Lisabob

ASM915 - I talked with my DE, a DD, and the Program Director. Haven't yet gotten to the point of contacting the SE, probably won't for now either (don't want to ruin my son's chances of being selected!). Will be re-contacting the PD who is supposedly council's point man on this.

Thanks Ohio_Scouter. I know that's the policy, and that in the past my council has gone first come/first served. No one has been able to confirm (or deny) that they'll do the same this time, but past practice is a pretty good guide in the absence of any other info. Now if they end up choosing to do something different this time, and if it means that my son doesn't get to go, that's one thing. He'd be disappointed as he will not be able to attend as a youth in the future. But you know, they took my $100 three months ago now, and if they don't intend to select my son, then I guess I'd kinda like to know about it and also have my deposit back! Looks like I just need to be patient some more though. Admittedly not always my biggest strength.

And if they only lost those, (though he indicates that they also lost all of his other records too), he still has every right to be annoyed by this. Any council that loses adult records 5 times in 8 years appears to have a data management problem. The results of such problems are, as seen here in the posts of various scouters, a loss of confidence in council records of all sorts (justified or not) and the risk of angering dedicated volunteers (which is bad policy for a volunteer-driven organization).

Try making a personal appointment to meet the SE and discuss face to face. Put him on the spot and be blunt about your displeasure, but (at least the first time) I think you do owe it to him to do this privately before you string him up publicly at the council open house. Then follow up with him in writing with a letter requesting a written response. CC council president on your letter. It sounds like your options are as follows: 1) Give in and grumble. 2) Leave the organization and find another council with better management or another youth program to serve. 3) Keep the fire lit under the SE until he/she decides to focus on getting it fixed. Now let's consider the number of weekends/evenings of training that we could be talking about for a highly trained SM. Sure, some of these can be done now online, but that's fairly recent and I still know many folks who have done these in face-to-face classes instead. I don't know exactly what training this particular poster has done but most WB'ers I know have gone to more than just the bare minimum. NLE SM training OLS Woodbadge University of Scouting? Safe Swim/Safety Afloat? Climb on/Trek Safely? YPT? LNT? Others? (plus any cub or venturing training that a leader might have done) Not to mention the tenure for BS leader training and Scoutmaster's Key awards. I'd be annoyed too if my council lost my records of all my training on a yearly basis. It IS a sign of incompetence, causes people to harbor ill feelings about training (why should I go, they'll just lose the records anyway) and undermines faith in the council's record keeping abilities for other (more important!) matters like youth advancement records.

Hello, My son signed up online, got his forms together with SM signature and turned those in to council, and I paid the $100 deposit to our council back in June when the online registration first opened up. Council cashed the check. Tradition in our council has been first come, first served in terms of who gets to go (provided they meet the basic requirements). However, here it is late September and no one has heard word one yet from our council about youth (let alone adults) applying to attend. The only reason we knew about the whole process was thanks to you guys on this board. I've asked the council pro's about what their timelines for advertising and organizing, not to mention paying for, youth spots in the jambo troops. None of them know anything and the guy "in charge" dances around my questions. I'm assuming at this point that my son probably has a spot but I have no verification of that. I don't know how much it is going to cost but I'm guesstimating $2000 (we live in the midwest so transportation will be a fairly hefty cost - in the past I believe they've chartered buses). I'm concerned that a slap-dash effort will be less than enjoyable to be part of, and I'm worrying about budgeting for the cost. I know other councils have their acts far more together. But then, Jambo is still close to two years off. How worried should I be?

Congrats to you and your pack, and thank you for your efforts! I hope you'll keep the board updated from time to time as the year goes by. It is nice to hear how things are unfolding on the ground.

