NJCubScouter

Well, your Scouts can think what they want, assuming they even see this document. (I doubt that any Scouts in "my" troop will even see it.) This document is not the BSA requirements book. It is just a document on a web site. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be correct, both as to the old requirements and the new requirements. In fact, if anyone at National is reading this, please fix it, now. This is another unfortunate example of how you confuse the Scouts and those of us out here in the field who are supposed to be leading and/or supporting the program. And along the same lines, I looked at usscouts.org to see whether they had these changes yet, and indeed they do, but they say these are "Proposed" changes and they also say: "The wording of the requirements shown on the pages linked below are still in DRAFT form, and subject to change by BSA. The final wording will be published in the next edition of the Boy Scout Handbook, and the 2016 edition of Boy Scout Requirements." And that page was updated July 4, 2015, so it's not out of date. So (assuming that that web site, which is unofficial, is correct) what we are looking at on the BSA web site may not be the final version. So there's more confusion. Thanks National.

I think the real "story" here is not the availability of digital versions of badges, which are really just pictures - and maybe an electronic certificate to go with the graphic. The real issue here is summed up in the sentence I quoted above: "But members can now take full courses on their smartphones to earn digital badges, as well as the stitched ones." Having read what I wrote above, I should make clear that that was NOT a direct quote by the BSA person mentioned in the article. That sentence was written by the writer of the article, and it is not clear what it is based on. It also is not clear what it means. Does it mean, as I suggested above, that a Scout will be able to do some advancement completely online, meaning they will be interacting with a computer to earn a badge without any human interaction at a patrol or troop meeting, camping trip or with a merit badge counselor? If so, that is the REAL change. It also does not sound like a good idea. But I have seen no indication that anything like that is being put in place.

After reading the entire article, I'm not sure what is really going on here. Some of the terminology is just so odd, it seems to have been written by someone with very little knowledge of Scouting. The article also seems to be mainly a promotional piece for the non-BSA organizations that are involved. There is one direct quote from someone at BSA, which doesn't really say anything new, followed by the sentence "But members can now take full courses on their smartphones to earn digital badges, as well as the stitched ones." I have no idea what that really means. I haven't heard of any program for Scouts to do advancement online, outside of the regular patrol, troop or merit-badge-counselor setting. Some adult training courses are online now, though I wouldn't want to do one on a smartphone. The terminology in the part about Philmont seems "off" as well. Does anyone know what is really happening?

I will point out that the comment of mine that you are referring to had a little smiley face next to it. That meant I wasn't serious. Anybody can discuss any issue they want in this forum as long as it is done in a reasonably Scout-like manner. I will acknowledge that some of the moderators, to varying degrees, go on at least "yellow alert" when we see a new thread in Issues and Politics, because the chances are greater that we will have to take some action, either formally or informally, than for posts in other areas. But even having said that, very little "moderating" actually takes place in these forums. Compared to other forums on the Internet, the "moderation" in this place is virtually invisible. About 90 percent of what we do is probably removing unauthorized advertising. I don't think I have done that, and I don't think Packsaddle has done that. Speaking for myself, when there has been a discussion of membership changes over the past couple years, I have usually participated in it. My record before that (back to 2002) is a bit more checkered because for long periods of time it didn't seem worth saying the same thing for the 100th time. In fact I remember a time in this forum (before 2013) when, every time a new thread was started about "membership issues", some people OPPOSED to the change would loudly complain, Oh NO, not THIS again, why are you bringing this up again, beating a dead horse, howling at the moon, etc. (I'm not sure where the howling at the moon thing came from; a certain former poster with the initials BW used to say that's what I was doing, and I don't mean BadWolf.) Now I'm supposedly resisting discussions about it? Talk about it. Talk about it all you want. (As far as this moderator is concerned, anyway.) But please keep in mind that any other member has the right not to talk about it. And if you see me "resisting" a discussion in my capacity as a moderator, please let me know.

Well, one more. Here is one of the new requirements for Scout: As they say these days, "Really?" No more learning as you go along? Now you can't even get the first patch on your pocket without being able to recite the entire path that lies ahead? Fresh off the bridge from Webelos and you are expected to describe the merit badge program? I don't even like the idea of kids earning merit badges until they are at least Second Class, but I know that ship sailed a long time ago. Maybe "a" and "b" are ok for Scout, but I think they could have let "c" and "d" wait for Tenderfoot or later. And that's even assuming a requirement like this was necessary in the first place.

