MattR

Maybe, maybe not. Either way it's called a high class problem.

What are the ratios of boys, girls, men, and women in the 11+ age ranges of UK scouts? One of my concerns is finding women that want to do the more challenging events. We've had moms that will go on one or two and then they're done with that while the dads love it. One thing that sounds different in the UK are the ages of the adult leaders, some of which are not adults. (I hate to say it but when the UK scouts talk about back in the day when they were scouts they're talking about the 90s whereas this forum, and BSA in general, seems to have a lot more, ahem, maturity.) Given that the ages of each type of scouts (beavers to network) is about 3-4 years and we have scouts from 11-18, it's different. It sounds like scouts from one age level can help lead at a lower level. Is that true? and does it happen very much? If so then the issue I see coming wouldn't happen in the UK. My other concern is whether there are enough girls to form viable units. In big towns I don't see a problem but small towns is different.

This policy sounds like a mess looking to happen, and it did in the form of two dads. There is gear each scout owns and pays for and takes care of and there is gear the troop owns and pays for and takes care of. There is nothing inbetween. Partial ownership rarely works out. The idea of patrol ownership is great but a patrol is part of the troop. The troop could give a patrol a budget and they could buy what they want. If they run out of money then they could have a fundraiser, for their patrol. The scouts earning money for their patrol would be a much better lesson than the adults buying gear for partial ownership in a condo, err tent. Disposal of gear is easy. The troop owns it and the PLC decides. The emotions will not be so high because the parents won't buy anything. They may make donations at worst but hopefully they will have encouraged their sons to earn the money. Now, how you get to this is another problem.

It would be really nice if there were a well done bit of training that a UC could point the SM to that described how it should be done. That way we could avoid this discussion about over stepping boundaries. Unfortunately, such training doesn't exist. What's left is the UC trying to find the right balance. I think it's great. Rather than perfection the goal should meerly be improvement. Just a hunch but the SM, if he has a vision of what boy led means, isn't sharing it. There's nothing wrong with anyone having that discussion with him. I think what people are worried about is the tone of that discussion. If it's confrontational than of course it will not work. But if it's more along the lines of I see problems and your leadership is needed and what is your vision, plan, goals so the adults can best help then it's quite possible the SM will welcome the help.

Doubling in size won't be good or bad so much as a big change. The question is who will be ready for the change? The adults will react faster so I think you're right that they could take over. I went through big growth spurts twice and there better be a plan with everyone on the same page or there will be problems. Unless you've dealt with that many new scouts before it will be new. My guess is neither the scouts nor adults know what is coming. There are lots of questions that the scouts should have answers to. What do the new scouts need to learn and in what time frame? Who will teach them? How will it be made fun? How will scouts be prevented from falling into cracks? How will problems be identified and solved? As I said, I doubt if the adults have answers to these and the scouts won't know they need to have a plan. The adults also need a plan: how are they going to prepare the scouts for this? My suggestion is bring it up as an opportunity for the scouts to take on more leadership. And along the way the adults can be trained as well. I would not go around the sm. This should have his backing. If he isn't concerned then there's a chance to get someone that is concerned to help the scouts get prepared.

There seems to be a common theme here. Either the training is too onorus or it's a good way to get more people outdoors that have no experience. The BSA training is too short and incomplete but cub scout training is too much. Given that many cub scouters get burned out from too much advancement, repetition, etc, maybe there is room for better training. I'm not sure what it would look like or whether the BSA can deliver but I tend towards the side that says one night in the woods is a good idea for cub leaders.

ItsBrian, I'm of the mind that judging someone's religious practice is problamatic at best for someone your age. Talking about it could be good or bad. Find someone you trust to talk. Just know that many people struggle with religion.

Thanks for sharing.

Must be, we found a food court type restaurant that specializes in octopus.

Hey @@qwazse, are you currently on the southern coast of Spain? If not then we are not one and the same Much philosophy goes here but I'll leave that for another time. This place is an adventure.

