Oak Tree

BSA uses the term "Brother-Sister" combination instead of twinning, so it's close to being the same concept, although they would certainly not be identical twins. From a membership brochure titled "Boy Scouts and American Heritage Girls: why you need to consider both for your youth program" - "So consider offering both AHG and BSA in your youth program. This brother-sister combination allows for both moms and daughters, and dads and sons, to be involved together in similar programs, thus building and maintaining the family unit."See http://www.scouting.org/filestore/membership/pdf/522-010/522-010.pdf

A lot of times, I think that "I don't know" is actually the most honest answer. People will often rationalize all kinds of things as the reason that they are doing something, when in fact that isn't the reason at all. Marketers know this very well - people will give one reason for buying a product (e.g., taste), but the actual research will demonstrate that they are swayed by all kinds of other things (packaging, advertising, product name, etc). If the answer "I don't know" appears to be a real answer and not just a way of avoiding answering, then I think I'd be happy with it.

I think that if your CO changes addresses, you shouldn't lose vet status. Your new council may be just fine with calling you 90 years old. You might have to pay more for your current summer camp. You definitely switch lodges. You'd have a different district camporee and/or council camporee. You'd have different connections for going to jamboree. You'd be invited to a different monthly roundtable. You'd get different council emails. You'd have a different Eagle board and/or procedure. You'd have different patches to put on your uniforms. You might have a different person doing your Friends of Scouting presentation. You'd have a different contact for popcorn sales. You'd have a different OA team coming to do your election. If your unit number is already in use in the new council, you'd have to change the unit number. You'd have a different contact for rechartering. You might have a different process for handling rank awards and paperwork. There could be different policies at the council level. Some of those changes might be good and some might be bad, and I'm sure there are more. It would take a little bit of adjusting, so it would just depend on how bad things were with the current council.

Individually. Absolutely, definitely, for all the reasons stated above.

Look, there has to be an appropriate place for the world crest to go on a new shirt. The BSA uniform regulations don't suggest moving the world crest to allow for shirt collars or square knots or service stars, although people do indeed do that. I think the practical answer is that the world crest doesn't come on the uniform because it would be a hassle for them to do it and it's easier not to. I do think the uniform regulations should be adjusted to allow for varying placement of the world crest, but maybe they are just uniform "guidelines" anyway :-)

I do expect that at some point there will be girl Eagle Scouts, if and when girls are allowed into the program in general. American Heritage Girls has a Stars and Stripes award that is patterned after the Eagle award. If BSA merged with AHG, they could either keep the awards separate or call them both Eagle. I do expect girl Eagle Scouts to happen within my lifetime. I don't ever expect a merger of BSA and GSUSA.

Get a CO address in the new council. But what's the advantage, really? There aren't council taxes, unlike the state situation. Well, I guess there are some things that charge more for out-of-council troops, but that seems pretty minimal. Can't you already attend any events you want in the other council?

Yeah, a lottery seems like the fairest method that is least likely to cause resentment. I agree with you that you have to have the advisors' sons go on the trip. We haven't had to deal with the situation, but it does seem like a lottery, a wait list, and some criteria for staying on the attendee list (making all payments on time) are reasonable. We would likely give preference to someone who is going to age out, for whom this would be the last chance.

I too have found this frustrating. I'd like it if National had an easy way to track these down. At a minimum, it would be nice to have a map of the US that had all the council boundaries on it so you could click on any council to get to their web site. When I've wanted to track down opportunities in the past, I've had to search the web for the councils and try to figure out what their boundaries were, and then find the training activities on their web sites (which are all different). This has worked ok, but it is slow and inefficient and I'm sure it's not complete.

We try to hand it all back at the end of the trip or the meeting, but if that doesn't work, we put it in the lost and found box. We usually set out all of those items at courts of honor when the parents can also take a look. After that we will take it to Goodwill or throw it out. I do like the idea of auctioning it off, though. We tell our Scouts to label everything, and not just everything, but every piece of every thing. Still doesn't work, of course.

I don't hear those questions in our troop, and I don't ask them. Maybe somewhere down the road I'll find out if they were in Scouts. 1)So, what do you do for a living? 2)How many kids do you have? 3)What brought you to Scouts? 4)What do you hope your son gets out of the program? 5)Are you interested in helping out?

