T2Eagle

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 so

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 b

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

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 oft

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

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 insu

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 ea

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,

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 a

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. I

I spent many a night in a tent like that. Pole in the middle of the tent was the devil's design. We were told not to get near it on pain of death. External pole systems were one of the great design innovations in the evolution of consumer tents. I was intrigued, so I went looking for an image. Here are pictures of a tent the spitting image of my family's. As John-in-KC mentioned, there's a sort of side room. https://s430.photobucket.com/user/seavandal/story

This is a purely hypothetical question for me because so far our Pack has no female dens and no one has stepped up in our CO to start a female Scouts BSA troop, but does anyone know if there are rules regarding Den Chiefs having to be the same gender as the den?