qwazse

We have a scout that is held up because he needs service hours for star......He will not do anything other than meetings and camp outs..... No selflessness in the boy.....he is 12 years old. Another FCFY success story! Does he do a good turn daily? Of not let him know there's an old fart in Steeler country who would happily kick him to the curb if he doesn't shape up.

Great!!! I love those well thought-out all aboard projects. But what if a PL decides he wants his boys to shovel out fire hydrants after last night's blizzard? (It's all I could think while sweating into the screen. Pretend we're discussing this five months from now.). He gets the all-clear from the SM the word goes out and everyone digs their way to the VFD house for lunch. (There's a coffee shop by our fire hall. I can find a couple of scouts thee on any given day.) Again, they missed your deadline. Most of the bous will not get the message. Paperwork? If mom was pulling graveyard at the hospital and dad worked for the power company, junior probably just left with a note on the fridge "I'm making my way to the coffee shop by noon!" Next meeting, it's probably on each boy's honor to gauge how many hours he worked. The fire chief is pleased. It makes the papers. Now do you really want the tag line to read "Troop xxx's heroic efforts: not service, says committee"? My point: yes, you should plan ahead. But be flexible and prepared that boys will do great things with just there buddy on a moment's notice. I don't see anything in the book that prevents that from counting as service.

I'm sorry, but if any boy hasn't done a day of good in six months time, he should be kicked to the curb. We had to set some standards for projects and start screening after being overwhelmed with last minute requests. Now we don't even consider a service project without 30 days notice. Also we never schedule in conflict with a camping trip or other activity. What's wrong with last minute requests? Half our projects occur during campouts. Imagine this situation: patrol x while on their hike, find a vandalized cemetery. They find the farmer who owns the land, and he explains that he has been catching up on tornado damage and would love to see the toppled stones righted. PL calls SM and asks to adjust hike plan so they can spend the afternoon fixing things. SM approves, and boys get to spend sunset looking over their work. They set up camp nearby to watch over he dead. In the evening the vandals come by, and PL explains how uncool it was what they did. The boys then walk the thugs through the graveyard, showing them the many infants were buried beside their young moms (cholera probably), and the chief thug asks if he can come to their next meeting. Everyone parts amicably. A couple of patrol X come back to the next meeting ready to log rank advancement, and your committee member says, "Sorry, you should have waited until next month to do that good deed, those hours don't count, troop rule."

BD, my experience has been that youth in whatever organization have put the service hours in to make any rank they desire 10 times over. They just haven't kept track of it. The only thing that those requirements do is take up time during the announcements, because some adult just has to pipe in "this weekend's project counts for service hours ..." to boys who've knocked off their hours months ago and will show up with tools in hand and grins on their faces nonetheless.

Scout should spend exactly eight hours (no more or less) testing paddles at the community boat ramp. Like the song says: "Dip. Dip. And Swing." While we're at it. If a boy does a good turn daily and it takes a minute each time, can he count it as 6 hours of service by the end of the year? Yes, I think mandatory service hours are an abomination.

Some of our units are pretty seat-of-your pants. Then they have a problem like this. Try to fix it, but eventually succumb to the prevailing culture.

Okay, use your "nice labels" and when the kid is in Juvie and has nothing better to read the dictionary and look up "oppositional" and "defiant" he'll say "[insert expletive here], so I was a bad kid and they were too chicken to say so!" What you call it doesn't matter. How you handle it does. First step in a cure is recognizing you have a problem. If a kid knows your accepting him (that includes with negative reinforcement where necessary) as he is: bad and all, no whitewashing, he will grow to respect you. The challenge is you have to be very clear to him when he is doing harm to other boys, and as they get older this becomes more ambiguous. (The boys may find their own way of dealing with him, and the results may be less than pleasant.) Get the parents to deal with it if at all possible. If not, you need a dedicated adult to manage that boy.

No hiking required for tenderfoot, although a hike is a great way to gain a few of those skills. (E.g., poisonous plant identification.) Lots of our parks actually have fitness trails with stops where they do particular exercises.

It may help to use the term the best experts in psychology use for ODD: a bad kid. To succeed, you need an adult dedicated to enforcing discipline in that one kid. One cuss or threat, removed from the activity until willing to behave. One hit, go home. Forcible removal may be necessary, so it's best if the parents get trained in restraining the kid and are responsible to do this. You have to be this strict at the cub level. It's our only hope that the boy will be in any shape for scouting as he matures.

