Oak Tree

I'd go along with the general trend of 1) having fewer rules (especially adult rules), 2) having natural consequences be a good enforcement, and 3) having the Scouts enforce the rules where it makes sense.

I also am a big believer in communication with the parents. The more you can explain to them why you have the rules that you do, the more likely you are to get their buy-in.

We do remind them to use sunscreen. That's pretty much it. We don't check that they use it. We don't verify whether they've packed it. We do remind about possible consequences, but we figure they can decide for themselves after that.

We don't have any strict "no soda" rule. We don't have it on the patrol meal plans, but we also don't check every Scout's personal gear.

In general, if a Scout were to disobey a direct adult directive on a trip, saying that their parent said they didn't have to do it, I think we'd have an issue. More with the parent than with the kid. If the kid doesn't want to do geocaching, I won't make him, unless there is a logistical problem about him hanging out by himself. In that case, I'd say, you have to come with us. You can work on whatever you want as long as you are with the rest of the troop.

"Mom may say you can wear flip-flops, but your mom isn't here. Camp safety rules can get to be more restrictive than your parents. So sad." I'd also probably email mom just to let her in on the status. In our troop I think it's almost guaranteed that the mom would say "I never told him any such thing. He can follow your rules like everyone else."

The three tote thing is pretty funny. I think I might have a conversation with the parent first regarding just how bizarre this looks. "Do you really want your kid to be the one hauling a mini-mart around with him?"

You constantly have to do things to normalize the behavior of the kids and the parents. Most of it comes from being around the rest of the troop and learning how you do things. Lots of communication helps - both one-on-one, and messages out to the group. The kids also teach each other what's acceptable.

Well, I haven't checked twitter, but I do have a whole set of badges that I've been unable to get approved.

- "Sarcasm" translator strip

- Dumpster Diving merit badge

- Lord of the Flies merit badge

- Purple Heart for injuries suffered while Scouting

- Parental Combat adult knot

- Hand Sanitizer, Liquid Fuel, and Aerosol Fire Experiments merit badge

- Gross Joke Analysis merit badge

We keep a stash of rank badges and award them the night that they are earned. Sometimes we might have to have a little bit of a discussion with the people at the store in order to get them to give us extra badges, but eventually they have always come around.

Normally once you build up your stash, you should be good, but then those centennial rank badges came along...

We don't do anything like this. I don't think that this is corporal punishment, and I don't think that it is bullying, but it's still something that we wouldn't do, just because it doesn't feel right to me.

Any punishment involves something that the recipient doesn't like. Sometimes it might involve loss of privileges. Could be a sort of "time out". Sometimes it's possible to have the consequence clearly fit the misbehavior (e.g., misuse of a knife results in loss of a knife.) Sometimes it's not clear what the direct "consequence" would be. Coming and sitting with an adult might be a punishment. Loss of permission to go to the trading post. It's going to depend on where you are and what the activities are and what adults you have available.

We do not put up any barrier. Scouts wander into our area regularly. Depending on what their purpose is, we'll talk to them, walk back to their patrol, tell them to go find their patrol leader or the quartermaster, or whatever seems appropriate. We do try to avoid feeding them or lending them equipment, unless good judgment suggests otherwise.

The odd thing about your post is that you are the SM. Did you know what you were getting into when you took this job?

You have the position to be able to influence a lot of change, but I've seen this done badly. If you think that you can make whatever decrees you want and that the other adults should fall into line behind you, you could certainly be courting a backlash. What I'd do in this position is to really work to communicate with the other adults. Talk about what your vision for the program is. Communicate with the entire troop. I like sending periodic emails to all the parents, just so that they know where I'm coming from.

Who appointed you as SM? Why did they give you the job? What do they think about how the troop is run?

In my opinion, it's vital to build a consensus among the adults. Find some allies. Find some others who are willing to listen to you and work with you.

As Barry says, though, to make the changes you have to be willing to be the dominant personality. Not in the sense that you have to order people around, but there are lots of little things you can do to make it clear that you are in charge.

Sounds ok to me. I say that they are within their rights. They aren't preventing the Scouts from actually earning the awards, just from being recognized up front. Same as not getting to go to Jamboree if you don't have the full uniform. Or not being on the Boys' Life cover.

Now, presumably, they are verifying that everyone has the means to acquire the uniform, and are maybe even providing ways to help that happen.