Well, it is Friday afternoon at summer camp so people are tired of a week with each other. We don't know what the whole week was like or generally what the relationships are between the various characters. So maybe asking whether it's okay isn't as appropriate as asking whether it's likely and what should happen afterward. I mean, from the face of it it sounds a bit unreasonable but who's always reasonable? Maybe the best scenario is that this is an opportunity for a scout to see a bit of reality after he graduates into the real world.

Agreed. I'm seeing this happen in my own troop right now. Advancement is easy so the entire troop is working on one MB. It doesn't matter that a lot of scouts already have it. It was really easy to pick a MB for a month long theme. It was really easy for the plc to divy up the requirements so each pl does some classroom style explaining. Not sure how fun it will be after a few months. Until the bsa can explain this program in a way that parents can easily catch onto this is what it will be. Btw, the new sm is an eagle scout, so this is not a new problem. Also, this theme came right out of the programming resources documentation that the bsa publishes.

Bsa needs a message for visitors and a message for current parents and a message for leaders. They are all just more detail of the what and how. Prepared for life is nice but maybe "helping your kids grow up, faster" might hit a nerve. Beyond that there is need for more and more detail of how it works. I think there is a difference with sports since scouts will have more opportunities to make decisions. I still like sports though. They compliment each other.

Hawkwin makes a good point. There's another issue - cost. It's costly to staff shooting and aquatics activities. It's cheap to staff a mb where you can pay a 16 year old less than min wage to stand up and talk. My scouts used to sleep during mb classes to make up for playing hard. Anyway, this problem also needs to be looked at if your council will buy in.

Ask anything you want, just mke sure it's in a foreign language and see how they respond. Ask them where the wc is or what a pancake is. If they have fun with it they're good. Frustrated, not so much. If they start frustrated, you explain what's happening and then they have fun with it, they're also good.

That's the issue that's missing in the poll: not enough moms. It doesn't matter if the units are coed or not. Hopefully I'm wrong but we've had moms that will do some challenging campouts once, likely just to say they could do it, and then they're done with that. The problem with GS is the lack of dads. It's not that all moms don't want to do it but the dads are more likely to want to do the adventurous stuff.

I removed several PORs because I didn't see any responsibility. One scout asked me one time if he could be bugler and I told him I'd give him credit if he could figure out what the responsibility was and how it helped the troop. I suggested he find an adult to help define it. I did the same for librarian. I'm not against those positions but I don't see the need anymore. <Anti Rant on> It's nice to know someone else sees the same thing. <Anti Rang off> This point right here needs to be written large in the SM handbook. It's much easier to teach a different way of doing things to the youngest scouts and just keeping it going until they become the older scouts. For years I tried working with the older scouts to change the culture in my troop. I finally decided that working with the younger scouts was the way to go. That was the best move I made. Unfortunately I asked for adults to focus on the new scouts and all I got was having advancement requirements signed off. It didn't matter how much we talked about leadership, teamwork, or character. Now that I'm no longer responsible for the entire troop I can focus on what I want and so last week I took the new scouts on a campout. They planned the whole thing and I drilled into them responsibility and teamwork. I wanted a duty roster and I wanted them to follow it. They could fill in the details. It was some of the best teamwork I've seen. The adults that went along were real happy with the results and were also sold on the idea. Previously I could tell adults that responsibility was key to teamwork but they just didn't believe me. Once they saw how the patrol worked together they started to see it. Anyway, it would do the BSA a world of good if they would write some training on how to turn a troop around. A few years ago I had a patrol that ran off the rails and I held them all responsible. In all honesty they were all guilty. Some may have been worse than others but none of them stood up for what was right. Anyway, the adult response to this was rather instructive. I had two families quit over that one and the rest were absolutely behind me. The families that left couldn't see that their children did anything wrong. It was the other scouts that caused their children to misbehave. Their kids were perfect after all.

Welcome, @@SFTX. Go ahead and just ask what you want to know about. As Yoda said when he was a den leader, do or do not, there is no lurk.

That's rich. Apparently the people of NOW were never girl scouts. It must be awkward when the NOW folks and GSUSA folks get together.

That sure is terrible. Just my guess, but rather than a 1000 ft climb (9.1) he was likely doing 9.2, Backpack, snowshoe, or cross-country ski for at least 4 miles. That's not the issue, though. There were two other "teenagers" with him and I wonder what kind of training they had. We see plenty of merit badge counselors that don't belong at summer camps. Is this what happened?

