qwazse

I always believed the philosophy was to provide scout's fellows a sufficient amount of overnights with the troop on which to judge the candidate's merits. More nights throughout the year = more data points. Since the canoe trip was a troop excursion and not some big-ticket provisional HA, it would mean the lad's character was manifest to the rest of your scouts on that trip. If he was a saint to scouts on land where you all were watching, but a jerk in his boat every time you adults were around the bend, he won't get elected.* If your boys are like mine, word gets around if one scout made the others' overnights miserable. So, we're starting at different points but reaching the same conclusion. Lacking any other reservation on your part, count the nights. *A rose by any other name ...

If the registrar make this a "hang-up", it's the fault of adults. The scout's application would not be rejected. An appeal to National would come down in favor of the scout. Again, this is where getting to know your advancement chair comes in handy.

What is the "overall budget of the organization" when the organization offloads stewardship of it's resources (meeting space, equipment, and a boatload of management onto COs and volunteers? If council-owned troops become increasingly popular, there will be budgets will increase and the SE's pay as a percentage of that budget will decrease, even if actually salary remains constant. SE's get compensated well when a lot of other people do work for the council for little or nothing.

Our SM was unavailable, so Friday I conferenced and signed the Eagle App for a scout whose birthday was yesterday. (Yes, he registered to vote.) I was in communication with the SM and other ASM's throughout. Keep the BS out of the BSA. Check in with your district/council advancement chair so that your current arrangement is well understood by all.

A scouter can be taught! @curious_scouter, Regarding that sanity check, let me hand down what my advisor told me when I was an Advisor dealing with all manner of cross-talk regarding how to do my job, and I asked, "Am I right, or am I crazy." He said, "Oh, you may very well be crazy, but you are certainly right!" If I were you, I'd get the "cooler boys" a patrol of two totem for their flag. What's going to happen if that pair are the only boys from their patrol who show up on activities ready to scout at full tilt and give other patrols a run for their money? Other scouts as nutty as them will want to be in their patrol. Bottom line, don't break up patrols for your convenience. Let the scouts tell you and the SPL if they want to adjust their members. It can be because of attendance issues like the one that concerns you, or it could be because a couple of scouts in a patrol are like oil and water, or because of youth protection requirements. Ask the SPL to evaluate if it's a problem, invite him and the PLC to resolve it. They may need options, or they may already have their minds made up on what would be best. They just need the freedom to think that through.

So ... here's how to rub the other way. Invite big donors to your program. That makes the SE pay very close attention to you. If a donor is posting on his/her media page about the attendance of a scouting event that you programmed, I assure you that that program will get funding. For any of you who are feeling an "ick" factor because you're "in it for the boys", please understand that the entire USA movement is founded by businessmen who understood cash flow far better than they understood youth development. Design a program that a businessman sees as a worthy investment, and you'll find more support for it than you may need or even want. Then you let your pro's do what they do best -- being a liaison who primes the pump for funding program and and solves many of your paperwork/legal challenges, justifying their salaries in the process.

Oh, how cute. Thinking that executives of organizations under collapse would get reduced pay. On the contrary, expect executive salaries to increase as councils merge and more demands will be placed on a professional who could find better compensation doing less for more in the private sector.

There you go reminding us of a scouting-pro's-dozen annual ideas that do nothing to motivate more growth -- be it personal or numeric.

How about a committee lead by SPLs to review adults before earning their "trained" patch?

