Lisabob

I think it might be a good idea to talk again with the SM and the scout. Make sure everybody is on the same page. What will happen, for instance, if the scout decides during his week with your troop, not to attend all MB sessions? What if he comes home with a partial or two (or more)? Will the SM be upset with you? If the SM insists on having major input into the badges the boy selected, will he at least consent to guiding this boy toward some MBs that other boys in your own troop are also going to work on so that the poor kid isn't on his own all day long? I can understand why some SMs might guide some scouts away from the 1st year program if they feel it isn't very good. I can also understand giving a lot of guidance to 1st year scouts in their choices of MBs. I do think you want to be real clear with everybody that you are not going to be held responsible for the scout's completion of MBs during camp though, and that you have concerns about him being alone all the time. It does impact your troop directly - an unhappy, lonely, bored, homesick fellow could be a real challenge for the patrol leader he is assigned to, and could end up spreading misery to your other new scouts too.

You probably will lose the boy, though if mom here is intent on making a scene, she'll probably wait until she's done so (again) to pull her child from the unit. So you have options. 1) Regretfully remove the boy from your unit too, along with removing the parents. This is a tough call because probably the boy has done nothing wrong except to have the misfortune of being born into this family. 2) Alert whoever is running this event that you may have a problem adult in the midst. At least that way, program organizers can work with your pack to try to downplay any outbreaks that occur. 3) Have somebody - perhaps your UC if you have one - have a less gentle sit-down with this woman and clearly tell her she can attend with her child, but the first sign of misbehavior will result in the entire family being escorted from the event. If she feels she cannot abide by that, she should consider not attending. If you don't have a UC and want back-up, consider contacting your District Commissioner (if you don't know who that is, call your council office and ask). If that doesn't help and even though it really is not their job, call your DE and ask him/her to point you in the correct direction for district-volunteer support. Hope this helps, and good luck.

Interesting. I sort of feel like we're playing limbo here (how low can you go?) but...how 'bout 3 weeks? This all stems from a conversation I had with a troop advancement chair not too long ago. There are several almost-18 life scouts and I suspect the adv. chair sees it as part of his job to push them through to Eagle if possible. Anyway he mentioned that some of these fellows have 3-6 weeks before they turn 18. I must've raised an eyebrow a little too far because he immediately became defensive and said it could happen. So I'm imagining best-case scenarios for the boys but I still have a hard swallowing that 3-4 weeks is really possible. Honestly I'm not even sure the boys are all that interested (at least a couple rarely attend troop meetings) but as I said, I'm curious.

Isn't it fun to manage other volunteers?! Contact your charter organization pronto. Let them know that the Cubmaster and Committee Chair have chosen to move on to other things. Have your Charter Org. Representative direct council to remove them from the pack roster, and have the charter org. send a letter to the ex-CC and ex-CM stating that they are no longer members. As an ex-member of the pack, she will have no reason to attend events. If your charter org. is not currently aware of the situation, now is the time to make them aware before your psycho ex-CC does it for you, but from her point of view. Depending on how involved your charter org. is, you might also want to offer them the names of folks who are willing to step in to replace the former CM and CC, and get the charter org representative's signatures on those adult leader applications taken care of right away too. That way council's records will be updated to reflect the change and you won't have to wait around for your charter org to get with the program (if they're typically un-involved).

Park ranger is a good idea. Also check with : your state historical society; the individual(s) who focus on that period of history in the history department of a local college or university; or maybe a well-regarded group of union or confederate re-enactors (though I'd be a little careful there, as there are historically authentic civil war re-enactors who take this stuff seriously, and then there are guys who like to play dress-up but aren't very focused on getting the details right). Considering the potential for there to be a lot of attention and criticism of such an issue, doing a little leg work to get it right is probably going to pay off big in terms of headaches avoided later. And I hope that nobody in the unit is doing this to push a revisionist history agenda! That would be an inappropriate thing for boy scouts to be doing, IMO.

