Lisabob

Yeah I saw that! The $200-ish air gel sleeping pad caught my eye too. Looks cool though.

gwd - by "suspending" instead of "quitting" candidates get to keep their delegates but this is all a show and nobody who has "suspended" would have a serious chance if they rescinded their suspension anyway, so in reality it is a done deal - Romney is out. What will happen is that Romney's delegates get to go to the convention as "uncommitted" delegates. If Romney endorses someone else then there might be some pressure on his delegates to support that person at the convention. If he doesn't endorse someone else then they will choose for themselves whom to support at the convention. As for Coulter, I about snarfed my coffee when I heard her say that the other day! I'm pretty sure Clinton will graciously decline her offer of assistance. And (being a Democrat) I think it is quite amusing to watch the Republican party eat its own candidate.

Let me add my Welcome! to the chorus. There are lots of folks here who are just troves of knowledge about scouting. I hope you'll find us to be a helpful lot and I look forward to hearing about how things are going for you and your pack. Yours in Scouting, Lisa

I was thumbing through a copy of this today in the bookstore. Some interesting reviews in there and I liked the pull-out section dedicated to maintenance and care for gear. One thing I wondered though - it seems to be focused on fairly high-end users. Those of you who are more in the know than I am, is this a publication that you find applicable to the kind of gear and use (and abuse) that typical boy scouts really need? Do you find the reviews in this publication to be pretty reliable? Just wondering if I should bother showing it to the boys as most of the stuff in there is out of their price range anyway. MODS: Please don't move this to the equipment sub-forum. The sub-forums are way too easy to overlook and threads there often don't get a lot of responses. Thanks.

Agreed - either they parrot what their parents say, or if they're deeper thinkers, they're still trying to figure out what they believe and are walking on shifting sands anyway more often than not. We have one boy in the troop who has been a Christian, a Muslim, and a couple of kinds of Buddhist, all in the last 6 months or so. Right now he self-identifies as a Deist a la Thomas Jefferson. He can explain what it means too and to his credit, did so at school when his teacher told him Jefferson was an atheist. Too bad you lost the boy and his family over this.

Michael quotes yet another guy as saying, in part, : " What, after all, is Marxist socialism - any kind of socialism - if not an organization (at the extreme, a militarization) of society designed to appeal to our hunger for security - to what is most unheroic." Yeah there Michael, you might want to go read a bit of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. I recommend you start with The Leviathan. Note that H and L (both by the way, commonly considered to have provided key philosophical contributions to modern democratic theory) talk a whole lot about the notion that human beings created government in the first place to provide ourselves with basic security. So much for them, they must have been nasty pinko commie girlies ahead of their time, huh. Have you actually read any of Marx's writings? Or Gramsci's? Or Engels'? Or other serious political theorists (not pundits) of this vein? There is plenty to find fault with there, but blaming them for what the 20th Century witnessed as so-called "communism" is kind of like turning to Jim and Tammy Faye Baker to understand Christianity, or watching Baywatch to learn what American culture is really about. What they wrote, and the twists and perversions that were added by power-hungry (ahem) men in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the 20th C. really bore little resemblance to each other.

Help me understand this, and I am not trying to pick apart what you said, just to understand it. When you say he would not be reverent, do you mean that he and his family actively denied belief in any sort of higher being at all or do you mean that he and his family did not conform to your, or your troop s, or your COs, interpretation of reverence? In the former case I would have to agree he did not meet the current BSA joining requirements. In the latter case, while he might not have fit well with your particular troop, I wonder if he could not have found another unit with a different understanding of "reverence." (This is where I find the BSA DRP to be very unfortunate. On one hand, it keeps out fine young men and women who have the courage of their convictions and who would also both benefit from, and be of benefit to, the program. On the other hand, it allows for belief in "Mother Nature" or the "rock in the back yard" or other such amorphous and potentially empty (?) ideas as a convenient "dodge" around really explaining what, exactly, constitutes acceptable types and degrees of "reverence" in the eyes of the BSA powers that be.) ETA: And on the THIRD hand (I seem to have extras) the BSA is still rather uncomfortable with religious groups like Wiccans who might express a coherent belief in "Mother Nature" as more than simply a "dodge" around the DRP. Witness the goofiness surrounding the efforts to get the BSA to recognize a Wiccan religious award program, as has been discussed by others at length. We cannot have it both (all three) ways.(This message has been edited by lisabob)

He puts on women's clothing And hangs around in bars?!