@InquisitiveScouter and @fred8033 are working sides of the same coin ... that of mistrust. Once upon a time (those of you who are older than me may snicker now) before districts were the size of councils: counselor lists were a district function, camps were district camps, it cost real money to communicate out of your area code, and SM's knew councilors quite well. All of the verbal gymnastics in the GTA boil down to "a how to" when SM's or MC's don't trust MBC's. However, we need to understand that this is a truly tragic situation. Not because it happens, but because we've once again lost the skill of being plain-spoken. Take this phrase ... Might as well tell the scout you don't think he's trustworthy to read requirements and act accordingly. Might as well tell scoutmasters that you don't think they are trustworthy to deliver a scouting program. I like Fred's idea about more nights and less minutiae, but the bitter truth is that as long advancement has to be completed within 7 years or less, someone is going to find the high speed, low drag method of executing whatever requirements we conjure. I'd rather tell a scout and scouter that 60 years ago National instituted an ageist policy regarding advancement, MBs evolved to be more like school and less like adventure. The complexity of advancement is the fault of neither scout or scouter. So, rather than circling that GTA drain, ask what your troop can do to bridge the gap between what an MBC actually taught and what we actually should have learned from the MB? Instead of fretting over who skates by and who doesn't -- making BoRs dreadful things in the process -- let's make advancement scouting again.

I've found that, for me and my council, retaking YPT about now keeps peace with all of the bean-counters. (It also falls between mandatory work online retraining and open enrollment. So, all I have to do is stop watching war footage, and I'm golden.) Did the test last night and aiming for the other 3 modules tonight. I guess I could have done the whole thing but taking a power drill to a pumpkin was way too much fun.

@jscouter1, you may not have noticed that BSA tends to recruit from within. Consider your the staff at your summer camp. Many were scouts who attended that camp and were recruited by camp staff. There is no better resume than the character shown over consecutive days. That cuts both ways. Many staff chose to work at a camp because of the positive experiences they had while participating in camp programs. HA bases are no different.

I think the Daily Mail is using the holiday as a device to add some humor to a picture which may have been acquired some time time ago. I leave to native Brits to comment further on their countrymen’s sense of humor. But … an interesting backstory would be if, off camera, Bear Grylls talked to him about introducing his girls to scouting. We might not know until the young ladies publish their own memoir decades from now. Until then, I’m willing to let them have a small niche of normalcy and explore no further.

I did the band thing, too. Before that, the American Legion had a boys club where we went to the armory and drilled with mock rifles. Lots of activities were hosted at the armory or the VFW’s lawn. (The guy who directed me to these forums in the VFW band!) But in no uncertain terms did we consider any of that (or the marching that scouts did) military. It wasn’t until I befriended a professor in college who protested in the ‘60s that I realized how triggering much of that could be. However … It’s all a matter of what we want to hand down. Your post opened with scouts disregarding protocol. It is possible that learning to be “in uniform” has more to do with becoming a well-rounded person than it does with becoming a cog in a military establishment. We’re giving scouts a culture that they can norm to. The O/A provides a slightly different culture. In doing so, we teach youth that they can be flexible and still retain their sense of self and moral compass.

Yes. Somewhere I’ve seen posters of the scout sign, salute, handshake, attention, at ease, as well as marching formations. Many of us take it for granted because a lot of us saw our heroes in film. I had Dad, uncles, an aunt, older brothers, several cousins, in the military. There were a lot of parades. (Multiples on the same day … Mom went from street sale to street sale.) Many, many, military funerals. I’m sure some of you were immersed in that culture even more. My kids only experienced a fraction of those events, the movies they watched rarely involves military or even marching band, and their video games skipped the flag protocol part of life.

Or do the trek with strangers! Check with your council to see if they are forming a contingent or if a troop or crew is looking for scouts to round out their numbers. Many of my scouts took advantage of this.

Do you all have your own cork board or whiteboard for notices, meeting agendas, etc … ? Either that or a binder with those things would be good to have. The scribe could insert completed minutes and attendance sheets there as well. I might also suggest some drawings of stances during protocol. Many scouts wouldn’t understand this as films and videos about life in a regiment aren’t a popular thing. There are especially very few such media for young women. My daughter, when she joined our crew, didn’t understand this aspect of scouting either. If you have a female officer in your neighborhood, encourage then to drop by to visit your troop. That might help.

After CoH last night our SM and I were talking with our COR, and she asked if any of the boys had visited the nuclear power plant where she used to work. I asked if she knew anyone we could contact, and then the SM says, “Wait a minute, I have a colleague who works there!” That next adventure could be in someone’s contacts list.

