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Don't worry HT, E94 has his bright moments. But graft an corruption -- especially from volunteers and pros -- cause him to squeak. We really emphasize this point with the boys. If they don't know a scout, abstain. (Yes, we have to teach them what the word means and how to spell it!) Some first class scouts in a troop that's only been doing patrol-oriented activities may only be known to their patrol, SPL, and ASPL. For them, 6 honest votes (up or down) out of 10 is all that should matter ... unless between school and meetings other scouts know that he robs liquor stores to buy drugs. The opposite could be true. A scout could be in a patrol full of bullies, and he's going against their current. The thugs don't notice it, but boys in other patrols do. Either way that's why you want as much of the troop as possible to weigh in and vote: yes, no, or abstain.

I'll let someone else spin this about something like who's got any news about WSJ acceptances ... @FireStone, don't get me wrong. I want boys to master first class skills ASAP. Girls too ... my crew, when active, goes for wilderness, and we only go as deep as skills allow. The sooner those skills are mastered, the sooner we can make better hike plans, do better service projects, build honor guards, support civic ceremony, cook really good meals, etc ... But, I'm in no hurry to put a patch on a scout who hasn't mastered the skills in those requirements. And for all but disabled boys that is met, not by time spent in the program, but rather time spent on the program. A boy spending 5 hours a week and an overnight a month working on advancement will rank up right quick ... an hour a week and camping once a quarter will take a good couple or five years.

Hey guys! WM crossed over to the dark side! One FCFY down, umpteen thousand more to go!

It's a national policy. I think the general idea is if a scout is favored by the majority of half his unit, that's a 25% of the boys registered in the unit weighing in on his election. I'm pretty sure they didn't spend a lot of time examining the properties of the multivariate binomial distribution for this one. They just figured it was a good enough number of boys to judge if the lodge was getting a decent candidate or not. Obviously, if you've screen your boys and 3/4 of ballots from 40% of the troop endorse each of them, the other half of the troop would make no difference. We've had some "just-by-a-vote" elections. So, if we ran one with less than half the membership present and the absent majority found out that they we railroaded the results, we'd catch a lot of flack from our scouts. We used to have elections at summer camp. I liked that. But then our boys started going to different camps. That made it tougher to get a majority, so we arranged for a meeting night. And, it's pretty much like @Back Pack's troop. We make a plan to collect ballots early and announce well in advance.

Want to be despised, yet loved? Try "tortured soul": I'd say make your course 5 points on the edges of your grounds. That's 20 possible headings (four from each control to any of the next). At night, you could set up strobes/glowsticks and drop decoys. Be sure to leave time for clean-up.

Dude, where have you been? Mom's have held committee positions for a long time. The mom of the best scout I ever knew sat on my BoRs.

No pancakes last night, just tacos and fellowship. There a friend delivered an awesom one-liner in her Midwestern deadpan .... I can think of no better mashup of holiday for a single woman than Valentines and Ash Wendesday

Actually, they have had a voice. They joined venturing, rose to positions in the national cabinet (similar thing hope so via O/A) and have been telling key-three that we scouters need to stop being petty for a couple of decades. And that may be a real victory. @cocomax, have you actually talked to scouts from other associations. Or, have you camped with our boys when a couple of them were afflicted with the drama bug?

I think you're trying to mansplain something to me, but being a dude, I missed the micro-aggression

Replacing the period with the space in the search, I found https://iscoutgame.com/en/home

My FL relatives don't do WDW with their Pack/Troop, but they do camp at Daytona speedway sometime on or around race week.

As long as they are cool with the declaration of religious principle, I'll SM a patrol of them too!

I missed your post the in Virtual Campfire, so thanks for linking to it. I could merely upvote it once in both places. So I strongly recommend everyone to navigate to MattR's post, then the link he shared, and vote on both accordingly.