RememberSchiff posts in another thread: What can you say to a dad who years later says "My son served two tours as a Marine in Iraq but he wasn't good enough for the Boy Scouts?". I want to ask you for clarification, RS. What sort of affiliation or interest are you looking for, and not finding, that causes you to turn away families? Because my understanding is that BSA does not require any affiliation at all and that BSA members can certainly be (to use John-in-KC's term) "unchurched." In fact, I'd say about half of the boys in my son's troop fit this description. If pushed, most (not all) would probably give you some vaguely Christian doctrine reflective of the dominant religious culture in our area, but they and their families would not identify as either "affiliated" or terribly "interested." They're not actively opposed to religion either though. Would you turn them away from your troop, and if so, why?

In addition to above - when you can treat others with the respect due to all human beings, even though you may disagree with them or don't understand them.

In the thread on COs, Beavah said the following: "If we bring a pastor to a district committee meeting to listen to someone complain about last year's hot dogs at the pinewood derby being cold, he's never going to return, eh? " Heck Beav, if that's what is happening at district committee meetings, you aren't going to get ME there either and I'm part of the district committee! (And by the way, this is one major, major reason why I DON'T go if I can help it.) As for the business about districts being merely administrative arms of the council, that's true. But just as the saying "think global, act local" has some value (beyond the triteness of it), so too can we who really care about scouting (but don't have big bucks to deliver to buy a seat on the council exec board) have more influence at the district level than at the council level. For example in "my" district we're planning a variety of program aids, events, and RT-type efforts aimed at helping units do a better job of member retention (current focus on Webelos-Scout given the time of year). I can't pull that off council-wide, it is just too big an area. But I can pull it off in our district, I think. Also in "my" district we're working on re-thinking our approach to the Venturing program. That's a tall order because it has been in disarray for some time. Our whole district has fewer scouts registered with Crews than you might find in gwd's Troop right now. This is a labor-intensive effort and district-size is about all I can imagine biting off right now. Maybe my view of districts as useful and manageable "chunks" is a result of the fact that we are apparently a rather small district by national standards? 16 troops, 30/31 packs, and a couple of crews. Only 1 truly "mega troop" of 100+ scouts with most troops being at 25-40 scouts. We cover only 7 distinct communities, all in the same county. Maybe there are much larger districts, both in # of scouts or units and in geographic area where a focus on district is less well defined or useful.

Yes I would consider that inappropriate, if that's what happened. As a parent, one option might be to go to the SM and CC and discuss the matter. Another option (escalation) might be to go to the CO. A third option (really escalation) would be to go to all of the above and the council professional staff (DE and/or SE). Another option (really, really escalation) would be to go to the legal authorities. Depending on the details of the situation, which I understand you do not want to share, some of the above options might be more or less appropriate. If it is a matter of a single pinch and nothing else, personally I would choose to start with the first or second option, rather than the third or fourth options. Note that, since you've already publicly tried and failed to oust the SM, you may face some push-back if the allegation is against him and if it comes down to a you said/SM said situation. I'm sorry to say this but I think it is likely to be true, given past history of interactions between you, as you've described them in other posts. You might also find it useful to have a look through the BSA's online Youth Protection Training module. You can find it here: http://olc.scouting.org/ (you have to create a free account to access the material, but you don't have to be a registered BSA volunteer to do so) All "trained" unit leaders are supposed to have completed Youth Protection Training, either at a face-to-face training session or online.

I've also seen some scouts who had all of the requirements completed for 2nd and 1st class prior to finishing the physical fitness requirement for tenderfoot. This depends a bit on how the troop powers that be understand the second part of that requirement (the "show improvement" part), and it also depends a little on the scout being interested or willing to do the requirement, practice, keep track, etc.. Not that it necessarily ought to be that way and I'm well aware that requirement can be completed soon after joining, but it just doesn't always play out that way through no particular fault of the troop or the scout.

I see you've got a camp picked out for this year. There's also Camp Manatoc in the Akron area (also within 4 hrs of Columbus). Anybody been there? I haven't yet, but the troop is going this summer.

Stosh, I am a teacher by training (though college, not K-12, but I also have a formal pedagogical background). I don't think any good teacher in the country would agree that it all needs to be fun and games. There are serious topics and serious work to be done and games per se do not always do justice to the material. However, asking boys ages 10-17 to spend their Saturday sitting in rows in a classroom listening to someone read a merit badge book at them word for word (no discussion allowed, hold still, eyes up and stop slouching young man!) is not teaching either! Yet that happened to at least 100 boys who took Cit. in Nation with the fellow my son had at our council's MBU last year. Most of them probably learned nothing, except that guy was incompetent (or ill-prepared, or both) and the MB was boring...easy, but boring. Every single one of those boys got one of the most important Eagle-required MBs there is "completed" in that way on that day. What I did with the communications MB last year was better than that. It included segments of information interspersed with opportunities for the scouts to contribute, to interact, and to do requirements rather than just listen to some boring adult blather for an hour! But they were still sitting in rows in a classroom (because the chairs were bolted to the floor). Most of them clearly wanted to be fed the info and get out of there as easily and quickly as possible. Some of them so clearly didn't want to be there that they became a behavior problem. And I don't blame them, because sitting in a school on a lovely Saturday morning listening to some adult they don't even know and will probably never see again talk about a topic for which their SM or their parent signed them up because it would be "good for them" is not something to which most boys aspire. My biggest beef (other than poor organization) with our MBU was its heavy focus on eagle-required MBs that are better done one-on-one or in very small groups, instead of on MBs that boys might not have a chance to do elsewhere, and which made better use of the facilities available on campus. That might even have been worthwhile. In contrast, our council runs a HAM radio day every year that is well attended because it is really good and the boys love it. Boys who have finished the MB go back anyway just because it is so cool. Why a MBU couldn't be more like that, I'm not sure. (cynical answer: because the MBU is not run by council, but instead is run, with council's blessings, by a college service organization as a fundraiser. Really good events take too much time and effort to set up to make it worth their while to bother, and if they made it more challenging, perhaps all those people who attend just to get those pesky MBs out of the way, would not attend anymore.)

