SR540Beaver

Kudu, What if your boy run troop sees the folly in hauling 60 tents instead of 20, sees the value in raising the money to purchase patrol gear to ease the cost on new scouts and buddy up for safety's sake?

Question with uniformity aside. You have a troop with 60 boys in it. Do you use 20 troop provided patrol tents the boys raised money for with 3 boys per tent or do you haul along 60 individually owned tents because each boy wants to use his own?

I've been in troops that have done it both ways. While there is some benefit to a boy owning his own tent in the hopes he will camp outside of scouting, I kind of fall on the troop supplied side. Our troop has been using the Eureka Timberline tents for decades. We take care of them and they take care of us. We actually have some back-up tents still in use from 1983. When a tent goes out of service, we scavenge all the usable parts for tent repair. We sleep two to three boys per tent depending on the season. The tents are issued by patrol. We supply everything needed by the patrols with the exception of PG (personal gear) like sleeping pad, sleeping bag, daypack, flashlight, mug, etc. Patrol box, cooking untensils, durch ovens, gas bottle, stove, lantern, distribution tree, gas hoses, KP buckets, tents, etc. are all troop supplied. It eases the financial burden on a family when their son joins the troop. But we are a large troop that varies from 50 to 60 boys per year and have been around for 45 years and have a nice reserve of raised money in the bank to spend wisely.

Would this be a bad time to raise the question about migrating to vBulletin software?

As long as the CSP is for your council, you are good to go. They don't come with expiration dates. There are councils out there that devise all sorts of special event variation CSP's and as long as the council approved them, they are legal.

I wear the first CSP of our council on my centennial uniform. Many councils produce new or limited edition CSP's for things like FOS, the 100th anniversary of BSA, etc. There isn't a problem with wearing any of them. In fact, I have uniforms with four different CSP's from my council on them.

I am a big supporter of boy led......but believe in adult directed. We are charged with providing the promise of scouting to them. A boy decided lock-in due to cold weather is NOT a campout. Our troop does one indoor activity per year. We usually do a trip to the Scouting museum, an aquarim or a lock-in in July. July is usually our lowest turnout due to kids having just got back from summer camp, going to church or sports camp and vacations. The other 11 months we are outdoors regardless of weather. Last August was a float trip with highs in the 90's at night with about 95% humidity and misquitos and January is usually a trip to Kansas where it is often only in the teen's or lower during the day. The few times we have packed up early or cancelled was due to ice storms. Scouting is an outdoor program and it's principles and lessons are taught thru outdoor skills. You need to either confront the status quo or find another troop.

As I said in QuekolisChief's thread, I am a newly minted Chapter Adviser who is trying to revive our Chapter. One of the things that has not happened in years is a regularly scheduled Chapter meeting. Our "Chapter meetings" were actually ceremony team meetings at the previous Adviser's house and those were not advertised to the Chapter members. We are reinstituting regular Chapter meetings to be held at the same time and place as our monthly District Roundtable. I know it will be slow going, but my intent and desire is to get the OA youth in our district to take an interest in OA beyond wearing a patch. Here is my problem. Since we have not had Chapter meetings in the recent or even distant past, I have no model to go by. I need to know what you do at your Chapter meetings......from beginning to end. Do you have an expectation that the youth be in uniform or not? Do you do the pledge and the admonition? Oath and Law? How long do they typically last? What do you do? HELP!!!

I'm the ASM-Program/back-up CD for SR-1017 being held next month. It sounds like your staff did IT right, because it sounds like you GOT IT! You hit a lot of nails on the head in your post. I wish all the naysayers would just take the course and find out it isn't the bad, evil thing they think it is. Thanks for a great post!

QuekolisChief, I feel your pain. I'm a new Chapter Adviser attempting to revive our Chapter. Boy, would I love to have you as my Chief. Our Lodge has been in decline for a number of years. Our Chapter was one of the few who was still able to provide a ceremony team to the Lodge, but that was all the Chapter was.....the ceremony team. And that ceremony team except for one member all came from the same Troop. So basically, the Chapter was boys from one Troop doing ceremonies. They did a Chapter banquet/lock-in as their only activity during the year. I'm trying to change the culture in our Chapter by trying to get the SM's of the other troops to promote and support the OA. Most are fairly indifferent to it while others are flat out against it. We have 25 Troops in our District and only 9 let us come hold elections. Of those 9, only about 4 of their SM's will respond to my emails. We have managed this year to double our ceremony team from 5 to 10, but most of these guys have never really been active in the OA, so I'm having to do most of the leg work right now. Our Chapter Chief has an extremely short attention span and diesn't attempt to keep track of our schedule. I'm having to work with him by taking baby steps. My VC of Inductions and Ceremonies has other activities that are keeping him from being available for team practice. I can't complain because it is church activities, but his availibility is affecting the other 9 guys. I wish I had some easy answers for you, but I think Eagle92 is correct, reviving a Chapter is amulti-year process and if we keep plugging along with a plan, it will pay off long term. Keep the faith Brother!

Tomahawk throwing IS popular. It is always set up at our OA Fall Fellowship as well as other scouting events. Our troop even owns their own set of throwing hawks that we set up several times a year on campouts.

I saw that earlier today and had the same thought. I also thought it was Jerry Hall, but wasn't sure.

