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Looks like Bryan on Scouting hasn't gotten the memo yet. He called the National Venturing Cabinet president a "youth'": https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2020/06/01/meet-tyler-grey-venturings-top-youth-leader-for-2020-2021/

@yknot, Half my kin are in WV. They'd like your business, not your germs.

There is a sense that bigger is worse. Growing up, our default camping locations: Adjacent a water dam (no swimming, just hiking and fishing) Lakes on conservancy land (again no swimming) The trail that cut across our county. The back of a farm The county fair grounds (our campsite actually was an "exhibit" for the Bicentennial) Town/township parks A church camp that needed a trail built during the off-season The county airport (SM put a gnarly orienteering course there) The nearest summer camp ... we'd do Klondike there in the winter We had so many low-budget options that state park rangers would have to ask us to camp in their primitive sites.

Oh, it is much harder to get MBC's in general now. The paperwork someone has to do just to be registered probably consumes the equivalent of a few counseling sessions. Coupled with a culture that just won't answer the phone, and our boys have a hurdle 10 times the height that I did. A good district commissioner should help you hunt down that unresponsive MBC. There might be some real-life support that we as scouters could offer someone. Heck, in this case, the person might be an essential employee, and one of us could go till his garden for him/her! I am very grateful that my son's counselors got back to them right quick. One even stopped by the house because her office was chaos due to relocation, but she wanted to get Son#2 in right away rather than wait for her life to be settled. I know that doesn't always happens. But, this is the world that our scouts will have to live and work in. Shaking trees is a life skill.

He folks, he's coming around! No little round medallion is worth sitting through a class to earn! The only reason that the MB pow-wow that I attended as a scout was interesting is that it was in a college science building, and along the halls were museum-quality exhibits. Guess how many classes, online or otherwise, the two Eagles who I spawned sat through (outside of summer camp)? None. Zip. Nada. Why? Because that was the last thing they needed for their personal growth. What they needed was to learn to call counselors and work out how they were going to complete the requirements. This is exactly what our scouts need to do in this pandemic. Infection control protocols? No excuse. Contact your counselor and figure out how to make it work. Summer camp closed? No excuse. Make a plan B. Make some calls. Include your PL and SM on the plan. Aquatics areas not open? Schedule some land-shark MBs. I can think of no better time to work on Personal Fitness, Hiking, or Cycling. Get outside and expose your water droplets to solar radiation. You know who really cares about getting your MBs signed off? Your scout, and your counselor. So much can be done from a balcony or front porch. Make it work. SMs, get your scouts in touch with counselors who you've met and whom you trust. Get the troop librarian in control of the library. If you're troop is still a Red Zone, arrange dead drops for pamphlets.

@JoeBob, I don't propose to speculate on the proclivities of the interred. I can say that, I am better for having walked among them last week with my sons and a girlfriend decorating their graves. It's an act of faith on my part, that as I am moved to do so for these strangers, someone will do the same for my father, uncles, and aunt. That memory was the sauce to the BBQ.

The purging of the godless. Egregious ageism embodied in the now-60 year-old ban on anyone above a certain age earning rank.

If any good comes from this pandemic at the collegiate level, it will be the realization that that students don't need the community built by university to learn stuff. The have the community, they need the university to come teach them how to build it.

Laurel Highlands council just cancelled its resident programs at Heritage Reservation. That'll be it for summer camp in Western PA.

@TimB as others said, you have little control in an HA aside from making yourself fit for anything that will come your way. And, given the behavior of this crew as a whole, you might be dealing with scouts who haven't even maintained their boots ... let alone their bodies. Ideally, right now, your scout (I'm not using "son," because at this point you need to detach yourself from your knowledge of his aspirations, emotions, etc ...) needs to be touching base with the other scouts every week or so. He needs to be the cheerleader, promoter, joke-teller ... whatever suits his personality. Selfies with his gear are in order. A socially distanced hike or service project is in order. (Online shakedown!) Anything that could be for the good of the group ... challenge him to think of it and put himself out there. I cobbled together a Seabase Bahamas crew from three different regions. There was a lot about that that was not perfect. But, there were things that went very very well. Building of a scouting fellowship among venturers was one of them. My WSJ troop was actually a lot harder to prepare because we had scouts from a dozen troops with different cultures. Worse, in their own troop they were pegged in one role, but in our troop that was irrelevant. Fortunately, most of the challenges happened via one or two scouts a day, so as leaders we could work through them. I talked to the advisor from the one crew in our region, and he said it was even tougher because his Sea Scouts and Venturers had few days of storming. I've debriefed enough Philmont crews to know that they face the same problems. The fittest, most well equipped boys will have a less than perfect time if they haven't learned to love one another. That scout spirit has to be the first thing in the backpack!

