up. I see nothing that says a scout can't record more information elsewhere. For most projects, a detailed di

Tampa Turtle wrote: "mostly to show that no one is above the work." Fully agree. Scouts lead and run the clean up. But there's no worse example than adults just sitting around while work needs to be done. Doesn't mean we do the scouts job. But it's not adults versus scout jobs. It's not we got our stuff done, so we can sit. Weight: Our troop only has a few things that are too heavy for one scout to carry. Such as a car port tent. Nothing is heavy enough to require an adult to help. And almost everything can be carried by one scout including the cook kits. Or two if it's

On Sunday everyone is thinking about getting home. It's a huge distraction ... for scouts AND adults. Plus, adults are trying to make it to church and parents are hoping their kids get home to make it to church too. So the answer is DEPENDS... If a short drive (less than 50 miles), we pack, clean and eat usually a cold breakfast. Scouts are dropped off at their houses. Our drivers prefer it as it's less waiting and significantly less standing around saying goodbye. Plus the families appreciate not having to wait in a parking lot. And it removes the stress timing the departure

Eagle92: Points well taken. I bet 95% of the district advancement committees nation wide are grumbling. I think that's also exactly why BSA added pages 21 and 22 to the workbook. Those pages are very well written.(This message has been edited by fred8033)

Twocubdad ... The examples you wrote could have been pulled directly from our troop. I know multiple over 18 year old excellent kids who gave up on advancement because of the horror stories getting Eagle projects approved. I know scouts who had their proposals bounced for ridiculous reasons. Now you can debate the emphasis on Eagle and the priorities and what not. But it should not take 3+ months to get a proposal approved. It should not take a 30+ page paper. I really like the new workbook because it gets the scouts away from the bureaucracy side and focus more on driving a service proj

papadaddy wrote: "I could understand it if there was a decrease in professional staff (and salaries) ... " Hmmm.... That raises a good question. Just curious. Not trying to incite something. How many professionals are in your council? Our council has 80 professionals listed on the contact page. It does NOT include scout store staff, but does include nine camp rangers for seven camps. Just curious.