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No, we agree. We should resolutely hew to the mission of the BSA https://www.scouting.org/commissioners/bsa-mission/ The section continues with Oath, Law, etc ... Then it references the federal charter. ... Then goes on to describe council and district responsibilities that commissioners need to know. Guess what's not there? Aims. What this tells me? If I hew to the mission and never learn the aims of scouting, my youth will be just fine.

With the membership losses over the past couple of years, there has to be more gear than boys need out there. For decades, most of us have been sharing with GS/USA, so this will be easier than most think.

So, here's my deal about Aims being largely superfluous for most scouters ... In my Junior Leader Training 4 decades ago, I was never lectured on the Aims. When I signed up Son #1 for tigers, I was never lectured on the Aims. When I became a committee member I was never lectured on the aims of scouting. When I became an ASM I don't remember being lectured on the Aims. Somebody may have told me what they were, but nobody said, "Remember these, or you'll be no good." The SM at the time we crossed over was a lineman who swore by the Oath and Law (along with Motto and Slogan) and said they were words to live by. One of the ASM's was our council (and later area) president, and he didn't waste breath on the Aims. The only concrete lecture on Aims came when I took Venturing Leader Specific Training. I chalk that up to venturers at the time using their own oath and code so they needed to do some verbal gymnastics to say they were cut from the same cloth as boy scouts. As far as I could tell, every effective scouter cared about the aims about as much as he'd care about a rodent's donkey. Why? Well maybe ... because ... the aims were written for people who never were scouts, never learned the Oath and Law, and would only write big checks or legislate in scouts' favor if the package was delivered in three (four?) executive summary points.

@AltadenaCraig, time to smell the coffee. The Aims and Methods are a marketing pitch ... no different than any mission or vision statement. As far as I can tell, folks think "leadership" sells, so "leadership" is in the aims. They think "character" sells, so "character" is in the aims. Even though a US president signed off on it, folks don't think "courage" or "kindred values" sells anymore, so it's not in the aims. This aspect of BSA decision making is not transparent, so without someone doing a PhD thesis on it, we may never know how or why these word-choices shift. Would you be a better scouter if your aim was "patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred virtues"? I don't know. I do think that those four items are quite distinct from one another, whereas "character development, citizenship training, and personal fitness" overlap. And, "leadership" in my mind is redundant to all three. But, I also don't think any of this is mutually exclusive. We have scouters who say, "All I do is teach boys how to stack sticks and keep a fire going." We know that's not all they do. But, we also know that from their perspective, everything else flows from that. I'm not going to force them in their little corner of the world to restate their aims because some policy wonk thinks that new verbiage resonates better with the rest of the country. Do they mean something? Yes. Do other things have the same effect? Sure. That's why there's no panic in changing documentation.

Welcome @Onslow, and thanks for all you do for the youth. Venturing, eh? You're in for a wild ride.

Five years, and I am still trying to sort out how leadership is in any way distinct from character development, citizenship, and mental and physical fitness.

You might need to drill down to see if the units who dropped were also not doing much in terms of advancement in previous years. The other thing to ask is if the CO's have abandoned youth programming altogether or if they've taken up a different youth program.

I'll side with the scouts on this one because ... The skit is funny. Especially if the scout who plays the victim (let's identify him as scout-zero) is the one who introduces the skit wearing the clothes that are about to be "acquired" by the other scouts. Most things are in the delivery. Boxers, or briefs? t-Shirt? Is the victim strutting? Or, does he look like he's just been robbed? I've seen on-the-edge skits from a mixed company of scouts. They did a great job with the balancing act. I'm sure they had some help. I've watched as scripts that National thought were downright innocent go terribly wrong so badly that in presence of my female crew members half of the scouts in a large arena wound up booing at the concept of scouts vs. venturing. Had the organizers cared to vet the script by our VOA, I would probably have said that a partially nude scout streaking across the stage would be preferable. But, I'll admit to there being a "flip side" because ... it's a big country. There's no hard-and-fast rule defining inappropriate dress because some parts of the country think nothing of a scout-zero in a sketch putting on an act in his/her underwear for a few seconds. In parts, having seen that, the audiences night would be ruined. It's hard to determine how the scout would be "at risk" in this scenario. But in some parts, at some times, this could be a threatening act. Everyone knows that beating the pants off of someone is not to be imitated in real life (that's why the skit is funny), but you might have a group of scouts who have been behaving that way IRL, and their laughter would come from a very dark place. Folks with certain stock portfolios might also find this hurtful. The store performed awfully last year. So, the question is: how well do you know your audience? Your boys? Is there a way to deliver this sketch without coming off as mean or mocking cultural sensibilities?