I didn't know that plagiarism was a Christian value! I believe this has been done with the full knowledge and cooperation of the BSA. There is a memorandum of mutual support. http://www.scoutingnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/mou_bsa_ahg_bw.pdf

Well, just to be different, our counselors for this are almost entirely men. We do have some women that counsel a variety of merit badges, but they have not clustered together on this one. Must just go to a lot of subtleties of the established culture.

What insignia specifically are you curious about?

Where does it say that you have to be a citizen? This application just asks "Are you a legal U.S. resident?" http://www.ahgonline.org/uploads/NEWAdultBGCKVolunteerApp12.pdf AHG is very open about their mission. "American Heritage Girls is a Christ-centered leadership and character development ministry. The following Statement of Faith applies to all American Heritage Girls' Charter Organizations, Adult Members and Adult Leaders." In practice they appear to be very much like BSA in pretty much all aspects except that they require their leaders to be Christian. Their program is not really much different at all from the BSA - it doesn't appear to have any more distinctly religious aspects than Boy Scouts does, although I'm sure that varies from group to group in both organizations. They do have some nice features in their organization that I view as small incremental improvements to the BSA model. They have a position of troop vice-coordinator, which would be a vice-chair in a BSA unit. They require that the chair, the unit leader, the treasurer, and the vice-chair be from different families. They have the equivalent of a combined pack/troop - so they are set up not to experience the same loss as what happens at the Webelos crossover. All their units have the same recharter date. I like the words of their creed slightly better than the Scout Law (which has the overlapping concepts of 'friendly, courteous, kind, cheerful') They have a clearer non-discrimination policy than the BSA does. "Girl membership in the organization shall be made available to all without regard to race, color, creed or national origin, under such rules and regulations, not in conflict with the provisions of the AHG Oath: I promise to love God, cherish my family, honor my country and serve in my community, and the Purpose and the Basic Policies of AHG. This non discrimination policy clarifies the intention of AHG to serve as an outreach ministry. All girls are invited to belong to AHG as long as they will say the Oath and abide by the rules and regulations of AHG and the chartered Troop." One of their six "program emphases" is "Developing teamwork and building confidence through varied outdoor experiences." So they are very clear about their desire to get outdoors. Our CO is chartering an AHG troop. The AHG troop picked the same unit number as our BSA units. From what I've seen, the entire organization is extremely similar to the BSA. In fact, if it wasn't for their statement of faith for their leaders, I'd think it was almost a perfect fit as "BSA for Girls" and I would expect a merger, but I'm not sure how they could reconcile that significant difference.

Is that OK to tell an SPL? He can't encourage kids to be eagle scouts? No, I certainly wouldn't say this to an SPL. That's crazy. I might work with my SPL to try to find better ways to encourage the guys, because I do agree that this is not necessarily the most effective encouragement, but I would never jump on his statement like that. He's welcome to encourage people to learn things, to become Eagle Scouts, and even to call them "guys".

I did two shirts. I don't like the way Velcro looks. But I recognized it was for my own personal benefit - not because the kids really cared.

Run away. This is a politics-laden situation, and Moose, no offense, but I'm doubting that dealing with these adult issues is going to be your strength. If you want constant adult frustration, sure, go for it. The problem is, you can't just deal with the kids. You have to deal with the adults. The only way I would consider going into a situation like that would be if 1) I had a sufficiently strong coalition that I knew could make a change - if I liked and worked well with the SM and/or some ASMs and/or the CC and 2) I could see I had the backing of the most powerful interested party (which could be the IH or the COR or the CC or the SM, depending on the troop) and 3) I had some kind of vested interest in making the thing work out (e.g., my son was in the unit, or some good friends really wanted my help). Mark my words, if you take this position, you will have a constant stream of questions for this board on how to deal with unhappy adults. As much fun as it is to work with the Scouts, would this position really be fun for you?

Would we have cancelled? Probably not. It all depends on some of the specifics of the situation, though. Chance of flooding? Well, it depends on whether or not you think there's a chance you'd be trapped in a flood. If the worst that would happen is that you'd have to pack up due to rising water, that wouldn't have been a reason for us to cancel. I do think that bad weather can make for good adventure stories. We wouldn't cancel just because it wouldn't look like fun. We might cut a trip short if the weather is getting bad at the end of it. Why go, even if you can't have a fire and the equipment will get wet? I'm thinking I'd go because there are lots of fun things to do in the outdoors. A big reason we don't cancel is that we don't we want people to be thinking that we might cancel. Don't really want the Scouts trying to lobby for cancelling a trip. Don't want to deal with the logistics of canceling. Don't want anyone to think "this trip might not actually happen" as that can subtly affect their willingness to sign up for trips. If some of the leaders were uncomfortable with the safety conditions, we would normally have two possible answers: 1. Go anyway with the leaders who are comfortable in the situation, assuming that there are enough of them. 2. Switch to an alternate location.