Well, thanks for making me feel these years today! Me and my buddies? Well, for some of the tools that we used, we could have benefited from a coach. But, the SM was actually pretty savvy and had a good feel of who could muddle through and who might need to ask for a volunteer to lend a guiding hand. We just needed the sense to follow his example of asking questions about best practices before we started working! This was pretty much in BSA's heyday, and the service project requirement was well established. So maybe I'll make son #1 feel his age! Given the scope of his project a decade ago, we paired him with an ASM Eagle Scout who had a landscaping business and whose son was an Eagle. This guy not only advised and coached, but refereed by keeping Mrs. Q and I at a distance when it came to on-the-spot decisions. (I.e., I was "politely reminded" to keep the chopper grounded. ); however, he was not called project coach/advisor. He was just one more line on the list of the boy's service hours. Contrast to about 3 years ago, and Son #2 asked if I would be his project advisor (a really stupid choice on his part, but we both muddled through). He did not get much help from me except some help finding debugging links for that hideous pdf, some IT advice that he ignored until after the project, pointers on wording, and encouragement to call our district advancement chair about procedural stuff. I was pretty much a "paper coach", not at all more involved than any of his other volunteers. So there's a decent timeline: 70-80s the SM was the coach, 90s-'00s, SM's started getting so many Eagles doing such different things that they started pairing them with a coach/advisor, '10s-present, coach/advisor became a proper position in the paperwork. I'll leave it for you to decide if a decade is "fairly recent", but as evidenced by @Mattosaurusnot having a coach ... we see that the practice has not sunk in everywhere.

@WisconsinMomma, Eagle Coaches are a fairly new addition to the process. They aren't essential, although they probably are a little more useful than strangers on the internet! @Mattosaurus, I would still have you complete the application. Just explain that this process got rolling before you realized there was paperwork to file. It won't hurt your prospects in the least. And, it will give your council a better sense of how things get done in your neck of the woods. The main thing that council wants to know is that you are paying attention to how things should be done and acting accordingly. Keep up the good work! Regarding the cash from your Luddite donors: you are simply collecting their donations on behalf of the beneficiary. That's not your money. You are just doing a good turn helping someone's offering get to the desired collection plate! For the fundraising application, I personally don't think that needs any special documentation beyond the Beneficiary's online solicitation. But, it's good to be accountable to yourself. So try to keep clear who gave what ... in both your records and on the beneficiary's books.

Are you kidding? I'm keeping the BSA4G patrol 200 yards distant uphill! But, seriously, your troop shouldn't be forced to change its culture, and I think it's on your CO to defend that. However, as with other new-troop start-ups some of your best boys should be called upon to help train the neighborhood's BSA4G troop -- should the need arise. I find that a little sharing of ideals is the best way to preserve the traditions of the senior unit.

Nobody's going to freak out over this. The beneficiary is effectively fundraising for the project. In the description, state that the beneficiary has already set up a special collection for this project and is raising funds for it on its own website. A fine point (in case you haven't done this), some Africans restrict their diet out of religious devotion. So, you may want to label meals that contain pork/alcohol vs. those that don't. I'm not sure if you're also collecting halal ingredients. But if you do, take the trouble to note that on your packaging. It will mean a lot to the recipients that you thought of this.

For reference and enjoyment, this snapshot by WOSM may serve: https://issuu.com/worldscouting/docs/wsbero-membership_report_2013 What's relevant to us, is that Scouts UK had not recovered its market penetration, but compared to 2007, it had "turned the corner" and was gaining market share. It is reasonable to expect that it has continued that trend. However, it probably has a few years to gain the share of boys. On the other hand, BSA's program(s) has lost market share at an alarming rate over the same period. Anyone worried about losing boys nationwide, that ship has sailed. Anyone thinking including girls is a panacea should reconsider their position. I'm in this for smiles. Some girls want this program? Let them. Some boys want to keep to themselves? Make it work for them ... even if your troop is full-on co-ed. These things are best managed on a local level, and the sooner BSA gives scouters the latitude to do that the better.

Thanks 'Skip. That cuts both ways. Being unisex is not what caused your boys to leave your program, but going co-ed didn't bring those boys back. Over here in the land of quick fixes, our P-R guys are trying to couch this move as a boon to membership (more family friendly, simplified for single parents, etc ...), when a real leader will admit that it is hazarding the loss of some seasoned leaders.