Obviously, the bigger a den the better. But, it the odds of success increase with every 11-13 year old who is interested in a troop. Incoming members of diverse age, yet full of brotherly love is a big deal. Trained adult female leaders is essential. So incoming members who can bring a mature sister or aunt are invaluable. This may mean putting real $ behind funding the training of a younger SM/ASM (e.g. a 20-something college grad or ex-military). If the parents of these scouts aren't in a position to do that, they need to figure out how to ask for help. Finally, one of the biggest blessings is someplace special to camp. Who has property (maybe near a trail)? Whose grandparents have a farm? Which parent has done a favor for a park manager and can ask for a camping spot in a hidden corner of a a community park. Scout camps are nice. But it's really nice to have someplace special that your troop can call "its own."

I always appreciated adults who asked questions. I need to know that if someone sees anything out of place, they'll tell us.

Has your founding librarian built shelves? Procured a field box for literature? Collected the last two months of Boy's Life? Identified the pamphlets needed for the MBs scouts will take? Her job is far less bogus than an SPL's would be. In a one-patrol troop, the PL or APL can do whatever the summer camp asks of SPLs.

What others call ghost members, we might have called 1st class scouts back in the day. In other words, boys just having fun hanging around the troop but advancing slowly. Now if you have a lot of LDS packs/troops, it could be that in those units they were trying to wrap up advancement before closing their unit. The venturing is likely the insult of the YPT burden on 18-20 year olds. If they can't be trusted to assist a troop/pack somewhere, what's the point really? A scout trained for service cannot live on high adventure alone. Family scouting is bad news for some units. It will discourage some scouters. So, this could reflect that. My larger worry for some years has been that scouts are getting the bogus message "If you ain't advancing, you ain't anything." Honestly, I can thing for no worse recipe for membership loss than that attitude.

I've found this with venturing females as well. The ones who haven't had formal recognition as leaders before are really enthused to hold a position. They don't even care about the patch (especially if they weren't in GS/USA). They just want to be trusted with some responsibility. And the smile on their face when you give them a "well done" is priceless. If I were you, before summer camp, I would take a shot at teaching ILST (Introduction to Leadership Skills for Troops) for PLs APLs and any youth interested in running for SPL. If one of the girls was a venturer, she may have taken ILSC. If so, you could ask her to lead the course. It really is intended to be a youth-coordinated youth-taught kind of thing. Obviously, schedules might be full and this takes up the better part of the day. Even if you can't fit in ILST ... if you are on course to have the lion-share of each current patrols at summer camp, I strongly suggest you move up your SPL elections to before you depart for camp. Two or three campouts is enough for youth to decide who they think would be a good leader for the week. I don't think you will regret having one youth and her assistant "on point" for the entire week. Really, PL is the much harder job at camp, and your patrols -- especially very new ones -- really need stable leadership. In this circumstance, the SPL basically fills out rosters assigning patrols to troop-wide responsibilities, leads roll call, and does occasional after-action review with the PLs (i.e., practices holding PLCs). At the end of the week, you can ask your camp SPL and ASPL if they are still interested in serving in September. They may not be because of other extracurricular obligations. Either way, your scouts will go into the fall with a better idea in their head about what to expect from an SPL if they see one trying to work the position for a week straight.

It makes no sense that they would "do a swap" just to get the SPL tapped out. All three boys could be elected as well as just two. So, if they were going to commit fraud, the simplest thing to do was change the vote count. Did you all have pre-printed or write-in ballots? I ask because one of the mistakes scouts often do is write the first name of one scout and the last name of another on the same line. I would have gone beyond the OA rep to the lodge advisor. Anyway, you're not going to have any peace about this until you confront the SM and/or CC and let them know what you observed. To do that before or after the lodge advisor chimes in? Your call.