Oh boy. I guess there is a lot I could say about some of these, and over time I probably will. But just to pick one at random, here is something that jumped out at me: For background, here is old Scout (joining) requirement number 9: Now here is the new Scout rank requirement number 6: So far I have no problem. What they've added for Scout on this subject is the Cyber Chip, and while I have never read the Cyber Chip requirements, I take it it has something to do with "online safety." So what they're doing is increasing the "youth protection" aspect for Scout a little bit. And they're saying that if you REALLY don't have Internet access ANYWHERE, and your SM and parents agree, you can skip the Chip. (Get it?) Again, seems reasonable. But then I get to new Star requirement 6: Sound familiar? Star requirement 6 and Scout requirement 6 will now be exactly the same. What was previously a "joining requirement" must now be repeated in order to make Star. At first I though this was a misprint, but as I have been typing this, it is starting to make a little more sense. Having learned the principles of protecting yourself at age 10 or 11, you must now "renew" your knowledge at 13, 14 or 15 or whenever. And I guess this subject WOULD have a little bit more meaning at the age when most boys are going for Star. So maybe it does make sense.

I have moved this thread to Issues and Politics because it has gotten into actual discussion of specific "issues" that do not belong in Open Discussion.

No. Nobody can. I think I can speak for most of the rest of the moderators in saying that we are just fine with boring at the moment. Ixnay on the ou-know-what-yay.

Rule Number 1 being, I guess, Don't order $28,000 worth of inventory with a sell-by date unless you have a pretty good idea who's going to buy it.

Really? Of the Eagle required MB's, I think you could make an argument that Swimming, Cooking and Camping are largely repetitive of the T-2-1 requirements, although even then, not completely. I am not sure which other Eagle-required MB's would be a "rehash" of the T-2-1 requirements. I can't think of one offhand. To say nothing of the Eagle project.

I agree with BadWolf that this particular policy should be kept the way it is. The rank requirements are designed for a specific age group, and that is who should earn them. Adults have a specific role in the program, in service to the youth, and that is what we should be doing. But the historical discussion is kind of interesting. One thing I would like to know is whether the handbooks, advancement guidelines etc. of 1910-1952 ever actually said that adults could continue to work on rank advancement, or whether there was simply a lack of any age limit. In other words, it may be that they simply forgot to specify an age when rank advancement must stop - stranger things have been forgotten - and by the time someone said "Hey, why do we have all these adult men working on merit badges and earning ranks designed for teenagers?", it was too late because by then it was sort of an "entrenched" thing and they didn't want to take away an opportunity that some people were relying on. And it took years before National finally bit the bullet and said Ok, this has to stop - and still more years before they got all the councils to make it stop. Unless someone has any actual evidence to the contrary, I think my "We forgot, and then it was too late" theory sounds pretty plausible. This actually shouldn't be an issue now because the minimum draft age is, conveniently, the day after all Eagle requirements (except for BOR) must be completed. I am not sure whether the draft age was ever below 18. I am pretty sure it was 18 at the time of WW2 - at which time you could still work on ranks after turning 18. One of the comments on Bryan's blog suggests that this further delayed changing the policy, because if someone was 18 and a half and still working on ranks when they got drafted, when they came back the BSA didn't want to say "tough luck, you missed out on Eagle because you were fighting in a war." My father actually did get a couple of merit badges after turning 18, but I am not sure whether he got any after he returned from the military. (He was drafted about six months after turning 18.) He finished at Star, which he had earned before turning 18. There's an award for that, "Spirit of the Eagle." Families of Scouts who have passed away can apply for it.

I'm guessing there wasn't really a single buyer, though why someone would make up something like that, I have no idea. And if there was... well, if I received an order for $28,000 worth of popcorn, I would call council and ask them what to do, before actually placing the order. There's always a chance that some customer will try to cancel their order, but if it's for $15 or $20 out of orders by hundreds of different customers, that can be dealt with. Usually the stuff can be re-sold. This guy put himself in the position of having $28,000 worth of popcorn delivered to his house without having been paid by the customer, and no pre-arrangement with council as to what would be done if the customer didn't pay. And it also appears that when things went wrong, he didn't contact the council right away, he just kept the popcorn at his house. None of it makes any sense.

I don't think our council has ever had the MB counselor list on their web site. It used to be available by email on request but I don't think that is the case anymore. It seems to be shared only with the SM and maybe one or two other leaders in each unit. I guess the idea is that they want the Scouts to talk to the SM first before calling a counselor, which is what they are supposed to do anyway. There may also be an issue of putting the counselors' addresses and phone numbers on the web, since some counselors may have unlisted phone numbers.

That's an odd story. The leader told the council he had "a preorder" for all that popcorn - more than $28,000 worth! Later in the article it says the leader said the customer had canceled the order, but he would not disclose who the customer was. The article also says that the leader later returned about $24,000 worth of the popcorn to the council but then says: "Attorneys believe the popcorn was destroyed — at least the popcorn that was packaged in the tins." I am not sure what the "shelf life" of that stuff is. One would assume that if it was still within its' sell-by date, the council would try to resell it to recover some of the loss.