This was discussed in another thread a few years back. I haven't managed to put the data in a good sharable format, so here are my conclusions and you'll have to just hope I got these sweeping generalizations right: Aside from Indonesia and some former communist-block countries, co-ed WOSM organizations have generally seen a decline in membership, although not as steep as us. However, they nearly all have uniformly lost boys. The percentage of boys served in respective countries has dropped. Although Scouts UK's census has recovered after three decades, it has not gained the number or percent population of boys it once had. Eastern European countries have generally seen scouting grow, with usually one scoutmaster for Cubs, Scouts, and Rovers. There were just too few adults who survived as scouts to remember how to start the program (or any other youth program for that matter). It's interesting that many conservative nations have co-ed scout associations, but those associations are also fairly new to the WOSM. Latin America? No data. Sorry. Two unisex organizations: Pakistan and Saudi have seen large increases. Saudi because its program is fairly new. Pakistan because, well, I think in general the young men have a sense of adventure and daring-do that some of us guys may covet. If you all are willing to pitch in for my ticket, I'll go to Indonesia and report back on what they are doing right.

@Col. Flagg, if somebody told me to take charge of a unit of 70+ youth, I'd tell them to go pound sand. The max I think I'd put up with is 40! That's all the more I've ever known. The more likely scenario is 5 girls knocking at my door. I know about 3 other women who I can trust to help start this BSA4G program without watering anything down. (I know more, but I'd have to convince them to find a job and relocate here.) While other CO's may let us use their facilities, my current CO would want those girls coming through their door, and my existing troop would want me to have both units coordinate with each other. Well, let's say we actually have fun and actually attract 10 girls a year, the number of boys in the troop remain steady, and the PLC's decide they like working in lock-step -- a highly unlikely scenario, I think. Well in four years we have that unit of 70 that I had been dreading, and the frog's been boiled slowly. If you're already at 70, you're probably getting 8-10 crossovers per year, and you may not have room to share with 8 BSA4G, let alone double your CO's capacity. Or, you might simply be a bigger frog!

I asked myself about gear the first time half my crew (i.e. the girls) wanted to backpack. Then all of a sudden packs and other gear got handed down, dropped off, or left on the curb for me to grab - even from the gnarliest curmudgeons. I still see some of those packs in circulation on the backs of cross-overs! It's a big country, and your leaders may be spread too thin. But I, for one, will make time for a patrol of girls if they come knocking. And who knows? If these girls learn to rig their own gear, the boys might want to buy it! Basically, anybody who's up for this has to be okay with a little improvisation and negotiation. And, respecting the boys who've put a lot of muscle into making a troop work to suit them. Now, if some zealot comes to your leaders and gives them a high-and-mighty lecture about how they now need to be accommodating, blah, blah, blah ... that will be a shame, and I can see some scouters jumping ship over it.

This is where I make the difference between "contingent" and "patrol". Contingents are handy when only a couple guys from each patrol are interested in an activity, so they peel off from their patrols' for that activity. This is often how we prepare our Philmont or Seabase contingents. The patrols serve as a scout's "home base." Needless to say, too many contingent activities and boys lose sense of patrols. Too few, and your patrols may miss out on "injections" of creativity from boys coming back from contingents.

Now that I think of it, I might have been among those scouts ... if not on a troop overnight, certainly on church camps. I remember that chapter coming to a close after I camped on a farm with a mixed youth group (effectively a co-Ed patrol). I remember it vividly because I had procured tents from my QM, but a female leader passed. She was the first person I met who gladly slept out under the stars. It took me until I was twice as old as she was at the time to adopt the same routine. Anyway, that event blunted the effect of a culture that taught that a girls were a population to be "raided." Your mileage may vary.

Was this 12 year old scout recommended by his SPL and approved by his SM to be the scouts den chief. Or, is he just tagging along as someone's older brother? There's a big difference. Underlying all of those rules for YPT are sixeteen points for safe scouting. The first is qualified supervision, the last is discipline. The one involves training, the other trust. This applies to scouts and Cubs and adults ... Albeit at different levels.