OK guys, I've decided I want to light a fire under our troop's scouts to get them thinking about jambo. Some of our boys will be too old (can they go as Crew members?) but most of our current members will be in 9th-11th grade at that point, which seems perfect from what you are all saying. Wish me luck, here we go!

very timely, thank you Eamonn. We recently selected a new District Chair. He has convinced Council to try to run a training session for district committee members. First one in my memory, at least. Unfortunately the council gave us a week's notice and scheduled it during a school holiday so many people had prior plans and can't attend. Hopefully they'll reschedule it. I've attended as few district committee meetings as I could manage in the past. The ones I've attended weren't useful to me. They tended to consist of people griping about their scouting pet peeves and how things "used to be" and passing along outdated info (esp. about cub scouting!). I find it hard to keep my mouth shut when that happens, I admit, even though I probably ought to just shrug it off. If the district committee is functional, that's one thing. If it is a coffee & gripe session, I have no time for that. I'm hoping we'll see a move toward "useful" in the coming months but I admit I'm not even really sure what that would mean - useful how?

SA, in my first year as a MBC I agreed to help with a MB university, as a last minute favor to the organizer. I counsel communications. Our sessions had over 100 boys in attendance! And a good many of them did not want to be there, or simply wanted to get one of the "tedious" Eagle-required badges "out of the way." Grr. If I could have found the fellow in charge of organizing the day, I'd have throttled him I think. The only good thing I could say was that I have a lot of experience teaching large classes of college freshmen so I can do crowd control. But that's about all I can do with 100 bored pre-teens and teens who know they don't have to be there. I gave partials, along with my contact info for boys who wanted to follow up on the remaining requirements. A couple of SMs complained and I let them know they were free to help their boys find another counselor. Not one boy contacted me to finish the badge. I gave it another chance the following year, when "classes" were limited to 25. It was better, but yes it was still "school." (It was even held at a school, and one I'm very familiar with too.) I wasn't happy with it. I gave more partials. SMs didn't complain but some boys did (and in very rude ways too - too bad for them that I know their SMs and am not shy about approaching them!). Two boys out of the ~100 I met that day did contact me and finished up their badges with me at a later date. The directors of the MB university asked for input and I sent them an email outlining how they could provide opportunities for boys to try more hands-on badges, utilizing the facilities available at that school. For example, there's a big pottery program at the school and a few people who teach in that program for a living expressed interest in helping with the pottery MB. The campus has an ecology program and an area where soil and water conservation activities could be done. There's a world class athletics facility, including pool, where various physical activity MBs could be done. The school has an excellent astronomy lab that could be fun to work on the astronomy MB. This is a college campus so they could stage a mock emergency preparedness drill and have all sorts of willing "victims" played by college students who live in the dorms. (Acknowledging the enormous amount of bureaucratic hoopla that would go with staging that, it is still a cool idea though.) I recently saw the schedule of MBs for this year. They're all set up as indoor classroom sessions again. Nothing hands on except for finger printing. The MB day is in mid March and counselors have not been contacted yet to see if we're willing to help. When I get that call at the last minute, I will decline to volunteer this year. If my son really wants to participate I will drive him - but I doubt he will. Last year, he started Citizenship in the Nation at the MBU. The "counselor" spent an hour literally reading the MB booklet to the boys, and then signed all their cards. That is WORSE than school! My son refused to turn his card in for advancement and started over on his own with a different counselor.

