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 poorly run as you say, such classes probably weren't exactly up to snuff anyway.

For the part of the paperwork that needs a SM, your son's new SM can do that, you don't need the old one to be involved.

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 school (we only live a couple of blocks away from our friends, but the school boundary runs between us). And it's not like it was some fancy private school, the two schools are in the same (kinda small) school district. The entire town only has 5,000 residents, (pretty much all the same skin color too) seems kinds silly to start dividing up by school boundaries. The town does have two Cub Scout packs that are loosely organized by elementary school, but boys move between the packs all the time.

Anyway, we're still looking. I'm a bit amazed, we have a little girl really excited about being a Girl Scout after attending a day camp this summer, but we can't find a troop for her. The latest message is we should wait until school starts and there will be information sent home sometime by the end of September.

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 favor of. I even think it should be fun!

But it also should be conducted separately from the ordinary youth-centered functions of the units and done in such a way that there's no chance it merges with the program delivered for the youth. There shouldn't be any sense that the scouts are competiting with the adults for recognition in the unit.

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 focus should be on the experience that the Youth have in the program.

I might be pursuaded to reconsider "adults working on the badges" though if it would encourage some of the Scouts to be a little more goal-oriented. Not sure if it would though, and I think I'd want a different set of adult badges in any event.

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 to produce good outcomes. Everyone else besides these experts are encouraged to defer to the experts and follow their rules even when the lay person seems to think those rules are likely to produce a bad outcome. Who are we to question the experts?

The other world view says it's unacceptable for people to stand around and let someone die when they might be able to help. The highest form of this world view holds that it is our personal responsiility to be prepared to render help. It encourages, expects, ordinary people to acquire a useful set of skills - including the ability to use good judgement - so that they have a chance of making a positive impact when in a position to do so. This second world view doesn't do away with rules, but it does change their nature. They are fewer in number and more general in scope. They set guidelines that are intended to help people make good choices instead of attempting to make those choices for them.

Acquiring a useful set of skills takes time and effort. It's unreasonable to expect the average person walking down the street to have the training (and equipment) of a trauma surgeon. However, human ingenuity is amazing. It creates things like EpiPens and AEDs that can be successfully used by people with no medical training. All they require is some good judgement and 99% of the time they will produce positive outcomes.

But even for things that require training, well, encourage it and encourage the time be devoted to learning usefull skills. Let's go back to the firefighters who wouldn't go in over their ankles to save a guy because they lacked the training officially required to do so. They had been trained on "the rules" that said they couldn't get their calves wet. They knew that. Their organization had prioritized training them on "the rules" over training them on "the skills" with the result being that when faced with a life-threatening emergency, they were able to quote the rules but unable to render assistance.

That's the sort of thing that happens in the first mindset. It creates the situation where the person on the spot lacks the training, iniative, mindset and courage to take the necessary action.

Think about Scouts out swimming.

Rule-based thinking: only a trained Lifeguard can Go into the water to rescue a drowning person. Untrained people should limit themselves to Reach, Throw and Row because experts have determined it is too dangerous for untrained persons to enter the water to attempt a rescue.

Results-based thinking: If someone is drowning, you need to be able to help them. Experts advise that rescuing a drowning person without putting yourself at risk requires skill, therefore you should learn Lifesaving so that you are prepared if the need arises.

Both cases encapsulate the exact same expert knowledge, but the first one encourages some nebulous responsibility for making sure the skills are present, while the second encourages personal responsibility for it. The motto of the first way is "not my job." The second is "be prepared."

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, through hubris, greed or stupidity have failed in ways that cause great harm to the rest of us, so I consider them at fault as well.

But I don't let the folks on the scene off either. "Just following orders" is famously not a defense for reprehensible conduct.

Thing is, both sets of people are part of the problem, which is a tendency to engage in impersonal, de-humanized, bureaucratic behavior. The hallmark of a bureaucracy is nobody is held accountable for outcomes, just for whether they followed the rules or not. That tends to bring out the worst in human behavior, 'cause if focuses people on themselves rather than what's going on around them. Those firefighters were asking "am I following the rules?" instead of "does that guy need help?"

I think this is an excellent area for us to discuss, because Scouting is an opportunity to address the issue with the rule-makers and rule-followers of the future, our Scouts. If we as representatives of adult authority in their world demonstrate bureaucratic thinking, we set the expectations with them that that's the way it should be. If instead we demonstrate personal responsibility, both as people who follow rules and who make and enforce them, we set that expectation.

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, which they didn't have. So a man drowned in what amounted to a city park while several healthy adult males in police and firefighter uniforms walked around the edges of the pond poking sticks into the water to test it's depth because "the rules" said they couldn't go into over their ankles without special training and equipment.

