nolesrule

Well, sorta. It doesn't necessarily have to be with a scouting unit, so long as it is a scouting event. If the scout is camping while helping run a Cub family camp, that is a scouting event. OA weekends are scouting events. No unit involvement in either.

Adults are not elected, they are selected. Any year that an OA election results in at least one youth being elected, the troop committee can select a registered unit adult age 21 or older (1 per 50 youth in the troop) to be an OA candidate, but it is not required to select any adults.

Someone who oversees an OA election team can chime in with more details if they so desire.(This message has been edited by nolesrule)

retention rates are calculated on recharter years. The JTE program is a charter year program, not a calendar year program, for simplicity in baselines and calculations

Each item that requires a calculation has a calculation formula, and it's in the actual paperwork.

This from a supposedly not-quite-final version that was distributed to us in January:

#2 Retention: Number of previous youth that rechartered © or separated/reregistered (D), divided by total number of youth members on the pack's previous charter renewal (E), less the number of youth who aged out or graduated (F). Total = (C + D) / (E - F).

Sure they could, but there's already the organizational structure and voluntary labor force in place to do all those things. Why reinvent the wheel?

The OA also provides an easy way for scouts to make friends with other scouts outside their units. The OA may seem insular, but it's external to units. A fully functioning OA lodge not only provides a "service club", but a "music club", "drama club" and leadership opportunities that usually cannot be equaled in scope on a unit level, among other functions.

And then there are the lodges, as desertrat describes, that are all about the patch.

I don't know which type of lodge is more typical, but I don't think I would agree with quashing the 96 year old organization when there are many lodges out there doing it right.

"Reimbusement through tax write-off is not a full reimbursement"

IANACPA but my dad is.

You can only get additional tax savings on the expenses as a scouter if you are exceeding the standard deduction and as such are able to itemize.

There is no black and white hard number. It's going to depend on how active the unit is, how active the scout is, and the costs of events and camps are variable from council to council. Whether a unit does fundraising or not, and how it is used.

Registration and Boys Life run about $27 plus council insurance. I don't know the current cost of a uniform but if you buy it big enough it'll last a few years for a growing boy.

Camping gear can be acquired over time.

You could ask 100 scouters and get 100 different "black and white" answers.

After a discussion with my troop guide today, I have officially finished my ticket 51 weeks after the close of the SR-1022 course.

Haven't set a date for the beading yet.

Now, back to working my ticket after I take a couple days o recover from the BSA Climbing Instructor course. :-)

Necro-ing a thread here, but I just wanted to add my two cents.

"The BSA certification is good for climbing walls and towers, but I would stongly recommend going to pros for climbing cliffs, rocks, etc. "

I just took the Instructor course over the weekend, and I would absolutely 100% agree with this statement.

I feel comfortable that I could help setup, run and tear down an event for the climbing and rappelling towers at our local camp, but I am not confident in my abilities to do the same for climbing/rappelling in a natural setting. However, I would trust any of the people who put on the course, most of whom are unit scouters, for that kind of climbing, including a former SWAT officer, a member of the state cave rescue team, and a chief of one of the local fire departments.

I did take the course as part of my Wood Badge ticket, but it's also because the council needs more instructors in its inventory to meet the demand for the climbing center. It was only the 4th course held since restarting the climbing program. Part of the commitment is to work multiple events during your certification period. We had 14 people in our class including 4 scouts getting their IIT training, and running the practical on Sunday for 40 cub scouts and families with all 3 levels of the rappelling tower and 3 lanes on the climbing tower open were a challenge.

Our council holds a Wood Badge reunion/recruiting dinner usually in mid-September. We do a pot-luck buffet, with different categories of items assigned to different critters. People who are interested in taking the course are invited to attend, which is why it's also considered a recruitment dinner.

I've only been to one dinner, but at the one last September, there were 3 beadings from a course that had already completed the 18 month ticket period. There was also some program, the introduction of the next Course Director and a slide show from the last course that had been held, which is the one I took.

Yeah, JTE doesn't really do much for units that are doing great, but it really does help newer or struggling units focus on improvement through a series of defined goals. Some of the goals are more useful than others, but overall, I see it as more useful compared to what we used to have.

The worst thing about the Centennial system was units setting their goals so low as to know they could easily hit them to get the award, rather than seriously working to grow/improve the unit.

