MattR

One thing that will really help this situation is an adult in the troop that gains the trust of this scout. He likely won't talk to someone he doesn't have a positive relationship with. The SM would be the first logical choice. I'd call the SM and find out what his view is. He may already be on top of it and you're done. He might really appreciate your help. He might have insight. He might need your insight. He might not want to deal with it. The scout needs to understand that he can talk about what happened without consequences from the other scout. Getting his side of the story, and not just a facade, is the first thing that will start to solve this problem.

I don't think that's what humble means. I don't want anyone to show humility, I want them to be humble. Besides, national is so far away that there's no point in my even talking about it. I'd be more interested in council leadership. Unfortunately, given the number of volunteers it takes to run the BSA program it shouldn't be a surprise that there are weak spots in the hierarchy. Units, districts, council, professionals ... there are difficult people all over. Authenticity and humility would help everywhere. You answered your own question. Much better than sack cloth. Admitting that they don't know all the answers and spending more time listening would be humble. And yes, some people are hard to listen to. Sometimes one needs to dig to find out what's bothering people. Of course, this is all described in woodbadge.

Authenticity is a two way subject. A leader may appear to be authentic to one person while another person sees the leader as full of him/herself. Something that's really needed to be authentic is humility. It's hard leading and mistakes are made. Humility is what holds things together and allows mistakes to be corrected. On the other hand, our zero sum game society, where there will always be winners and losers (as described above) doesn't leave much room for humility. Consequently we have anger. That anger is poison to any form of leadership. While it would be nice for everyone to be more humble, asking for humility won't create it. This is an age old issue, after all.

Welcome to the forum, @Better4itall.

Technically, you're both right. Technically, we could ignore it. However, it is a "strongly encouraged donation" of $200/scout (plus camporee fees and, for the first time, the insurance fee has been pulled out ($75) as well, so I suppose it's more than $250). The troop, and many other units, could just say forget this nonsense but they feel obligated "to do the right thing" and help the council because times are tough. When asked what the repercussions of not paying the donation are the response was "you will make the donation." Is that really a donation? BTW, this is not just from covid, this has been going on for about 3 or 4 years now. Anyway, we were talking about following the rules. The council is following the rules. They just seem to be twisting them a lot. Unfortunately, this is not helping parents that find $420/year more than what the program provides. Scouts are certainly leaving. This is a no win situation. The council will eventually have to make some hard choices. In the meantime the units are figuring out how to keep kids in scouts. This is why the troop also has auctions to raise some money.

Sounds like the SM is being run over. Talk to him. Also, the fact that you're in your mid 20's is not something that anyone will look down on. Don't doubt yourself. In fact, we have our own 20 somethings on this forum and my guess is they''ll chime in soon enough. One thing you can do is talk to these scouts and their parents. Just let them know you're concerned. That will help them a lot. Due to your status as a younger adult those scouts are going to connect to you much more easily than a parent. If this family likes the SM then that's a good reason to stick around. If you can get the parents and the SM together so that everyone knows what's going on that could really help.

I can see both sides on this. Just one example: My troop's budget just came out and they will be charging each scout $420/year. That covers national fees, Boy's Life, insurance, council fees, camporee fees and the money the troop actually uses to operate (which is about $50). The council is getting about $250/scout. So, when my troop asks about fundraisers and the response is sell more popcorn, people are not happy. This is one of the reasons many council and district volunteers have left. They know exactly what is going on. While I suppose the right thing to do would be to write letters to every unit CO in the council and try and bring that herd of cats together in order to replace the council board and SE, nobody is interested in that. They are interested in putting on a scout program for their kids so they just put on an auction and raise some money. I'm sure there are a lot of better run councils than mine but my hunch is my council is closer to the mean than the well run councils. I mean, how do council's get the message that their expenses need to go down if they can just keep asking for more money? It's a whole lot easier for a parent to walk away then take this on. I'm not sure lots of people walking away is exactly what these councils want either.

This looks like a people problem to me. Giving us the details is likely not going to lead to anything because we aren't the people involved. Rather, the people involved need to get together in a non confrontational way and talk. There are always two sides to these types of problems and the real question is how to get both sides to see the other's views. Scoutmasters do not think they are doing something wrong when they do it so that's one hurdle. A lot of parents are going to defend their kid first. This is natural and can also be a hurdle. It really depends on the personalities involved. Hopefully it's an honest mistake and this will be a 10 minute conversation. Unfortunately it might be much worse. You don't mention whether the SM is in the middle of this. If not, I'd start there. If so, all I can say is bring it up with the committee chair. Do your best and hope for the same. At the same time, sometimes scouts need to leave. Good luck.

Welcome to the forums, @Armymutt! Your enthusiasm sounds wonderful. Best of luck and please stick around!

A lab/golden mix and an Australian shepherd. Two dogs that need to be exercised.

