Oldscout448

On 9/15/2021 at 10:09 AM, MattR said:

@Oldscout448, I'm happy for you. It sounds like you had a great experience in the OA and it must have been a well run lodge. 

I wish more were run like that and more people would volunteer. That just doesn't seem to be in the cards right now.

I guess that's why I'm still hanging around trying to help out with the ceremonies six years after my youngest scoutson headed off to college.  I'm going to have to step back a bit next year. I'm just not physically capable of getting by on 4-5 hours of sleep after a day spent in arduous labor.  

"That's just the cold hard truth."

Tis better to do one or two jobs well, than to do four or five jobs poorly.

7 hours ago, Double Eagle said:

And when I earned skill awards, Scouts were allowed to teach and sign off on them.  Didn't need a MB Counselor to do it.  Skill awards were part of a troop meeting for those under 1st Class.  Worked great for me and looking back, the Scout taught SA allowed new scouts to interact and build a rapport with the higher ranking scouts.  win-win.

That's why it's critical that the older scouts who have mastered these skills be allowed to instruct and sign off.  Scouts get quite enough of adults droning on and on at school. 

"He who teaches, learns twice" 

I found that skill awards made it a lot easier to locate scouts in the dark. You just listened for the clanking noise.

3 hours ago, mrjohns2 said:

As a youth officer who ran 4 or 5 ordeal weekends, this was true for boys. Especially when we held our ordeals in late October. Our opinion was "these are First Class Scouts". Not all seemed to have learned the skills a First Class Scout should have. 

Hereabouts " not all" is nearly half. 

The girls actually seem to handle adverse conditions a bit better than the boys.

To my mind this is a crying shame.  The OA greatly enhanced my understanding of how the Oath and Law were supposed to guide a scout through out his life.  It also gave me a way to serve a larger scouting community than just my patrol or troop. As well as giving me ready access to other SPLs and JASMs when I needed to talk over an issue I was having with the new SM.  Many a Brother in the Order has told me much the same over a drink or two. ( Out of uniform of course)

It is a long established creed of the Order that an Arrow man's first obligation is to his troop and patrol.  So perhaps the old SPL and ASPL bear some of the blame here.  That said, I don't know the details. It may have been there was a long planned lodge event, commitments had been made, money paid, and the troop  then scheduled a campout for the same weekend.  It happens sometimes.

It may also become moot if the OA ceases to exist in a few years. Which seems more and more likely.

6 hours ago, David CO said:

No misunderstanding.

Since it is a unit function, the unit can choose to do it, or not to do it.  It is our choice.  Not OA's choice.  If OA wants to make it OA's choice, then they need to make the selections an OA function.  

 

As far as I know the OA is the only organization that has its members chosen by nonmembers. There are two important reasons to have a scout chosen by the members of his own unit.  Firstly, they are the ones who know the potential candidate the best.  They have a much better idea who best lives up to the Oath and Law in his daily life than anyone else. Except the scouts family. 

That's actually the primary criteria for admission into the order. There is  a rank and camping experience requirement but the bar is pretty low.

Secondly,  the Order is NOT supposed to be some sort of snobbish elitist club.   It is supposed to be recognizing the best scouts in each troop.  Whatever that "best" may be.  So I respectfully submit that the election of candidates for admission cannot be anything other than unit based.

We have our first ceremonies team meeting today. Trying to get ready for the fall ordeal which may or may not be cancelled or postponed.  Again.  

I'm pretty proud of "my boys", they just keep on showing up to rehearsal sessions and work days, knowing full well that there is a good chance that it will all be a wasted effort.

" I recognize the Council has made a decision.  But given that it's a stupid ass decision, I've elected to ignore it."

Nick Fury

9 hours ago, johnsch322 said:

If they are part of 82,000 do you believe they should be compensated for their abuse?