I like them both.

Individual unit ARE great at doing recruiting!

Yes, absolutely. Every district and every council has examples of good units, even great units. And there are all kinds of things that individual units can do to get better. I am all for individual units doing all they can, and they can clearly operate well or poorly in the current environment. Things at the national level do not make all that much difference to the individual troop program

At my district Roundtable in August, I will be doing a model recruiting night, giving the Cub Scouts of pack leaders the fun of making and competing at launching stomp bottle rockets as an activity to attract unit leaders and to show them how they can use an activity to attract new and existing Cub Scouts to their pack. The aim will be to motivate pack leaders to take recruiting seriously and show them how to do it.

This is great. All for it.

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Those things are already in place. I personally don't see a need impose more requirements on units. They are capable of deciding what they can do and want to do themselves.

My point here was going along with dkurtenbach's statement: "I think that BSA suffers from putting out a product that is highly inconsistent from unit to unit. Of course, there is a fear that improving consistency from unit to unit would mean not only eliminating units that fall below a certain minimum standard, but reducing the quality of highly successful units to make the product more uniform."

Sure, current units can run to high standards. They can also run to low standards. Right now the BSA seems to be fine with units that run absolutely terribly, so long as they aren't actively publicly harming the image of the BSA. This is a choice, and I understand it, but I do think it can create a fair number of people who are disillusioned through their experience with a local unit.

Personally I think the Tiger year is the best year in Cub Scouts. The problem with the Tiger Year is getting the program started since it generally involves EVERY family being new to Scouting. That is often tough for packs to do, can take months to do and not infrequently results in a failed den.

Yes - actually, I'm not too worried about the Tiger year itself. What I wonder is whether the extension of the Cub Scout experience to a five year program does burn out families.

I think LOTS of packs do a poor job of welcoming new parents into Cub Scouts and making those families welcome. Even packs that do a good job on recruiting too often leave parents fumbling once they collect a membership application and check. [...] We need to do a better job of remembering our first days as pack members and the confusion we usually had at that time.

This is a great suggestion. My only point is that we aren't going to fix national problems by improving one pack at a time. Packs are constantly either improving or deteriorating. We should continue to try to improve packs, but because of all of the packs in the country, changing the average performance is going to have to require some type of national change.

I very much appreciate your perspective, SP. I think you can definitely make a difference to the people around you. This, in many ways, is even more satisfying than fixing things on a grander scale.

In my every day troop life, I only worry about what I can improve at the troop level. Here on the boards, though, it's fun to take a broader perspective.

I like Lisabob's troop solution.

I would say, though, that a signed BC is good unless you know fraud is involved. In my opinion, this case would involve fraud, and I would not feel obligated to provide the badge.

There are clearly lots of things that an individual troop or district or council could do, but if membership is falling on a national level, there is going to have to be a national solution.

Individual units, in my opinion, are never going to be great at recruiting as a whole. The vast majority of leaders are doing the job because of their own kids. They just don't have a lot of incentive to go recruit more kids. Our district does a one-day recruiting day for Cub Scouts, and our pack shows up for that, but that's pretty much it.

National could certainly do more marketing, and they could make improvements on generally appearing to be a modern organization, and those would help, but these factors have been consistent over a long time and it doesn't seem like this is the big reason for the drop.

National could also take steps to make the program more rigorous. Require uniforms. Require certain minimums. Increase standards. That would be a huge change and very much in opposition to the general culture of the organization.

I still think that if we really want to figure out what is causing the great Cub Scout decline, we have to look at what has changed. One thing is certainly the addition of the Tiger program. Membership has certainly dropped consistently since Tigers became a part of the pack.

There is undoubtedly some effect from membership corrections. How much does this account for? Who knows?

Some of the drop is undoubtedly a permanent part of the new landscape that has more and more options for kids, and earlier specialization.

I still think that a large part of the drop off is because of the increasing out-of-touch impression that parents of potential Cub Scouts have of the BSA. I don't think this is going to change until BSA accepts gay leaders. There are more and more parents who just automatically dismiss Scouts as an option.

A lot of it depends on exactly what facilities you have available and what your Scouts look like in terms of demographics and participation, but I've been trying to think over the same issue in our troop.