Just curious here. Say you have a Life scout whose 18th birthday is just around the corner. Suppose that all his requirements for Eagle are done (POR, tenure, merit badges, scout spirit, etc.), except that he has no project. Hasn't planned one, hasn't presented one & got the requisite approvals, certainly hasn't carried it out and done the follow-up documentation. Maybe he has a vague idea but nothing that is immediately actionable. What's the shortest amount of time you have seen, or that you can realistically imagine, for such a scout to plan, execute, and document his project? Assume as well that there are no adults playing silly games to intentionally slow him down. Best case scenario for the boy. A month? Less? Guess I'd better clarify that I'm not advocating this sort of an approach in any way - I just wonder what the collective wisdom of the forum might be, in terms of the bare minimum time frame for an acceptable project, start to finish. (This message has been edited by lisabob)

FScouter, that is the price only for the youth-sized cotton short sleeve shirt. I had thought a major point of moving to supplex was to have a fabric that actually performs adequately in the field. So let's look at what those more functional supplex shirts cost. The youth-sized supplex short sleeve shirts are $34.99. Of course by the time most kids are 13 or so, they need an adult shirt, not a youth shirt. Adult-sized supplex short sleeve shirts will cost you $39.99 and adult-sized supplex long sleeve shirts are $49.99. I think HICO is right on target. For these prices, I'd expect better quality in the details. If I bought a $40/$50 shirt anywhere else with similar issues, I'd stop buying that brand of clothing. Unfortunately that's not an option if one wishes to be fully uniformed in the BSA.

"Yeah, I could try staying home, and if I tell the SM it's because they are too loud that would be another way to make my point. " Yup, that was my point, if talking to the SM simply has not worked. It isn't a question of training or anything like that. It is more a question of knowing what your limits are, and knowing what you can/can't change. If you can't get the SM to change his behavior then you have to decide whether it is worth your aggravation to put up with it. If the answer is "no" then don't go! Evidently you generally aren't in a position where if you don't go, the whole thing comes crashing to a halt. You are under no obligations to spend sleepless nights being annoyed by people with bad manners. By the way I do believe you only mentioned that you were in attendance as a Webelos Den Leader in your most recent posts. (It's rough to criticize others for not factoring that in to their responses when you hadn't previously mentioned it!) That changes the dynamic and I can certainly see why you were there in that capacity, but I'm betting that the Webelos don't camp with the troop all that often. And I hope your webelos had other adults in attendance with them. Perhaps you can use that opportunity to provide more feedback to the SM, along the lines of "Yup, the boys really liked the troop but you know, their parents were not too happy about all the noise all night long. I know we've talked about it before but you should know, Mr. SM, that this might cause some of those webelos to join a different troop." Assuming, of course, that this is true. Anyway I think John-in-KC has pretty well laid out your options. At this point it is a matter of what you feel comfortable choosing to do.

OK so let me ask a couple of questions. Why are you attending the camp outs? Do you bring some particular skill to the group that nobody else has? Are you the only one with a trailer hitch to pull the troop trailer? Understand I don't mean this in a negative way. Generally speaking, I'm grateful to the adults who give their time to go camping with my son's troop because they make it possible for him to have a good scouting experience. But if it is really that aggravating for you (and I can see where it might be), would it be better for you to just abstain, at least when Mr. Bar Room is going? If you've already had repeat conversations with the SM (one-on-one and not at 3am when you're really annoyed and he's hanging out with Mr. B. R.) and nothing has improved, then either the SM does not particularly care about, or does not fully grasp, the consequences of his rude behavior. If you don't attend, maybe he'll start to figure it out. (or not, but either way at least you'll be able to get some sleep)

I agree that the charter partner ought to be involved here. They, not your DE, are the ones who should be applying the pressure on this gentleman to resign before he is removed. If you even really need to wait that long. Anyway, there's a better-than-even chance that his wife will be in contact with him before his 6 months are up so he could certainly pass along the word that he accepts a resignation. Regarding this sentence: "When he was arrested, he was driving home from work (he is self-employed in as an electrician.) His kids were not with him, and he was not even near home at the time." I don't see what that has to do with anything? I'm glad he was not directly endangering his own kids, but he was endangering every single person on the road with him that day, including (most likely) other people's kids.