@Cburkhardt, It's obvious there is a debate as to how many patrols have to be formed before a troop needs an SPL. It's a big country, so you'll have to make a boots-on-the-ground decision about that. I'm of the opinion that two PL's and their assistants can sit at a table and plan meetings/activities without needing an SPL. If they have a field of dreams a stick and some ball for duct tape, it's obvious who will be versus who in the first round of playoffs. They and their assistants and any other scouts who are making rank quickly can gather over breakfast/pizza and have the troop's first ILST. Like @DuctTape says, they can decide which position they need to fill first. Another troop has given them a bunch of gear? Maybe they need a QM. Donations of books? Librarian. Etc ... @David CO is absolutely right that a mature scout or two from another troop can be a godsend. That's problematic for troops of girls who aren't linked with a troop of boys (or, informally with a co-ed crew that does a lot of hiking and camping). But, even without that, after three months of real activity, the PL's and assistants who you have will be "senior" in terms of the leadership "school-of-hard-knocks." You and your ASMs can sit on the opposite edge of a big old field with one patrol in one corner another in the opposite corner and watch them normalize before your eyes. It's when you recruit a few more scouts and those two patrols are oversize that the calculus changes. They need to form that third patrol. You need to be in the middle of the field -- and they, at three corners. Your head is going to be turned away from someone. Therefore, a scout and assistant have to shuttle around and check up on them, then report to you how things are going. The PLC is now 6. The troop leadership is now the size of a patrol in its own right, teams now have to take turns on that field of dreams, and to make things like that work amicably, the lines of communication need to switch from mutual to hierarchical. You may already be at that critical mass for an SPL. Or, you may have scouts like @Eagledad describes, who looking at that handbook and thinking that they'd like that patch even though the position would be make-work. Regardless, the one thing you don't want to do is have an adult doing the work of an SPL. Better to leave the position empty or try to coach a scout up to that level than give any inkling to the scouts that they can let an adult steal their leadership development.

When you have three or more patrols (about 24 scouts), elect an SPL, it's that simple. What changes is the frequency that the PLC meets. Starting out, you may need it have weekly short meetings. Eventually the patrols will stand independently enough that you can space meetings apart.

Just a heads up: that link has some click bait that hijacks the page to present a fake survey pretending to be from Firefox.

Son #2 prefers gentle persuasion, but the other day at the plant he realized that a couple of workers were taking advantage of that leadership style and assuming they could just watch their partners do the job. He instantly switched to "boss mode" because he wanted to end the week early and with successfully completing the tasks needed to keep the plant on schedule. (Did I mention that he's an intern!?) Maybe you do need to tread carefully with your volunteers, but generally when we find the tail wagging the dog it's time for a reset. Well golly. Now I'm gonna have to decide if "Uniforming ... it's not just about the cloth" can make a run against "Stupid happens fast" on the list of Q-isms to carve on my tombstone.

Our council has been doing something like this for decades. I think it was through the scoutreach program. Probably it is a "slack" week. Our reservation had one where all of the tents from the last session were left up for a week. It was a sweet spot just before HS fall sports seasons were allowed to start practice. The VoA used it to pilot a "super-activity" summer camp. It eventually became the camps "trek" program for older scouts. I'm wondering if this is a week that used to be filled by Venturing, Sea Scouts, or LDS.

Yes. In different ways. For a while we would not honor the signature of an ASM if it was in the book of his son or nephew. Then once we trained boys in sign-offs, we effectively revoked sign-offs of all adults. Then when we merged troops, we learned that the other troop's SM had revoked PL sign-offs because they were passing boys who barely showed any skill (if at all). His scouts were young and didn't have enough mature natural leaders to set the tone. After we merged, the SPL brought me a scout, explaining that a requirement was completed. I asked him if he saw the scout complete it. He said he did, then nearly fainted when I handed him the pen and said my signature doesn't deserve to be on that line. Now, we are at a happy medium where boys talk to the leader who actually saw them do the requirement and ask if they did it well enough. Finally, after a few disruptive years, everyone seems to be mastering skills equally well. The scouts are winning klondikes, they are serving up some pretty good meals, the senior scouts are asking for tougher challenges. Uniforming ... its not just about cloth.