Join scouts. My wife and I were going through old photographs and there was a pile from when my son was a webelo and a young boy scout. I vaguely remember when he was a tiger cub. He's 29 now and takes his dogs up 14000' mountains. While I still cherish my time with him he'll never sit in my lap again. Most all of scouting is at the unit level and so all the politics and rehashing of perceived mistakes can be ignored. Shanah Tova.

Maybe we could look at this from another angle. There was a several minute segment about the BSA on TV. Not only did it include video of this scout it included some high adventure shots and some other outdoor shots. Lots of people saw it. That is good for everyone interested in scouting. The eagle rank is one of those Yin/Yang things. As a positive it can be a great motivator. As a negative it can be a great motivator (and overwhelm other good aspects of scouting).

I can't believe I'm saying this but thank you for making the connection between porn and scouts. 😀 Now we're closer to back on track.

This is in the Open Discussion-Program sub forum and the discussion about porn is not related.

Call the insurance company and ask them. I did that once, asking them what constitutes a scout event and they gave me a very simple answer that blew the lid off of a lot of bad info that random scouters just assumed.

How about a section with ideas for helping patrols? I have yet to see a scout oriented site that has anything like that. So, just like menus and activity ideas are concrete examples that scouts can try out, how about specific examples of making duty rosters or solving people problems or just being afraid of screwing up as a new pl. Call it Patrol Life.

My understanding of the do not scan rule is that this is a HIPPA requirement, not a BSA requirement. I heard this from a guy that works IT for the city. However, I haven't read it in a more aauthoritative source.

You're right that the BSA is not a charity, and yet it still needs donations to operate. That's a conflict that I can't see ending well. Fewer donations and fewer volunteers will lead to councils having to charge more than their current costs of $500-$1000/scout/year. This will be a very "elite" organization. For me, I can't volunteer for an organization that isn't set up to take everyone. It's why I'm starting to volunteer at my son's old middle school. Besides, what does it say of the aims regarding citizenship if not all citizens can afford the program? If the BSA had the mindset that they were going to take all kids then they would not be in the financial situation they find themselves.Rather than a hammer looking for nails mindset it would require more asking and listening. Personally, I think it would be much stronger and attract a lot more kids. But I'm mostly just a clueless old SM with fond memories of watching a lot of kids have fun and grow up.

I came to this conclusion a long time ago. Pine trees make lousy bear bag trees and that's what I hike near. One problem with canisters is they don't work well with packs unless the pack is huge. I'm not sure how accurate this is, but the only times I've had bears in my camp is when I camp in well established sites. Bears make rounds. So I try to stay out of their rotation.

How? That seems to be the crux of the app. If you can make that work, inexpensively, then you'll have an impressive app. Heck, put in a module for explaining how to do the patrol method well and there'd be more interest. However, I think it's a hard problem to solve. To me this is less a software problem than a content problem. Good content is hard to create. Rather than talk about it I'd suggest making a prototype for one merit badge, say first aid, and show that to people. The software doesn't really need to be very well written. But the content needs to be engaging. Good luck.

@TAHAWK, it worked for me. If I just tap the " button above the editor, between the link button and the <> button, I get And I can paste into it. Or, I can paste some stuff, hilight it, and then press the " button Does that help? I'm not sure what you did but I fixed your post.

Scouter.com? Oh, sorry. But, to answer seriously, I suspect that if it's a phone company style breakup then the councils will have to agree on any changes. It will be bureaucratic to some extent but the bigger councils may end up with more say. Some councils might just split off. They might want to adapt it so different councils can make changes.

Maybe what this adds up to is: When we were young it was easy to use the patrol method because we had the experiences, as free range kids, to deal with people problems. And now it's much harder. I had luck with having a feedback mechanism for the patrols. Often, people problems would fester but having guidance to show the scouts how to bring up tough subjects in a thorns and roses session helped. It's the little things like this that aren't really described very well. Teamwork really depends on dealing with these types of problems.

@TAHAWK, and everyone else. If anyone quotes articles then they need to do it right. We need to be able to see the reference (a link to the original article is fine - just copy and paste the url) and we need to easily distinguish what is in the article and with what the poster is adding. (This can be done by highlighting the text and hitting the quote button, or using quote marks for small sections). There are a couple of reasons for this: First, it's bad form to plagiarize other people's work. Next, the moderators are obligated to understand what is being posted and it would be much easier if references were done correctly. Similarly, it really helps everyone in understanding what the poster is trying to say. You may think you're clearly delineating quoted text from your own but it's not always clear to us.

All I can say is, for any camp, make the rules and consequences crystal clear up front and don't make exceptions. Understand your risk. I've seen situations where people running an event keep giving scouts a pass and then all of a sudden the scout bails and we're holding the bag. If the scout bails on a $10 camp then we don't worry about it other than an opportunity to teach a scout a lesson. But it's harder when a scout bails on a $1000 trip because the other scouts will have to cover his cost. As soon as the troop has to make a deposit the scouts owe that much (more likely a week before). If the organization you're paying can deal with late cancellations then things are much more relaxed.