Something has clearly got blown out of proportion. Do your best to iron things out. Get help if need be. There’s more to life than scouting, you have quite a few years of parenting ahead of you, and you all will be seeing each other in your community.

If this is a one patrol troop, who cares what the SPL does? That patrol’s duly elected PL needs to be challenged and mentored in taking care of her youth. It doesn’t matter if he duly elected PL has only earned Tenderfoot. Her goal is now to qualify to take her patrol hiking and camping. The SPL doesn’t have to have interest in all the young scouts. (It’s nice when we have one like that.) She has to invest in one or two scouts: the PL and APL. The SPL can be encouraged to keep doing that networking thing she’s doing and look for activities the PL and her patrol might like to do. I remind our SPLs that their job is to be as fun as it is rewarding. The absentee SM is a problem … especially if you don’t have seasoned ASMs who will take up the mentoring slack in her absence. This may mean the ASMs “renting” the most experienced ASM from the boy troop for a while to bridge that gap.

I'm gonna tweak 'schiff's observation a little because folks these days equate adventure with "big ticket" scouting. Great units find great adventure. This the "magic" of my SM growing up. He was amazed by local history, so we went on a lot of town hikes. Even in our country hikes, if someone let us take a water break on our lawn, he'd welcome them to share what they knew about local native lore. If a scout overheard some debate about which side of the state line a local landmark was, he picked up the USGS map from the Agricultural Office and arranged to take us there to see for ourselves. On a routine campout, he handed me tube, out of which unfolded a WWI canvans box kite, which I proceeded to fly for hours. (In retrospect, I think it was a scheme to keep a young SPL from nagging his PLs. ) The town hike involved a visit to the county lock-up. One meeting each year was a hobby night ... we learned to pay attention to the interests of other scouts (none of which involved activities that could get us locked up, fortunately).

I’m sorry, you didn’t mention what game your scouts play before the opening our closing meeting.

Lots of great units around here. What they need … Youth willing to hold themselves to the Scout Oath and Law and Outdoor code. Rest assured, that everything else will collapse if enough youth in your unit let this slip. A sponsor with space for meeting and storage who is in it for the long run. A community enthused about scouts to the point that they provide use of some property, opportunities for service, opportunities to fundraise, and the occasional cash donation. Teachable adults who enjoy each other’s company, and have time and talent to spare for scouting. A council and region with scouting pros who can identify when, where, and how to muster all of the above. There’s a lot of detail in all of the above.

Thanks for getting the quote. There are two tragedies. The victim and his family, and the youth who has to live with his decision to handle a weapon, the net effect being another boy's death. I agree that an adult leaving a weapon armed would be negligence. But, lacking proceedings, we are only speculating on the sequence of events. We aren't told who armed the weapon. An "unsupervised" older scout may have had the combination to the gun safe, known how to load a magazine, and how to fire the weapon. Or, he may not have known how to properly disarm the weapon, and the next youth could handle it, leading to the accidental discharge. The paths to tragedy are many. For us to apply what happened here so that we can forestall mahem in the future, we need to know every point of failure. If the investigation could assign less punitive fault, we might have the facts sooner and all be able to more readily proceed into the future.

@malraux, it's not clear to me what the event was. Larger bores are permitted for older scouts and venturers. An older scout or adult may have been using the rifle when the youth was downrange. IMHO the make of the firearm is immaterial. The fundamental question is how a 12 year old scout found himself in the line of fire. Maybe being able to understand this is most pressing to me because 11-12 year olds are now the majority of our troop. Keeping them out of harms way is a formidable challenge. Once a year, we hold a demonstration of a variety of firearms that a couple of our troop's scouters (also RSO's) have collected. But, every model is displayed with empty chambers/clips. And still we go over the safety lecture before the scouts handle the weapons. (The whole point is to teach scouts to identify firearms and handle them safely.)