My son's troop has "always" had these, so it isn't an issue as most new boys to the troop just assume that's how you do things. On the good side, everything under the sun is in there. On the bad side, everything under the sun is in there. They're heavy and often kind of dirty inside, and they limit the boys' ability to do more than car camping. They also could result in boys not bothering to plan carefully because they just rely on what they need being in the box. So, like everything else, it depends on what sort of activities the boys are doing and also on how they use the boxes. I guess I wonder about what lessons your guys are learning when they go camping and forget some basic items. Do they remember that item the next time? What do they do to compensate for the forgotten necessity while they're camping? I would think that if they are forgetting important items like cooking oil or pans to wash up the dishes, that this wouldn't happen more than one time before they figured something out.

Well I think, among other actions, I'd send a photocopy of all my documentation, along with a tersely worded letter, to the SE, asking the SE to respond in writing with an explanation and a proposed solution. In that letter I'd explain that this would be the final time I'd be submitting my documents, and (depending on how annoyed I was feeling that day!) maybe also that the next time they lose them, I'd find a better-managed youth organization to serve. I'd probably CC the council president and my DE too.

raisinemright, no there is no such rule. I guess I'd be curious enough to ask the SM why he prefers that, considering the 20-30 mile drive and the cost of gas these days. He might have a good reason but I can't think of one right now.

shortridge: American Cultures

?? Eagle, the ones I saw have the letters BSA in black threads on the cuff. I'll have to look again when I'm at council shop next week.

I completely agree jblake, and on the very rare occasion when we've been short drivers, I've offered to drive. Happily it is rare in our troop, but that's partly because a lot of parents (most of whom are also registered troop leaders of some type) go on most of our camp outs. So, going back to bulldog's original question, yep, it is pretty typical to have parents in attendance. We just try really hard to keep them from acting like, well, hover-parents when they're with us!

I think it depends a little on your pack. If you are the only adult who knows anything about cub scouting, if you're essentially the glue holding the pack together, then having a good understanding of Tigers and Webelos might be useful for you to ensure that those dens are functional. But if you have any sort of competent assistance at all, then I have to agree with GW. Get the Tiger and Webelos DLs go to training for their positions! The CM's job isn't to micromanage the dens and so while you need a basic understanding of their programs (which you probably already have), you don't absolutely need the DL training. Univ of Scouting and Round Table will be more useful to you, and less time consuming too. A lot of councils do their UoS in late Oct/early Nov so start keeping an eye out for that. (plus, watch out! people who suddenly show up for a bunch of trainings end up on the district training team! )

nld, it may also depend on state law, as some graduated drivers license laws limit the number of passengers, the number of teen-age passengers, or the times at which teen drivers can have passengers in their cars. And personally, I'd be hopping mad if I found that an 18 year old ASM was driving my kid anywhere without my explicit permission. Sorry ASM59, I'm sure your daughter is a fine young woman and a safe driver. I'm just thinking of some fellows I've known who "graduate" out of being a scout and are suddenly an ASM by virtue of turning 18, and I wouldn't trust their prudence enough to allow them to drive my child down the street, let alone to/from a camp out. Of course, going back to the original post, the above also assumes that there are enough adults in attendance that getting kids to/from camp outs is not an issue. If not, then some parents are going to have to step up and drive their kids back and forth. And I think that's a part of why parent participation has become more common - as troops have ranged further afield, the prospect of driving a couple hours each way on Friday and Sunday is less appealing than just driving and staying the weekend.

I agree that council advancement records are sometimes incorrect, but I don't agree, Scott, that scouts should be individually calling the council registrar to check on this. That should be the job of the troop advancement chair, or failing that, of the SM or maybe committee chair. I know that in my council, if every Star and Life scout started calling the registrar, she'd be flooded with calls and not very happy! Further, if this young man has the green cards that are usually awarded to a boy along with the actual merit badge itself, this is less likely to be a council record keeping issue and more likely to be either a troop issue (they never gave him the badge) or his own issue (he lost the badge). Council registrar can't help with that. Use the resources you have at your finger tips first, got2surf. Let your Scoutmaster know of the problem and ask him or her to help you get it straightened out. Most likely it will be easily resolved.

