qwazse

Why market Eagle? Because its the one thing about BSA that intrinsically demands adult association. High school kids don't need an adult for outdoor fun. They don't need an adult to: Grab a ball/weights/running shoes, call up buddies, and condition for the big game. They can arrange their own time in the weight room, the QB can schedule additional film study without the coach if needed. Visit sponsors, go to the feed store, get the stuff to raise your livestock, and bring it to auction. To my knowledge, they can have one-on-one E-mail exchanges with adults who help procure materials. But they can make that club happen with a minimum of adult interference. Order their parts, get together and assemble your controller, build a bot to haul their gear to someone's grandpa's cabin, fish while the bot makes the fire. Bring the catch to the bot and run the "rainbow trout with cashews in teriyaki sauce 4.0" subroutine. That last one is a bit forward-looking, but boys will be out opening day of trout season on their own because it's a lot more efficient than finding two adult leader's to chaperon them. (Heck, I never went fishing with an adult until I was married and went out with my in-laws.) Older youth set aside scouting and venturing because it is good and right for well-trained fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and seventeen year olds to fulfill the vision of the pinnacle scouting experience of hiking and camping independently with your mate. Yes, I believe that those youth are at higher specific risks outside of the accountability to an SM or Advisor. But higher risk does not always mean "wrong."

If by functioning, you mean steadily losing membership -- especially among older youth, then indeed we've been functioning like some exquisite frog boil. More seriously, YPT was initially designed so that leaders could chaperon according to a continuum from children who needed the presence of adults to adolescents who were naturally gaining autonomy. It then became a tool for BSA to shed legal liability. At that point, it became a binary youth vs. adult policy. 21st century YPT is the result of directed litigation. Not the other way around.

We as a culture have relied on benchmarks to the point that subjectivity is a scary thing. Meanwhile there are some forms of service that require specific commitments of time. There are others where it’s one small thing done every day. Say a scout living near a cemetery wants to play taps for a veterans’ family. An SM might think, “Fine, that’s an hour during internment.” But, behind that one hour, there could be practicing that one song 10 minutes every day for months, listening to recordings of ceremonies, attending a ceremony or two, etc ... Maybe even practicing as an honor guard at a CoH. (See how I folded in the OP there?) The lines between what’s service vs. skill development can blur right quick. So yes, if so much time needs to be spent to get a decent haul when Scouting for Food, counting hours comes in real handy. But, if a scout is helping grandma navigate getting vaccinated, clocking hours falls by the wayside right quick.

@Kamala I hope it helps. As you can tell, we’ll keep spinning from here. A lot of us come across related issues, and we’ll keep jawing here for a while. There’s no need for you to follow every twist and turn. But, drop a while later and let us know what strategy you all took and how it worked.

This is not complicated. Stop worrying about service hours. The only reason BSA wants you to count it is so that they can for-sure-brag about the dollar utility of scouting to this nation. The scout slogan is Do a good turn daily. If scouts are doing that -- and it sounds like they are -- then they've performed the requisite hours of service. If not, then no dog-and-pony show at an ECoH or clocking hours at some project will make a hill of beans difference in the youth's scout spirit. Tell your boys to help the old folks in your life to navigate vaccine sign-up. I assure you that they will wind up putting in more hours than they need for any rank by the time everyone in their circle is dosed.

Oh yeah, they once visited the editor of the local paper. She took their picture, then they helped her write a caption, and fit it on the page for the next edition.

There have been job losses for executives, does that count?

File under: Why bean-counting of service hours should be stricken from all rank advancement requirements.

O what a tangled web we weave when we don't add 1/3 of a week to the end of each month. ;)

@ThenNow, the evolution of therapy is such that therapists determine that patients need more of it for refractory conditions. This, by the way, makes it nearly impossible for someone to complete certain kinds of therapy (e.g., strategies that require the patient participate with a family member twice a week for a couple of months are simply inaccessible to someone whose minimum wage job(s) with spartan benefits has inflexible hours). So, if the settlement is quite large, we may find that a victim of a scoutmaster has access to an expansive therapy while a victim of a family member -- especially from an underprivileged family -- gets limited treatment. From a social science perspective, it will provide a natural experiment into what works and what doesn't in a large population. From a social justice and health economy perspective it could have unforeseen effects.

