SeattlePioneer

Hello Drmbear,

Hello Jay, Unfortunately, Unit Commissioners don't grow on trees around here. Good ones even rarer. Wrong agricultural zone I suppose. As I understand it, District Executives are supposed to meet with the Institutional Head of each Chartered Organization each year and complete a standard report on the contact. That suggests you could bug the DE about doing that visit and raising some of these issues.

Hello Bart, Yep. For example, I was a Camp Commissioner at a Boy Scout Camp last summer. I was assigned a Scoutreach Boy Scout Troop and the Scoutmaster was an Eagle Scout who was probably a scant 21 years of age. On evening Troops cooked their own food. Regrettably this troop was unable to get a fire started to cook dinner and more or less went hungry. I didn't find that out until the next day. I don't know where their Scoutmaster was while they were trying to get a fire started. I'm afraid it didn't occur to me to be checking on Troops to see if they were making dinner with a degree of success.

Personally I'm not a big supporter of "free time." Scouting is supposed to be fun with a purpose. Free time is usually a chance for boys to create their own low quality fun --- usually fighting of one kind or another. What adults and Scouting should provide is a higher quality kind of fun which takes some adult leadership at least in Cub Scouts.

Hello Scout Nut, excellent comments, I'm afraid. Their usually aren't easy answers. That's my experience, anyway.

We have the luxury of worrying about increasing numbers of things. Worries expand to fill the time available.

At least around here, you can get a REAL Cubmaster or Scoutmaster paycheck by leading a Scoutreach unit.

Who is the current Chartered Organization Rep? There has to be one to be rechartered. Frankly, you sound like a terrific prospect to be the next COR and provide the long term leadership and build the relationship with the Chartered Organization. And if you do it, the pack probably isn't going to have to worry about untoward interference either. It would also give you an opportunity to work at building a better relationship with your Chartered Organization. I've been doing that for several years, looking for ways to wworm the pack into being a real part of the parish community of the Catholic Church that charters my pack. It's something that takes time and care. If you are lucky, you might identify someone in the CO community who would take an interest in the pack ---perhaps someone who was a pack leader several years ago. But most chartered organizations don't have racks of skilled and experienced leaders ready to deploy as needed. I say again --- YOU are the best candidate to fill the leadership position you want filled!

> Heh, heh! I think it's just you, Basement! Personally I encourage people to go for awards. My theory is that awards such as most knots tend to shape people's behavior and encourage them to do a quality job at filling a position. Maybe they need to have a certain percentage of boys advance a rank or attend several Roundtables. That's all to the good of the program for everyone. (except your district Roundtable, Basement....) I just turned in my application for my district committee leader knot, a position I've been filling since 2004, and I'll be turning in an application for my Cubmaster knot (or whatever they call it now) a position I've filled for two years. Frankly, few people are paying attention to such things for other people around here. I sell the knot program when I do the Tiger Cub Den Leader Training and include the application in the Tiger Cub Den Leader Handbook I've put together for participants. So I'm a knot chaser. It's just the froth on the latte. Sue me!

I had a situation in 2004, when I was just getting back into Scouting after being out since 1987. I was a new AS in a troop to which I was new, and on my first outing with the troop to a camporee. A mother was camping with the troop along with a couple of her children, including a teen aged girl. She told me confidentially that a long time Scouter with the troop had had sex with the girl in a tent. I listened to her story, but made no comment and did nothing. I did a second camping trip with the troop in June and then left to be a volunteer with a different troop. The one I left had issues with which I didn't want to be involved with. Several months later I heard gossip, which might well have been true, that the Scouter in question had had his Scout membership permanently revoked. I had no first hand knowledge of what allegedly had happened. Perhaps I could have suggested someone the mother might contact, but I didn't. I think I acted prudently, but not heroically. Prudence isn't bad.

As drmbear and others suggest, many units are slackers when it comes to updating registration records to conform with actual practice. And that can bite people sometimes. Personally, I'm quite picky about that for the adult leaders in my pack. I also make a point of awarding unit leaders their leadership patch at a pack meeting, along with a neckerchief and slide which their Cub Scout helps them put on. I've had a number of parents tell me that that ceremony meant a lot to their son, and because of that it meant a lot to them, too. Having adults recognized in a ceremony gives adults a taste of the emotional importance of such things to their Cub Scout. It helps put adults in the position of being better able to understand Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. I learned this myself when taking the IOLS Boy Scout outdoor training. At the conclusion of the training, the adult leaders put on an excellent ceremony to recognize the adults completing the course. The impact of that on ME was a surprise --- one I've remembered and tried to replicate for others ever since.

Ummm. What may be charming at one meeting may be a nuisance and disruptive after several meetings. I've had numerous boys who have had behavior issues when they entered Scouts. Fairly often, and if you are lucky, they learn better methods of behaving over time. If you are lucky, you can afford to wait for that kind of behavior change. If you can't you need to be pro active and take charge of defining what reasonable behavior is acceptable. If you don't --- well, one bad Scout can easily drive six good Scouts out of a unit. This goes for any behavior issue. It requires good judgment to know what can be accepted or tolerated and for how long, and to decide how to intervene if the behavior is too extreme or doesn't change. It's not just issues like autism. It could be a pugnacious boy who is aggressive towards others just as easily.