Allan I don't know how your council does things but in mine, when I signed up to be a MBC, I had the option of choosing to work only with my troop, or to be available for any boy in the council. I chose the latter. (I'd encourage all posters to do likewise, or else every single troop ends up needing to come up with their own pool of MBCs and it is a hugely inefficient use of resources.) Every SM in our council gets an updated copy of the council-wide list a couple of times a year. So yes, if a boy in another troop wants to do "my" badge and the SM gives him my name and #, I might get contacted by someone outside "my" troop. And in fact it happens occasionally, usually from other troops in my area where the SMs and I are friends, and seldom from some random boy in a far-flung corner of the council. (However, for 1 MB, I'm the only registered MBC in the whole council. It doesn't appear to be a highly sought after badge though, unfortunately, as in 4 year, no one has contacted me about it.)

don't forget the marshmallows! Have a great time.

When I went to commissioner training, one of the things we talked about was the impression "out there" that commissioners are the "council cops." It was repeatedly stressed to us that this is not a useful impression and not something we ought to encourage. And now here we have some folks advocating for recognition of the commissioner corps as just that. Hmm, interesting.

GW I believe we're talking about a cub scout pack here, not a boy scout troop. SctDad, please correct if I'm wrong about that. In addition to the suggestions ScoutNut made, I would make sure all the people who are planning to go understand the expectations governing adult behavior on a pack camping trip. That especially includes non-leader parents who may be unfamiliar with the BSA's policies regarding alcohol and smoking. I would also make sure that everyone understands who will be doing what (like cooking & camp chores).

Hmm in that case we'd better all scrupulously turn down the 10% discounts or what not that some outdoor supply stores give to scouts too. After all that's a donation of sorts.

Honestly ASM915, I wish more troops WOULD do that!

I'm a merit badge counselor for 4 badges, of which 3 are "eagle required" and so I do get a fair bit of traffic. Maybe because most scouts who do the badges I counsel tend to be older, I seldom get contacted by parents. When I do, it is almost always young scouts who haven't had much experience with merit badges yet. At that point I explain to the parent that I'd love to work with their child and that he should contact me to arrange a meeting. After that point, I hear back from maybe half of the boys - apparently the other half weren't as interested as mom and dad thought.

"Who is there to be the BSA rule breaker police?" Truly I don't know but I am certainly glad it is not my job.

I too can name a good many families who do not fit your rule of thumb, SR540Beaver. When you start talking blended families, families of other ethnic and cultural traditions, families where the woman didn't change her name, families where the parents did not marry but are in long term relationships, adoptions, foster parenting, etc., boy, watch out! I agree that I've had less difficulty when dealing with a boy scout troop because there, people tend to stick around for a pretty long time and most have been in the same group since cub scouts. So people know each other. But with cub scouts, every year new families who don't know anybody else in the group come into the elementary school system and into the packs and sometimes, no, we really did not know the exact marital status of a kid's parents or guardians. What we did know was the kids wanted to go camping with the pack and both adults came along with them.

Where it gets trickier, GW, is when they simply refer to each other by name. I know that people have a variety of reactions to long-term, unmarried couples. Still, reality is that sometimes people decide not to get married for a wide variety of reasons, some of which have absolutely nothing to do with their morals. And although you suggest otherwise, not all unmarried couples are living a wild lifestyle. In this particular case we're talking about a DE. He's young, he's new, he's inexperienced, and from the sound of it, he may not be very popular for other reasons. I completely agree that, because he's the scouting pro, he should be expected to follow the rules. I further agree that even if he got some kind of waiver, it was probably kind of dumb to think that it wouldn't cause raised eyebrows in an organization where a lot of people have very conservative views and where all eyes are on him as the new guy without a huge fan club. Dumb career move for him, perhaps. But, given some responses here, the logical outgrowth of what some folks have said is that we'd better do a quick marital status check on all the adults who go camping with us and who routinely share tents! And I do not want to stop parents in the parking lot and ask if they're married. If you want to do that, hey, good luck with it.