Meeting in separate places is definitely good. This holds for campouts and for troop meetings. Having the patrols have their own identity as much as possible is good - make sure they have all their own equipment. Have patrol flags and have them out often, just as a way to help everyone, including the adult leaders, think of the boys in terms of patrols. Find ways to mark everything by patrol - color code things, mark all tents and tent pieces, all cleaning equipment, etc. If each patrol can have their own storage area, even better.

Emphasize patrol duty rosters. Do as many things as possible by patrols...sign up for trips, do head counts, etc.

I think there is a little bit of a balance here. Most of the Scouts have friends in other patrols too, and they don't want to be permanently separated from them.

In my expereince, most people stayed with the same mixed-aged patrol

Oddly enough, we have the opposite experience. We've let the Scouts choose their patrols, and by and large they end up in relatively age-based patrols. Not precisely, and there are obviously a few who prefer Scouts of different ages, but I think it would be a stretch to call our patrols mixed-age.

The Scouts do largely tend to stay with their patrol, because we've let them start out by choosing to be with their friends, and their friends don't change rapidly.

There is no official problem at all. Everything is easily within the BSA guidelines.

If your troop has additional guidelines, then you'd want to be sure you were within them. The guideline in this case might be "The SM won't approve adults to work with their own son as a merit badge counselor unless the son is part of a larger group." But I don't know whether there is any such actual written guideline by the troop.

You seem to indicate that there is at least such an implied rule within the troop. In that case, I think it would certainly be ok to check with the SM and make sure everything is fine as far as he is concerned. It would also be good if your son was to invite the other Scout along every time you went to the pool.

In most cases, there shouldn't be any issue here. As long as adults act like adults, no problem. Of course, we know that doesn't always happen.

Yes.

Wikipedia gives some possibilities:

Troop 5, Denver holds claim to be the oldest continually chartered Boy Scout troop in the United States having been chartered continuously since 1910.[29]

Troop 39, Chapel Hill, North Carolina is also one of the oldest currently active and continually chartered Boy Scout troop in the USA. It was organized in the Fall of 1911 and chartered as Troop 1 in March 1912 by C. Walton Johnson, the original Scoutmaster. Troop 1 became Troop 5 when it was placed in the Cherokee Council in the 1920s and became Troop 39 when it joined the Occoneechee Council in 1937. The troop has been continually chartered since 1912.[30]

Troop 1, Park Ridge, Illinois was formed in 1910 and chartered on June 22, 1912. Charles Morison Dickenson was the first scoutmaster from 1912 to 1914.[31] Troop 1 has been continuously chartered by United Methodist Church in Park Ridge since its inception.[32]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_Scout_Groups

The decline has been going on since the 1960's

While there is some broad truth to that, we can be a little more precise.

Membership peaked in 1972. It declined from 1972 through 1980, and then it remained stable and/or gradually increased up until around 1999. From 1999 through 2011 there has again been a marked decline.

Cub Scouts, in particular, dropped from 2,166,289 in 1999 to 1,583,166 in 2011. That's an average annual decline of 2.58%, for a total decline of 27%.

Boy Scouts have done relatively better, and in fact, have increased in the past two years. The overall drop is 1,023,691 to 909,576, for an average annual loss of 0.98%.

Not "all training", but I think that pretty much all of the safety training does expire in two years. The range certifications have been that way for awhile, at least since I first became aware of it (maybe eight years ago).

Training like "Troop Committee Challenge", BALOO, and IOLS don't expire, but the swimming, boating, climbing, shooting, and youth protection all do.

I assume that the stated reason would be to prevent people from falling into bad habits. If you don't go for retraining, you can slowly forget what the stated standard is, or something like that.

Do you feel that you simply aren't ever going to learn the organizational part? That's a key part of being the committee chair.

You either need to find someone who can take that part over - a committee secretary, perhaps, or maybe a vice-chair - or else you need to move on. If you know you are going to continue to fail at the position, then the question might be whether you think it would be worse if you just resigned.

One thing you might do. Announce that you are overloaded and that you know you can't do the job that you'd hoped you'd be able to do. Hence, you are going to resign as committee chairman effective in one month. You can offer to stay around and help, but you can let the pack know that there will need to be a new committee chair identified, or else things will fold.

Nothing motivates folks like a deadline.

I'd probably try the one-to-one recruiting first. Go to the person you've identified as the next committee chair, and ask if they would come on board and help you with project management as Position X on the committee. Let them get comfortable with that for awhile.