The boy's in HS? That changes everything! The crew owes him a campout! He deserves a chance to sit with the venturers and adults away from the Webelos IIIs and figure out this dynamic and how he can fit in it. BD, prior commitments family or otherwise take precedence, IMHO. Now this could be a situation where the mom said yes to too many people, and didn't figure out until the last minute. Unless these girls were seasoned leaders (competent big sister types - it happens), I bet the SM would have preferred to have his oldest scout there, especially if the boy is new and needs opportunities to fit in. Regardless, everyone needs to work towards maximizing the number of youth on the field. We all can win, but everyone needs to know that that's the game were playing!

Oh my! Don't worry about that! (Except for maybe sending in your opinion on the matter -- letting folks at national know what you like or don't like about the current program and proposed changes.) Things will be the way they are now for a couple of years, which plenty of time for you and your mates to pull together an awesome crew carrying some serious bling! I don't see big changes in requirements anyway. You have your DE's attention. Good for you. get your adults trained. Get started on that first Bronze and seek that fun and adventure in the world.

It sounds like your SM wants to get to the bottom of this on your son's behalf. That's a good thing. My SM welcomes our crew on nearly every activity, I've insistend that if the SPL hasn't extended the invite personally to the crew president - youth to youth, in a timely fashion - the crew is not invited. My youth would be VERY upset to learn that another youth was left out because of their imposition on the program. Clear communication is imperative to make that happen. I think you can be honest with the mom and let her know you can't take her at her word. It sounds like she was the one who told you there was no room. Frankly, I've been known to forgo my own gear if that last seatbelt was needed for a warm body. But that's just sleep-under-tarp me. Other adults aren't so accomodating. If you have other issues about girls tagging along, (or boys from other inits for that matter), a last-minute culture etc..., you should admit them while respecting the fact that there may be cultural differences that you and your family can adjust to. Don't expect much from the troop except another campout soon. Other solution (for future reference, and I know this is a huge leap of faith for some folks): swap vehicles. If yours is larger, everybody goes. Fill the tank, and you can still claim the deduction. (Or reimbursement if your troop does that sort of thing.)

I've posted several replies about orienteering hikes or navigation hikes. Try those keywords. I don't think in terms of NSP's. A five mile day hike on medium terrain is well within the reach of the average 11 yo. So most of what folks have suggested with regard to first class requirements should apply. I would never call anything a tenderfoot hike. I've seen older kids have tremendous fun on the simplest jaunts. I've also seen eight year old girls climb a mile up to the continental divide, leaving older sisters back at 9000'.

I get what BB's pushing for. Sure, the Oath and Law is useful to anyone, but we expect adults to not merely be oversized scouts. We want them to implement the program from a different perspective. There are some virtues that scouters need that aren't in the law (e.g., patience, vision), this list helps an adult work on those things. For example, everyone wants to be helpful, but if everyone lights the fire the minute they see boys struggling, nobody grows. If you can't stand them being a mile off course on an orienteering hike, nobody will learn how to get unlost. You need someone with patience to coach boys through the process, and a vision of those boys a year or two older coming up to a soaked fire pit at the end of a very rainy hike and knowing exactly what to do. Well we don't want a "scouters law" with more vocab words in it! We just want adults to grasp what it takes to help these boys along. It's a unique privilege to have an "Adult room" for this sort of thing. I'm stuck having to herd adults into the church parlor once or twice a year. I figure I miss one or two things each time, and am afraid that some of the shyer folks don't know how to start the conversation (especially if their kid has recently been making parenting a little rough).

PDaddy: your addition is probably my #1 that I need to keep saying to myself. Bb: i don't think you can add attachments. Your best bet would be to make something like a google doc and share the link. Besides, text is more important IMHO. Centering and font choice has a lot to do with the room you're hanging it in. You should just ask one of your adults, maybe one with a sense of style, to give you their opinion. With that, I'll leave you with a #7: there are as many ways to write truths as there are people who read them, but there are only a few good ways to apply them.

BP, I get the need to train council pro's, really I do. But lecturing them on the Venturing oath and code ... what does that get me? Better to use that time they spend in training looking at slides of different oaths and codes to teach them how to get of my kid's backs and give the little gompers some real authority around council from the moment they darken the door of HQ! But that's my adult opinion, so don't count it for much. I'm encouraging our VOA Advisor to put it to the officers and have them formulate their own opinion and pen a brief to the task force.

