JMHawkins

MBCs (Merit Badge Counselors) can reissue blue cards. The summer camp should have a list of who counseled what badge, and a record of which scouts completed them. If your son writes a nice letter or email explaining that he needs replacement blue cards, odds are he can get them. Your son should also call or email the MBC for the 2 or 3 MBs he earned not at camp to get replacements too. I assume they were the old-fashioned way of working directly with the MBC. If they were troop-wide MB classes, then maybe you're out of luck - though maybe that's not a bad thing, if the troop is as p

Your son can certainly tell his friends and encourage them to join him. In the long run, he's far more likely to stick with scouting if his friends are in it with him.

Pioneering is something else that interests me. I've seen the scouts build some neat things. I could probably teach myself from a book, but I'm at a loss for where to get some poles. Home Depot, Lowes, or your local lumber yard probably has lots of pole-like objects if you don't have any suitable "naturally occuring" poles. Closet rods are pretty good. If you don't want to spend that much money, get some dowels and make small models of things.

Local option for membership.....Because of the color of our skin, School she attends, home address and age. My daughter has been denied membership in several troops. Y'know, my daughter had that happen this summer. We've been trying to find a troop for her (she's going into 1st Grade) and one of her friends (daughter of one of the other ASMs in the troop I'm with) joined a GS troop. We tried to get our daughter into that troop with her friend, but were told it was full. Then later 4 more girls joined and we were told they wanted to keep it to just the girls at the same elementary schoo

We did a week kayaking trip on a largish lake in the Cascades. It worked out pretty well for taking 12 year olds. The kayaks meant weight wasn't a big issue like it would be for smaller guys on a backpacking trip, but we were still able to do a 50-miler.

They are. For SM/ASMs it is indicated by the "Trained" patch on their sleeve. T-2-1 skills are mostly what IOLS is about. Hoo-boy, talk about "one and done." Actually, "one and done" would have been an improvement, we didn't even do all the requirements ourselves at IOLS (e.g. we talked about lashings, but didn't do any). I do think that adults having an opportunity to improve their scoutcraft is a good idea, especially when we have a relative paucity of those skills available to most programs. Training that is more rigorous than IOLS and goes more in depth is something I'm in f

I think the adults have to get enjoyment out of the program too in order to continue volunteering the rather significant amounts of time needed to make it all work. But I'm not in favor of making it "about the adults too" because it would too easily degenerate into some sort of large antlered ruminant lodge, though perhaps with less frequent drinking (at least while the youts are around). I'm okay with some kind of semiformal recognition of skills and accomplishments for the adults, and certainly with groups of Scouters getting together for their favorite beverages now and then, but the

The problem is that having untrained people jump into a situation can just produce additional casualties or cause further injuries. You're getting hung up on that point but I'm suggesting a larger issue. Let's grant that both the bureaucratic and the personal responsibility world view want good outcomes - both would like to see people in need get help that doesn't cause additional harm and doesn't get other people hurt in the process. How do they go about that? One world view encourages a group of experts to gather and debate things, eventually issuing a set of rules intended

Good Morning SeattlePioneer (btw, what happened to our summer? seems to have taken an early bus out of town), It is foolish to pass laws directing people not to intervene and to train employees not to act and then complain when they follow those directions. If you want to complain, complain about those who are restricting their judgment about what to do. I'm actually complaining about both. I'm not willing to cut the rulemakers as much slack as Beavah, I think they are guilty of more than ordinary human error. They sought out and accepted a position of responsibility and, t

So, I didn't really want to debate the specific merits of EpiPen laws, I merely wanted to use them as an example where the result of following the rules can be extremely negative. I don't think SP is going to budge from his current position on epipens, so let's shift the debate slightly. Earlier this year, a man in England had a seizure and fell into a shallow pond. Onlookers quickly called for help, and police and fire fighters promptly showed up. And did nothing. They weren't allowed by their rules to go into the water to rescue the guy, that required special training,

Most of our troop uses Katadyn filters. I use a Steripen with a prefilter (one of the screw-on caps for a Nalgene bottle). We're mostly in the Cascades though, and not much industrial or agg runnoff to worry about - nice mountain streams and you can often see the glacier the water you're getting melted off from a few minutes ago... I haven't had any problems with my Steripen. I carry spare batteries and an emergency bottle of iodine tablets. So far no clogging problems with the filters - but we're generally getting pretty clear water without much silt or particulates in it, wh

In this case there are detailed laws that govern such situations... Why, yes there are, and that's my entire point. There are rules and those rules say the kid dies. Which is why I ask my question, which is more important, rules or results? The point isn't to debate the merits of the law as it governs EpiPens or other medication, but the general idea, is it okay to accept a guranteed lousy result in order to follow the rules?

