qwazse

Sounds like you want some out-of-the-box thinking, so here's a Confucian, Wile E. Coyote mashup: If you can't build a bridge, paint a valley. Get a large white canvas tarp and blue, green, red and yellow paints. Half the canvas hangs from the ceiling as is painted with a two hillsides in the background, one with a Cub Scout symbol, the other with a Boy Scout symbol (or cub camp, and boy scout camp), with the "sunset" portion of the AoL shining between the two valleys. The inside half of a bridge is in the foreground near floor level, with the "arrow" portion of the AoL on the bridge as part of the "railing". The other canvas spreads across the floor, and is painted with a stream down the middle, and painted wooden planks crossing the stream. If your gathering place has a stage, the canvas could fold over, and you could paint a waterfall! You would want props (campfire ring, wood pile, etc ...) in the foreground to hide weights that keep the floor portion spread flat. Your wheel-chair scout could then cross on his own, just like the other boys. This should fold and store easier than any wooden bridge. Some parents have experience at stage management, so they could give you an estimate on the materials, or you could talk to a high school if some of the students in theater would want a service project. You could also use large pieces of colored tarp for different parts of the background, but you'll want the part on the floor to be one painted piece so things won't get ruffled with lots of foot traffic. Whatever you do, try and post a picture of the final product!

Welcome to the forums! The only thing your son has control over is the invite list. The troop has control over their participation. Your son's friends have control over their participation.

File under "you've never truly lived unless you ..." The national guard handed down a 24 man (Lord knows how many boys) wall tent that we called "the circus tent." Center-pole was a good 12' trunk in two pieces, which the smallest scout would climb to hang the canvas peak ... which was held together by crossing chains. Typically, we got it out for klondike derbies. We'd all put down individual ground cloths, which gave everyone a fair collection of packed snow for "pillow fights." (God bless my SM.) Yes it was fun. But it was also a good way of keeping an eye on our youngest scouts for signs of frostbite or hypothermia.

We're not much for skits either. I think it is mainly because the school district has a championship theater program (a couple of my venturers have gone on to professional careers), and our youth have pretty much had it with play practice when they finally can make it on a camp-out. That said, I can be blamed for pushing boundaries ... making white boys read "Negro" out loud for MLK day. It was not something they were at all comfortable with. But, it was their first time reading the "I Have a Dream" speech in full. And having done so, we could see light bulbs turning on for the first time. A compass is only good if you know where you're coming from.

3/4 will work, but as an uncoordinated kid, I always felt more stable on a 1" rope. A splice sounds like a great way to increase stability. 1/2" Might not withstand the tension in a 30' span. Has anybody modified the monkey bridge design with Kevlar, a.k.a. slack line?

SBmom's den has come up with examples -- four at the time of her first post. What's in these boys' way is a willingness to defer to one another and come to a consensus. I'm not sure pointing out that they won't earn AoL will motivate them to break that log jam. But, it could be worth a try.

This is typical of Area/Regional Venturing officers. They see more of professionals than most scouts.

Having recently gone through a similar situation, I think that's about all that can be done. I explained to the aggrieved scout what scouters had done wrong, and what his options were. There was some back-and-forth about it. But at no time did I try to assign any more motive to it than, "Looks like this new committee is trying to address a skills retention problem." The scout eventually made peace with the committee, knowing he was well within his rights to keep digging his heels in. Follow-up: as crew president, he is centering meetings on refreshing those first class skills. A process that is much more fun when the only award is bragging rights, and the promise of some real-world challenges in the near future.

Institutional head. For our CO (a Presbyterian church), that is the Clerk of Session. For other churches it might be the pastor. For a fire/police station, it would be the chief.

Is it ... Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, or Reverent? And not the striking opposite of any of those? Most of your limiting cases might fall under not being kind. But not always. Some really good skits might get precluded by your tight boundaries.

@@Stosh, I was talking about a blown out heel or sole of a boot. For actual feet, yes the duct tape, and/or a thin sock layer (I've become addicted to merino wool liners from the army surplus store, but they didn't have them this weekend ) will do the trick on most people's skin. Please, everybody who may have means to acquire it, only use incendiaries on the boot WHILE IT IS REMOVED FROM THE FOOT, and at appropriate safe distances from any body part (yours or your buddy's) as advised by your munitions instructor!

Loved my tin whistles. (The first one was probably from my oldest brother's scout gear.) Then, as we became a kayaking family and I volunteered supervising aquatics, the Fox 40 became my friend (no waiting for a cork ball to dry before the volume kicked in). Then National Camp School came out with the philosophy that life guards shouldn't have whistles -- undue sense of superiority and other such truck. Someone, please introduce me to the guy who asked for a ruling on that .

I find most adhesives give way without heat and pressure. Now if the 1st aid kit came with a little plastique and detonators ...

@@ShutterbugMom, I was one of those who led off with the "not your problem" shtick. But I was dead serious about making the boys go to the library to research this. Especially if they are at loggerheads over it. As long as they aren't getting into wrestling matches and breaking furniture, they need to go through this forming-storming-norming-performing process on their own ... perhaps with the guidance of an older scout. You know when your troop will use them. I'm assuming they do too. They might even be getting a rise out of you being irritated by this. (I was an 11 year old WEBELOS once, and getting our DL to blow his stack was a favorite pastime of ours. So, pardon me if I've wrongly generalized my childhood to your boys. ) So, feeding them concrete ideas from strangers on the internet will just reward their drama. Don't get me wrong you absolutely must keep the heat on (e.g., "You guys might look a little like Tiger cubs at the end of the meeting if you don't settle on a yell."), but you must at the same time distance yourself from the problem ("I'm sure you guys can figure this out. Just remember the 4th and 5th points of the scout law while you do.") There are somethings that are sacred. And boys' patrol "image" is one of them. Unless it's blatantly obscene, we keep our hands off.