I'm amused that folks find it puzzling that LDS is doing what most of our other leaders of faith traditions do ... empowering its parishioners to do what they do best according to their passions. I'm not heavily invested in my church's youth program (teaching Sunday school doesn't count, that's an investment in The Church -- different concept) because other congregants are better cut-out for the Jr. High youth group dog-and-pony-show. (Yes, folks, there are consequences to having that attitude, and Mrs. Q. and I have had to work hard to rebuild slightly burnt bridges.) The fact of the matter is that most parents find the concept of sending their kids on forced marches into bear country to be slightly unnerving. So, I do my scouting thing and make it work for the scouts in my congregation. They are all in different troops. Others lean into the church's youth program as they see fit. Telling everyone to get on board with the church's program or go home is the last thing we elders in the congregation would ever do. A lot of folks on this forum were perplexed with LDS scouters because that's precisely what many of their bishops were trying to do in calling them to lead a program they didn't quite know how to invest in. I'm looking forward to VISA because, going forward, when we put LDS scouts and scouters beside scouters from other faiths, we'll respect them for the balance they are making between scouting and their church's youth program (just like many of us religious types do). And we will be able to have more fun with them at our campfires, in our service projects, and at our MB pow-wows ... just like I did when I was a scout.

I was so relieved when I actually opened @The Latin Scot's reply because right below his abbreviated message in the sidebar was an ad with an image of facemasks -- the first of which was purple. So for those of you whose cookies lead to the presentation of other ads ... visualize:

Like everything else, it's an odds game. The bulk of cases in a normal season have occurrs by the end of February. For kids, that puts their viral-related cardiac risk window in the spring semester. We have no idea if Coovid-19 will impart more or less cardiac risk than other viruses. But the timing guarantees that we won't start finding out until June.

What I am about to say is in no way an attempt to minimize the current contagion: all natural viral infections can find their way to the heart weeks after recovery. The 2018-2019 flu vaccines got a bad rep for their lack of efficacy, and accordingly my brother-in-law and his wife passed on them -- swearing by the vitamin supplements. They got hit bad the week before Christmas and by March, his heart went into a-fib requiring hospitalization. One of the most significant benefits of influenza vaccines -- even when they don't knock out every strain of virus that comes our way --- is the dramatic reduction in subsequent cardiac complications. Most years, we don't think much of this by the time summer camp rolls around because most kids who weren't vaccinated will have had their infections 6 months earlier and are well past the window where, for some of them, the infection would rebound in myocardium. Basically, those heart attacks are more likely to happen in the school gym than on a weekend camp. Given that any given scout's coovid-19 infection would have been more recent, the cardiac risk window will fall in a very active outdoor season. This begs the question ... do we want our youth to be home alone, or around other scouts should one of them has a heart attack? On the other hand, how far away from major trauma centers do we want them to be?

Contact a counselor in your district and arrange for a meeting. It's front porch weather. A great way to earn a badge. (Actually, one of the old Cit. MBPs was written around the story of a scout meeting a local judge at his house.) Neither of those MBs have a requirement of being in online classes for so many hours.

@InquisitiveScouter , I'm laughing out loud. Prospective Parent: Is ___ in your crew? Me: Yes, ___ is our CC. Parent: Then my kids aren't joining it! Me: Well, would you like to be CC? Parent: No!!!!!! Me to Myself: (Dodged a bullet with that one.)

In general, I'm sufficiently free-market to understand that someone hast to pay the bills. I just wish: 1. Ads didn't drag on the presentation of pages. 2. Ads had the same format as forum posts. Maybe a slightly different color. 3. Ads were related to forum content. We can't dictate any of that. There's a firm belief among admen that sales are better if they read your cookies, etc ... before inserting ads and presenting a page. So, the best we can hope for is that Terry is negotiating well for the hit on performance.

