T2Eagle

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?

A website from Health and Human Services (HHS) has some really good information and tips for these types of situations. https://www.stopbullying.gov/ I think their definition is more complete than the BSA's. Importantly they add in the components that it is "unwanted and aggressive" "real or perceived power imbalance" and "repeated or has the potential to be repeated" Those three change things from just boys will be boys, and can help understand the difference between unacceptable bad behavior and true bullying. "Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time. Both kids who are bullied and who bully others may have serious, lasting problems. In order to be considered bullying, the behavior must be aggressive and include: An Imbalance of Power: Kids who bully use their power—such as physical strength, access to embarrassing information, or popularity—to control or harm others. Power imbalances can change over time and in different situations, even if they involve the same people. Repetition: Bullying behaviors happen more than once or have the potential to happen more than once. Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose."

There is not, to my knowledge, a set of guidelines about what to do, in the sense that there's no program that says "if bullying is alleged conduct investigation this way..." and then "if bullying is found to have occurred take action X..." In line with @Gmath I would urge you to speak with your son about what he thinks would be a good outcome, and make sure you convey that to the SM right away.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/world/europe/netherlands-dropping-children.html?action=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage Blindfold your scouts, drive them out to the middle of nowhere, give them a GPS (for the first half of the trek only) and wish them luck getting back to camp. Don't try this at home.

My answer would be that I don't know of any unit that does that, and, assuming this is a run of the mill service project not some overnight event, I have never heard of or seen any other organization require medical forms for this type of participation. If there's someone in your troop who is particularly fanatic it about it have them be the person who shows up at the event and hands them out and collects them.

Humans are astoundingly fallible and incompetent at almost everything we do. Assume good will on everybody's part and that not mentioning your son was an oversight. Send a polite note to the COR reminding him mashmaster jr. is also going.

We had a parent who played nothing but Grateful Dead music on a long trip. When we all met up at a rest stop the scouts in is car were desperately trying to change cars.

In answer to the broad question, I would say that a troop level BOR should be suspended if there is doubt about the scout having fully completed the requirements, the BOR isn't the proper forum for other concerns like very recent misbehavior, the SM, CC and troop committee as a whole are the proper ways to hash those out. As to properly reciting the Oath and Law, those are acts that scouts should be able to perform well early on in their scouting career. A scout in their first year or so of scouting may need to put in a little more effort, or receive a little extra time and help to do that. But it's important to remember that memorization and recitation are not the same as knowledge, and an inability to memorize and/or recite is not indicative of a knowledge deficiency. There's a lot of research available about how the brain remembers things, and one of the more fascinating facets to me is how the brain rewards itself for habitual behavior, even unhelpful behavior. Once you have memorized, or maybe more accurately imprinted on your brain, something inaccurately, correcting that is very very difficult. It's the reason that once you've made a wrong turn on the way towards a place to which you regularly travel, the chances are you will make that same wrong turn even if you start off reminding yourself not to..

No maybe on the rain jacket, thunderstorms are common this time of year.

"A surgeon would later reattach the bone holding his nose to his skull, using four plates and some 20 screws that remain in place" that ain't no bloody nose; he also missed two months plus of work. That's a pretty big financial hit, possibly devastating to he and his family, especially if he has anything but first class medical coverage. As DavidCO said this might have been driven by an insurance company, or it might have been driven by desperation. I'll withhold judgment without a whole lot more information.

I'm always a fan of scouts thinking ahead and thinking outside the box. I like it.

For our camp and our troop those would be fine. My crocs, which I wear around the campsite but not really for trucking all over summer camp, are they type which have a heel strap and so would, I think, satisfy Treflienne's concerns.

Camps can have their own sets of rules, some internal, some dictated by the state because they're camps. In addition to whatever forms your camp requires for summer camp your troop should require the BSA Annual Health and Medical Record (AHMR) for everybody in the troop and anybody going on an outing with you. "For any and all Scouting activities, all participants must complete Part A and Part B." https://filestore.scouting.org/filestore/HealthSafety/pdf/680-001_AB.pdf The two authorizations are not necessarily in conflict with each other. The camp has an authorization to administer OTC and the troop has authorization to administer OTC. Given what the camp form says you could check with them for their opinion of whether you refer everything to them while at camp. Our camp has us send everything above band aid level to them.

Our council camp's shower/bath facilities are all individually doored with no common areas. They added some changing rooms at the pools, but I believe that had already been on a list of planned improvements to accommodate the increasing number of female leaders at camp. There were no restrictions on weeks or campsites. I haven't had a chance yet to ask how many female only troops we were expecting.

BSA Med Form Part B Has a yes/no question authorizing non prescription medications and and any exceptions to that permission. One more reason why leaders need to be sure they've read and understood the med forms for everyone on a trip.

This is why National has to keep adding rules to the GTSS. Coming soon, a rule against homemade boats on scout outings --- why, not because it's inherently unsafe or a fun idea to do as J76 does, but because somewhere out there is another group like this

Do you have reason to believe there's money in the account? If so your best bet is find out from the bank who is listed as an authorized signatory and try to track that person down and have him transfer access to you. If there's no money it's probably easiest to just start from scratch. If you can't get good information from the bank, or if you can't find who last had access, than you'll need to get your Chartering Organization involved, the bank account should be under their tax ID number and they'll have to claim the funds from the bank.

