BartHumphries

Cub Scout and Boy Scout pins on religious knots, year pins, gold/silver pins on national outdoor things, how do you keep them from falling off?

http://www.ci.st-joseph.mo.us/fire/locations.cfm should give you all the information you need to find out any applicable laws and guidelines for where you live. It should probably be stored in a locked clearly marked container that might need to be airtight depending on whether you're storing liquid or gas fuel. You may need to display an NFPA 704 warning label on the door -- for instance if you're storing kerosene or gasoline and a fire broke out, then it would be a horrible idea for firefighters to start shooting water at the burning building. NFPA 704 placards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFPA_704 You might need to maintain chemical safety datasheets on whatever it is that you're storing. so that if a tank is cracked and people are breathing it in or if it spills on someone or whatever then people who are unfamliiar with whatever you're storing will know what to do about it. Your church should already have a material safety data packet for any cleaning supplies, etc., that are stored in the building -- talk to your building maintenance person about that. Those are things that are generally required by various national standards -- your state/county/city might have additional requirements and someone whose job it is to know about those things can fill you in on whatever you need to know. If you're storing commercially purchased fuel containers (for gas stoves, for instance), you can probably get a material safety data sheet from the manufacturer or from whoever you bought the product from.

I tried taking the online physical wellness class and I'm stuck on the part where you're feeding the blob. No matter what food I do (or don't) give him, he either does nothing, or he gets so big that he explodes. Has this happened to anyone else?

myscouting.org, click on tour permits on the left which takes you to... scoutnet.scouting.org/tour permits or something... Then on the Vehicle tab, in the first section, only the owner's drivers license is requested or even talked about. "For each record you will need the Vehicle Make, Model and Year; the Total the Vehicle will carry based on the number of seat belts, including for the driver; the Owners legal name; the Owners valid Drivers License Number and State..." Down lower, if the vehicle is a bus or super huge van, then you also have to list the driver's drivers license number (and it must be a commercial driver's license, as was pointed out). If I'm driving a regular car, I don't even see a spot to put my driver's license, only the owner's. I think this is an oversight on the form.

http://meritbadge.org/wiki/index.php/Scouter%27s_Key links to the official scouting.org progress records for each position -- I'd edit this into that previous post, but apparently I can't edit it anymore.

My mom and one of my sisters own a sewing machine, but most people these days don't own a sewing machine. Darning a sock is pretty much impossible with the way socks are made now and is consequently swiftly becoming a lost art. Hardly anyone sews their own lace for the same reason that men stopped wearing it centuries ago -- it's so easy to get machine-made lace for practically no money that it's no longer a status symbol. A uniform can cost more than a month of groceries for a family.

http://www.scoutingbsa.org/Programs/awards/Adult_Leader_Awards/Scouter_Key_Award.html For the Scouter's Key award, scroll down and find the part that you fit under -- apparently it's available to Scoutmasters, equivalent positions in other parts of Scouting (Venture crews, etc.), and all commissioners.(This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

Let it go. That anger will just eat away at you inside. Sure, $150 is a couple months groceries for some people, but he's gone, he's (presumably) not coming back, it's not going to happen again, you're wiser (sadly) for the experience. Just forgive him and move on (which doesn't mean to do it all over again). Maybe he's really having trouble making ends meet and doesn't want to admit it. Perhaps you kindly let him know that he can apply to the council for a sponsorship or maybe let him know that the boys have opportunities to fundraise to pay their own way or something. It hurts, yeah, but is it worth having his two boys miss out on the rest of scouting simply because their parent is acting foolishly?

He says he went to council and they said "He can skip wolf". Perhaps they didn't get the full story? They might have presumed that he was talking about an older boy and he presumed they knew the full details of what he was talking about. Ask around. Don't take the guy's word for a conversation like that, take the other person out to lunch or something and chat with them yourself, kindly.

I don't think we'll be seeing an official kilt, since even the women are all wearing pants now. Wearing something open like that can present a somewhat challenging situation when going up stairs in front of someone who's not right on your tail, walking up a hill ahead of people, heck there are a lot of situations where a kilt shows a little bit more than the rest of us probably want to see.

I'm filling out a tour permit for an upcoming campout. It looks like the owner's drivers license is required, but for vehicles that carry less than 15 people then the driver's drivers license isn't required? That sort of seems a little backwards. I can't, because of Youth Protection guidelines, transport a scout in a two-seater SMART car. I can, however, swap cars with a family member. We have our insurance set so that we can do this, but the car doesn't belong to me. The instructions say that I need to enter the owner's drivers license number but as long as it isn't a bus (seating 15+ people) I'm not required to enter my own drivers license number anywhere? Am I missing something?

I use a taut-line hitch when I, for whatever reason, don't have my ratcheting straps and I want to tie a load down in the back of a truck. Thus, it gets used on a regular basis for me.

Sounds like it might be time to look into splitting off into a separate pack. It would be nice to have that problem.

"Most of the problem centered on our advancement program." As in too much or not enough or something else? Perhaps they see how bad things can really be and realize that the grass was better back on the first side of the fence. You don't want to be mean and hold a grudge, but if they really didn't fit in before then will they fit in now? Have you asked them about why, if they were seemingly so unhappy then, they'd want to return? A good civil conversation often clears muddy waters.

