highcountry

I'm with XLPAnel. I find the same thing, kids would like to get home and get some fresh cloths and a shower and some need a nap after ou campouts (Hikes, up late by the campfire etc). Leaders want to get home shower, change maybe a nap and be with the rest of the family before Monday and Work rolls around again. My wife is happy when we are back early enough that we can do some family stuff together and maybe I can get a project worked on at home. We are up by 6 am on Sunday, break camp and wheels are rolling by 9, we are home by 10. Kids who's familys insist on making church pick them up

I pick my battles, uniforming is not one of the higher priorities, however, uniforming with my troop has greatly improved since I took over as SM 3 years ago and I do use some mechanisms (Occasional Uniform inspections with patrol points awarded, encourage my sons to wear full uniform to meetings and important events)to try to always improve uniforming in the troop. I am happy we have greatly improved use of the uniform but I have bigger fish to fry, if the Uniform Police wast to get up tight about it fine for them, we are too busy having fun and concentrating on more productive things. W

I agree with 2 cub dad, the BSA tells us to develop leadership, hard work and personal responsibility in boys through the program but then tells us that if the boy never shows up or participates we are supposed to advance him .....What ? Sounds like a contradiction. If all a boy needs be is to be registered and not kicked out he is considered active. I ask you then, why even have troops, lets all go to lone scouts. Why make the efforts to encourage patrol method and leadership when the scouts see that an inactive do nothing gets to move along just as well as the boys who actually show, learn

The boy led comments are spot on, I hadn't mentioned it to keep my response shorter, but it is another reason I like to run things like bike rides, skiing, paintball etc this way. We are getting improved boy led situation on planning and running troop meetings, and campouts but hav e along way to go. When a scout is intrinsicly interested in running an additional special activity, the self motivation to plan, organize, promote and run the activity teaches him a lot, even if he is running an event outside the troop, what he learns benefits him and the troop whne he is involved in helping plan

I just had paintball and lazer tag come up in a couple of scouts board of reviews last night. (Some of the same scouts who come to my house to hang out with my kids and play airsoft on their own time). I'm offering the main proppnent of this the challenge of organizing the lazer tag or paintball activity. He know that this is to be done without using scout funds, without getting a discount based on any relation to troop and BSA, and to organize it on his own via email and phone calls, no sign up sheet at meetings. It will not be a substitute for another troop activity or meeting. He can call

Fscouter, I don't know what kind of world you are living in. As I noted I have an inactive scout and I could care less about his lack of attendance at meetings and activities as far as my feeling insulted....whatever. Mine, and all the other adult leaders and pretty much every scoout in my unit feels he is not a good scout as he is not there, he shows no leadership, no responsibility, he makes some commitments and then blows them off. To pass this kid along to eagle would be an insult to every kid who actually did the worka and EARNED IT. The rank is the highest one scouting offers and t

We created a budget figure for the boys to plan against. Without some sort of guidelines for the boys to think around things get unorganized. We have a budget figure of 3 bucks per scout per meal which is actually a little low when you consider this includes Propane, Mantles, Lantern Globes, Batteries and other consumables. Adult leaders attending events do not kick in for thier food costs, the $3 per kid per meal provides enough to cover the adults who are donating their time vehicles and gasoline to make it happen. It also includes enough to provide drinks, snack bars and fruit and crack

I'm with Lisa on this, and this is another example of the kind of things that accumulate and burn leaders out.....Un reasonable adults who insist on silly requests and try to foist the burden on th you. This one is easy to eliminate from your burnout-stress items. Tell them they can either do their service at the same time as th interfaith service OR do thiers at any time but you are not required, and will not, schedule any time during the event for just thier requesat. A council or distict evenbt is a complex thing to put together, with individual units coming up with special requests to man

I have a good pointer.....make sure you keep problem people out of your committee, and adult leader positions. We have all seen plenty of threads regarding difficult people that are ruining troops and packs. As everyone knows I had the Committee Chair from below and barely got her fired before I lost more than half the troop. Everone knew this individual was a MAJOR problem when she got the position but since no one was willing to volunteer to be CC, she got the position as there was no one to fill it. A monkey with a pulse would have been elected before her. I try and point that out to adu

ASM I appreciate the pointers but the problem is in my real world that problems are always coming up that Rarely can be a dilema for the boys to resolve and only sometimes can be delegated to another adult leader, I do try when I can. There are problems adult leders in my group do try and handle but when push comes to shove, it nearly always comes back to me.....the SM. There are critical issues, time senstive things that have to get done many times that just ccan't be effectively delegated. When someone has issues, questions etc, 90% of the time they come to me. When I can I always deflect t

We are trying hard not to be the hour and a half of entertainmentevery other week, camp for entertainment type troop but a lot of it is trying to change the peerception of what scouting is in the minds of most parents. Many when you press them a bit do get the concept that we are trying to develop responsibility, leadership etc through the BSA program and outdoors but when push comes to shove in their busy daily lives, the scout meeting is another tick on the calendar, the campout a fun adventure they need to pack for and allow for and not much more thought than that. If troop meetings are n

Adults "can't do it all" - boy-led allows the leadership to be spread out over the whole troop and will keep the adults from burning out. Adults that burn out are simply not teaching the boys to lead. I've been working with youth groups for 40 years and have never burned out, simply because when they lead themselves there's no excuse for being over-burdened. Stosh Stosh, that's a nice thought but I'd wager at least 75% of the problems I have had, and those I witnessed before I took over as SM and those I have seen in the feeder the packs....and those I have heard about at other tro

Hopefully the moderators will do thier job and remove the complete idiot/troll that has decided to try and get his jollies here. From the quality of his thought process I would guess he is a disfunctional 10 year old with time on his hands.

