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There are a number of helps for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, I can't point you to them! The site https://troopresources.scouting.org/ is undergoing an upgrade due out this month. However, it's not too hard to leaf through the handbook and ask the scouts to pick a chapter to work on for the next coming month. Usuallly after summer camp the scouts' advancement starts to diverge, then the PLC's are about asking what is the skill that most boys in their patrol need to master, and how would they like adults to help with that. DON'T focus on advancement per se. DO focus on skills to

I’ll go one further: integrating the local community is the only way forward. There are hundreds of ways to do this. Waiting for National’s next marketing campaign is the least effective.

I don’t exactly. (Plus it was an English translation of the page that I think was originally written by youth. So a lot may have been lost in translation and generationally. ) My impression was that the girls’ organization wasn’t playing well with other scout associations, and the king, having been a scout himself, served as a neutral party with authority. Also, the Swedish scouters who I’ve met were relatively young, and not historians. So their description of their scout movement was limited to their generation. I myself was too immature to strike up a conversation with Carl Gustav, let

One trick with PLC: instead of one lengthy meeting a month, consider reserving 15 minutes after the regular troop meetings. This basically gives boys just enough time for after action review and time to plan the next event. Not great, but if it increases attendance you’ll have double your time in terms of man-hours attendance.

Understatement … Scouterna’s site used to be packed with a lot more details on its front page. It seems like a marketing agency got a hold of it and fell for Western “don’t let words get in the way of great pictures” style. From the original site, I learned that integration was contentious, and the king was instrumental in getting all parties on board. It made me feel proud to have launched a catapult for Carl Gustav when he visited the pioneering area at National Jamboree.

In another thread, someone criticized me for being okay with scouters and other adults speaking their mind to my youth. That got translated into allowing “hostile” acts — even though the topic was clearly discussing speech that did not involve any physical threat. Some repliesasserted that its somehow wise to shield a kid from someone who could teach a him/her how to forestall death, but has voiced problems with their membership. Youth have a word for situational ethics: duplicity.

Interesting point spinning off from JTE. How much should the PLC be invested in those benchmarks?

I would go lean on the advancement statistics. You can give that at each CoH. IMHO, the most important thing a committee needs to know regarding advancement is how much is being spent on patches and awards. how many BoRs were completed and thanking MC's who devoted time to this. how many BoRs might be needed in the coming month. how many MBCs are fielded by the troop, and which MBs need a counselor in your district. Try to listen intently to your PLC for ideas they float that may need committee assistance. These could be properties to camp on, special equipment

@mrjohns2, we validated you, now what do we propose for a solution? One of my strategies: offer to cook an adult-only meal. This assumes you know how to cook one very fine meal very well. But, usually when adults know that they’re getting a meal where they won’t have listen to kids complain, they’ll pitch in. Other ideas: Camp physically distant from the youth. Attend Camporees and require that the SM visit all of the other troops. Get your SM to training. Attend a summer camp that does patrol cooking. It takes quite a while to unlearn bad habits. So encourag

This is argument ad absurdum. In my years as an advisor I didn’t care how people felt about my venturers. (And some voiced fairly negative opinions.) I expected my youth to take it on the chin and press on. Those same people taught my scouts incredible skills. For that, they earned the right to voice any opinion they may have had. Needless to say, over time their opinions became more nuanced after working with my youth.

That’s a whole other metric. Registration fees have exceeded the cost of pizza. For older youth, many of whom pay their own fees, the pie that BSA is sharing is literally that.

@BetterWithCheddar when my sons were cubs, I only paid for the youth and didn’t need to register to overnight with them. BSA does risk pricing itself out of hey market. It’s not that they compete with sports, but they and sports share a pie with many things that parents want their kids to have.

