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@@Ankylus, good questions. 1. Rule #1: don't ask for a rule, it will come back to bite you. In Irving are the last people who I would find qualified to legislate any same-sex couple, thruple, or whoever else who may join us on the trail. 2. I don't know what you mean by "invoking." By virtue of dealing wih venturers and the occasional mom chaperoning with the troop. we follow this rule without dissent. Already, there are plenty of instances where my venturer's (or troop moms) would be just fine in mixed sleeping quarters without putting up a tarp/divider, or having the odd woman out pitch a tent. My other adult leaders have said so. But, the last thing I need is to be pilloried by someone who wasn't even on the particular trip over YPT. BSA provides people of the same sex a rule: they can tent together. Period. Follow it. Done. 3. See point 1 above., and page 1 of G2SS "In situations not specifically covered in this guide, activity planners should evaluate the risk or potential risk of harm, and respond with action plans based on common sense, community standards, the Boy Scout motto, and safety policies and practices commonly prescribed for the activity by experienced providers and practitioners." There in writing is the "use your judgement" directive you were looking for. All this is why I prefer to sleep under open sky.

Congratulations on having such fun scouting you want to keep at it. Wrapping up those partials is a good idea. How that's done is up to your counselor. So, if it is a badge you started last somewhere, the counselor may let you use the requirements that were in effect when you started. If it's been a few years and you only completed a couple of the simplest requirements, the counselor might rather you use the new requirements. So, bottom line: it depends.

Cross the road bed, up hill about 50 ft, dig. The bed itself should have enough rock to filter seepage from thousands of cat holes for centuries. Of course, in some parts getting that far up hill could be a very long walk.

I'm gonna pick on this statement just a bit. This is scouting for boys -- especially this requirement, which was adopted well after BSA mandated the age limit on rank advancement. If the Eagle project was intended to mean "management," the requirement would have said so. If it was intended to be of a larger scale than any other projects the boy has done as a scout, it would have said so. If positions of responsibility were intended to train in "leadership" they would all have the word "leader" on them. I say this, because we routinely expect scouts to plan and implement service projects. The oval on their patch is immaterial. Sometimes the projects they do before Eagle are tougher than their Eagle project (albeit with fewer signatures and reporting requirements and perhaps more for the unit or a camp than for an external beneficiary). So the Eagle project is more like the debutante ball for a seasoned scout. PoR's are simply a way to allocate management responsibilities across the members in the troop. There are jobs that need to be done, boys need to do them. There is a synergy between the two concepts. Some leadership skill is gained while managing ... starting with leading yourself to do your appointed task. Then leading others in contributing to your task, etc ... And every time we lead (or plan, or develop) a project, we pick up some management "nugget" (e.g., task allocation, scheduling, training, after action review, etc ...). But mainly, we learn to lead (form a vision, inspire others, incorporate others, etc ...). That's why when I look at where most leadership opportunities are throughout the advancement method, I find them in the service requirements. And, when I look at where most management opportunities are, I find them in the positions of responsibility. The really fun part, is watching it all come together when the boys work at mastering scout skills. But, IMHO, the First-Class skills are really a yard-stick to help a patrol measure its leadership and management potential.

Hope things work out for them. If they are doing other outdoor things with you all (hint: fishing season is open in most parts), even for a couple of hours, you're absolutely right. Active cubs should not be docked from advancement just because the camp out didn't work for them. That is why Call of the Wild requirement #1 has an option B.

I would love to see a quantum computing MB. Requirement #1, from the set of all words in all MB pamphlets ever written, consider all possible requirements for this badge simultaneously. Requirement #2, using a weighting scheme suggested by your counselor, determine the optimal requirements for this badge. The patch itself would look like all possible patches, until you stop looking at it.

How about somebody posting proof (besides some plackard found in a disorganized scout shop) that this is still currently being considered by the merit badge task force, please?