Not constructing fake barriers at all. Until I remindeed him and his parents for 7 months to make an activity, he had not been on ANY troop activity in 20 months. At the same time I was reminding the scout and the parent they had not been at a troop meeting in 5 months and only about 20% attendance before that. I got the "ya know...baseball" excuse from Mom. I had to pull his POR a year and a half ago and told them he could not have one until he began to show up again. He came to one PLC last fall, showed up late, left early and paid no attention, he distracted others with side bar jokes whi

F scouter, I think one of your assumption's is terribly simplistic...to get him active or you have failed. For you to assume that a scoutmaster has failed because he is not able to get any individual kid to be active, that it is all on the scoutmaster and he can overcome any set of reasons for any scout's inactivity is un-realistic. Scouts become inactive for many reasons, many of which a SM has little to no control over. If a SM is to avoid failure in your eyes, he would have to spend an extrordiary amount of time catering to the indiviual needs and characteristics of evey single dis-engage

It is preposterous that the BSA program is there for us to coach boys into young men, teach things like responsibility, accountability and leadership, then turn around and in instances such as this, tell us thay can go ahead and earn achievements anyway even if they did not demonstrate those qualities we are supposed to see them develop. Why then even have requirements ? If that is how it works, then I'll head on down to my bosses office right now and demand I be promoted to CEO, ignoring the fact I don't demonstrate the apptitude or skills or experience required for the spot, heck, I was he

Today's April First, right Beavah ? Think this one's good, everyone in Denver beleives they are trading Cutler, odd that story re-broke when it did....everyone seems to worked up to look at a calendar

We combined Scribe with Librarian and Historian as all 3 positions alone require so little, but combined at least give a scout enough workload to be seriously considered a POR. As the Scribe ours creates the meeting agendas, prints them and emails them from what the PLC or delegates have created for the meeting. He also takes notes at PLC meetings, transcribes and publishes, primarily the action items. We don't collect dues at meetings and we have a roster with scheckoffs for each meeting so all the scouts handle attendance on their own as they walk in the door.

Not so much modern communication but communication itself is a major headache in our troop I will say that, I see this topic is evolving down that road already so I will contiue with my rants and observations. I don't see the need to go to any other modes of communication, we already use several ones that SHOULD be effective. The problems I see are..... People Don't read email, or paper copies provided at meetings, paper copies mailed direct or paper copies given face to face and explained. Anyhting sent with scouts is the proverbial Granite Table lost in the black hole (I like that anal

I'm in the bunch that dis-agrees with committees/volunteers writting thier own rules. Since the scout is only bound to the BSA regs on this one, anything the Committee adds is moot and has no weight. If he receives any funds, I would suggest he keep that in confidence and use it to buy materials, then simply say the materials were donated....they were in a way, someone donated the means to get the materials. No mention of any cash or funds, do the project and get it signed off. Good luck. Admiting money was donated and used to buy materials is only going to start a peeing contest that will d

Our troop is one that is not and has not done anything with OA in a long time. We had a scout make Eagle shortly before his 18th Birthday about 5 years ago, I think he may have been OA in the early 2000's but it was before my time in the troop. One problem is that I as SM (And other adults in the troop) know little to nothing about OA. I got elected in back in the early to mid seventies but never even made the ordeal, I dropped out of scouting shortly after so I never learned anything about OA back then. I have brought up OA to the troop on several occasions but not one scout in the troop ha

Composite Materials was introduced in 2006, according to the fact sheet at scouting.org. (http://www.scouting.org/media/factsheets/02-500.aspx) Regarding John-in-KC's point about putting Cooking on the Eagle-required list... it looks like Cooking is the 5th-most popular badge ever ("More than 4 million earned!") But there's been a huge dive from 1993 to now - down from 46,000 to 24,000. And saddest is the fact that Backpacking has seen a similar plunge, from 8,800 in 1993 to 4,900 in 2007. (This message has been edited by shortridge) I suspect both Cooking and backpacking ma

I know the COR has to be the one to remove a CC but can a troop "vote out" an Advancement chair ? If a parent willing to do the job was willing to "run" for the position and the CC held an election for the position, the troop would have the opportunity to replace the problem volunteer who is currently in the position. Once out of the position, they become just noise with no power at all and could be ignored. At recharter they could be told that your troop is not accepting their application and that you all feel theri needs are probably better served by otehr troops, thanks and good bye. You

One of my ASM's and I had discussions on these MB topics. We have one MB councelour that keeps wanting to try and put merit badge minin class sessions in during troop meetings which make chaos of teh evening program as others already noted. I at least now schedule some program nights to accomodate this and have this focused on completing partial badges that many scouts have open in stead of starting more. ASM and I discussed the concept of the scout wanting the badge, getting the book, reaching out etc but I have learned that it will be tough to impossible to change teh parent and scout mi

Time to give back for me. I came to this forum a couple years ago to get the answers to the very same proble.....how to get rid of a CC that was destroying the troop. The folks here gave me the proper path forward and it litterelayy saved our troop that is now reached 55 years of age....much appreciated. We had teh same deal, teh CC from the farther below reaches of the planet. She had been booted from the local cub pack a few years prior and had been dispatched from at least 2 other local youth organizations as well. She had been to training but that was of no help. We too had a larg