Backstory: Tom is a Raven's fan. The other characters are always off-screen by the way. It's just dad and his dialogue for every episode! The average yard around here is 50' minus hillside, of which we have lots. So PD has 250' to go. Will he make it? Don't know. I'd love to see a future episode with him at a campfire talking to Tom and their SM about what they are doing letting their boys camp 100 yards across the field. The character also has a teenage daughter with boyfriend drama. I have half a mind to write the producers and tell them about the Venturing program, and suggest a sketch of dad's reaction when she asks him to sign a BSA youth membership application. The other half thinks like jblake: it might be too true to be funny!

UC points out what what I've observed. Most venturers don't have "patch envy". They've never even give it a ought. There was an instance in a neighboring crew where the boys kept insisting that the girls weren't "real" scouts because they couldn't earn eagle. The advisor/SM who told me about this was clearly frustrated by the situation. I witnessed one occasion where a boating director told two girls (certified sailors each) that they couldn't take a sunfish out because they didn't have small boat sailing MB. I suggested to her a paradigm shift. If youth throughout the nation are experiencing "discrimination by rank", then yes, they will want a more uniform advancement program. However I think that's a minority experience, and like my youth, older kids really don't want to be MB'ed to death. They're ready to do a lot of Star-equivalent work, but they want everyone to hold their applause until they finish their "concert."

I get it. Venturing's cool. But it is not huge (as my council president regularly reminds me). Their numbers are also on decline. (Boy Scouts, on the other hand, had a bump this year. http://www.scouting.org/About/FactSheets/YearinReview.aspx) Sure our older youth want to be part of something different. I as a scouter wanted to try something novel. This well crafted program was the perfect offering because it met a need of the youth in my community. But, learning the oath and code was not a big draw for me. It hasn't impressed my youth. Fact is, many of the girls who've joined my crew were thrilled to be considered scouts. Learning the same oath, might just help them sense a little more commonality with the other 90% of the organization. Or maybe not. That's why I'm gonna start asking the youth and maybe get them to submit an opinion to the task force.

CC, quantity is a quality all it's own. So Derrick, are you related to Robert? Are we getting in the middle of a family discussion here? Leadership is a little different in a small troop. For example, most of your merit badge counselors will not be in house. Boys may have to make more contacts outside of their troop to get advancement done. On the flip side, once you're on the trail, a team of 8 can cover a lot of ground. It's a lot easier to make a hike plan for one patrol than for four!

BP is the beneficiary of one of National's greatest program revision, which isn't even 20 years old, yet he doesn't want to be obliged to any revision for future generations. It's like going through the door and slamming it shut behind! That said, I look forward to more youth input. BD's daughter is a bit too young to ask if she'd rather not learn a new set of vows in three years. My kids are indifferent, and I think the rest of the crew will feel the same. BP! What say your youth (not that we don't cherish your well thought opinion and compelling rhetoric) as to adopting e scout oath and law? My one youth who is interested in awards likes the current program -- oodles of awards for every little thing are for her younger sister. She specifically appreciated the multi-part challenge and open-ended nature of the bronze awards.

St. Paul trumps any guidelines: "Let the marriage bed be sacred". But, I think that's the gist of the GSS anyway. And, it would lie at the heart of any discussion of PDA I'd have. Both are 18-20 (in spite of me remembering them entering high school just yesterday), so I figure I'm advising them one adult to another. They still got a lot of maturing to do, and I'd be honored if they chose to sit around my campfire to do it. At least, that's the way it's worked with older youth (from other crews as well as mine). Life happens, they wind up coming to camp, play a few cards with the "youngsters", then pull a chair up beside you to talk about whatever is really on their mind.

BDB, need all e dish, eh? He is still registered, although hasn't been able to participate because his leave schedule did not coincide with our outings. She was never a member of the crew (although she came to a couple of day activities). Her dad wouldn't allow it for fear of what might happen between the two of them in the woods with us. Go figure. I'd have no problem with them tenting together, although I'd warn her that I've been known to applaud from my bunk loudly in response to beautiful performances. Seriously, I would expect these two to want to bunk with their friends from high school for old times sake, but this is the crew's first married couple, and they aren't both signed up, so for now it's all hypothetical for me.

Crows, who you gonna caw?