We've done BORS on the same night for all three ranks at least once in the last three years, and for two of the ranks the same night on several occasions. Usually people who want to impose waiting periods simply do not understand that arbitrary timelines (and that's what you are describing) can kill off the enthusiasm of a young scout, and for no good reason either. If the scout really knows the skills and has done the requirements, then what is the benefit from forcing him to cool his heels? If, on the other hand, he has not really fulfilled the requirements then one hopes the SM would not have signed off and sent him on to a BOR in the first place. So clearly, the SM is vouching for this boy, and the BOR should have something a good deal more evident than vague adult unease at the boy's rapid progress before putting road blocks in his way. The other complaint sometimes raised is that boys who burn through the early ranks will become Eagles "too early." Yet, while my observation is that the leadership and service requirements of these ranks do tend to give pause to a lot of younger boys, there are also boys who are just more mature for their age and who are READY for the challenge. In the former instance, the boy will slow down naturally, thus resolving any concerns on his own. In the latter case, a boy who is truly ready and is arbitrarily held back to conform to some adult's notion of adequate progress, will probably become frustrated by the experience and may sour on scouting entirely, or may go somewhere else to find a more challenging opportunity that the troop has denied him. So, long story short, no these sorts of time requirements are not part of the advancement requirements, there's a reason why they aren't currently in the advancement requirements, and your committee folks should think long and hard about whether their desire to slow down a boy has more to do with other issues like their discomfort with kids who are goal oriented, or possibly with a weak program that allows boys who aren't well qualified to advance anyway. In either of the latter two cases the committee folks should focus more directly on the real problem and not take out their issues on the boy.

Acco, I have to respectfully disagree - you can sell kids on all kinds of stuff but if parents say "I'm not paying for that!" or worse, "No you are not going halfway across the country with leaders we don't already know!" then it just won't happen. Another jambo question - since deposits are paid so far in advance of the event and apparently jambo troops often have mandatory pre-trip events and meetings, what do you do in a case where a boy has paid his deposit (maybe plus some) and then his family moves out of council, perhaps across country (far enough that it would be really hard or impossible for the boy to attend all the pre-trip events with the jambo troop)? Are they just out of luck? Do jambo contingencies in other councils take special-case "transfers?" This must be something that happens from time to time.

I think one of the difficulties you are having Pappy, is that you seem to be trying to generalize from your own, limited, set of experiences. Yes scouting has issues in some places more than in others. But it is very much alive and well too. Just as one "for example" moment: last night our troop had their Court of Honor. Out of about 45 scouts, we have 3 who are seniors in high school, 8 who are juniors, and 8 who are sophomores. We also welcomed several brand new 5th grade cross overs last night, who were escorted to the stage by an honor guard of older scouts. What a cool moment that was. Within certain broad outlines, the way BSA works right now is just about what you are describing. It allows COs to emphasize the parts of the program they feel are most important, and to downplay others. It allows members of any faith (except agnostics and atheists) to join. There are units out there that pay little more than lip service to the "values" aspect of scouting, as you say. There are probably far more out there that take this seriously, but who do not express their understanding or teaching of "values" in an overtly religious manner. There are others where the doctrine of a particular organized religion directly informs the way the unit operates. So already we have a broad spectrum of "end users" (COs) taking advantage of the considerable flexibility that currently exists within the BSA program. Why we would need another organization like what you propose I don't understand - it seems redundant to me. And before you attempt to say otherwise, I am by no means an apologist for the BSA. There are things I would like to see changed and there are policies that I do not agree with. But the particular charge, and solution, that you mention in this thread simply don't make sense to me.

Your best bet is to call someone at council and just ask. Chances are good that lots of units in your district and council do this sort of thing and as long as the paperwork is filled out properly, the council folks will nod their heads in approval.

Do you know anybody involved with the troop? If so, now is a good time to invite one or more of them out for coffee and ask for their help. They ought to be very concerned because if your pack folds, it will probably dry up their main source of new boy scouts too. Perhaps some of them are willing to go to the CO and make the case for continuing to charter your pack. Perhaps some of them can come back and help the pack with leadership issues. Or perhaps some of them can help the pack transition to a more stable CO. But, with 60 boys I am really surprised you can't find enough adults to make this work. Are the parents aware that everyone in the pack is a volunteer? And why does the CO seem to want to shed itself of the pack anyway? Typically DEs are very conservative about moving units away from COs and this is usually a situation where the DE and IH have a long sit-down meeting to see what the story is. And I hope the school your new DE has in mind is a private one, not a public one? Because the BSA actively discourages public schools as COs (my understanding, anyway).

I was thinking that it might be easier with a smaller troop because a) small troops are often more tight-knit socially and culturally so getting parental buy-in might be easier, and b) there are simply fewer families to try to convince.

Yeah, as a professional political scientist, I don't buy this red/blue schism business. The evidence is simply not that clear cut, unless of course you are a pundit looking for a simple argument with which to sow divisiveness and upon which to hang your hat. But if you look at the details what you find is that most states are really quite purple. There are a couple of demographers and a physicist at University of Michigan who have published some very interesting (and enjoyable) work on the matter. Here's a link to one of their sets of maps: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/