Regarding costs ... I am only pointing out that the rhetoric does not match the math. To be honest, I expect the cost of therapy to rise in proportion to the size of the settlement. Victims might actually get less support if they are awarded more. Regarding properties, etc ... scouting doesn't really need them. But, I can foresee a future in which independent property owners could be sued if they allowed a troop with an abuser to camp on their land. Regarding the term "arrogance" ... note that I'm not the only one using it. BSA needed to admit that it's protections only work unto a point, but it now cannot do so in the face of litigation.

So the proposed settlement would cover the costs of therapy.

If we are coming in above budget, we usually cover dues or camp costs.

You moved and your boys stuck with scouts. That’s a win! No personal experience. My kids are just not that creative. (They went on to study chemical engineering). Our troop had a scout or two with brothers in another unit. They all grew up just fine.

@ThenNow, thanks for the perspective. It sounds like step 1 was recognizing that you didn't do enough to stop an nefarious person. Step 2 is to recognize that nefarious people know how to avoid being stopped. They game the system, and that's intimidating to a young person who barely understands how the system works. That means that, yes, you didn't do enough, but that does not mean you weren't good enough. To get the kind of victory you're thinking of, you needed a lot of other people around you to be open and brutally honest. But, the culture was not standing by the young people who would do that. BSA was part of that culture. I think the biggest problem was that they were arrogant enough to think they had a solution.

@skeptic, Fauci was on NPR 1A this morning saying that he wouldn't expect a roll-out to elementary age kids until sometime next year. (That's not to say one shouldn't vaccinate a child with asthma or other serious condition.) The fact that youth are at the least risk is a reason to hold off on the vaccine until side effect data are in from everyone under the emergency use authorization (EUA). The current vaccines have had about 1000 claims of deaths after administration to 40,000,000. That's way better then the lethality of the virus in adults, but it's not better than how infected kids have fared under natural exposure. Arguably, most -- if not all -- of those claims may not be valid upon autopsy. But the EUA for all three vaccines were based on trials of adults, so the side effect profiles are concerning enough that the pediatric trials will start and proceed with caution. Also, FWIW, the margin of error (confidence interval) on the single dose's 85% efficacy against severe illness or death ranges from 54% to 97%, and there was enough variability among trial designs that one shouldn't say that the efficacy is "slightly lower" than the mRNA vaccines. All three vaccines are performing quite well against placebo's. We don't think one is performing much better than the other. So, expect to have a tough time recruiting in communities with pandemic-addled parents whose kids are not going to get vaccinated for a while.

Thanks @CynicalScouter. The retention of units makes it quite clear that LDS, folks with a restrictive sexual ethic, and litigation have become a perfect storm. Nothing against pros. They are in an impossible situation ... trying to sell registration at a higher cost than many parents/scouts are willing to pay ... and trying to do it without handshakes in-person. Many CO's are on the brink of collapse. If we've hit bottom, we might see some rebound post-pandemic. But I think that won't happen until '22, based on when vaccine will be rolled out to kids.

It's been a while, but some of my favorite visits were to: The volunteer fire house, One of the dad's commercial photography studio. Nature trails, Ball games. Marching in parades! For our district, I coordinate a flag placement one evening in advance of Memorial day. Lots of Lion/Tiger parents tell me how much they appreciate that!

Gentlemen, didn’t Mama tell you it’s not polite to inquire of a lady’s age?