As I said the last time this was discussed, the sources differ as to whether this change was made in 1952 or 1965. I think that knowing when it was made would be the first step in trying to figure out why it was made, because then you could look at other changes that were made at the same time. However, I suspect it was mainly a matter of realizing that in a youth program, it didn't make much sense for adults to be earning the youth advancement awards. I also have had the impression that it was fairly rare for adults to earn Eagle, even though they were allowed to. The "change" may have been more like the closing of a "loophole" rather than an actual change in the program. Added note: I looked at some of the comments about this on Bryan's Blog. One of them says National actually imposed the age limit in 1952 but that a lot of councils ignored it until there was a new change in the requirements in 1965.

Stosh, in your first post you say "no fun" but then when Calico says the girls seemed to be having fun, you say just because it's fun doesn't mean it's Scouting. I think we get the idea that this is not your idea of a good activity, so I guess it's a good thing you weren't invited. This was a group of fourth-grade girls, about 10 years old. It seems like an appropriate activity for that group. Whether it would be an appropriate activity for another kind of group is a matter of personal opinion. And apart from the outdoors aspect, getting to meet with the President and First Lady seems like a positive activity citizenship-wise. If my troop were invited to do that, I would suggest that they go.

In my experience mailing anything to our council office by mail (i.e. postal service) is a good way for nobody to ever see it again, or at least nobody at the council office will admit having seen it. Personal delivery (which of course requires MORE volunteer time) seems to have a lower "missing" rate. I know that some things can be submitted by email but not other things. And of course all this assumes that the form is filled out correctly in the first place. Especially in Cub Scouts, when I was more involved with the paperwork than I am now, a lot of parents seemed to be under the impression that any information required by a form that they did not have immediately at hand did not apply to them.

I am fairly confident that when our new friend used the word "swearing", he was not referring to words invoking a Deity or Holy Book to confirm that a person is speaking the truth. (Although "God" is, of course, part of one of the words potentially at issue.) He is talking about cursing, profanity, vulgarity, bad words, bad language, inappropriate language, whatever you wish to call it and however you wish to define it. I also strongly suspect that he is not talking about what we in our troop call "grey areas" (some of which has been bandied about by other posters above, to the great amusement of all, I'm sure) but rather to the good-old-fashioned, major league "bad words." Like George Carlin's Seven Words You Can't Say on Television. (But pleeease, no speculating about what those words are in case someone doesn't know, and no discussion of which of the words may no longer be on the list 40 years later.) On the issue of campsites overrun with well-meaning parents, I think we all basically agree on this. I don't think that has anything to do with whether a troop can ever have "family camping" and still call itself a Boy Scout troop. "My" troop used to have what the SM called a "family camping trip" once a year, generally in late June. It was a way of doing something special to mark the end of the school year, a break from regular meetings until after summer camp, and was usually to somewhere that was not the same-old-campsite in the same-old-camp. In practice, at least by the time I was going camping with the troop, it was "family camping" only in the sense that more fathers than usual were present - no moms, sisters or little brothers that I can recall. (I mean, we did have some committee members on some camping trips who happened to be moms rather than dads, but they were registered leaders so that's different.) The whole idea of family camping seems to have faded out around the same time that my son was aging out of the troop, and now the June camping trip is just another camping trip. But here we are not talking about a once-a-year special event. We are talking about a troop where EVERY camping trip must be dominated by parents. And where the parents are upset that BOTH parents of EVERY boy can't be there. Boggles my mind.

On the issue of a "swear jar", it seems to me that the first step in cleaning up the troop's language is for the leaders (both adult and youth) to clearly establish that this behavior is unacceptable, and part of that is to set a good example and not swear themselves. In other words I think a "penalty" works better on behavior that is an exception, not the rule. Just my opinion.

BadWolf's post, in comparison to mine, reminds me of something, which should be mentioned since you are new to the forum. Sometimes I think something like this should be posted at the "door" of the forum so new members, and especially youth members, see it before they even post. You are going to get a variety of advice from the members of this forum. Some advice is going to be inconsistent with other advice. (Example from the first two posts, my suggestion on the approach to the "swearing" issue is different from BadWolf's, though the intended result is the same.) Some of the advice, I suspect, is going to be stated more "pointedly" than others. Some may focus more on the "patrol method" than others. But you have to realize that everybody (hopefully) is going to be trying to help you get to the same result: A troop where nobody swears and your campsites are not inundated by parents. It is going to be the approach to achieving this result that is different from post to post. As you read further in the forums, you will find discussions where the intended end result isn't even necessarily the same from post to post, but even there, each person (almost always) is giving advice based on their experience and opinions about what works and what doesn't work, in the best interest of the Scouts. Please do not be deterred or confused by any of this. Also please remember that (except in very rare instances) NONE of us know the people you are dealing with, their personalities, what kinds of events may have shaped the way your troop is now, etc. etc. Only you know that. You need to take the advice you get in this forum and look at it in the light of what you see and know from your own troop, and decide what is right for the Scouts who you serve as a leader, including yourself. I hope that helps, too.