Eamonn, I agree that this is not an inspiring theme for youth (probably not even for boy-scout-aged youth). It might appeal to us geezers but even then I'm not so sure! I like your kite idea - too bad the weather wasn't more cooperative. Anyway, two things I have seen that worked pretty well for the little guys: 1) We partnered with local fire departments to do a Tiger recruiting event. Every little boy I've ever met wants to climb on, in, through, and around a fire engine. Turn out is virtually guaranteed. Ours had a catchy name which I can't remember at the moment! The key here is to ensure that everybody who shows up understands this is a cub scouting event and not just a fire hall public relations event. 2) We set up booths at local festivals in late summer and hand out whatever old gimmicks are left in the council cupboards, along with info about local packs. Last year we gave away literally hundreds of matchbox cars that were found in the storage room, left from a couple of years ago when the theme was centered on NASCAR. (We gave them to every boy from about age 3 up, and to more than a few girls too - figured it would spread the word about scouting in general and who knows, maybe they have brothers or male cousins.) And scout stickers. And press-on tattoos. (remember the 3 amigos tattoos from a few years back?) We have also done a simplified raingutter regata and let anybody who wanted to, race boats. Water-related fun on a hot day at the local festivals drew in a lot of kids & parents. I've found a lot of cub leaders are pretty burned out by this point in the year. The prevailing attitude I ran into while doing the above tended to be that they're not going to turn away new boys but they're not going to seek them out at this point in the year either. I was hard-pressed to find help running district recruiting events in spring/summer as a result. Also most packs in this area don't run much of a summer program so they'd prefer to wait until fall to do their heavy recruiting. I don't know if the dynamic is different in your area? Oh, and another one (though I don't know how I feel about this!). One lady I know in another district arranges to attend all the Head Start kindergarten graduations and signs up kids for Tigers on the spot. She simply assigns them to the pack that is the most closely affiliated with where ever they'll go to school in the fall. Her district usually does really well with membership as a result. But I don't know how many of those boys actually end up participating in scouting, come fall.

Tell me that this fellow has all sorts of endearing qualities that make him a great SM, mentor, and role model to the young men in the troop, and that this is his one flaw that irks you. Because if it is a symptom of an otherwise unpleasant, rude, inconsiderate jerk then a) nothing you do is likely to change the situation and b) I wonder why you'd want to be associated with this troop. Assuming we're talking about the former situation then probably 3am is not a good time to address the matter. You most likely are not at your best and the SM is sitting there having a good time in front of his buddies, which sets up a pretty grouchy and confrontational dynamic. Another venue and another time when you're both fully awake and on even ground would probably garner better results. Maybe a conversation at a committee meeting about driving safety, or about boy behavioral issues caused by being over-tired, would work better (make sure to have the committee chair in your corner first if you choose this route). Do any of the boys or other adults raise concerns about the noise? This might be especially hard on the younger guys who probably are not as used to staying up late as some older teens might be, and on the patrol leader(s) and SPL who have to deal with the over-tired boys the next day. Exhausted 11 year olds are a real joy. If it is a regular occurrence, I'd imagine that some of them would have said something by now, and you may have some backing there. As for myself, I know that sometimes I am over-sensitive to noise. And I am very bad at tuning out annoying sounds. In fact, the more annoyed I get by noise, the louder and more obnoxious it seems to become (especially when I'm really concentrating or I'm over-tired). Knowing this about myself, I've found that a good pair of headphones and some music can really help. And perhaps it is the SM's job, not yours, to be awakened in the middle of the night by scouts who are having difficulties?

OGE, the coaching analogy is a good one, I agree. I guess what I see sometimes is that we don't tend to be terribly flexible in our manner of communication with youth, particularly when things aren't going as smoothly as we'd like. We adults tend to get all parental, and then get frustrated or angry when it doesn't produce desired results with boys who are not our own and who are not used to our particular style. When that happens, it can set off a pretty bad dynamic. ("Bobby is mouthy/rude/ignoring my instruction." "Mr. X is always yelling. He must not like me much.") If you are the SM (or CC?) watching such a situation unfold, do you take the adult and/or boy aside and try to help them see things in a different light (how?) or do you just say forget it, and figure that either they'll get over it or that maybe one or both aren't a good fit for the troop after all?

After having some difficulty getting the guys moving on a recent outing, my son came to the realization that the reason behind "form ups" in the morning is not (as he previously supposed) so that the leaders can laugh at the sleepy-headed, half-dressed boys reluctantly dragging their behinds out of their tents, but instead so that the youth leadership can be assured that everybody actually is awake and functional. This was a bit of a revelation for him as he is not exactly a morning person himself. So he's re-instituting form-ups and he's the one who will have to get up first from now on to make that happen. Funny how things change when you're the one in charge.

This must happen from time to time in pretty much every troop and I wonder how you handle it. Do you ever have a situation where one or more of your key adults and one or more of your key youth just really function and see things *differently*? For example, some fellows respond well to a sharp word, others become defiant. Some can get startled into action by a well-timed bark, others shut down completely. Some respond really well to a quiet comment, others tune it out. And so on. A good match between adult style and youth personality can yield marvelous results in terms of personal growth, mentoring relationships and character development. But how about when it isn't such a good match, but you want to keep both the adult and the scout in question? I'm asking you to share your successes, and maybe also your failures, to balance adults/scouts, both of whom you see as assets to the troop (though perhaps not in combination!), in this arena.