Pretty much the same thing happened in California last year. Police and Firefighters stood around while a man drowned, saying they weren't authorized to go into the water. A woman, a civilian bystander, after watching these paid authorities do nothing, finally jumped in herself and tried to save the man, but it was too late. She retrieved his body for the big, strong, guys in their uniforms and badges.

Now, we can to a fro about Reach-Throw-Row-Go and how Go can be hazardous, and how a rescuer needs to avoid adding to the victim count, and disect these events in minute detail if we wish. Yet...

the spectacle of grown, healthy men in Police and Firefighter uniforms standing around refusing to help people in need because they were afraid of violating The Rules didn't go over well with the people who witnessed these events. Both juristiction have changed "the rules" since then, and given the exterme inertia of the modern civil service bureacracy, I don't believe any of the particpants have lost their jobs or been subjected to any sort of discipline. However...

Oak Tree's excellent list mentions R1. Obeying rules set by legitimate authorities is a moral imperative in itself. I agree, but the key phrase there is "legitmate authorities" and the actions of the authorities in the above two cases eroded their legitimacy. They were paralyzed by fear of their own obtuse rules.

All this is just a long way of saying that the only reason to have rules is to help produce better results, and you can't excuse bad results by saying you were following the rules. The means don't justify the ends.

Now, to specifically address SPs point about training, yes, absolutely, better training of the people at the scene is usually going to lead to better results because the people on hand will be better prepared to make good judgments. So the best approach a society, organization, nation, outfit, whatever, can take is to encourage people to acquire the skills necessary to have and use good judgement. Creating a detailed thicket of rules intended to manage the situation by remote control (remote in time and space) won't work. Rules that inhibit using judgement work contrary to the best interests of society, because they leave the members of that society unprepared to make appropriate decisions when it is vitally necessary for them to do so.

None of that is to say rules are bad. Bad rules are bad. Good rules are great. How do you tell them apart? Well, I think you have to use your judgement...

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, which I imagine helps a great deal.

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 of finer grits if you want a smoother finish). Then maybe rub it down with some mineral spirits and paint a couple thin coats of urethane (or your favorite outdoor finish) over it.

Mostly you can treat bamboo the same as any other somewhat waxy/oily wood.

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 justifying a tragic result by saying you were just following the rules. In a bureacracy, you can often escape blame for minor failures by hiding beind "the rules," but if the screwup is big enough and causes enough damage, you're still going to be on the hook for it.

Don't believe me? Scenario: your son is two days in on a hike when he gets stung by a bee and goes into anaphylactic shock. He doesn't have an EpiPen, but his SM does. Are you more concerned with rules or results at this point?

And two, it's fine to teach youth how to successfully interact with bureaucracy when they encounter it, but we should not teach them to encourage it or accept it as normal.

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 down to, the Scout knows perfectly well how to pick up a phone and call the MBC (well, so long as it's a push button dial. Give 'em one of those old rotary dial phones and he might break a finger). But the kid doesn't want to because it's scary. What they need to learn is that it's okay, they won't die of embarrassment. I can't teach them that, they really only learn it by doing it.

Same thing if they need to reschedule or ask a question. It's not a matter of knowing how, it a matter of getting past the metal blocks.

So yeah, if Mom or Dad handle the occasional communication, that's fine. But if they're making the majority of the calls, then they are denying their own son the opportunity not to learn a skill, but rather to develop his own self-confidence.

Scouts don't need personal secretaries. They need the self-confidence to handle that stuff themselves.

Oh, blw2, chill out. You're out of line, too wired up, and you're not even hearing the message folks are trying to convey.

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. That's my analogy about SSD and the local swimming hole. The guy in Irving writing the SSD rules may be far more experienced and capable of deterining the safety of a specific swimming hole, but he's not there to see it. He's in Irving. So the rules he writes are most effective when they empower the responsible adult standing there at the river bank to make a good decision. If instead, the rulemaker tries to, by writing detailed rules, define the answer from his desk in Texas, he'll fail. He'll get it wrong, because nobody can write rules detailed enough to cover every swimming hole in North America without relying on the good judgement of the person who has to actually evaluate it.

BSA gets this one exactly right. SSD requires the on-site person to use sound judgement. Of course, it's still a little heavyweight. Technically we're supposed to set up markers and what not. A couple of weeks ago, we were on a trip and the scouts wanted to go swimming. We checked the area for safety and used the buddy system (but not buddy tags), but we didn't set up a non-swimmer or beginner area. Why not? Every scout (and adult) on the trip was rated Swimmer, and every Scout was going swimming, so we dispensed with that. If we'd taken the time to mark out a wading area and made buddy tags, we wouldn't have had time to actually go swimming. Were we breaking the rules?

