Melgamatic

We also have only a very thin relationship with our CO, a local church. The pack has been with them for 43 years, but we are just another group to them. We hold our meetings in the auditorium of one of our two feed elementary schools; the facility is much nicer than the church's low-ceiling auditorium.

Some of our dens have used the church for den meetings, but we usually get angry phone calls about various perceived problems with the way we left the classrooms or chalkboards, few to none of which were actually created by us.

We used to store our belongings in the basement, but don't do that because the Boy Scouts tend to shove our stuff to the side and cause damage. We keep our (nice! shiny! new!) PWD track underneath the stage, but that seems to be secure.

We don't really even have a CO Rep, although we recently realized that one of our committee members was a member of the church, so we signed him up.

Our finances are completely separate from the CO. I'm sure they don't even know we have finances.

Our pack seems to be running well, running steady at around 60-70 cubs and enough adults to fill the leadership positions. We manage to convince people to get trained, and we have 6 or 7 parents who are extremely active and make things work. I am not sure what our CO could contribute. What are we missing?

Unlike my scout troop from my youth, which was associated with my church and had tons of scouts who were associated with the church, we have only one actual cub whose family is a member of our CO. I sometimes wonder why they bother, but we don't cause them any issues and we do have 42 years of momentum.

Oh, we also put their name on our parade float, and since the Memorial Day parade route goes past the church the members like seeing us!

-Dave

OK, we'll stop by if we are in the neighborhood, but not if it is going to take us way out of the way. I'm in London now, on the business half of my trip. Family is flying in Thursday for a 4-day weekend.

On the agenda:

- Legoland

- boat trip from Westminster pier to Greenwich on Thames

- London eye

- walking tour of Jack the Ripper sites in the East End

- take wife to my favorite pubs for some real beer

- St. Paul's Cathedral

- walking around Southwark (where I lived for 4 months)

That's going to fill up 4 days, I think.

Thanks, Dave

I travel to London for business quite a bit, but for the first time after my next trip I'm going to stay in London for four days and have my family fly over to join me. I know London quite well and so have plenty of things to see and do on my list, but I've never been to Baden-Powell House, and I'm wondering if it is worth a trip?

Has anyone on these forums been there? Worth a trip? What's there?

Thanks, Dave

Last year a number of our best sellers were Tigers (or at least, a number of our best sellers had sons that were Tigers). We don't push them, but we find them anxious to join in pack activities, including popcorn.

They want the pins and patches, too!

Old enough to have seen the movie, or old enough to have seen the Grateful Dead in concert to know that it's the really long, sometimes boring song they play in the middle of the concert.

[i created a new username so I could talk about this freely]

AhoyDave, I am very unhappy to hear your long, negative experience with your son. It's very upsetting to many people on these forums, I am sure. But, I am not sure that it represents a general bias or programmatic fault with the BSA in general. It sounds to me like you just got stuck with a whole bunch of jerks (I would probably use a stronger word starting with "a" and ending with "oles" in person).

I have two specific examples which make me think that it's not as bad everywhere:

1) In my wood badge patrol, one of our members was quite challenged. He had experienced a lot of tough things in life, mental and physical problems, and clearly had a lot of socialization issues. He laughs at inappropriate times, tells jokes too loud, and really doesn't have much feeling for social clues.

But, he was the first one in our patrol to get his beads, and the rest of our patrol has ensured that he had a good experience. In fact, everyone involved in the entire wood badge course from SM and SPL through all the other wood badgers made sure he was welcomed, accepted, and had a good time. He tested peoples' patience some, but I think it helped us bond.

In the non-inclusive BSA world you describe I don't think that this would have happened.

2) I am a CM for a medium-size pack, in a moderately affluent area, with a bunch of kids that have reasonably severe problems. There are at least 8 or more that are "classified" and a few that are not mainstreamed. They constantly test our leaders' patience. I know the den leaders sometimes want to pull out their hair. We sometimes say to each other "How did we ever end up with this bunch of kids?" But, we get it done, make sure the kids have a good time, and the kids (mostly) advance with the appropriate level of assistance and support from Akela. Of course Cubs is much different, and we can lean on the parent, but we welcome all the kids.

I have empathy for the many postings on these forums about kids that are too disruptive to keep in the pack easily. I only have mild disruption problems, and our technique is to tell the parent that they need to pay more attention, which has actually worked, so far. It's worse on the campouts; it seems the parents have a harder time keeping track of the kids for that long, and the kids tend to get wilder. A kid who doesn't listen to anyone and who doesn't pick up social cues can be dangerous when running through a campsite with a burning marshmallow on the end of a pointed stick...

So, AhoyDave, I have no doubt that you've had a really bad experience. It may be that this kind of thing is quite widespread, but I thought you should know that it isn't universal, and I really haven't seen the BSA do anything that seems to encourage that bad behavior.

-Melgamatic