I hope there is someone to help you, but in general BSA has been ignorant of open standards for databases. Thus we have reason for you to despair. The logical location would be a page linked from the upload page by an info button. But, providing such specifications may be a violation of agreements with software companies that track scout advancements. Developers of such software are welcome to prove us wrong by providing the location of your software's specs for portable files.

I guess these adult codes of conduct are the new trend. For your comparison, here are the ones for other world scouting organizations that I could quickly find: Canada: http://www.scouts.ca/policies/Code-of-Conduct.pdf UK: http://members.scouts.org.uk/supportresources/3099/young-people-first-code-of-good-practice-for-adults-yellow-card Austraila: http://www.nsw.scouts.com.au/images/stories/LSG23_CodeOfConduct_Apr15.pdf South Africa: http://wiki.scouts.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Members-Code-of-Conduct.pdf They all seem to have popped up in the past three years. (Although maybe some of these are revisions of older documents.)

Well, license is, by definition, a grant to exercise certain discretion not generally allowable to all, But, If we are talking about BSA regulations: For tenting arrangements, the bias against unwed opposite-sex tent-mates remains in the G2SS (a document to which Scouter Code of Conduct explicitly refers in #3); however, SCC statement #6 seems unbounded as to time and location. But, the license given indirectly in statement #3 (i.e., by virtue of being allowed to share a tent according to YPT, one would be allowed to stroll to one's spouse to one's tent -- with or without holding hands), seems intended to address gross indiscretions, not PDA; moreover, generalizing from the right of venturing youth to set their unit's boundaries for acceptable PDA, which by majority, applies to non-married social relationships. If my crew had a restrictive PDA policy but also had venturers who were married couples, I would ask the officers to consider if it would be better or worse for moral to carve out exceptions for holy estates. This leads us to conclude this PDA is not the purview of national, and that policies are allowed to vary by unit -- maybe with some guidance from their CO for reasons that may be entirely parochial. Any scouters having a tough time with this, are welcome to come camping with any unit I'm involved with, I'll hold your hand through the entire process.

Like doing more dishes, and paying for cable to enable someone's HGTV addiction?Maybe you should also have scouters remove their wedding rings, because I made it quite clear to my Jr. high kids that the vows and blessings behind them were the sole thing that rightly leads to "other stuff." Affection is not sexual conduct nor vice versa. The Mediterranean in me is patently insulted that you'd think such vile things of me and my buddies. Your troop, your rules. But don't expect some half-baked policy from wonks in Irving to convince me and my unit leaders to join your crusade of paranoia.

Great lengths? Each crew is to set their own PDA policy -- defining what is acceptable in their by-laws. It is certainly not mandated by national. So, following your logic, since venturers are permitted to allow certain forms of PDA -- and even the crews with bans "on the books" tend to grant latitude to engaged/married couples among the ranks, we scouters are permitted to grant that same latitude to married couples. I'm pretty sure that Stosh is not suggesting that in his troop, Mrs Q and I would be asked to behave more discretely than he and his wife. We would hold each other to some reasonable standard and move on. Maybe he'd warn me if this group of scouts were the kind to not let overhear one's spouse's pet name, and that would be it. At the same time, I bet we'd pick up real quick that Flagg's outfit is more discrete, and we'd act accordingly.

Now @@Stosh, don't confuse the poor DL's. They might make den meetings so much fun that each one will be considered an activity, and nobody will know when they actually have meetings!

@@MattR, international parents, when they finally get the courage to send their boys into the woods with us, are the most grateful people I know. I was referred to this forum because I was getting a lot of cross-talk from people who were telling me how to advise my crew, but weren't willing to listen to the youth about how they wanted to run their crew (and their troops for that matter). My council and area Venturing committees were also a great help, but I touched base with them less than once a month, and I really needed to get up to speed faster than that. National's sites (including Scouting magazine) were full of spit-and-polish vignettes, but no nitty-gritty. Well, grit sometimes rubs people the wrong way, but it is mighty helpful stuff when you've got some rough edges to sand off. I'd like to think I'm a smoother advisor from the dialogue here. And, I have passed on the most applicable posts from these forums to scouters and parents who might benefit from them.

