T2Eagle

In our troop, one member of the patrol acts as "grubmaster" and picks up the food for the menu the patrol decided upon. Usually this person is working on either rank or Mb requirements, if no one in the patrol is then it's just a volunteer. We reimburse the costs from the fee for the campout. We don't have a specific budget for the weekend, but it averages out across the year. We used to have the scouts get reimbursement direct from their fellow scouts, but it was very uneven in its success rate so we switched to the current system.

The answer to your question is kick this up to your Chartering Organization. Concerning the rest of the discussion, FGM is illegal in Michigan (and 34 other states). The law making it illegal passed prior to the Federal case being thrown out. It was never clear to me why the feds rather than the state brought the prosecution, but it's possible most or even all the conduct occurred before MI's law went into effect. So, you have someone credibly accused of having committed a crime. This is not sufficient to convict someone in a court of law, but it's generally sufficient for other folks to make rational decisions to not allow that person to be around their children. If forced to make this decision myself, I would allow this parent to observe meetings, but I would not allow him to participate as a leader or in any other supervisory capacity.

I will never understand this Sm's decision making. By his own admission he "suspended" the violating adult. None of us should think we can handle something even remotely like this on our own.

Most of these rules arise from an incident that occurred, and the rule is an attempt to prevent a re-occurrence. If there are leaders out there who's judgment is so poor that they allowed "rock-throwing""at each other" as an activity, then we collectively do deserve to have this level of micromanagement.

Our Cubmaster isn't going to be available to us for the next few months, and so our Asst. Cubmaster is taking over. In My.scouting we can designate a "Key 3 Delegate" who will then have some of the same powers withing my.scouting that a member of the Key 3 would have. Unfortunately, nowhere does the system tell me which powers a delegate receives and which they might not be able to exercise. Does anyone know? Specifically we would like the delegate to be able to accept youth applications, so far it doesn't seem like he can do that. But we're not sure if that is a system restriction or something not working just for him. Any knowledge would be helpful.

Kudos to the scout for his inquisitiveness and inventiveness. The article doesn't really answer his original question, why doesn't the house activate a fan when there's a build up of CO. Does anyone know whether there would be a good reason not to have a CO alarm also trigger a fan, either a whole house fan or something attached to the HVAC system, to vent to the outside and begin reducing CO during an evacuation?

Interestingly, this is not the first time they tried to sell it. They put it on the market in 2007 for $100 mil. I wonder what happened...oh that's right.☺️

RichardB asked the question three years ago. Does anyone know if there has been a formal answer? I would absolutely not allow any scouts to vape. Regarding adults, does anyone know if there are formal BSA rules. We have one leader who smokes, he's tried to quit a couple times. He knows it's bad for him and a bad model for the scouts and so he is very discrete. I don't think many of the scouts even know he smokes. If we had a leader join who wanted to vape I would insist he treat it like smoking and never do it in anywhere that the scouts could observe.

I'm sympathetic to their troubles, but once again they add doublespeak and a lack of candor. The council hasn't been "subsidizing" insurance. Insurance is a standard operating cost of any organization. I can believe that insurance is one of he big driving costs in their deficit, but to say this $12 is for insurance is just inaccurate; it's for insurance, and salaries, and interest payments, and camp costs, and training, and everything else. The council needs to close a million dollar deficit; they've decided the best way to do that is by charging a per member fee --- SO JUST SAY SO!

In my opinion, one of the more distasteful aspects of BSA management, which I think comes in part from having an insular hiring and promotion policy that means everyone in the organization has essentially grown up knowing no other culture, is that they are compelled to spin everything as if they have it all under control. In this case: "As part of our regular evaluation of our needs and resources" and "it is partly based on the recent decision." Neither of those statements is remotely true. Nothing about this is part of anything regular, and the need to layoff thirteen people is entirely based on the decision by the church to separate. I am baffled by the inability to simply be transparent and candid.

I most often have this conversation in the context of becoming an Eagle Scout: "You should become an Eagle Scout because you want be an Eagle Scout, not because you think it will get you into college, not because you think it will ever get you a job, not because you think it will ever "pay off" in any way, but only because YOU want to be an Eagle Scout. I have had been involved in the hiring of hundreds of people over my career, I never hired anyone because they were Eagle Scouts, and no one has ever hired me for that reason. Being an Eagle Scout will not get you a job, will not get you a scholarship, will probably not ever get you anything. But 30 or 40 years from now you'll be happy you're an Eagle Scout if you become one because it's important to you." I try to have a similar conversation with parents, I think the scouts pay me greater heed.

Mine too. The canteen I had lasted two decades before being accidentally kicked off the side of one of the presidential range peaks in the White Mountains. Way too far for me to climb down to get it.

First, trust the scouts. I have to have this conversation almost every year with some of my adults. For all the goofiness that might be said during the process, and you really need to be patient during it, they want the program to be successful and they are going to ultimately act responsibly. This is a time when your relationship and mentoring with the SPL are critical. Make sure you've had some in depth conversations both in terms of how he runs the planning and in what kind of goals or outcomes you both want from it. A common problem is what Perdidochas describes, they'll often regress to the mean and do what they've done before. If that's a concern you have then talk to your SPL about it in one of your several conversations, does he see it, does he agree that some variety would be better, how can he then lead the scouts to see and find the same. Sometimes, after talking to the SPL you can have a shorter version of that conversation with some of the other older scouts who tend to have a big influence on these things.