"if councils put a fraction of the effort into basic scout leader training that they put into WB, we'd really have something...." Well now that, I can agree with. One thing WB taught me was that we really do have a group of excellent trainers in our council. Sadly, these are not the people who typically deliver most of our basic scout leader trainings.

None of the troops I know of hold a regular meeting schedule all summer long. Some do nothing except summer camp. Some hold a curtailed schedule. My son's troop meets in a school and so we stop with weekly meetings when school ends. We have a number of service activities and fundraisers throughout the summer. We camp in June and we go to summer camp in July. This year our venture patrol is doing a week-long backpacking trek in August but the troop as a whole doesn't typically camp in August. Back when I was a cub leader we had a couple of summer activities each month but it was really hard to get attendance and the few leaders who organized and showed up aometimes felt taken advantage of. It did not seem to matter what the activities were either. I guess there's a balance. I hate to see units that basically only run from October to April. But you have to make sure you aren't burning out your leadership too.

HICO, I don't disagree that there are other venues where people MIGHT get a chance to just chew the fat about scouting. Few of those venues compare to Wood Badge though because of the single-minded focus of Wood Badge participants and besides some of them (camporee, summer camp) tend to exclude large numbers of scouters other than ASMs/SMs. Roundtables are more open to scouters in a broader range of positions, but they typically have an agenda to follow, leaving little time for deeper discussion, and besides they're only an hour a month. Back when I started grad school and I was an impoverished student imagining how nice it would be to have a tenured position as a professor someday, one of my profs took me aside. She said yeah, the money is nice, the job security is nice, the work is mostly rewarding, etc. But by far and away, once the basics are covered, the biggest thing you'll end up wishing you had more of is not money or security - it is uninterupted time to think, read, research, and write (these are an academic's life blood). Over the years since then I have found that she was 100% right about the luxury of time. Most people just can't think deeply and seriously in short bursts with a million other duties and distractions pulling you this way and that. I know sometimes I talk too much so let me try to boil this down. What I find most valuable about Wood Badge is the sustained, uninterrupted, focus on developing a vision that will translate into delivery of a better scouting program. This sort of soul-searching can benefit even the most seasoned leaders who may need to look at their program with fresh eyes from time to time. All the other stuff one gets from Wood Badge is ancillary, in my view.

HICO, I'm glad you got that as an ASM. Not everybody does. Some are in small troops where they're it! Some are in troops where collectively, they couldn't find their way around the campsite with two hands and a flashlight. Some are not ASMs/SMs, but committee members. Some serve cub packs where, often, all of the adults are pretty new and clueless. Some live in districts where Round Table is a joke. Some are not unit volunteers but district or council volunteers. Around here, some are lonely Crew advisers with maybe only 2 or 3 functional crews in their whole council. And so on. For me, I was a Cub leader when I went to Wood Badge, between my son's bear and Webelos I year. The pack had gone through a leadership disaster and I and our cub master were left holding the bag. Neither one of us wanted to ever go through that again so we agreed to do everything in our power to improve the pack. That included both of us attending Wood Badge. I'm glad we did. It made a huge difference in how we approached the rebuilding effort. One of the (many) things we had trouble with in our pack was making contacts with other leaders. There are 10 cub packs and 6 troops within about a 10 mile radius of us, and we knew hardly anybody in any of those. This resulted in mammoth amounts of work re-inventing the wheel at the cub level, and it meant our webelos didn't really make good connections with area troops and therefore either didn't cross over, or didn't stay involved due to poor fit, once they did cross over. And the only time we ever saw boy scout folks was at the cross over - no connections back and forth, ever. That changed as a result of attending WB and getting to really know a bunch of other folks. Another thing that I found invaluable was having a sounding board of folks OUTSIDE our troubled unit. Not only were most of the other adults involved in the pack not really inclined to spend their time thinking and talking about scouting, but also, we needed constructive outside suggestions. And yeah I know - UCs - but as I may have mentioned elsewhere, we really didn't have those in our district. So I used my Wood Badge patrol as a sounding board for ideas and, occasionally, just to voice frustration. Among other things, my husband appreciated not having to listen to so much of it! I freely admit that I did not understand much about the patrol method, going in. Probably not surprising since I was a Cub Leader at the time and for obvious reasons, never a boy scout either. I did learn a lot about it. Had I waited til my son joined the troop and I had a better understanding of boy scouting (as opposed to cub scouting), I probably would have gotten different things out of the course. But you know, my son's pack needed me back then in a way that my son's troop does not need me now. So I think that was the right time for me to do the course. ETA: We don't have a council-run boy scout summer camp. While we do have a cub scout resident camp and cub scout day camp, many times these operate on a family-by-family basis, rather than a whole pack signing up at once. And while there, parents are pretty much engaged with their kid. Not a lot of time for sitting back and talking about scouting in the big picture. (This message has been edited by lisabob)

Sounds great! Keep up the good work!