I recently took the Unit Committee fast start training online. I'm not on the Unit Committee, I'm an Assistant Scoutmaster, but my opinion is that knowing what other people are supposed to do can only help me do my job better. It's like singing, in my opinion -- knowing the other parts to a song helps me sing my part in better harmony because I'm really familiar with where we blend, where one part should be emphasized over another, etc. So, I took it that course and I think the Unit committee probably shouldn't be working wholly behind the scenes, what they do should probably be visible even to the boys in the troop. For instance, the Committee Equipment person should be working with the troop quartermaster -- if they're both trying to do the same thing independently, then it's just not going to work as well. When the Senior Patrol Leader is planning activities, he will likely need to coordinate with a number of the committee members. There's a whole lot of examples that I can think of where the boys likely should be contacting and working with their unit committee counterparts. I think they should be acting as leaders, not as absentee board members who come in to ratify some decisions then go back home again until next month. That's purely my opinion, though I don't know how widespread that opinion is amongst other people.

Even if you expect to use it, without looking at it again, it's still easy to forget how to do it. I worked at a scout camp for multiple summers and one of the things I taught was the Pioneering merit badge. I tied those knots multiple times a day every day for months. I helped dozens and dozens of kids learn how to tie all those things. Recently i went to teach some of our boys those things for the First Class lashing requirements and I blanked on how to tie a clove hitch. Luckily I go through everything that I plan to do before I do it, so I could just go look it up and then I was ready to teach it again. Very simple knot, but I just couldn't remember what it looked like, even though most all lashing begins with it. I took precalculus in high school, then the first part of calculus in college. Then I left school and just worked and recently went back to college. One of the courses I took was calculus and holy toledo was it difficult -- while learning calculus I also had to relearn all the algebra and trigonometry that I'd forgotten because there just wasn't much call to use the quadratic equation in my everyday life. It's just a fact of life, if you don't continue to use and develop a skill, you're not going to be as good as if you still maintained that skill and the longer you go without using it at all, the more likely you are to forget more things. It may or may not come back very quickly, depending on how well you learned it to begin with. You may retain things for a longer or shorter period of time based on how well you learned it the first time. But forgetting things as time goes by really is a fact of life -- it's why literally every "professional" field mandates yearly "continuing education". You need to keep updating your skills or they'll be lost. That being said, once you have really earned something in the Boy Scouts of America, it can't be taken away from you on a troop level, no matter how much you've forgotten. The Council or National might be able to do that, but it's not something that a Scoutmaster or Unit Committee can do.

Do we have pictures of what the things look like to recognize bronze, silver, gold? How noticeable will a given level of accomplishment be?

GTFA still? Ok. The Adventist site I found was the #1 Google result: www.journeytoexcellence.org -- I thought at first the logo on that page was the new Scouting Journey to Excellence logo, but apparently that's the logo of quite a different organization.

So you would institute mandatory yearly retesting of all Eagle Scouts across the nation for the rest of their lives?

No, it wouldn't be unfair if you don't want it, as the responsibility to act swiftly and correctly to save a life can be a heavy burden to put on someone who doesn't want it. But, why not go get trained yourself? Talk to your council about Red Cross training -- it's my understanding that the Red Cross has partnered with the Boy Scouts to offer training classes at $5/person, if you have 12 or more people who want that training. It's really not difficult. You just take the epipen, then stab the kid in the thigh, basically -- it's designed to be as foolproof as possible. That being said, if the parent is going to hanging around all the time, perhaps see about making them an Assistant Scoutmaster or committee member, or something, just so they are more useful than a bump on the log. Or, maybe you could get a boy first aid/cpr/aed certified and put him in charge of doing that. By the way, I'm pretty sure that I'm allergic to peanuts because I feel my throat swelling shut and my eyes start watering every time I look at my paycheck.

Where is the Journey to Excellence website where we're now supposed to enter service projects and service hours? I found one Journey to Excellence website, but it seemed to be one created for the Adventist (7th day) church and not one that really had anything to do with scouting.

That thread linked to the district requirements, which had already been linked to in this thread. That thread also linked to a site which offered a webinar at a future date which would explain the new requirements, but which did not then show the requirements. However, I found this with a new Google search: http://www.scoutingnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Journey-to-Excellence-Troop.pdf That troop pdf document was linked from this page (if anyone wanted the pack/crew/district/council requirements): http://www.scoutingnews.org/2010/10/10/bsa-journey-to-excellence/

I replied in that other thread and said: The boys can never lose a rank advancement simply by forgetting what they once knew. Once an Eagle, always an Eagle, even if it's been enough years that you no longer remember how to tie a bowline (the rabbit comes out of the hole, around the tree...). The same goes for the other rank advancements for boys. It may be that you shouldn't have earned something to begin with, but once you've earned it, it's yours and unless you're expelled from the scouting program (which is a council action, not a troop action), those things cannot be taken away from you. Anyway, every unit should have an active program that teaches those things continually and where older scouts teach younger scouts. However, in my opinion, only the scoutmaster should sign off on requirements since he should be overseeing any training going on. That being said, validating that training is sort of the point of the board of review, so I can certainly understand other troops who allow boys who've completed something to sign off on a requirement for a boy who's just learning something. Every troop is different, right?

The boys can never lose a rank advancement simply by forgetting what they once knew. Once an Eagle, always an Eagle, even if it's been enough years that you no longer remember how to tie a bowline (the rabbit comes out of the hole, around the tree...). The same goes for the other rank advancements for boys. It may be that you shouldn't have earned something to begin with, but once you've earned it, it's yours and unless you're expelled from the scouting program (which is a council action, not a troop action), those things cannot be taken away from you.

Our unit recharters in March. Can any of the units that recharter(ed) in October share with us the new quality unit requirements?