Once upon a time, we called it a single-strand rope bridge. The materials now make it much more feasible for a lot of boys. And where on that old rope bridge the best we could do was dash across, a quality slack line enables the obsessive practitioner to master some really cool acrobatics. Our museum/library (the one with the to-scale bronze diplodocus) has a really nice cut of lawn with evenly spaced old sycamores, where some CMU/Pitt students set up their lines in the evening. Definitely fun to watch. But you have to watch out as their skills increase. For example, our troop for a while had some pretty athletic boys ... really good climbers and hikers who were pretty cautious in the wild. But, as soon as a Frisbee or football was introduced to the mixed, you could almost count down the seconds until a boy reported to us with a broken bone. Skills increase: more challenging maneuvers: get more padding and more spotters and maybe even send the boys to gymnastics class.

Scouts purchase/fabricate their own tents or borrow their buddy's (or go without). Quality varies. But, as boys share different tents over the years, they get a good idea of what they want to invest in when they come into their own $$'s. If anyone asks me, I tell them that over the years Eureka has become my brand to trust. After exploding in 100mph winds, I could keep one patched and serviceable for a decade of use by two active scouts. The Venturer tended to prefer the 6-man Coleman, or the 50-cent pup tent.

No problem as far as I'm concerned. Many Area officers do have responsibilities that could benefit from WB's goal setting. However, he needs to understand that WB is not a two weekend course, it is an 18 month commitment. Not always easy to do with a bunch of life transitions coming down the pike. He should have a chat with his advisor(s) about the pros and cons. (That includes parents' expectations).

When we ask "Is this reasonable" we need to specify "for whom." For every scout in your council? No. For all, or even half, the scouts in your troop? No. For 1 in 40 boys scouts? Well, that's where we find ourselves on a bubble. This kind of big-ticket scouting is the sport of 1-percenters or scouts surrounded by 1-percenters who could provide jobs or fundraising opportunities. (Jambo always only attracted less than 3% of registered scouts.) That number plays out in our troop/crew. Of about 40 eligible, one signed up. So, the working assumption of far-off councils might be that it's worth it ... only if they can guarantee opportunity-of-a-lifetime side-trips. And for boys in distant councils, the working assumption is that they will never be anywhere near these places again unless their parents shell out for the entire family's air fair. But, son #2 at age 16, for example, having met a regional venturing officer who we dropped off at the Megabus stop after an area summit, came to Mrs. Q and I with a plan to go visit a buddy who had re-located to Charlotte, changing buses at the DC rail station. The boy had a solid plan, and was going to cost us less in gas and food than if we had taken him along vacationing with us at his grandparents! He could have stayed over in DC, except he and I had already done that once when Mrs. Q had a speaking engagement with the hotel expense paid. Paying $ to be on someone else's tour schedule has always been a non-starter for my kids. And I guess for most of our council, which offers no side trips. But, most of the scouts around here don't mind the kick-in-the-butt to buy a spare uni (scout shop coupon comes with our council's Jambo fee). There's the mystique of maybe being able to swap a whole shirt with one of another scout's your size. One of our scouts came back with a larger-than-life story about him and a buddy swapping their uni's for two soldiers' BDU's. The boy then parlayed that into getting fast-tracked at the doughnut line, then going to the back of the line and selling his box of doughnuts to impatient scouts.

If he really is into conservation, this is is probably the right schedule. I'd like to see more boys hustle up and get their Eagle at the start of high school so that they can tackle things like Hornaday as older scouts.

And I, being a revolutionary, believe we would do well give only Den Mother/Father patches to adults, dispense with Den Chiefs, and have Scouts and Venturers be the Den Leaders.

@pchabdo, for point of reference, the crew president decided to devote last nights meeting to fire-starting skills. Each member successfully kept to one match - except for the oldest, most impatient and easily distracted venturer. Long range goal: multi-point insertion, land-navigation, and general survival drill. (Or as we used to say growing up: a walk in the woods to some cool campsite in the middle of nowhere.) I don't talk adventure anymore. I'm about resourcefulness. Be resourceful, and the adventure will come.

Not your problem. Make it clear that it's not your problem. They either fix it or be the umpteenth patrol in this country who never settled on a yell. If they want to get unstuck, have them try this ... Go to the library, check out Hank, The Cow Dog series (in paper or audio books), enjoy the story or fast forward to where Hank encounters coyotes, pick a really cool line from the coyote characters, convert it to a yell. But let me re-emphasize: not your problem to solve. Like @@Stosh says, it may not even be a problem. The boys may call the SM/SPL about how often their troop uses patrol yells. If they do, ask the SPL on an older scout to pay your boys a visit. If they don't, well, there you have it. Finally, there's nothing saying they can't have a multi-part yell: one for the morning, one for the evening, one for when they brush their teeth ... Real coyotes certainly know how to mix it up. They've been driving us campers nuts ever since they've been reintroduced to WPa.

Yep. Sounds nice. Until some creative scout does something really creative, and a disgruntled committee member spouts off about it not being in the guidelines as if you've just tread on holy writ. This is a question for patrol leaders to resolve. Period.

Not service anymore than reading a MB pamphlet or attending NYLT is service. It sounds like great preparation for service. And I think he should look into unique opportunities that he can have outside of his troop (e.g., schools, youth groups, etc ...) once he completes his training. Let us know what your son thinks of the course.

The drop in enthusiasm for side trips might be money, but it might be a sentiment like "My folks are gonna drag me - or I'm gonna go - to a march on Washington someday anyway. So why bother now?" Also, more kids are post-modern nomads anyway. (Heck, you can't even pile in the back of the station wagon for a wrestling match anymore.) So, more time on the road does not impress them.