I nixed a "two axe handle lengths apart" concept for the same reason.

Sweden's mortality rate is still climbing -- and that includes some pediatric deaths . Ranking higher than the US is sometimes a bad thing. S Korea just had a fresh outbreak in nightclub attendees. The US strategy has been and continues to be a middle ground between two extremes. Our hospitals are getting back to treating non-COVID patients. They aren't elective procedures any more, they are scheduled essential procedures.

Who wouldn't love another patch? Go for it!

E94's experience parallels the classic my-son-can't-do-more-pull-ups problem that scouters face. Did the scout grab at a pull-up bar EVERY DAY for a month? Did he at least hang there for 30 seconds? In a community of brutal honesty, the answer will be "No" to which the reply will be "That's okay, when he decides to try for 30 days straight, I'm sure he'll get a chin above the bar." In other communities the answer will be obtuse with varying levels of indignation. The reply remains the same. However, my impression viral spread among the home-bound hasn't increased, it's just the number of large gatherings has plummeted, and along with that so have new infections from that source.

Okay social distance warriors ... there's wisdom and there's zealotry. Now I am grateful that we brought Mrs. Q's mom up from FL last year. We were beyond done with long distance elder care, and the pandemic would have put the stress levels through the roof. So, I feel your pain @HashTagScouts. But, here in PA the "secured" nursing homes have been utter nightmares. Given the situation that you described, your dad's best bet is to get out with his buddies, hit the links or at least walk the course. Here's hoping that call never comes. You might be right @Sniktaw. As I mentioned earlier, some camps would be better operated with two week (or maybe even three week) sessions. My oldest Aunt remembered Campfire Girls camps in NY that extended through much of the summer. I wonder if that was part of it ... get any kids who might not have yet been exposed to flu through their first week so that they can enjoy the remaining four or five. Could an HA reconfigure to handle such extended adventures? Maybe. Would today's parents buy in? I doubt it.

The Egyptians really nailed it, didn't they?

Without denying the possibility of intentional obfuscation, there could be a receiver-operator thing going on here. Only a fool would look at any cadre of kids and say they are 100% safe -- as in zero accidents, injuries, or infections will occur every day they are at camp. One might with 100% confidence be able to say that they are safe relative to being at home for that week. That's no consolation to the parent who is 100% confident that their child is 100% safe at home over the same time. The entire framework of Bayesian statistics is built around a proposition that people have a different confidences for a range of values so that: Camp director is 100% confident that campers will be 80% safe, 90% confident that campers will be 85% safe, 20% confident that that they will be 90% safe, 10% confident that they will be 95% safe and 0% confident that they will be more than 99% safe. This is mainly because they've seen thousands of campers, talked to dozens of regulators. It's not because they've seen a slew of campers during a pandemic. Unit leader is 100% confident that campers will be 50% safe, 80% confident that they will be 75% safe, 10% confident that they will be 80% safe, and 0% confident that they will be more than 99% safe. This is mainly because he/she knows that one of those campers is going to pull out a Frisbee or a football, and things will go south fast (especially if the ASM emeritus picks up said toy after all the kids handled it). And he/she has parents that have experienced this from ground level. On the other hand ... It's not because they've seen a slew of kids at home in the summer during a pandemic. These are what we call prior probabilities of a utility function. (It's more complex than that because the root question is "safe from what?", and each calamity comes with a different distribution. But, I've over simplified to make a point.) If you are in a community who believes 20% unsafe is happening at home anyway, then your money is on the camp director. If you're in a community that doesn't even see 2% unsafe happening at home, you're money is on the unit leader. Those decision points, needless to say vary. I have 4 health care workers coming into my house every day (one sleeps here). Two more of us are essential workers with travel papers. Another is running our elder-care errands as needed (i.e., taking our elder to for drives that include a McD's shake and burger). I'm more confident that this bug will find me at home than at camp (which, as I've said, is patrol cooking). I don't expect anyone else to be running the same gambit. But, anyone who wants to pull the 100% confident rhetoric can talk to the hand. (Once I put my gloves on.)

I think that's how Venturing saved me. I was able to discover a few "happy places." BP's water colors "My House in the Woods" also gave an indication of where a scouter should aim. Applying that to advancement, I only advise the parents who ask me directly about how to help their son with a requirement. Doing more than that is a drag on everyone's time.