Yes HICO, in thinking about it some more and listening to my son's frustrations, I think you are right. He doesn't understand why a couple of the adults in the bunch keep driving them to do things a certain way, because those adults have not communicated well. These are the same adults who have voiced frustration that the boys are not behaving the way they would like them to behave. Of course it doesn't help that these same adults are doing most of the planning for the week-long trek, effectively keeping the boys in the dark about what it takes to pull off such a trip. Aside from the adult:youth ratio which is still a problem, I think this is the bigger deal. Lack of communication over expectations puts everybody at cross-purposes. That, at least, is something I think I can find a constructive way of addressing on the adult side of things.

The WHO is not a part of the United States government. They have nothing to gain from inflating fears without reason and, in fact, every WHO statement I've seen so far has included an attempt to tamp down mass hysteria. If you want to blame some agency for ramping up fears in order to increase their budgets, focus on the National Institutes for Health and the Centers for Disease Control (neither of which do I believe are acting badly but at least they are part of the US bureaucracy and do get budgets directly from Congress so they're a more logical target for blame in that regard). Dean, ask your CDC friend about the impact of closing borders, would you? I saw some computer models earlier in the week that suggested that even with a 90% border closure (recognizing that there is likely to be a list of exceptions, making up the other 10%), the path of a disease like this probably would not be significantly altered. Fact is, it is already established in at least 10 US states and, if it is going to spread, will do so regardless of border policy. Closing borders would therefore be a political action, not a science-based action. It might make people feel better and so it still might happen though, if this thing gets a lot worse.

Your DE is probably getting strong-armed and told by his boss that he WILL make an appearance at your meeting, if he expects to stay in his job. So, if he shows up, send your CC out in the hall/outside to have another friendly chat while you, the CM, hold your pack meeting. At that point I think the CC might want to ask point blank whether the pressure from on high is the reason the DE showed up after being asked not to. Nicely put the cards out on the table where everybody can see them. If the answer is yes then at least you all can be sympathetic. If the answer is no then you push a little harder - why did he show up then? Perhaps he needs to learn some people skills. From what you wrote, he was clearly not invited. Time to be a little bit blunt. Either way, it is your program and I don't think you are obligated to give him more time on your agenda. You could offer to leave the flyers on a table by the door and mention that FOS is continuing if anybody is interested. No harm in that and if the boss is pressing the DE, at least the DE can say he was there and distributed the literature.

Twocub, I have to tell you that I believe your assumptions about your letter being attached to any future transfers is incorrect. Future troops would probably get a scoutnet report, but unless the new troop contact you directly, or unless you live in a very small town environment and the transfer is within that small environment, or unless you are in a district position that causes you to see other units' rosters on a regular basis, you'll probably never know if the scout in question joins a different troop.

Beavah, I certainly think a good counselor could augment the books with all sorts of other interesting stuff. But I still think it is incumbent on the scouts to at least make an effort on their own, too. It is hard to have a conversation with somebody who knows absolutely nothing about the topic under discussion. To be honest, I see (and push back against) the same attitude among my college students, some of whom cannot understand why they are failing their exams when they haven't read (or in some cases, never even purchased) the books. I don't want our scouts to learn this sort of behavior at an even earlier age. In one class I teach where there's a serious, real-world, statistically-based project at the end of the course, I have had students come in shortly before the due date (after many weeks of supposed work on the project with all kinds of guidance), completely befuddled, asking for my help. Of course I give assistance, but when I ask them why they haven't consulted the page references in their books that show them - step by step - how to do some of the required items, and they tell me "oh, I never bought the book" or worse, "I just figured you'd tell me what I needed. I don't have time to read it." Then yes, that irritates me. You want help, I'll give it, but you need to put in some effort on your own too. Scouting isn't school so the comparison isn't perfect, but books are a wonderful path to independent learning and I view MB books in that light too.