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 Commitee, even the camp rangers, CITs and unit commissioners are support staff. So is the CSE.

So when someone creates a rule, that rule either helps the front-line folks deliver a good program, or it hinders them. A handful of general rules that provide framework help. Detailed rules that can never account for all possilbe local conditions hurt.

Centralized decision making has been the downfall of companies and countries.

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 making a rule, the centralized policymakers in Irving are saying they as individuals know more than the volunteers of BSA do as a group.

Some rules are necesary, they give structure to things. But every rule made by a centralized authoirty negates the local knowledge of the people at the periphery actually doing the work. It's usually justified by some version of "the local yokels don't know as much as the experts" but the truth is, the local yokels usually know a whole lot more than the experts, at least when you factor in all the things that matter for making the actual on-the-spot decision. The best rules defer to that local knoledge, such as SSD requiring the folks actually supervising the swimming area to determine if it's safe by responsibly using their judgment rather than by referring to a detailed definiton from someone in Irving who's never even seen the swimming hole in question.

The worst rules impose centralized idiocy, like the ban on 1,2 and 4 wheeled carts.

The farther away from the action a group is, the fewer rules it should make.

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 certificates, getting all the necessary signatures...

-on that same recharter, a Scout who's name nobody had ever heard of showed up on the roster at recharter time. He wasn't there the prior year, neither I nor the CM collected or signed an application from a youth with that name, he just showed up.

-Several other Youth and two Adults who had joined the Pack in the intervening year were not on the roster at recharter time, requiring another paper chase to get apps re-signed and re-submitted. I've gotten smarter about that - I make copies before submitting the originals and just re-submit the copies (er, copies of the copies) now, but it's still a hassle.

The whole system is antiquated and unreliable. Our district has nearly 60 units, and we're just one of about a dozen in Chief Seattle - I can't imaging the volume of paper getting shuffled around not having glitches.

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'll tell Junior to deal with it. If they're not, they'll complain to you, the CC, and the committee. If the youth don't struggle, but mom and dad aren't on board, mom and dad will complain anyway...

If the CC is on your side, you'll have a valuable partner in dealing with the inevitable discontent (there will be some families that prefer an adult-led troop. They want a Guided Tour of adulthood for their boys, rather than an actual introduction to it). If the CC isn't on your side, there will probably be another change of command pretty soon.

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 two reasons for that:

1) it ignores the (very large) population of eligible boys who are not Webelos, self-limiting the troop to the easiest pickings.

2) it may cause the troop to (subconsciously or not) slant the program towards Webelos-like activities, greasing the skid to a Webelos III program that sacrifices long-term retention (not to mention the youth development the troop program is supposed to provide). It doesn't have to be that way, but it sure seems to be an easy trap to fall into, based on my observations (both local and over the internet).

It's that second point where I see some strong similarity with what BP and qwazse are saying about Venturing. If we think of each program level as just a continuation of the previous level (Cub Scouts -> Boy Scouts -> Venturing) then we run the risk of treating the entire program, from 6 year olds to 21 year olds, as a continuum. It shouldn't be, there are important discontinuities in there.

20 year olds are a lot different than 7 year olds. Well, duh, nobody is saying they aren't, but the important question is, when do we change the program to reflect their growth? How do we know? It seems to me that the layout of the three programs can provide a useful answer:

Cub Scouts - young boys, not yet independant, need activities and opportunities to develop social skills and teamwork, as well as lessons in personal goal setting, accomplishment, etc. - do your best.

Boy Scouts - the transition from "boy" to "young man", learning independance and self-reliance along with learning to fit into a group, a massively critical phase for every male child, the program needs to offer challenge, guidance, teamwork (patrol method), reinforcement, ceremony, and recognition.

Venturing - already made the step to "young man", capable of independance, need practice doing for themselves and the confidence that comes from accomplishments. No longer "kids", Venturers are "adults in training." They basically should have everything they need to be a functional adult except the experience, and that experience is what the program should provide. I think the last part of the Venturing Oath, to seek truth, fairness, and adventure in our world is a great goal to direct youth this age towards.

Looking at each program level as it's own entity, not just a continauation of the previous one, I think helps keep us focused on the specific goals each program ought to be looking at. Reading BP and qwazse's responses here really helped me understand (I think...) the differences between what the Troop level program and the Venturing level program need to provide. Or at least ought to provide.

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 sitting around setting poor examples waiting for them to do it.

Personally, I don't think there's a good solution to that - if you're sharing, then the adults need to help, but that means you'll probably end up doing it all since the scouts will be slow.

A sepearate adult area is the right solution - then think about separate patrol areas too.