There is plenty of evidence that people adopt sexual roles based on the social situation they inhabit. Currently for example, there are the LUGS --- Lesbians Until Graduation, a feature of college life these days: The LGBT slang terms lesbian until graduation (LUG),[1] gay until graduation (GUG), and bisexual until graduation (BUG) are used to describe women primarily of high-school or college age who are assumed to be experimenting with or adopting a temporary lesbian or bisexual identity. The term suggests that the woman to whom it is applied will ultimately adopt a strictly heterosexual identity. Some members of the lesbian community use this term to disparage bisexual women.[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian_until_graduation

I kind of like the Tau idea. For one thing, it's about the only issue in mathematics I can think of where a middle school student and a math professor might have a math issue they could discuss with a degree of equality.

> To answer your question --- BSA prohibits the use of tobacco, alcohol or drugs by any person at Scouting activities.That's a much tougher standard than is applied to homosexuals. And if you are a Committee Chair or Chartered Organization rep, you can refuse to appoint anyone to any leadership position in your unit for any reason. Just to put a point on that, you can refuse to appoint leaders who smoke, fornicate, drink, do drugs, are overweight or wear short skirts. And homosexuals too.

You'll need to do a powerful lot of rubbing on your magic lamp to have that wish granted, Two Cub!

I seem to recall on this forum where Boy Scout leaders were posting pictures of themselves wearing dresses....

I agree. A good place to recruit someone to do this task is from among those who failed to provide the proper paperwork. One of my theories is that Scouting isn't just a program for youth. It functions to improve the character and leadership skills of adults, too!

In our district we wouldn't nitpick Assistant Den Leaders. Our Training Chair and District Executive encourages such people to be awarded knots. And I also wouldn't hesitate to have multiple Den Leaders in a den, either.

Environmentalists raise all kinds of objections about the outdoors these days --- but never address the one that I'm most sensitive to --- how much harder the ground is these days than it was 25 years ago! At age 61, I use a camp cot when I'm camping these days. That solves most of the issues raised by Scoutfish in his opening post for me. And I can set it up in my tent.

A few weeks ago, our Council Executive gave a lecture to district Scouters with the theme that there were three elements that controlled Scouting ---- volunteers, "suits," and professionals. Suits were mostly the people sitting on the council board. I think that's a reasonable description of reality. If all three are working together in harmony, you ought to get a pretty good to excellent program. If one or more are fighting each other, there are going to be problems. If volunteers fight suits and professionals that are united, the volunteers are probably going to lose, I would suppose. Perhaps they should. If the board wants to fight the professionals, they can probably fire the council executive and make it stick. In our council, we have a top flight council President who is a leading businessman with a looong family history in Scouting. A former CEO of Boeing is also on the board. Any council executive trying to hand a line to those folks would be making a BIG mistake. Perhaps for that reason, there are no stories of such conflict I've heard about. We are lucky to have volunteers, suits and professionals working together. Frankly, as a volunteers I have only a limited understanding of the finances of the council. It's not surprising that volunteers reflexively oppose selling off council camps, but it's not surprising because volunteers are usually emotionally invested in camps, but are poorly informed about the council finances that need to support camps and program. A lot of councils are under financial stress these days. It may be that selling off camps is the best way to maximize the ability of a struggling council to survive and continue to provide the Scouting program for youth. If that's the case, then selling a camp may be the right thing to do, even over the objection of volunteers. And if the board and professionals agree on that, it's likely to happen.

It's a waste of time for BSA to chase after approval by the liberal left. They are never going to be happy. Is the left happy with military recruiting now that the Don't Ask Don't Tell law3 has been repealed in favor of non discrimination? Of course not! http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/10/portland_high_schools_set_to_p.html

The more they dug, the more impressive the Eagle candidate seemed to be, according to your description.

In my pack making den flags is an activity at our June campout. Dens make new flags to reflect their advancement to a new den level. We don't use den numbers, although that's probably a mistake since it offers a small degree of continuity from year to year. I collect flag material at thrift shops in the den colors when I see it ---orange for Tiger Cubs, yellow for wolves and blue for bears. I cut off tree limbs or alder saplings for the staff and cross piece, and Scouts use a staple gun to attach their flag to the cross piece. Saw the limbs to the needed length. Boy Scout lashing hold the cross piece to the staff. At our October Cub Scout Roundtable, the adults made a flag along these lines for the Cub Scout Roundtable. It was probably the first hammering and sawing some Den Moms had done in years --- but I think they saw this would be a good den project. We also made a stand for the flag using 2x4 lumber and some nails. A spade bit in a drill cut the hole for the staff, and the base of the staff was cut to fit the hole with an axe. The only parts I wouldn't have Cub Scouts do would be the axe work and lashings.