I'm sorry. In my frame of reference, sexism and hypocrisy are two different things. It is possible to eschew one and not the other. Regardless, I think the point is that those who favor organizational segregation do not feel that they are sexist. And, although they feel alternate views are philosophically inconsistent, they have not labeled the people who hold them as hypocrites. For my part, I think it's a mistake to lionize this batch of Eagle scouts. If there was a "lion" in this movement, it was Mike Sarbaugh, who made the executive decision to grant girls access to the program, and proceeded over a couple of years to "herd" a critical mass of scouters into accepting it. Of course, he was pushed along by numerous venturers and arrowmen who kept questioning the principle of sex segregation. If one good thing comes from GS/USA's suit, it will be a discovery of the thinking of both national boards -- great fodder for some historian to synthesize in the next decade and think of better ways for both organizations to collaborate for the well-being of your youth. That process will take decades of iteration since our nation lacks a POTUS who (perhaps, along with the 1st lady) will lean on execs in both organizations to "play better together." But, interfering not help election prospects, so here we are.

Was the post edited, or the word misspelled? Because when I searched, you were the first to use it in this thread. I ask, because we do call each other out on ad homenim arguments, and would have done so had I noticed.

Without telling them, there were several reasons why I wanted our troop's boys and parents to know about this recognition: It might inspire a few sisters to "Scout In". It also gives Scouts BSA girls who are also in GS/USA a pulpit to promote the Gold Award. Some of you are negative about that, but I consider it to be a positive. For a number of reasons GS/USA has not tracked the future successes of its top awardees. Sure, lots of us here know about it, but IMHO it does not have the on-the-street recognition that it deserves. Some of our scouts get stalled in their advancement, and don't realize how quickly they can move things along. There were some good project ideas there. Most Life scouts could use more ideas. The social media interaction might inspire our scouts to try something similar. Some of our boys are making instructional videos for school. So, more examples of scouts presenting and recording themselves might help that process. Some of our boys can relate to the testimonials about stepping up to leadership challenges. They aren't comfortable with it. Or, they try once and it ends badly (e.g., a boy may get labeled "bossy" just as readily as a girl). Regardless, it helps for those boys to know that other kids are out there who once felt the same way and learned to lead well in the process of advancing. Anyway, I shared the link with the troop because the list of positives about the event overshadowed the "first ever" hoopla.

Welcome to the forums! As St. Ambrose told St. Monica, "When in Rome ..." Ask your troop if their are any insignia dorks among the leadership, and pose the question to them. If nobody in the troop has an opinion, here's mine: Since you're buying loops and #s anyway, match whatever your son's doing. Me personally, I just get whatever is selling for less at the time and slap it together. Don't bother trying to "stay vintage" unless you're also going to stick with a vintage council strip and other patches that you may have worn as a scout that would carry forward when you turned 18. And, the only reason to do that is if you ever expect to give your shirt to a scouter from another country letting him/her know that you tried to maintain its historical accuracy. When you pass off a uniform as vintage, however, it is good form to keep a card with it explaining the period that your trying to match, and the meaning of each insignia. This helps the person who gets the shirt to appreciate the effort that you made and increases the likelihood that the shirt will travel the globe as one whole unit. This is a nice way to navigate the scouterverse, but too much work for me!

Linked troops allow for all the interaction requested by most American youth. So, what happens in the next few years will depend on the long-term stability of units for girls, and the affordability of a CO chartering two linked-units. If linked units wind up posing a bureaucratic nightmare at the CO level, then we'll see demand for integrated units. As @Eagledad mentioned, depth of leadership is the limiting factor -- especially for linked troops. Joint activities would require, at minimum, two female adult leaders. And, in the real world, female adults will have obligations to girl-specific scouting organizations as well as Scouts BSA. I find it a source of dismay that BSA and GS/USA have not collaborated to form an association to honor the youth who earned top awards in either organization.

The simple reason is that sex segregation is preferred among American youth. Based on my discussions with young people, there is not a great demand for full integration. Most youth in my area are fine with sex segregation and find it somewhat refreshing. That begins to shift at age 14 ... thus the shift toward venturing. Of course, it’s a big country, and demand for a fully integrated program may rise with time. But, that hasn’t happened in the largest scouting associations around the world.