ItsBrian, bored is good. That means everyone is doing something. That's teamwork. I''m sure you can find something else to work on. Some other way to make the patrols stronger? But getting back to PLs that won't lead. Given that the PLs have likely never experienced good leadership they are likely learning on the job. Something I realized is that it's easier to learn leadership if the rest of the team is willing and able to follow. In other words, they need to understand teamwork. Each scout has a job and does it. The PLs job is not to plan everything, it's to get everyone busy, helping the patrol reach its goals. Recently I've been working with some younger scouts on teamwork. The result is we have a PL, who's 11 years old, and the only help he needs is a bit of focus. Well, the entire patrol needs to be kept on task, but that's it. They just planned their own campout. The grubmaster brought menus everyone could vote on. There's a scout in charge of the activity and he has a list of ideas the patrol went over last night. The PL is talking to everyone to make sure they're getting things done. Sure, there are a few parents asking if anything needs to be done and how is it going. But the teamwork is developing. Leadership in this case will be easy. You said that your PLs can't plan. I'm sure that's true. But part of the problem might be that they are frozen with fear in that nobody will help. So one thing you might try is to start working on teamwork. I've tried with 14 and 15 year olds and I'll tell you, it's a lot easier with 11 year olds. Sure, it's like herding cats at times but they want to try.

I had nothing against the OA. I liked the idea of the OA. However, it struggles. In our case the leadership consists of some rather young scouts that are well intentioned but quiet. And they can't seem to follow through on much of anything. I had to run the OA elections on my own. Whether this is just poor leadership or lack of motivation I don't know. But it was hard for me to encourage my scouts, who aren't much better, to show up. If they had good enthusiastic scouts making things happen then it would have been easy to get some scouts over to chapter meetings. This isn't just the OA, a lot of troops are having the same problems.

They added a FAQ that made them look particularly dumb. Yes, there have been increases an average of once every 5 years. But in this case it's been twice in 7 years and the total has doubled in 5 years? Didn't it used to be $15 five years ago? And yes, soccer costs $400 some place and that doesn't even include uniforms, but guess what, the $33 doesn't include uniforms either, or summer camp, or any camp, or anything within the council. So the $33 national gets just because is suddenly not so far off the $100 the council wants everyone to donate to FOS. For people that don't have much money this has just lowered the amount of money a lot of people will be giving to their council. Truth be told, if national had less money they might have to focus on what's important so anyone that wants to complain ... go for it. Yes, I'll still pay for it but something about Thrifty is what bothers me about this. What expenses have doubled in the past 5 years? Be honest.

Cubmom07, first of all, welcome. Secondly, I hate to say this but the reason these kids (sorry, but I won't use the term scouts) "roll their eyes at me and act like they don't hear me every single time" is because there doesn't seem to be a reason why they should. While positive reinforcement and talking to scouts about how they should act scout like is usually a good thing, there are times when they are just figuring out the boundaries. Not the specified boundaries but the real boundaries. If the worst thing that happens is they get a lecture then maybe that's reasonable. I suspect there is one scout that is leading this, mainly because he doesn't want to be there, and the others are following along because, let's face it, they have power over the adults and power is fun. How to solve: This is echoing Col. Flag and CambridgeSkip, but what would you do if this were your son doing this? And why? There's most of your answer. No, you can't drag a kid off by his ear but you can get him out of there. These kids need rules and consequences for not following the rules. They should be very clear to the boys and their parents. Do not back down. The reason these boys are running amok is because they know the rules don't apply to them. Make sure that you are willing to follow through on whatever rules you come up with. Also, as an unwritten rule, if one of these scouts does what you ask of him then thank him afterwards. Tell him it made everything go better and it sure is fun having him around. The boys need to know that every interaction with an adult is not a bad thing. Good luck.

Pretty much anything, assuming they have a responsibility. If you really need two buglers then why not. The point is the scout has responsibility and is fulfilling it. BTW, APL is usually not a position that gets credit for rank advancement. But that depends on your troop.