JMHawkins

Honestly..how many boy scouts do you get that did NOT come from a pack? My guess is that in any given troop it would be between 1% and 5%. Well, if the given troop happened to be the one I'm with, it would be 60%. 19 of our 32 Scouts were NOT Cub Scouts. But then we take recruiting from the community seriously. So, back to Jeffrey H's pros and cons post: Pro) maybe without Webelos crossovers, Troops would be more motivated to actually get out and recruit Boy Scout aged boys instead of relying on the Cub Scout program for all of their new members. Now, I don't think we sh

There are two things that are a bit frustrating about the training requirements. One is the constant hokey-pokey dance that National does with what is "required." It seems like the protocol is just to mandate stuff and leave it up to the front line folks to figure out how to meet the mandate instead of, you know, planning and organizing an effective solution. Then when the requirements can't be met and units will fold, the requirments get relaxed or delayed. Or maybe it's just lousy communication. Both explanations are exampls of poor management. Irving might want to hire some management

SeattlePioneer is proably right that Jambo isn't the best place for the boy to start managing his own care. However, he is going to have to start being responsible for his own care at some point. There's over a year until Jamboree. If he's mature enough - something I of course can't tell from the other end of the Internet - that's enough time for him to become proficient. If he's not, well, that's a differnt story. But ultimately it seems to me the more important question isn't who's going to Jambo with him, but rather what the strategy is to get him to the point where he can manage h

Maybe it's time to move this to I&P

Camilam, perhaps I can chime in as a neutral observer. I'm just another guy on the end of another internet connection. The troop I'm in is pretty well uniformed. All the SMASMs except one wear full uniform (the one is another of those retired military types. He said up front he'd be glad to volunteer as an ASM but he was done wearing uniforms. If we'd take him under those conditions, he'd step up. If not, he was happy to continue being a parent helping out where he could. We took him up on the offer without any hesistation or regrets). A typical meeting has 90% of the Scouts in full un

perdidochas is right, separating the group was the real problem. Of course, had the scouts taken their phones on the river and lost them, the parents would be demanding that the SM pay them for the phones. Not in our troop. We make it real clear to the parents that the Troop is not responsible for the gear the scouts bring. "Scouts lose stuff" the gear handout says. "The smaller and more expensive, the more likely they seem to lose it." We make the point that it's their responsibility to keep track of their own gear. We'll pick something up if we find it and bring it to Lost-n-Found a

I'm with Twocub. I'm surprised you didn't hit somebody. It is not your job to "help out the local program." It's their job to help you. Bingo. This is the clue to when a council has gone sideways: they've forgotton who the customer is. I suspect it's one of the challenges of running any sort of business ("non-profit" or otherwise) that relies heavily on volunteer help while also having paid management. The paid folks maybe get confused and think anyone not being paid by the organization is a customer who ought to be paying for the services of the outfit. Then they start to see the vo

Find out the cost of a week long resident camp in the interest area of you son. Subtract the cost of one week at Summer Camp. The difference is the value of having volunteer leaders take the youth to Summer Camp Minor change to the number, OGE. Take the difference, multiply it by the number of boys going to camp, and divide by the number of adult volunteers. Last year for us, it would've been 7x the per-Scout differential.

Well, to answer it in another way, if there were no unit level volunteers and the Council had to pay me to put on a weekly 1.5 hr Leadership Development Course for 30+ corporate trainees, along with a monthly weekend offsite, and one or two week-long off-site residential sessions each year, they would have to pay me between $30k and $50k per year as a part-time consultant. That might eat into their salaries a bit. On the other hand, I'll go camping for free. So, what does National want the focus of the program to be again?

I lean toward, not having a statue if there is DNA evidence, and a match comes in 20 years later.. But, I have only heard the pros for waving the statue for DNA.. I could be swayed to the other side if someone has a good arguement against it. DNA evidence is more appropriate for exonerating an innocent person than it is for proving guilt. A DNA "match" only means there's a possibility the accused person is the real criminal, it doesn't prove it. Your DNA - at least as far as DNA testing technology goes - is not unique. With theoretically perfect performance by the lab technicians doing

Some people are very good at getting others to follow them, but don't necessarily make the best choices about where they're leading everyone off to. They're natural born leaders, but they're also disasters. But looking just at the "getting others to follow them" aspect, I think natural born leaders have a handful of traits. One, they have a plan, a goal, something they want to achieve. It may not always be a wise, useful or socially redeeming goal, but they have one and have a desire to reach it. Two, they tend to see other people in terms of what that person can do to help the leader

There is no possible way to prevent it..... No, there isn't a way to 100% guarantee it'll never happen. But there are ways to reduce the chances, and that's what we should focus on. In fact, the idea that any failure to prevent abuse is inexcusable and should result in draconian consequences for the organization is highly counter-productive for that very reason. Although the threat of consequences helps to ensure people do what they need to do, there is a point of not just diminshing, but negative returns. If good faith efforts are not enough to protect honest people from a failure t

Victims of abuse can take a long time to come forward, the reasons can be shame, desire not to let their parents know i.e. wait for Mom and Dad to pass before going to court, desire to forget, or fear ("say anything and I will kill your family") and then there is the possibility of DNA evidence which may have been unknown at the time of the crime. Whether the trial occurs a year, ten, or forty years later, the accused still has to be proven guilty beyond a doubt. This applies to murder cases, add "child abuse' as well. Evidence exists on both sides of an issue, and it degrades over