The standard issue coffee pot from the aluminum patrol mess kits does a great job at this when you forget to brink your moka pot.

The equivalent of "Class-A" in the military would be a blue jacket/red tie combo. The equivalent of military "Class-B" would be the field uniform. Then there's the BDU -- with no youth equivalent, and the fitness uniform (a.k.a. gym cloths) which would be our scouts' activity shirts. The boys' scout uniform should not be treated as an "indoor, don't get it dirty" piece of cloth. However, that ideal is undermined by the obsession with the "third world general" feel of the ODL design, the cost-effective alternative of imported t-shirts, the size of patches, and the rise of technical fabric for every type of activity. Maybe even the Army's sharp look of their "Class-B" uniform has this effect as well. The insignia guide doesn't help, as armchair wonks now feel free to criticize every image that scouting magazine posts of scouts and scouters in action with something non-compliant. A good scout uniform should look like it's seen a few campfires. Inspection sheets should probably include bonus points for stains and smudges.

@Treflienne I can think two strategies 1. drills and competitions on the material that was signed off. This could be on a campout where the prize for demonstrated mastery is dessert. To make it interesting, score the scouts (on a 0 to 5 scale or something simple) on each skill you tested, but then, assign that score, not to the scout, but to the leader who sign off on her requirement. The leader who has the highest score gets recognized for producing quality scouts at the next CoH. The leader in last place gets a "Sign it when you see it" totem (maybe to wear around his/her neck when in uniform). 2. The SM and the CC also have a nuclear option. They can simply ask the scout at an SMC or BoR, "If I asked you to <insert requirement here>. Could you do it?" A scout is trustworthy, if she says "no" have her come back to complete the SMC/BoR next week or when she knows that she mastered the skill. On her honor. If the scout says "yes" but then later is found to struggle with the skill, ask "What happened? I thought you told me that you had mastered <insert requirement here>." What do we need to do to get you back on track. In the meantime, it's okay to agree to disagree with other adults on things like this. For good or ill, no matter what we ASMs think and how loud we say it. The attitudes of the SM and the CC will rub off on the youth, and eventually if the youth step up, they will set the correct tone. Stay the course. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

If we are talking about first camping activity, obviously that would be troubling because half of the requirements can only be completed on a campout! But, I think the scouter means "before summer camp", which wouldn't trouble me at all. Every scoutmaster should want all of their youth in top shape before they land in the middle of a bustling camp three months from now? In my troop, that means being sure the scouts are physically fit, that they are ready for patrol cooking for a week straight, that they know enough knots to set up canvas, and that they can look sharp at flag ceremony. (That latter one is no joke. One year, we drilled our scouts at the church's flag pole at every meeting until every patrol could handle the flag flawlessly.) We put it on our PLs to train and sign-off on T2F skills at camp -- be on a weekend or at summer camp -- regardless of what other time the PL would like to spend on his own advancement. I would far rather have our PLs enter summer camp with only one two boys needing to earn tenderfoot than all eight. Keep in mind in a new troop, the PL wouldn't even have made rank. The PL's job is to qualify to take the patrol hiking and camping. First class rank is that qualification. Now that may take a couple of years, but it starts with giving everyone confidence by getting most of the scouts to nail those tenderfoot skills within a couple of months.

I think @The Latin Scot we all are victims of an inordinate elevation of Eagle rank ... to the point that I fear many scouts who could do otherwise just "stop there." Case in point: avid readers of Bryan's Blog, know that Eldred was the first Eagle scout. How was the first Quartermaster, Silver Awardee, or Summit Awardee? A scout's Eagle project should be the first of many such endeavors. It is truly impressive when youth coalesces his/her next four projects along a single theme in a few short years. The Hornaday award (along with awards in Venturing, Sea Scouts, and Exploring) have been undersold by BSA and NESA. FWIW, no scout needs to earn Eagle to earn Hornaday. But the Eagle project may count toward one of the 5 projects needed for the Hornaday silver medal. So if you have a scout who is really into conservation projects but his advancement is flagging because of MB ennui, consider introducing him to the Hornaday awards.