I'm probablygoing to catch flak for this, but no.  There was nothing in the ASMs background that would have indicated predatory behavior. The scouts were looked for and found probably within 10 minutes, certainly within 15. The scouters talked between themselves for years about this, attempting to figure out how this slipped thru the cracks, and how to best prevent any type of recurrence.

I could certainly get on board with suing the perp into oblivion. Yas,he is still alive. At least he was 7years ago. A chance encounter. He didn't recognize me, but I'll never forget him. 

Concerning this specific case I know only a few more details since the victims immediately dropped out they didn't desire any contact with the troop and I had to respect that.   I was told that the scouts family moved away within  a few months, but I don't know if it was motivated by the abuse or unrelated.  I also wonder if they are among the 82,000.  

As to the ex-ASM he completely dropped off the local radar screen. Which was wise considering that there were quite a number of young men in the area who would have liked nothing more than to meet him in a dark alley somewhere.  Or even a brightly lit street. He had brought unbelievable shame and dishonor to the eagle badge and our order. Much more importantly we considered the young scouts as our little brothers. 

I did talk to three Scouters from other troops who had gone through some training courses with him.  "Just plain Weird, a bit strange, and decidedly odd" were the words they used.  Telling that in his own troop, the one he grew up in, he always acted perfectly normal.

Yes, the other scouts were asked. And we asked every parent in the troop if their sons had said or done anything that in hindsight sounded at all as if something had happened.  From what we could glean that horrible night was the only case.   

I suppose I'm trying to say that we did everything we could think of, everything the authorities of the day recommend, and yet by today's standards we fell short. I guess since what happened did happen we did indeed fail those two scouts. But it wasn't for lack of trying or caring. Which is why I get so angry when I'm told that we Scouters only cared about your organizations reputation.

Circa 1980 a young(21) ASM was thankfully interrupted while doing extremely inappropriate things with two young (11) scouts.  Parents were called. Police were called. Council was called. 

The parents refused to press charges, and tearfully begged the Scouters NOT to let any one else know. " For the boys sake"  

So what were we to do? 

Personally I wanted to beat the perp within an inch of his life, not just see him kicked out of Scouting.  But I figured that the parents had the right to have the first crack at him, and if they declined in order to protect their children from the social stigma which was sadly the case for victims back then, then I had no right to 

14 hours ago, 5thGenTexan said:

Not limited to Troops.  Our new CM, since April, has no Scouting experience and since he has read stuff on the internet has ALL the answers.   

Bless their little hearts!

This was nearly five and a half years ago if the byline date is accurate.

Some of our chapters candidates opted to skip the offered virtual ordeal and wait for the in person one our lodge had scheduled for this summer.  I just got an email telling me that it's postponed until next summer.  "Unable to hold" it said. No further details.

No one who "attended" the virtual ordeal signed up to serve in the chapter in any capacity.  At the October ordeal we skipped the Sunday morning meeting/ sign up due to keeping a safe distance apart I guess. In fact the last time anyone was given an in person opportunity to join the ceremony team was April 2018.

I swear sometimes I feel like the ship is slowly sinking, and the Captain and officers are busy setting it on fire.

5 hours ago, David CO said:

I am very glad to hear that your kids are OK.  Not everyone was so lucky.  Some were scarred for life.  

That is sadly true.  There are predators out there, the two legged kind. I've met a few. Some in church, some in Scouting, as well as a few other places.  Some people I care very much about have been deeply hurt by these (insert unscoutlike word). 

You are doing what you think is right to protect those in your charge and I commend you for it. 

Peace 

43 minutes ago, David CO said:

If we have learned anything from the scandals and bankruptcy, it is that BSA cannot be depended upon to safeguard our kids.  The Chartered Organizations need to step up and take responsibility.  We can't rely on any other outside group to do it.  Safeguarding our kids is our responsibility.

Ok, I think I finally see where you are coming from.  It is obvious from your posts over the years that you care deeply about the kids.  I applaud.  long and loud. 

