ParkMan

@The Latin Scot - that's exactly my point. The guy ate a frog while filming a survival show. Yes, he did it in a national preserve - a bad choice. But, on the spectrum of offsenses the one seems pretty minor. Why does that now make him a poor roll model? I'd rather have him use it as a teachable moment. Here's an opportunity to admit his mistake and to highlight the importance of national parks and their role in protecting the environment. But instead you'd rather have him step down and no-one talk about it?

I'm not going to knock the GSUSA for selling cookies or for partnerting with WB/DC. The GSUSA has a different program than the BSA and that's fine. More power to them. That's why I think this lawsuit is inherently dumb. They are two different programs with two different sets of activities. On second thought - I do knock the GSUSA for partnering with DC. If they'd had an ounce of sense they'd be partnering with Marvel - not DC.

I guess my question would be: What's more important, someone who is the best example of the Scouting ideals, but is boring, so someone who can capture the imagination of youth, insprire them, but misses the mark on things like this. Sure - we'd like someone who is great at both - but those folks seem to be in short supply.

Thanks for sharing the podcast @AltadenaCraig. While i fully appreciate his point - that Scouting starts with the patrol method, I've found that strongest troops I know of focus on more than just patrol method. They have a great outdoor program, they develop youth leaders, they have a strong advancement programs, they build a strong adult team to mentor the Scouts, they continue to push for continual personal growth opportunities for the scouts, etc. I'd simply suggest that it's important to focus on all eight of the methods. Don't overlook adult association because you're focuse

Based on my understand - yes, the unit would be in compliance. However, I tihnk you have to look at why the BSA made this YPT rule. In essence, YPT rules exist for two main purposes 1) protect youth from situations where abuse is more likely to occur, & 2) protect adult volunteers from being in situations which are more likely to lead to accusations of abuse. I know there is a third reason - to protect the BSA in lawsuits, but for the sake of discussion, let's not focus on that at this time. I expect that the BSA leadership felt that situations with a female youth was alone with tw

I find the 8 methods are largely complimentary and go to building a diverse exerpience for Scouts. For example, if you focus mostly on advancement - then eventually Scouts get bored. If you focus mostly on outdoors - the same. So, I don't think I'd rank them - but instead ask myself - what's the best I can do in each? The strongest troops that I know seem to do well in all. Sure, not every one requires the same level of effort - but it doesn't mean it's any less important. For example, an active outdoor program requires lots of time whereas uniforming does not. Uniforming is more abo

Our pack had a financial model where Scouts paid for events as they go. So, one year we decided to have our B&G catered. It ended up being about $5-10 per person. We had no objections from families. In fact, most of our families told us that they preferred paying a little bit to avoid having to pull together a potluck dinner. I think you really just have to know your pack families. $20-$40 to attend the B&G wasn't going to break any of our families, so we traded some convenience over saving money. Worked well for us. Had we been a pack with a different set of families, mayb

Hi @PARENTinSCOUT, If you really want to see this policy happen I would encourage you to seek out your council's Youth Protection champion. If your council has one, this would be a senior volunteer who has the mandate of making Youth Protection policies successful in your council. This volunteer would not get involved in resolving what happened in your specific troop. But, they would be a person to talk with about the possibility of your council adopting a no retaliation policiy for reports of Youth Protection violations. Futher, this person would be aware of similar regional level co

There's two different issues here. 1) the question of which stands in court really has nothing to do with the BSA directly. In court, it will be up to whichever lawyer makes the more compelling argument. In this case the BSA has two documents - one which defines the policy and one which expands and clarifies it. Here, I think just about any lawyer would be able to make the argument that both hold. But, I'm not a lawyer - so perhaps I'm wrong. 2) I completly agree that the BSA should be more precise in this language. There's probably something like 10-20 different adult supervisi

I think this confuses many people. They presume that the "BSA hierarchy" will overule, supervise, correct, etc. unit leaders. I recognized a long time ago that the BSA is essentially a francise system. The BSA provides the program and infrastructure for the chartered organizations to run their own program. Local unit operations and volunteer supervision is entirely within the domain of the chartered organization. The BSA does not get involved in unit operations unless there is a safety or youth protection issue. Beyond that, the BSA really attempts to stay uninvolved in local unit ma

My daughter's are girl scouts and I wish the GSUSA all the success in the world. But given how part of the GSUSA lawsuit specifically focused on the actions of individual local units, their comment seems remarkably hypocritical. Ugh - I just wish this had not stooped to the level of lawsuits.