The arguments about employer-paid benefits vs. what is taken out of paychecks and so forth is a silly argument. Salary itself is just the invisible line in the total compensation package that divides what shows up on your paystub vs. what doesn't.

I agree with sherm. The scouts should consider it a learning experience.

When representing the OA, the lodge might want to have a policy on uniforming for conducting OA elections if they don't already, as an elections team is making an impression on the scouts of the units they are visiting, and they are invited guests of the unit they are visiting. What a scout does in his own unit and what he does when representing the OA are two entirely separate matters and need to be treated as such.

It seems obvious that the leaders of the unit being visited did not want someone setting a poor uniform example for the scouts of their troop, although in the end they allowed it anyway. At least the troop tried to find them temporary pants instead of kicking them out. With the exception of the rant by the former scoutmaster, I don't see an issue with how it was handled, unless the visiting scouts were berated in front of the troop they were visiting and not taken aside quietly for the discussion.

There are some things in the syllabus that are more effective without prior knowledge (IMHO), but knowing what gear to bring has no bearing on those.

You may be active, but it is near impossible to provide an effective Boy Scout program with only 3 youth.

The cheaper they are, the more likely they will be lost/broken, which won't serve its purpose as a useful reminder of anything.

What's the needed quantity and the budget for the items? If you know someone in the promotional products business, that'd be a good person to ask.

Well, I think now I'm beginning to understand some of your resentment. Seems to me, based on what you wrote, that the bitterness stems from the people around you, not the course curriculum itself. And i can't say that I blame you. I don't think I would have fond memories of that either.

I have no idea how common or uncommon that experience was. I can only speak for my course. Our course staff was professional yet jovial, and my patrol worked as a team on everything from start to finish (even our TG was astonished at how quickly we came together on the first day).

Plenty of accomplishments can be line items on a resume (which is why people list them). It's up to the person making hiring decisions as to whether that will make an impact on their decision-making, and there's nothing illegal about it.

Any smart person hiring would only use that as a tie-breaker in the case of equal candidates.

"It also means that the count is way off since it probably also goes higher every time you jump from post to post within a forum, and from one forum to the next. "

Not likely. Web servers can identify unique visitors. Otherwise, when you request to view a web page, the server wouldn't know where to send the response.

The count most likely also includes content crawlers, such as Google and other indexers.

"you need to make sure your batteries on your mp3 player are charged .... to cover the snoring with a book-on-tape (mp3) or music ... "

They had mp3 players before WB21C was implemented? You must have taken one of the last of the previous courses (and paid out the wazoo for the mp3 player).

/finishes reading the post...

Oh, my mistake. You were talking about WB21C. There's already 3-20 threads on the merits of that training course. This isn't one of them.

Yup, much like a jamboree patch, you can wear it until it gets replace my a more recent one.

And if you really, really want to get technical, the masculine plural form is used when there is a combination of males and females (even if there is only one male) or when the gender makeup is unknown.

So that brings us back to "alumni" being appropriate. :-)

Now, now Beavah. When I say "program side" I'm referring to the adults. As most conversation about problems in scouting are, it's about adults and how they play together. Youth responsibilies such as scribe are a red herring in the discussion, otherwise they'd be the ones running the treasury and there would be no need for a committee.

Seems to me it's really an issue of the program people not wanting to add more fundraisers to the schedule to help defray cost of participation.

Again, you need to listen to your customers. I'm pretty sure I'm quoting you when I say that, but it might have been someone else.

And all that said, I still agree. The COR gets to make the call on this.

" But I do have to ask: why is the name of this knot PLURAL? It's for individuals, right? It should be "alumnus" knot. "

The award is for individuals, but it's about trying to recruit in the PLURAL. Besides, "alumnus" would not necessarily be accurate in regards to the award earner since women are also eligible.

The directory book might have been garbage, but that's because it was one of those Who's Who type books where the whole idea was to sell books. But I have found the Eagle Scout database on the NESA site is a goldmine. I've looked up the list of Eagles from my troop, Scouters I know who were Eagles, scouts I knew from OA and camp staff. Even relatives.

Just last year, I happened to be looking through the database and found my uncle had earned his Eagle on the same month and day that we were celebrating his 80th birthday party. I told my aunt, and she got him a scouting-related gift.

Yes, council's should be using it more.

I didn't really mean to sound negative in my first post about not physically getting your money's worth. Obviously, NESA is an organization where members in general should be giving, not receiving.