The most non traditional project I've seen was one of our scout's organizing a dinner in our parish that showed the distribution of hunger in the world. A very small number of people got a typical first world dinner: meat, rice, vegetables, dessert; a slightly larger number received rice with a little bit of chicken; and everyone else received a cup of plain rice. Along with the dinner he had presentations from groups that fight hunger, both locally and more broadly, with specific sign up opportunities to volunteer for them. He then tracked the participation rates of those who volunteered that evening. There was some push back on it initially, he had the leadership part covered by organizing his fellow scouts to cook dinner for over a hundred people. The lasting impact part took some explaining but it was fulfilled by both the educational aspect and the specific volunteer work generated by the event. Beat the heck out of another park bench as far as i was concerned.

We never subject the scouts, Cubs or older, to FOS presentations. Yes, have them go do something fun while the parents listen to FOS.

YPT, and their response nowadays is scorched earth. Anyone with a touch of involvement: scouts, scouters, and parents, goes, no shades of gray.

I don't sign that many as a counselor that if a scout came up to me even a year or so later that I wouldn't be able to remember that we completed the badge, in which case i would just sign a new card, and really even if I couldn't remember specifically I would have to believe strongly that we HADN'T completed the badge for me to not sign a new card..

We hold them until the scout has aged out, and then we keep them until someone decides it's time to purge the files every few years. Holding on to them is pretty redundant since the record is held electronically in BSA's Scoutnet and in the Troop's Troopmaster file.

Interesting, we regularly use neighboring council camps. In the last two years we have stayed at camps in five different councils, not a single one has asked for anything like this. I started to think that maybe familiarity made the request unnecessary because three of those five directly border our council, but the other two are far enough away that we might be the only troop from our council to stay there. Our council also gets a lot of troops from out of council at our camps (see story about Michigan closing camps), and at least at the Campmaster office we're not looking for any insurance info from visitors. In all these instances I'm talking about weekend trips, maybe things are different for summer camp.

I don't quite follow. What kind of insurance are we talking about and when you say require, require for what? Is your council, let's call it A, requiring that an out of council troop provide proof of insurance from council B before that troop can camp in council A camp? I've never had anyone, local or out of council, ask for proof that we were insured.

We have great success with our wreath sale. We use a local farmer (Michigan). I would recommend talking to local Christmas tree farms.

It's not that I doubt you, but is that really true? Popcorn sales around here are mostly Cub Scouts and it is thankfully still true that most Cubs don't have their own smart phone. How in the world do they intend to enforce that? My own council has a form/contract they want everyone to sign saying they're on the hook for popcorn that is ordered by a donor/customer but then refused when it's delivered. I pointed this out to someone who said well we don't really intend to enforce it that way, to which I replied that they then really shouldn't write it that way. Complaint fell on deaf ears. My suggestion to anybody who asks --- sell the popcorn, don't sign the form.

That BSA has the policy doesn't mean the policy self justifies. As a guess, the reason for the total ban on alcohol at BSA events comes from the influence that some religions had historically on the development of BSA. The ban probably came about more from a strong belief among those religions, like Methodists, Baptists, and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that alcohol was per se evil and shouldn't be consumed at all, with scouting simply being a subset of that "all", rather than any reasoning specific to scouting that alcohol and scouts shouldn't mix. My own religion, Catholicism, doesn't ascribe per se evil to alcohol and outside of the BSA prohibition there isn't any reason that controlled, moderate consumption would be strictly prohibited at a Catholic scouting event. It might come as a real shock to our cousins across the pond to know that the prohibition against alcohol at scouting events is usually read to apply to adult only events where no scouts are present. For instance, there is a prohibition against alcohol at Woodbadge.

The longer than dkurtenbach , but still short answer here is that no, stalling is not an acceptable tactic, making it more difficult for the other side to make their case by being untimely or uncooperative is in fact strictly prohibited under various court rules and the general rules of ethical behavior that govern the profession. Unlike what may be portrayed on TV or in the media, there aren't supposed to be surprises in legal cases. The point of the process of Discovery is that both sides are supposed to have the same full set of all the information relevant to a case. Each side has an affirmative obligation, that is its obligation exists no matter what the behavior of the other side, to fully disclose to the other party, in a timely manner, all the information that it possesses that MIGHT be relevant to the case. There are specific and tight deadlines on these disclosures, you're not supposed to mess with them in any way. I clerked for a Federal Magistrate, the language used here by the judge indicates some serious wrongdoing on the part of the attorneys. If you want to use a sports metaphor, this isn't throwing an elbow, this is refusing to give the ball to the other team so they can properly in bound it. There is no day light that I've ever seen between the rules of the court, the Rules of Professional Responsibility, and the Scout Oath and Law.

Every time I read about this I want to go kiss some of my council board members. We were under tremendous pressure to be a part of this, and despite a lot of arm twisting we stayed out of it --- kept our camps and kept our endowment. There was no question that a number of camps had to be sold off. Several councils in the state were teetering on bankruptcy, and there simply wasn't enough revenue coming in to sustain every camp. But it sounds like they haven't gotten the revenue/expense balance right yet, and I am always unhappy with the lack of transparency from every council. If there's a plan in place to balance the books it should be available to anyone to see, keeping it secret and trying to put a positive spin on negative news just makes the truth harder when it's confronted.