Full of bugs as in bugs eating the bamboo fibers, or just living inside the sticks? If they're just living there, a hose sprayer and maybe a scrub brush should do the trick. If they've infested the bamboo, not sure, you might need to use more aggressive chemicals. As far as a finish - like paint or stain - bamboo I've worked with has a natural wax that you have to sand off before it'll take any coating. If these are old, maybe that's already gone, but I'd take one, clean off the bugs, sand it with some 100 or 150 grit sandpaper and see if you get a color you like (go with a few passes

In da real world, society can find yeh negligent for not usin' reasonable judgment, even though you "followed the rules" in the BSA. And rightly so. Being a leader, and being responsible, and havin' a duty to another means that yeh must exercise judgment. If yeh fail to do so, yeh are negligent in your duty. Hear, hear. I'll repeat a couple things I already wrote. One, the means don't justify the ends. You usually hear that the other way around, eh? But it's more true the way I wrote it. You've got a better chance of justifying dubious tactics with a decent result than you do j

Scouters and MBCS would do well to learn confident equanimity in their communications with these unknown adults. This is especially true if Scouters or MBCs wish to flatter themselves with the conceit that teaching Scouts to communicate with unknown adults is in area in which Scouters have expertise parents lack. Ha ha. I don't think I have any special skill in teaching Scouts how to communicate with unknown adults, but then that's not what the Scouts need anyway. They don't need someone to teach them how to do it, they just need to do it. Really, that's what it usually boils d

johnponz, I specifically pointed out that over-centralized rulemaking was the downfall of companies as well as countries. The folks at the center think highly of themselves - they've been successful after all and gotten promoted to exalted positions, and maybe they are in fact smarter than the average leaf node in the organization. So it's easy for them to start thinking they should make the decisions for the leaf nodes, in order to make sure the best decisions get made. But, the problems is, even if they are smarter, they don't have access to the information the local guy has. Tha

johnponz, you're still missing the main point of my comments. It's not about who sits around the table in Irving, it's about how the program get's delivered. Whoever writes the rulebook in Irving, however they are selected and whoever they think they represent, the more and more detailed the rules they try to create, the worse the result is going to be. Ultimately Scouting is about the experience that youth have in the program, and that experience depends on the effectiveness of the unit volunteers. Everybody else - everybody else - is Support Staff. The DE, the SE, the District Commi

I am sorry to break it to you, but no one at National represents you or should they. When you rely on volunteers to deliver the program you make your salary from, perhaps you ought to figure out a way to represent the volunteers. Else they may eventually volunteer for someone else.

The ends do not justify the means, but the inverse is true as well, the means do not justify the ends either. Bad results from well-intentioned rules are still bad results. By picking and choosing which rules to follow, you are saying that you as an individual know more than the BSA as a group. Actually this is backwards. The rules aren't made by "BSA as a group," they're made by specific individuals who claim to represent BSA as a group. How effectively they represent the group of volunteers that make BSA function is a question for the governance policies of BSA. Regardless, by

SP, we're in the same council, and it may be better than others, but it's not immune. I've had plenty of roster and records problems with the Pack I'm CC for. -it took 4 tries to get YPT recorded for one of our DLs. Her original training actually expired before it was ever recorded. -Another DL who was on the recharter two years ago was mysteriously missing when it came time to recharter last year. I hadn't dropped in the year before, he was just gone from the roster. Of course, getting him back on required filling out a triplicate form, printing and resubmitting YPT certific

Chiming in late (hey, been out in the wilds), but I think we do a disservice to Scouts when we teach them to be bureaucratic. It's maybe good to teach them how to handle bureaucracy when they run up against it, sure, but I don't think it's good to set the expectation that bureaucracy is good in and of itself. Rather, we should teach them how to dismantle bureaucracy when they find it. After all, you don't teach farmer to grow weeds, do you?

Actually SP, "change of command" sounds great, as long as he's talking about command of the adults:) TheGong, my advice is, talk to the parents. A lot. And the CC. A lot. If the CC isn't on-board with the switch to youth led (or if the CC doesn't have the same idea as you on what "youth led" means), you'll have problems. If the majority of the parents (especially the vocal ones) don't support it, you'll also have problems. The scouts may or may not struggle with it, but if they do struggle, they'll complain to mom and dad. If mom and dad are on-board with the youth-led change, they

As I understand it, 85% or more of Boy Scouts come from Cub Packs. And it would be 100% if troops only did the sort of recruiting BSA provides support for. Our troop asked for yard signs for a recruting event, and the only thing our council had were Cub Scout signs. But we went forward on our own and we are about 50-50 Webelos crossovers vs recruited from the community. It is important to recruit and retain Webelos and I even agree that it's a lot easier than recruiting from the community, but it's bad to let it be the sole (or even 85%) focus of a Troop's recruiting. There are

So when it comes fo talking about centuring to troop leaders, my preference is that the pros talk less about retention (which may or may not happen) and more about empowering (which is more likely to happen) of older boys as they hey bring some aspects of scouting to their friends. Y'know, that sounds a bit like how I feel about the emphasis in Troop recruiting on Webelos crossovers. BSA seems stuck in their recruiting thinking, looking only at moving youth up from one program to another, rather than looking at how to attract youth to the programs.

I agree with Second Class, shared kitchen setups are trouble. "That's not my pot. I didn't make that mess. I already cleaned up my stuff. Hey, that's not your Peanut Butter..." Whenever we've been crammed for space so that patrols had to share a kitchen area, we've had that sort of bickering, and generally sub-par KP performance (which isn't exactly their strong point anyway...). And then there's the main problem you are asking about - that adults are generally a lot more efficent so if you have anything shared with the Scouts, you either end up doing jobs for them or sit