I reread your post a couple times to make sure I understood the facts as you're reporting them. I definitely think you should hold a committee meeting, and you're within your rights to suspend the scout if that's what you as CC want and/or if that's what your committee reaches a consensus about. I would add some cautionary notes for you. First, I would be leery about involving anyone outside the unit until you have decided as a unit what you want to do. Because if you do involve outsiders than you may lose control over the situation and end up being forced to do something that is counter to what the troop leadership wants to do, and this could go either way, the troop may want to be more punitive or the troop may want to be more lenient in its reaction than what a DE or UC or Council would want. I would note that the Chartering Org is not outside the unit, and I leave it to you to decide if this is something they would feel strongly about being a part of the decision making. The reason I caution about going outside is because you have somewhat shakier facts than you may believe. You have an accusation from one parent that they saw this scout smoking pot. What exactly did they see? How much of what they reported was direct evidence and how much was a conclusion arrived at from some things that may have been more equivocal? Second you have what's called hearsay. You can fully believe that he told the younger scouts that he had THC and stole from the trading post, but that's not the same as knowing that he had THC or stole; it might well be braggadocio on his part and both things could just be made up. That doesn't at all make it OK, and saying those things is sufficiently unscoutlike and worthy of punishment in and of themselves. I'm not at all down playing them. But it's because of some of the ambiguity of what exactly you know that I would say handle this in the troop first and only go outside if you can't resolve it within the troop and believe that outside intervention is necessary for the sake of the troop's cohesion.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/big-in-peacekeeping-boy-scouts/590614/

Having read the article, the only thing it really says is that Philmont and SBR are going to have some sort of family camping available soon. I don't have a strong opinion about that. The devil is in the details. But for SBR I would like to see them open it up to weekend camping for scouts first. We go to WV for rafting and end up staying in commercial campgrounds a couple miles from SBR. I don't understand why we can't just camp there like we could at pretty much every other Council camp in the country.

There is a more in depth document referenced in the on line guide that you can click through to: https://filestore.scouting.org/filestore/HealthSafety/pdf/SAFE_USE_OF_MEDICATION_IN_SCOUTING.pdf The essence of it is that leaders, parents, and scouts work together to determine what is the best way to handle a scout's medications. As KC mentioned, some scout camps have their own rules, there are also some states that have specific rules. Michigan for instance requires that an adult hold and distribute prescription meds. Our camp does not require that we hold the meds, and within the troop we handle it individually --- some scouts can handle their own, some are better if held by the leaders. I always know who takes what and check up on it even if the scout is handling it himself (just as I do with my own kids). So there's really nothing and no one to "report" this to in the sense that something necessarily wrong occurred. This is more a situation for the unit to work through. Was there pre-existing guidance within either the troop or camp regarding either phones or meds? Going through anybody's personal belongings is something that should only be done after some consideration. Scout's have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their belongings and that should be taken into consideration. This is the type of thing you have a calm, quiet chat about when everyone is back home, showered, well fed and well rested.

Meh, I ate in dining halls in the 60s and 70s. Maybe the comfort level then was the near universal military experience of our adult leaders. Where I live now, Pioneer Scout Reservation, which has its own issues as a MB camp, has various levels of cooking from bring your own food, to cook what we deliver, to mess halls. We ask our scouts what they want to do, they choose mess hall. We do all patrol cooking the rest of the year and really cultivate it as a skill; the scouts would just rather focus their time and energy on other pursuits at summer camp.

There are a couple different things to unpack here. First the easy stuff: there is almost certainly no such thing as "troop insurance"; BSA carries insurance for all scout activities. Search the BSA website and these forums for better explanation. It is possible, but highly unlikely that your Chartering Organization has some supplemental insurance that covers its youth and/or scouting activities, but that would be really unusual and not in the control of the troop anyway. Since it sounds like your son is in the troop this is a topic you should be able to discuss with your troop leadership, independent of this incident, just to clarify what nonsense they think they're talking about. Second is the relationship between the troop and pack. There could be good, bad, and just lazy/dumb reasons why the troop would not support this activity. Troops have their own program and activities that they have planned and it takes concerted effort just to make them work; adding in another activity just because someone else thought it would be a good idea, and maybe it is, isn't as simple as saying sure let's do that. It's well within the troop leadership's purview to decide to just do nothing about the event --- not support it, not communicate it, not participate --- and they don't really need to have any better reason to do that than to feel that they have a full plate and simply don't want to add another activity to it. But at a minimum, they should have had the courtesy to tell you that. It's worth keeping in mind that this was the pack's event, it was very nice that they were willing to invite the troop to participate, but an invitation compels no more obligation than an answer, in no way was the troop obligated to participate in any way just because they were invited. The fact that you were expecting them to tell you who was going indicates that you maybe assumed they were obligated to participate, including by helping to organize part of the list of participants. I think the troop's behavior was poor because they should have declined your invitation if that's what they intended, they also were way off in telling troop members not to participate; that's not their call regarding your pack or any other scout unit. If you want to invite members of the troop to join in a pack activity that's great, it's your activity, you're responsible for making sure it complies with all BSA rules, and the troop really has nothing to do with it one way or another. If this was my troop, we would have said "That sounds nice, we'll pass along the information to the troop, send us an email with the details and we'll pass that along." It wouldn't have been our event, but we'd be happy if people decided to participate. It sounds like the troop and pack are part of the same chartering organization and so their relationship is an important one that both sides need to recognize and work on. I would suggest asking to meet with the troop leadership and have a broader discussion about what that relationship should look like and how can it be mutually beneficial.

Like everyone else said. The first of the four digits is a unit type, it isn't included when you're putting the unit number on a uniform. My units are Pack 3099 and Troop 0099, but we're actually Pack and Troop 99. 422, as long as it's not taken, should be fine. When you're entering a unit number in the system or on an application you'll use 4422, but just put 422 on your uniforms.