This year's leader's guide for Bear Lake Aquatics Base does not list SCUBA as a possible activity. They do offer airplane flights with the EAA, and they have ice caves rappelling, but no SCUBA.

We have to sign waivers all the time. I'd expect that around here, any Scout participating in a SCUBA activity would have to sign a waiver, so at a minimum they would have been warned of the risk. This doesn't really seem like it's the bulk of the complaint though.

This is an interesting mix of understanding the theoretical practices that the rules require, as well as the practical question of what you do in this situation.

The young man cannot register as an adult leader. As far as I know, he could register as a Venturing youth, because the last time I saw an official BSA policy on gay youth, it said "In the unlikely event that an older boy were to hold himself out as homosexual, he would not be able to continue in a youth leadership position." Now, the BSA might also argue that the young man is not agreeing to live by the Scout Oath and Law, as the BSA believes that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the obligations in the Scout Oath and Law.

But leaving aside the Venturing question, you might ask whether unregistered adults can come along on troop functions. The answer is yes, absolutely, as in the case of unregistered parents. You can also have other adults come along to provide additional leadership, and they do not have to be registered.

Can he bring along his boyfriend? Well, his boyfriend could attend for the same reason.

Interesting question about sharing the same tent. I don't believe there is any actual statement on this topic. Clearly adults of the same gender can share the same sleeping facilities. I would suggest treating them as any other unmarried couple, but that is not required by the rules.

So, from what I know, the BSA does not prohibit you from inviting along two openly gay adults on a troop trip and allowing them to share a tent.

Now, your CO may have a whole different point of view...

I think you definitely don't want them sharing a tent.

I'd think you would probably not want to encourage the inviting along of any boyfriends or girlfriends in general in this age group.

If you allow other recently graduated, 18-year old adults to come along, then I'd allow this one to come along too.

But you really want to see what your CO says. Just because something is permissible doesn't make it a good idea.

I'm going to agree with Beavah - I don't think it's the training that makes the difference. Most people are just doing the job that the Scoutmaster or Committee Chair has asked them to do, so as long as those jobs are in line with the training, I don't think the training helps all that much.

Now having said that, all of our troop's committee is trained. And it works well. But I don't think the training is the reason it works well. It works well for a whole lot of other reasons, including primarily the type of people that they are in the first place. It helps to communicate with them regularly, and to be as clear as possible about what you would like for them to do. And it's really important to select the right person for the job.

For real trouble situations, I probably don't want the entire committee to have to respond anyway. I'd work with a small subset of the committee that is well-suited for dealing with the particular problem.

Sure, it should count.

This is exactly the kind of gradual roll-out you'd hope for in terms of getting people comfortable with the idea that the policy is going to change.

The national executive board members (I can't find the list right now) includes a variety of global CEOs. Virtually all large companies these days are committed to non-discrimination based on sexual orientation, so I expect that there are more people on the board who feel the way this member does.

Maybe the change is coming sooner that I'd expected.

I'd be surprised and disappointed if he is asked to step down.

It seems like one of the key requirements of the by-laws would be to define who can change the by-laws.

We never vote, either. I can literally never remember a vote in either the pack committee or the troop committee.

If it is not defined, though, I'd expect that the default answer would be that only registered committee members can vote. They could decide to open the vote to others, but if you are going to count votes, you only count them from registered voters.

It depends on what you mean by "poor Eagle Scouts."

If you mean that they haven't generally mastered the outdoor skills, I think the answer to that would be to change the advancement requirements to require more mastery. Expecting leaders to require more mastery just based on the current requirements is not going to happen.

If you want Scouts to have more of a Scouting presence, then add some attendance requirements. Sea Scouts does, for example. Require the ownership of a uniform. Require it to be correct for the Eagle BOR.

If you want them to clearly have done more in the outdoors, then bump up the Camping merit badge requirement. It used to require 50 nights of camping. Now it's 20.

If you want to require a higher standard of leadership or morals, well, good luck. It's very difficult to describe a consistent standard for this. You could do something like OA, I guess. Require someone to get a 50% vote of the Scouts in the unit as deserving Eagle. Not that that could ever cause any problems....

At a minimum, though, you could let units set their own standards for some of these things and enforce them. At least some of the Eagles would be held to a higher standard.