JerseyScout

I might make it a certain amount of points for 75% attendence at each meeting for each patrol (meeting attendence) instead of 75% of 3 of 4 (or 4 of 5) so that if there are two bad weeks in a row (due to a flu bug, or whatever else) the patrol wouldn't just give up on attendence points altogether, but that's just me. It looks pretty good/

Guh, don't get me started. In the last five years, we've had just under twenty boys make Eagle Scout, most of them excellent Scouts who really worked hard for the honor. Every one of them (and their parents) have come away from the Eagle Board of Review with a horrible taste in their mouth. Scouts are asked the same question four different ways, and then berated if their answers are in any way different. The interviews focus less on reflection of a Scouting career and how Scouting will continue to influence their lives and focus more on tiny, inconsquential details and what I can only desc

You win.

This is my story for my Scouts (and impatient leaders) about "the bad kid" or "the annoying kid". When I was in my troop as a Scout, there was this one knucklehead. He had at least one knife confiscated off of him every trip (as his patrol leader, it was usually by me), talked back to the older Scouts (and some leaders as well), was regularly in fistfights, had some extremely dangerous moments with fire, made the leaders absolutely crazy, and had almost no Scouting abilities whatsoever. In his third year of Scouting, we all (about 50 kids and 15 adults) went up to New York state for a w

Maybe its because I work with kids that age (10), or maybe its because I've seen how alot of troops are having problems with falling recruitment numbers (my troop, thankfully, is having our best recruitment year in a decade), but five new kids are a blessing. Run with it, with five of them together, they should catch up just fine. The good thing about age is its always going up.(This message has been edited by JerseyScout)

A giant thumbs up to National for adding this on. Our troop had a crappy looking website that myself and another adult revamped information-wise over the course of a year (it had been neglected for three or four years). Then one of the Scouts took it over last winter. This scout, a kid only in 7th grade, took the site over (his father had been the adult who helped me revamp it) and completely rebuilt it by himself. And by himself, I mean, he did it with no help technology-wise from anyone. The finished (but constantly being improved) project is beautiful, in my biased opinion bett

We had a problem with this for a couple of Scouts who "just felt like leaving". It noticably dropped off when we started stopping someplace "cool" each Sunday on the way back from each trip. It sounds like you guys already have something like that though.

Each summer, my troop heads to a different location (the only rule is it must be out of state) for a week long camping trip to places such as the Smokey Mountains, Vermont, Western Pennsylvania, etc. We usually split into groups, one for a 50 mile backpacking or foot/afloat and a "base camp" that does day trips each day (canoeing, kayaking, rock climbing, hiking, a one night backpacking trip, etc). None of these trips has been to a Boy Scout camp (although we were fortunate enough to send crew to Philmont five years back), and we've been doing this each and every summer for over 40 years.