How many adults from your troop would attend? Generally speaking, we have roughly the ratio of one driver for every carload of Scouts. But it can vary a lot. How many is too many??? We don't discourage volunteers, and it doesn't seem to make a big difference. We try to have all the adults camp in one location, and we only assign a couple adults to wander past the various patrols to see how things are going. This has worked out pretty well. The adults will usually hang out and talk. Often times it's possible to put the extra adults to good use - maybe offering other activities, or doing some advancement work with a Scout who wants to. I try to use it as an opportunity to recruit adults to take on other jobs within the troop, too. Camping trips are my best chance to get to know the parents. At what point does adult participation in outings interfere with the program??? When the boys aren't able to actually make decisions because the adults are constantly there helping them to decide. I do acknowledge that there is some effect from the adults just being there, but really, the way we tend to set things up, I'd be fine with a 1:1 ratio, not that we've ever had anything that high. Can we all agree that the simple presence of an adult alters the boys behavior? Sure, Heisenberg said so. Observing the boys alters their behavior. Now, if you try to keep the adults away from too much hands-on "observation", I think you can pretty much minimize the effect. An adult right there with the boys will definitely alter their behavior, even if the adult does nothing.

Are we doing them a disservice by not offering all of the available options???? Nah, I don't think so. Sometimes it's easy enough to look at an event and decide that it won't fit the schedule, or the budget, or the troop's profile, or whatever. So as an adult leader, do you offer fresh ideas during the troop planning conference??? Absolutely. We encourage everyone to do so. Only a few do. Generally it's the adults that have the more interesting ideas. If someone is excited about it, that's a good way to get other people excited about it. If so, do you limit your new offerings to things you are interested in or eliminate things that are too expensive or you deem as unscout like?????? To things I'm interested in? No, definitely not. I was never interested in attending Scout night at the monster truck jam, but that made it on to the calendar in the past. Eliminate things that are too expensive? Well, we do kind of steer them away from them - or at least we point out what the cost would be. I don't know that we've outright eliminated them, though. Unscout like? I can't remember ever eliminating an event because it wasn't appropriate for Scouts in the adults' minds. (Not counting things that violate the G2SS - those we would eliminate - skydiving, hang gliding, paintball). I don't think we've ever had the Scouts actually ask to plan an event that was too far afield.

I'll agree with those above who say that two signatures are of no benefit and are too burdensome for my taste. I also agree that getting advance approval for every purchase is too much of a hassle, as well. We do some kind of blanket authorization - "The equipment coordinator has authority to order up to $500 of equipment as determined by the quartermaster and himself."; For bigger numbers, I do just check with the committee chairman to get his ok on expenditures. I think the best protection is knowing that other people will be able to see the statements - either because they are looked at monthly, or they get mailed to someone else's house or to the CO, or because they are electronically accessible by others. And I certainly agree with the idea of choosing someone who is well-off and respectable and unlikely to risk anything on stealing small amounts of money from the Scouts.

Wait, there's prestige available? Where do I go to get me some of that? When I was Cubmaster the Cub Scouts looked up to me and the parents told me I did a good job. They gave me a great retirement gift. Now I'm Scoutmaster. The Scout look up to me (a little bit, anyway, or so I tell myself), the parents tell me I'm doing a good job. That's pretty much all the prestige I need. What do the district people think? I don't know. I don't notice any obvious treatment differences between the two. As Scoutmaster, I've been around longer and I know more people. I don't hear people putting down Cub Scouts. Maybe I'm just lucky.

Always get two signatures on every check. Can you explain how this helps? If someone is going to embezzle funds, it seems like it's almost as easy for them to forge a second signature as it is to make the unauthorized check in the first place.

If the FOS donation is required for participation in an event, does that change it to a fee thats not tax deductible? No, because fees that adults pay to participate in Scouting are also tax-deductible. All the fees that you pay to go to jamboree (as an adult) are tax-deductible, because they are expenses associated with you providing service to a non-profit. Money you spend on uniforms is tax-deductible. (Not a lawyer or accountant, but I'm confident on this one.)