I admit to having not read the whole thread. I have to agree with BDPT00's last statement about "cream of the crop". I was an ASM for the 2005 Jambo and am an ASM for the 2010 Jambo. If you are 12 years old, a First Class Scout and can get your SM's signature, cash talks. Don't get me wrong, we had some outstanding scouts in 2005. We also had slugs who wouldn't lift a finger to do any work without an adult standing over them and had to be made to cooperate in the most minimal of ways. We periodically had kids that would ignore the buddy system while touring DC and throw us in a panic trying to hunt them down. I should say that the bad stuff was few and far between.....but it was there. There was more than one kid that the adult leaders talking among themselves were glad the kid was not in their home troop. Can we send them home? Technically yes.....but what a pain that process would be. You end up grinning and bearing it.

hehe

Ya know, I really used to like you guys.

Eagle90, I wondered the same thing, but he is originally from Texas, so this gets him closer to what he would consider God's country.

Hmmmm, my "almost 17" year old "almost Eagle Scout" son drove himself 160 miles roundtrip between camp and home on his 24 hours off on weekends while staffing cub resident camp. He along with many of his peers drive themselves to the Webelos Crossover ceremonies they perform as well as OA Chapter meetings and Troop meetings. On occasion, a scout has driven to a campout if he had to work on Friday evening.

Yep Mike, our previous SE was tasked with a $10 million capital campaign and finally reached it last year. Now he is on to another council and Jeff will be coming in and getting to spend it.

The Last Frontier Council in Oklahoma City, OK lost Scout Executive Tom Dugger to the Dan Beard Council in Ohio as of January 1, 2010. The announcement has gone out this morning that his replacement will start March 1, 2010. He is Jeff Woolsey, Scout Executive of the Aloha Council, Honolulu, Hawaii. Anyone know him?

A little interwebs searching shows that the movie is directed by a Kels Goodman. He is an LDS filmmaker. Here is his extended resume from IMBD. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0329144/resume

Lisa, It depends. Summer camp is a week long. Jambo is 10 days combined with 4 or 5 days of touring. Virginia at the end of July and first of August is about 90% humidity and close to 100 degrees many days. I'm a sweater. Dress me in cotton and I'm pretty much wet 24/7. If I'm attending summer camp in New Mexico, I'm dry. Back in 2005, our council ordered contingent t-shirts in 99% cotton. While I didn't chafe, I was miserable wearing wet clothes the whole time......which makes me wonder why I'm going back this year?! Add to the whole equation that you are providing showers for 300 to 500 at camp instead of 40,000. It was like a line for a ride at Six Flags. We'd have guys swing by the showers multiple times during the day trying to find a slack line where they wouldn't have to wait an hour or more to get a shower.

WAY, WAY, WAY OUT in the boonies. I remember wondering why they don't rotate the subcamps among the regions. We have to pay a huge amount of money to travel across the country and then once we get there, we have to hike into where all the action is. There is a subcamp 21 this time that is kind of an overflow subcamp with scouts from various regions and our council will be in that subcamp. Thank goodness it is closer to the action and we don't have to march nearly as far to get to the arena this time.

E, We were in subcamp 17 and it was an issue for us reported to us by our boys. We then reported it to the subcamp. As I said, we sent our senior leadership and older scouts to look out for the younger scouts. Boomer, I believe most schools still have the large group showers. I was in junior high from 69 thru 71. I would assume the same 50% of boys that took showers back then are the same number that do today. Many were modest.....but half the time the coach didn't let us go in time for a shower or they had run out of towels and broke out the dirty hampers. No thanks!

Yeahhhh, about that daily wash......it gets difficult. Showers for the youth are temp open topped buildings made of 2x4's and black visqueen. For every kid under a showerhead, there are 10 or more waiting. Showering becomes a lengthy hassle. Twelve year olds are already nervous about walking around naked amongst the 16 and 17 year olds. Add to that the unscoutlike behavior of older guys pulling young kids out of a shower so they can use it or pulling stunts like throwing another kids clothes over the top and outside and you have a recipe for NO washing. Due to YP, adults can't police the showers. We ended up having to send our older boys to the showers with the younger boys to protect them so they could get a few showers in while they were there. I know, I know.....it shouldn't go on at a Boy Scout event, but it does. That was the reality on the ground in our sub-camp back in 2005 at least.

Invest in synthetic skivvies that wick moisture and dry quickly. I took them in 2005 and have used them ever since. They are worth their weight in gold. If your Jambo committee folks have not decided on t-shirts yet, try talking them into getting the same kind of shirts. The material I'm talking about are 100% polyester, but look and feel like cotton. Our council bought 100% cotton back in 2005 to save a few bucks and heavy sweaters like me staed wet from sunup to sundown. Here is what I bought in 2005 and I'm still using them in 2010. They don't deteriorate like cotton does. http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/templates/links/link.jsp?id=0058232981023a&type=product&cmCat=SEARCH_all_NYR&returnPage=search-results1.jsp&QueryText=men%27s+underwear&Ntk=Products&sort=all&_D%3AhasJS=+&Nty=1&hasJS=true&No=36&Ne=3&nyr=1&Ntt=men%27s+underwear&N=6263&_dyncharset=ISO-8859-1&_DARGS=%2Fcabelas%2Fen%2Fcommon%2Fsearch%2Fsearch-box.jsp.form23 If the link doesn't work, go to Cabelas and search for MTP Performance Boxer.