My understanding that a retaliation clause would more directly effects those who are friends of the YPT offender. i.e., we're going to make your life tough for making a YPT report against our good friend Scoutmaster Joe.

It would seem pretty reasonable for the BSA to have a statement prohibiting retaliation of good faith YPT concerns. Simply saying that retalation in response to good faith YPT claims can result in revocation of membership in the BSA ought to be sufficient. Leave it to the BSA to arbitrate what good faith means on a case by case basis.

I have to assume that in a one-on-one meeting, either parent (male or female) could serve as the second adult. It wouldn't make any sense otherwise.

I would concur with @Sentinel947. In our area, gifts are not typical nor expected for completing Wood Badge. But, if you'd like to present a small gift, I'm sure it would be meaningful to your Cubmaster. I have a Fieldbook presented to me as a gift by the den leader where I was a den chief as a Scout. A different situation - I grant you. But, it's something that sits on my bookshelf to this day and is meaningful to me.

I'm still intreguied by the new unit Commissioner part of @Ranman328's question. I've always been of the understanding that the role of a UC is to provide guidance to the unit leaders to help them be successful. Advice can certainly sometimes be directive i.e. "you should allow the Scouts more time to individually finish ranks on their own timeline instead of rushing it." But, generally I've always thouht of the UC as more of a trusted advisor or a consultant. If a new UC showed up and started telling me what I was doing wrong, I'd don't think I'd listen too much. "who is this UC

I'm not surprised to hear that the Scoutmaster is new to the role. The new 2019 Scouts BSA online training is really playing up the buddy part. I was struck by how prevalent it now is in the materials. I could very much see how a newly trained leader could be confused by that one.

There is no tax implication for the reason you mentioned. Theoreticallly it's like a church allocating $1,000 to their youth group.

Understood. I think this is one of those "lemonade from lemons" situations. It's been my experience in dealing with CO's that they are not terribly well versed in how to manage the Pack/CO relationship. So, when they do nutty things (like trying to bribe the pack to help out), it helps to take a step back and ask "what are they really saying here?" I think it's always worth strengthening the CO/Pack relationship. If you think that the CO is asking for too big a committment, then to @fred8033's point - start a dialog and see if there is something that does work.

You're going to need about 50 scouts to do this over the course of the year. With 40 scouts between the pack & troop, you'll probably want to ask each scout to sign up for 1 or 2 spots. That's not an awful burden to help fund the pack. But, I think my real question would be - do you want to do this? As I see it, your CO is basically asking you all to be more involved in the CO's success. We as Scouters are often commenting how uninvolved the COs are in our units. This strikes me as an opportunity to be more engaged with the CO. That can be a very good thing. My recommendati

@Mom2Scout My last post was getting long and this is a different point, so please pardon the double post. In your specific situation, I would encourage you to start participating in the committee meetings. Something that I took away from @ianwilkins great post is that it's not necessarily the decision to start a troop for girls that is the issue. It's how the interaction works between the troop for boys and the troop for girls that is the area of focus. A great place for you to be able to impact how this all works out is from the troop committee. You're already quite active in the

@Mom2Scout I completely agree with you that the troop leadership could have handled the timing of this better. Waiting until after recharter is done suggests that the leadership feared that Scouts would leave and they wanted to avoid that. It may be untrue and unfair, but that's what it suggests. The leadership team should have avoided that perception and announced it earlier in the process. Perhaps just before recharter. In my experience, Troops are essentially small communities. For most Scouts, their involvement in the troop is a significant part of their lives. So, their familie

It feels like advancement often gets a disproportionate amount of attention. As I see it, advancement is just one of eight methods of Scouting. It's not the most important nor the least important. It's just one of the eight. Our troop provides lots of opportunities for Scouts to work on advancement. Often it's in the form on a PLC organized event, skills instruction, or adult organized time to work on something. We make sure the opportunities are easily and readily available for a motivated Scout who wants to advance. We don't force advancement on anyone, but nor do we try to slow i

Guess I need to go back and work on my math skills. Oops! Still - seems pretty impressive to me.

That's about 30 new troops per state. Not too shabby!