Yet there has to be a point where we let them spread their wings and fly. Short flights in good weather near the nest at first, of course. Then gradually farther and higher as they get stronger and wiser. Scouters and parents know there always comes a day when the kids are going  to go solo.  Whether we think they are ready or not 

Our job is to make them as prepared as we can for that day.  I do not believe that we can do that by constantly hovering over them. I might even go so far as to say that we do them a disservice by doing so 

So yeah, I let my kids go to OA functions, Jamborees, Philmont, Provo summer camp... They came back tired, sunburned and more confident. Proud that they had risen to the challenge.

So when it came time for them to go to college hundreds of miles away, I wasn't too worried.  

4 hours ago, David CO said:

That is exactly my point.  OA is not a unit activity.  OA should not be involving the unit in their elections.  

Confused by this. So  if unit elections are out, how does a scout get into the Order?  

6 hours ago, David CO said:

I think that is a very good idea.  CO's should be supervising and safeguarding their unit's scouts at all scouting activities.

Alas my friend, I greatly fear we're going to butt heads here.  I just cringe at the thought of Father O'Kelly " supervising" an Ordeal.  Or even worse  "safeguarding" a Vigil ceremony!  It might be interesting to see who on the CO's staff gets  tagged to go supervising on a 60 mile hike. Or it's probably more likely that such strenuous events would be cancelled outright.  The scouts are supposed to be growing into adults, they need some room to do that.

We are in complete agreement except on one point.  I will contend that it can be extremely beneficial to have venture crews set up so that the 18 thru 20 crowd can continue to serve and lead. For example it's darned difficult to have the Lodge or chapter serve as camporee staff when most of the brothers, or sisters,  have an important role in their own troops, which should always be their priority. I've sent SPLs back to their troops more than once, even though we were short handed.

Many a 18 year old Eagle wants to continue his journey in the order, but his troop committee or SM isn't too keen on signing him up as a ASM.    I was one such once upon a time.

On 6/14/2021 at 9:48 AM, InquisitiveScouter said:

This^^^^^ and the rest...great post.  Would give it more Upvotes, if I could.

Like units, each lodge has it's own personality and culture...

Those with the least draw for that council's Scouts are what we term a "self-licking ice cream cone" (SLICC)  Some common themes among these are:

- The Lodge focusing more on being a "Native American Heritage Society", where dance teams, drum teams, pow-wows, and regalia become more important than the "thing of the spirit"  

- Councils using the OA as a set up and take down of their Summer Camp to avoid paying staff extra time to do this...to the point of telling the lodge that Ordeals must be scheduled as bookends to Summer Camp to accomplish this.

- Lodges putting out the message to unit leaders that they should consider what a Scout's contribution to the lodge will be when considering eligibility for OA election.  (Yes, this happens.)  An Arrowman's first duty is to his unit.  https://oa-bsa.org/article/thoughts-arrowmans-primary-duty

- Lodges which do no unit service, other than conduct elections.  You can generate a whole laundry list of possibilities for this, starting with producing the WTGCG mentioned elsewhere.  I know that some lodges even create Venturing Crews which are set up as units solely for the purpose of giving Arrowmen a place to register in order to meet the the "must be registered member" requirement. (anathema!)

- Lodges which do no community service events, but serve only themselves (or Scouting) through Fellowships, Ordeals, Camp Work Days, Conclaves, etc.

Those with the most draw do the opposite

 

 

 

 

" Do what is right by the scouts, don't worry about the rest" 

Advice given me by a truly old time Scouter when I because a DL back in '94.  

Raising a tall frosty beverage in your direction Brothers!  Welcome.

I never could figure where some SMs get that idea anyway.  When I look at the PoR patches at a chapter meeting they are 50% SPL or ASPL,. 30% PL, QM, or Scribe. With an occasional JASM or OA rep. These are the scouts who are doing the heavy lifting in their respective troops and for many the Order is one of the main reasons they stay in.