BSA should lobby for no statue of limitations for child abuse. Start with the states where we have high adventure camps! Y'know, it sounds all nice to say that, but statue of limitations don't exist so that criminals can "get away with it" if they just wait it out long enough. They exist because after a long enough time, it's difficult or even impossible to obtain reliable evidence. If someone is accused of a crime, especially a serious and morally repugnant one like child abuse, it is our responsibility as a society to make a careful examination of the evidence. If it's something that

There are a couple of fellows named Strauss and Howe who have a theory of a four-generation cycle to American (and British before that) history. They claim that the nature of our government and society means that every four generations there is a window of opportunity to make significant societal changes. The window is open for a while, then after people have absorbed as much changes as they are willing to accept, it closes for another four generations and whatever problems remain unsolved will have to wait for the next cycle. Their theory makes some sense and is backed up by annecdot

No, they just don't have the ambition or passion for the vision. Believe or not, probably less than 10% of volunteers don't haves desires of being a leader. Of course not. They have the desire to help out, make a difference, maybe vicariously re-live a little of the adventure they had a boys. That's not a bad thing, assuming they can temper it with some adult perspective and not let their own maudlin' trample the fun for the Scouts. Very few adults really have the desire to lead a group of 12 year olds. Those who do we should maybe be concerned about... Actually, seems to me the

If there were a startup national outdoor adventure association that pitched its offerings to middle schools and high schools instead of to churches, my guess would be that they'd decimate the BSA. I've been surprised that nobody "real" has moved into the space; so far all we've had are some fringe groups who cared more about their agenda than doin' good outdoor adventure youth work. That never works. Worse, they try to do somethin' with the uniform and badges stuff that the kids don't care for. Well, the badges and uniform stuff is the easy part. I can come up with a spiffy (though mayb

Less than 20 months is a statistic taught in college for long range business planning. It is not specific to any organization but an average of many volunteer organizations from political action organizations to religious organizations. If you compare the work by all the volunteers in the units, you will find the average scouting volunteer actually puts in far less than 20 months. Those of us who put in more are a minority. But of course "those who put in more" are the backbone of the operation. It's their motivations that make or break the program. I suspect the big difference bet

Our troop is 10 1/2 months old. The Scouts that have been on every trip have 24 nights sleeping outdoors. All of those except 2 nights were in tents. The other 2 nights were in 3-sided, unheated Adirondacks. That was in November and the temps got down to 25 degrees with a slight freezing drizzle the first night. We've camped every month of the year except March (the trooop only started in April - we'll get our first March campout in next month). The second outing the troop went on resulted in 7 inches of rain in a single day - set a record for our town (we're just outside Seattle). The

I got a Scouting education. I started to push more of the boy lead, patrol method, and boys voting for their leadership. Not an adult choosing the SPL, and then the SPL choosing the PLs. That's the way it was. Now we have full boy lead, patrol method, boys only voting for their leadership. And it is working. I first wouldn't have known all about this if I hadn't gone to WB. It's encouraging that Scoutbox has made these changes and it should mean a better program for the youths in his area. But I found myself really surprised, and disheartened, by his comment that he wouldn't have known a

JMH -- difference between an Eagle project and your "Fetch the Rock" game is with the Eagle project, the boss/Scoutmaster is available to help you look for the rock if the Scout wants him to. No, I wasn't clear enough. The "boss" is whoever has final approval. The SM doesn't have final approval - that's the EBOR. They're the boss. If they can tell the Scout "wrong rock" after he's finished his project, that's a problem. In particular, it's modeling bad management practices. If we're going to sacrifice outdoor adventure for corporate management, we can at least teach good management

We need something around the 5 dollar range. I see many people willing to buy with their hand going to their pocket/purse. Then they ask,"how much," "$10-20 dollars" the hand slowly drops. Yep. We had quite a few people at store site sales this year hear the prices, and then ask if they could just donate $5 instead of buying something. The price is just too high.

I wonder how much simple transportation becomes an issue? When I was cub-scout age, I could walk or ride my bike over a fair chunk of the town I lived in. By the time I was a Boy Scout, I could ride the bus to the next town over by myself if I needed to. Bottom line, my parents didn't need to drive me all over creation for me to make it to a meeting. It's not like that now. Parents having one more event they have to get their kids to becomes a problem. All in all though, there are multiple problems dragging down membership. Lack of adventure is the least excusable in my book.

That means, however, that approval of the basic plan is not sufficient to ensure that the project will pass muster at an EBOR Hmm, this is perilously close to what, at my old company, we used to call "playing fetch a rock." The Boss told you to fetch a rock, then when you brought one back, he'd say "No, not that one. Fetch a different rock." If you asked what sort of rock he wanted, he'd say "You're a professional, you should be able to figure that out." He might give some hints here and there, but would never officially tell you want he wanted. Of course, he wasn't tel

Just to relate a story that made me proud of the scouts. The adults established a rank requirement for SPL, and the scouts themselves decided to do the same for PL (just Tenderfoot). We try to schedule BoRs as needed, but committee members have schedules they need to keep too, so a BoR can't always happen at the drop of a hat. Elections were coming up. The SM announced that next week the Committee would be available for BoRs, but that was probably the last opportunity before elections to get a BoR so any scouts who planned on running should get their requirements wrapped up before next wee