Waterplant, first of all, welcome to the forums! On the swearing issue, step 1 is that the adults, all of them, need to stop swearing, and certainly in front of the Scouts. There is no way the adults are going to be able to get the kids to stop doing it if the adults are doing it themselves. It's the Scoutmaster's job to get the other adults to stop swearing. Of course, if the SM is one of the adults who is swearing nonstop, you are going to have to decide whether you want to tell the Scoutmaster that HE needs to change his behavior. I would phrase it in terms of describing the overall problem in the troop, looking him in the eye and telling him that all the adults need to stop swearing. If he is part of the problem, he will know it. There are some Scoutmasters who would take this constructive advice in the way in which it is intended, and unfortunately there are some who would not. You know the man, none of us do, so you will have to decide whether this is feasible or not. As far as parents on camping trips, it's kind of baffling that some troops have this problem while others (like the one in which I am a Troop Committee Member but "retired" from camping after my son turned 18) can barely scrape together the minimum number of leaders necessary to go on an outing. (Which in our troop is three.) But you have too much of a good thing. One parent per Scout is too many. I think what you need to do is to pull together some facts, such as, what do these "extra" parents do on the camping trips? Do they "get in the way" of the Scouts doing things for themselves? (I'm betting the answer is yes.) How exactly do they interfere? How would the Scouts be better off if they were not tripping over an adult every five minutes? What I am suggesting is that you prepare a "case" for why the troops (meaning the SCOUTS) would be better off with fewer adults on the trips, and present this to the Scoutmaster. (Probably you and the SPL should discuss this and then present it to the SM together.) The basis of this "case" is really that the camping trips are for the Scouts, with the adults being present to make sure nobody gets hurt, to help with the "program" for the outing if so requested by the boys, to fulfill the BSA's leadership requirements, etc. With at least one adult for every Scout, I don't see how the focus of the outings can be on the Scouts. Hope that helps.

BadWolf, it seems I may have misunderstood where you were going with the idea of odorless products. I thought you were talking about ways to keep the bear from grabbing the toothpaste, soap, etc. themselves, particularly at night. (For which putting them in a bear bag should do the job.) But after your "thin mint" comment (I prefer the Tagalongs myself) I realize you are talking about avoiding products that would put us humans on the menu as well. From that perspective using no deodorant/antiperspirant might be best, but ONLY from that perspective. Also from that perspective the unscented varieties might be okay (even if they are not truly 100% odorless) because it becomes a matter of balance at that point, and our general human fragrance that the bears don't like will still be there. (Not that I actually know anything about this, it just seems like common sense.) As for toothpaste, if you find one that doesn't taste like anything, please post it here. My son was looking for one, because he can't stand the taste of mint. He ended up with cinnamon-flavored toothpaste, which I am not sure would be any better in bear country. Baking soda itself would work, though I'm not positive that would be completely odorless to the bear and that might be a tough sell to kids (and adults) who are used to toothpaste that is marketed for its wonderful taste. I've never really noticed the scent of insect repellent, maybe because I was never particularly interested in inhaling it.

BadWolf, when you say "no smell" I assume you are talking about items that cannot be smelled by a bear or other four-legged invader. A lot of items that are labeled "unscented" do have an aroma, and even items that may seem to us not to have an aroma can still be detected by an animal. So are you talking about items that have actually been tested with animals? (That would be an interesting lab to work in, if the test subjects are bears! I don't imagine that anyone actually does that kind of testing, but I could be wrong.)

Aha?

When I was a Scout we did newspaper/magazine collection and recycling for awhile. I have no idea what we made or whether it was worth the effort. I am not aware of any troops that do paper recycling around here. Another group I was involved in made some good money for awhile doing scrap metal recycling, ranging from cans to some large abandoned items. That really depended on having someone(s) willing to go where needed, in some cases with the proper vehicle, to pick up the medium-sized and larger items, and also to store those items until it was time to go to the recycling plant. As I recall the prices also fluctuated wildly, to the point where sometimes it didn't really make sense to do it and other times we were getting hundreds per month.