@AwakeEnergyScouter, having grown wiup in a troop from a small-town (plenty of farm boys) and interacting with boys from troops of more urban areas, I kind of got the impression that our SM often picked the more remote campsites at summer camp and camporees. That might have been partly because some of the boys (yours truly excepted) were pretty rowdy. But it could have also been that some leaders absolutely needed more immediate access to showers, or needed weekends with a cabin (something our troop never spent a night in), or some other amenity. We took some pride in being that little bit mor

@Armymutt, I wouldn’t say that it’s the norm. I mean, wanting to “go full on papa bear” is one natural reaction in the context of all that we know about the prevalence of abuse among teens, and the disproportionate prevalence among females. It takes a while to balance out that protective streak with lived experience working with other leaders to deal with problems of substance. So, it’s likely that this kind of thing will arise fairly regularly. It isn’t all that new. And the behavior also happens in unisex environments. It probably has been happening in BSA and GS/USA since the 60s, co

I’m glad you can air your grievances. My conservation: there is a great temptation among leaders of female troops to clear a zone for the girls. In my experience this is especially true for male leaders. We had one upset that our boys were fishing behind their girls tents. Well, when they weren’t girls tents, nobody made a fuss about where our boys were fishing. Heck, the previous year, with a different female troop, not only did they not complain their leaders were grateful that our boys treated them like fellow scouts. Needless to say the boys are frustrated about the mixed signals. And

They could be less prone, but the data is spotty (criminology is hard). It could be that CSA is more frequent among European youth, but here’s a report that shows how widely risk estimates vary in Nordic countries https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10538712.2015.1108944. Here is the most recent examination of CSA from a nation wide youth survey in the US https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/su/su7201a8.htm when this year’s data are available (probably by next year), I’ll try to plot out the responses to abuse-related questions for us all. At the moment Scouts UK is on the as

I figured it was duty to a country of rugged individualists.

One of the kindest, most mature, and friendliest of my scouts made his arguments about why BSA should not have included girls to me and, I later learned, to scouts of mixed sexes in a merit badge class being led by a female camp staff. Exactly which cudgel should I have had BSA reign down upon him? Meanwhile I have had to help multiple female scouts stand firm against proper sexual harassment from scouts (or sometimes verbal abuse from scouters). They don’t want anyone to get hurt, they don’t think they’ll be believed, they think they led on, or they think it’s part of the job. It’s

@ramanous much of a troop’s culture is set by the SM. If he doesn’t buy in, the best you can do is assist his vision. With little nudges based on what you did for fun as a scout. Your personal goal should be to build your relationship with your son, his friends, and their parents. Some of this stuff regarding ideal methods will have to be put on the back burner.

It depends on how you define “tent”. At times my venturers slept under the stars. I didn’t bother to measure the distance between bedding to make sure they were the equivalent of two tent walls apart. (Although truth be told the sexes segregated on their own on most occasions.) It’s a big country, and National simply has no way to enforce a common culture on this.

Facts not in evidence. People do wear non-uniform patches because they have a story to tell. Because @Armymutt didn’t ask, we don’t know what that story is. In terms of taking a side, the American flag is about as much of a side as anyone can take. But the implication of it on a BSA uniform has more to do with identifying the organization’s country of origin, not alignment with international policy. So, I understand why the dissonance. A piece of real estate devoted to affiliation seems to be being appropriated for something more personal. Emphasis on “seems.” Like the Puerto Ricans, th

The solution, to me, seems quite simple: get the scouters shirt size, look up the UA scout association, and see if you can order a shirt his size. Along with payment, send a little extra coin for purchase of tourniquets and other supplies. Give the scouter the shirt, encourage him to go big.

… doable, as long as BSA is willing to take another membership hit over the next few decades … We’re not scouts UK, and litigation waits in the wings for any reports of sexual assault in any American organization that promotes both sexes camping together as a matter of course. I personally believe that a coed troop could be a healthy option for many communities. But the specter of abuse lawsuits will linger for quite some time.

Mamma rolled steel. Women on the shop floors was bigger than we realize. The Socialist Workers Party agitated at the time, and she rebuffed them soundly. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t the only American woman who did.

GS/USA might have and issue. You see, BSA likes to tally up all the service hours of every scout, multiply that by some dollar wage amount, and claim that they provide that many millions of dollars of service to the country. Now you're saying that maybe some of those $ might also be claimed by another organization!🙃 As far as the scout's advancement, however, I'm in favor of double-dipping. There's something to be said for doing the kind of work that multiple groups want to recognize. Besides, I'm sure in ways that nobody's observed this scout's done more good that went unrecognized.