This is not an "either or" proposition. Perhaps you have been able to retain youth by brushing them off with "Why ask why?" replies to the hundreds of questions that come up about their world when hiking and camping. I've found that to be a good way to stifle scouts' leadership ability and, with regard to advancement, make them merit-badge-mill dependent.

Stained glass was a hobby for Mrs. Q and I. It would take us a year to put together something like this. This piece was worth every penny.

Hate to say it, but that's why PSR never made it up to the top of my list. On the other hand, now that the National Scouting Museum relocated there ....

Pages are three years old, and 8 years old, respectively. I'm suspecting that over the years, BSA has adapted to Community grants and UW's targeted giving. What they might not get from one, they may get from another. But, where UW does not co-up with BSA, they lose donors who are looking for that organization's name on the UW list. It's like a tech stock fund that doesn't have holdings in someone's pet tech companies. That someone will likely look for another portfolio entirely rather than investing in the fund and buying their pet stock on the side. I think there are also structural shifts: our UW campaign piggy-backed on our payroll system. Now that that's all electronic, folks don't engage the UW as much. (They do engage more, I think, in the corporate day-of-caring opportunities.) But, what that means, I think, is that the in-flow of "general givers" decreases.

'Skip, after all these years of imported comedy, "bloody minded" still doesn't translate well crossing the pond - (blame Zombie movies), but we get it from the context. I think @Sentinel947 nailed the issue. There is something to be said about being old enough to not worry about dying young anymore. We all see how teachers and coaches and school board members are treated by parents. When I was in my 20's I was more comfortable being yelled at by angry zealots than putting up with parental disrespect. (Zealots made better coffee.) A lot of us aren't up for being under that microscope -- even if parents confine their criticism to the weekends and evenings that you are doing scouting. Folks need encouragement that that kind of scrutiny is worth the hassle. So, my advice to a 20-something ASM is: in every class of new parents, look for the one most likely to buy-in to your vision of a scout leader. This does mean half of the time you are effectively training adults. At campfires, get them immersed in the history of where the troop came from. At breakfast, talk about where you and your SM think it should go. Every year, one more adult. In five years, you have your very own front line behind which you can quarterback, handing off or passing the ball to scouts with impunity. The adults who currently buy-in to your vision become your coaching staff, and you all have more than a team. You have a dynasty. (Can you tell my town is morning the loss of one of the greatest franchise owners in NFL history?) Obviously, as Flagg points out, if you and your fellow scouters aren't assembling that cluster of parents, find a new unit to serve before you face scouting burn-out.

Not clear is if targeted giving is on the increase, or if folks who normally give to UW's general fund gave less, or the campaigns for new donors did not meet expectation. Either way, a sinking tide grounds all boats.

@@SSScout, in words: But, Doesn't anybody look at pictures of anything but kittens anymore? You can get the datasets, and some videos here: https://dash.berkeley.edu/stash/dataset/doi:10.6078/D15K5K. But, for all that is right and holy, don't have your STEM award oriented scouts go over this pre-collected data to settle any arguments. Use it to inspire them to build their own knot testing stand (possibly from re-purposed trailer parts and stationary bikes). Or maybe two stands designed to test scout knots. Each patrol ties a designated knot on the other's human-powered shaker, then on the start signal, see whose knot can survive the machinations of the other patrol.

First things first: it's never a problem if a cub does not earn a badge. Period. But the park conservation project is definitely an outdoor activity, as would be any hike in a park, picnic, ball game in a field, etc ...

The darn shame of it all is that evil has no age restrictions.

Western PA here, and the attitude is much Ohio. Based on posts on this blog, I think it is nation-wide. If I were you @@Sentinel947, I would take 'Skip up on his offer. In fact, @@Cambridgeskip, any chance you lot will take gaffers? On day my crew is bound to replace me.

For those scouts for whom "Because, the bad day, when winds exceed 50mph ..." just isn't enough ... http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/473/2200/20160770 My apologies to anyone who can't bring up the article in all of its glory. In summary: