T2Eagle

I guess this is what surprises me, or is at least something I never really understood until now --- because this description is pretty accurate for the 80% of us who are not part of LDS. We love scouting qua scouting, and I think this why I believe that although the LDS decision will have a negative effect it won't be crushing and will be very uneven across the country. I'm in Ohio and there aren't more than a handful of LDS units in my council all of them relatively small.

As DavidCO said the policy only applies to scouters communicating with scouts. But if you want to be Helpful to your leaders, if you happen to email say your SM, or especially if you're texting him or her, copy a parent or other adult when you start the communication, that makes it easier for the SM to reply to both you and another adult --- which is the obligation he has. I say this because I know i have inadvertently violated this rule when receiving a text from a scout, and then replying with a one word or short answer and forgetting to copy someone else.

I don't remember how explicit it was in the latest training, but the previous training was clear that matters of health and safety trump ypt guidelines when you have to choose between them. A much more direct scenario for this would be: I'm walking down the road at summer camp with two of my scouts, we're on the way from one activity area to another. Suddenly one of them becomes gravely ill and needs assistance, let's say CPR. Assuming cell phone communication is unavailable, I would send one scout to go for help and I would stay and render aid. Heck, let's make it maybe a little less dramatic and go with one scout with broken leg, I still send one scout for help and stay alone with the injured scout. All YPT rules have a primary goal --- the protection of our scouts --- with a secondary goal of protecting us scouters. So when confronted with choices, choose what is in the best interests of the youth we serve.

Not claiming expertise here, but there are two bodies we're talking about --- National Council and National Executive Board. The statements about unanimity on votes on changes are referring to the approximately 70 member Executive Board. That board does not have voting members from local councils like Idaho, Utah, or NY. I don't think the National Council has or even necessarily will have votes on the membership rules. I can't really find what they are responsible for doing at their annual meeting other than voting on the National Council President --- folks like Gates, Tillerson, Stephenson, etc.

They did give up their charters in order to refocus on service to the parishes. Most of the units found new homes with parishes, probably a few folded and a few found non parish homes.

Digging around in the source RS originally posted, it looks like the National Council, which includes representatives from local councils, "is the corporate membership of the Boy Scouts of America ..." While the Executive Board is the governing body of the Corporation. That looks like a structure similar to the idea of shareholders and board of directors in a public corporation. This is a pretty similar structure to a local council, where the council itself is run by an E-Board, but there is a membership and annual meeting where each CO has a vote. Pure speculation on my part is that there would probably be a way for the National Council to override the E-Board decisions either directly or by voting the members out en masse in the same way a public corporation's shareholders can dislodge a company's board of directors. Possible, but exceedingly difficult to do as a practical matter. Sure, the Idaho Council gets a number of votes, but so do places like New York and California, whose local Councils may have different opinions on the wisdom of the recent changes.

That is interesting. I am Catholic, my current troop is sponsored by my parish, but neither my Pack nor troop growing up was sponsored by my then parish, and a troop I was involved with for my nephew while he was a scout was also not a Catholic parish. The COs were respectively a Knights of Columbus, a Presbyterian Church, and a volunteer fire company. So my scouting and my Catholicism have never been as intertwined as they clearly have been for a member of the LDS. It is worth remembering that the same is true for more than 80% of all scouts here in the US. I find it interesting that, as far as I can tell from the Church's statements, they are neither attributing their decision to recent BSA decisions, nor are they giving any instruction that LDS youth not participate in scouting. I wonder at the number of people who claim that they loved scouting but are leaving now that it is not a mandated part of their worship. I long wondered whether the relationship between the LDS Church and BSA was both a strength and at the same time an Achille's heel for the BSA.

The rule prevents inappropriate contact in the same way the underlying philosophy of no one on one contact prevents it. Following the rule makes the grooming process that is part of predation much harder, not purely impossible but more difficult. It also sets up an environment where deviation from the rules is broadly considered suspect and so it is noticed more quickly, questioned more rigorously, and can be used to cut off access to victims at the earliest stage --- even before any explicitly exploitative behavior has actually happened. This applies to both other adults noticing and the scouts themselves noticing, with or without having received explicit training. As to false accusations, the very fact that they're false means they're impossible to prevent entirely. A false accuser could, a year from now, accuse you of misbehavior on this weekend's outing, even if you weren't on the outing and were three states away. The evidence, and the fact, that you were three states away is what will prevent bad consequences ensuing from the false accusation. The fact is that nothing digital is ever actually gone, so being able to prove that you didn't send an inappropriate electronic communication is always going to be possible. A clear history of always involving more than one person in your communications is going to make your claim to be innocent easier for others to believe even while they're waiting for actual proof.

The hopeful was that he thought that long time scouters who were also members of the LDS would remain members and supporters of scouting, hopeful because he believed many LDS families would continue to have their sons (and daughters) in scouting because they loved and believed in scouting not just because it was mandated by their church, and also hopeful in that he believed that the council was positioned to survive financially because of some sound investment strategies they had made. At the same time, he's certainly realistic about his council being much smaller.

This was a fascinating, thoughtful, and excellent interview. Really gave some great answers on the practical side and the hopeful side of the changes coming to our org.

At a minimum you should make sure the other leaders know your contact is a youth. It certainly would be HELPFUL of you to remind them of the new(ish) rule about electronic communications with youth. As a practical matter, it's likely most communications will be group emails.

In a world where women's needs were so narrowly defined that they were considered BY THEIR NATURE not responsible enough to vote, incapable of becoming doctors, lawyers, etc., and so subservient to their husbands that if they married a non citizen, say a recent Irish immigrant, they instantly lost their US citizenship, it's hardly surprising that he or almost anyone else in those days would have thought that the needs of boys and girls would not be drastically different. It's true that we can't know what BP would have thought if he was around today, but it seems foolish to look to a world so full of wrong headed views about the nature and capability of women as having any wisdom to impart to us today.

The same logic probably will apply to camp closures/sales/transfers. The LDS announcement specifically mentioned (IIRC) there being an outdoor component to their new program, so presumably they'll need some camps to carry out that program. When some of the mountain-west councils need to start closing camps, things could get interesting/messy where donated land, endowments, and trusts were tied to continuing scouting as a condition to ongoing ownership by the local council.

Here's a twist on the question. What would his answer have been 10-20 years ago --- before the internet and You Tube? Assuming you would take the same "watchful eye" only approach. He would have had to first go the library and probably find at least two books, one on plumbing one on electricity. If the right books weren't immediately available he/you might have had to wait weeks just to take the next step. Having gotten a hold of the right books he would then have to wade through the material and extrapolate from probably very generic instructions how to apply the material to the specific job he wanted to accomplish. There would probably not be a chapter in each book with step by step instructions on how to install a dishwasher. This would have added hours to the learning process at the same time decreasing the chances of success, especially success on the first couple tries, and not only decreased the success rate but increased the chance of catastrophic failure, that is ruining a brand new machine because he got it wrong. Instead, he was probably able to find in just a matter of minutes a video that showed exactly how to do the thing he wanted to do, maybe even specific to the model of dishwasher. He could watch this video through a couple times in preparation for the project, and ten stop, start, and replay it as needed to work through the project step by step. So today it's possible to spend much less time learning this task and have a much better chance of completing it successfully. Before we get too nostalgic about how much better the old days were we should maybe stop and consider that the old days were just different --- not necessarily better. As to the question "how do our youngsters measure up" they're mastering the skills they need for today's world in the same way folks before us mastered the skills they needed for their world. So maybe today's youngsters are a lot better than we sometimes give them credit for.

Unless I'm reading it incorrectly, the Church doesn't seem to be saying the things you're saying. The Church's statements appear to be saying that the reason its program needs to change is because a program that is very US specific simply doesn't work for a now much more global Church membership. Nowhere in any of the statements I have seen has the Church attributed its pulling out of scouting to be the result of the changes within scouting.

The latter part of your statement was true 100 years ago, before the discovery of antibiotics and the recognition of the primacy of sanitation. That's not the case today in even the worst conflicts. The caveat to that is that most famines and really bad disease outbreaks are side affects one remove away from the battlefield, see for instance Yemen.

Just to be clear, the people who have the final say on whether someone is allowed to be present at Pack activities are the Chartered Organization, that is, the folks who sponsor your Pack. I would approach them directly. It's probably important that you have written facts with you, or attached to a note if you're doing this by writing. When you say he's on the registry, print a copy showing his name, when you say you've verified something with law enforcement does that mean you have something written from them or was it a direct conversation or something passed along to you? If it's not in writing then you should do the research and get the actual data, law enforcement can make mistakes like anyone else. The important issue when you're approaching the Chartering Org is probably going to be the exact facts not some discrepancy between what she said, or what you heard that she said, and what you heard someone else say.

They had to come up with something, Scouts BSA isn't bad. The idea of Scout Me In as a marketing campaign actually is pretty clever.

We've had some discussions with our IH/COR, who is pastor of our Catholic parish, and some preliminary discussions among the troop committee. IF, we end up with a troop for girls, we'll likely be looking at the linked troop model. We'll have the same CO, one troop committee and two troops. Because we want to maintain the single gender model we would have the troops meat on different nights, separate PLCs (to the extent a likely small troop needs a PLC), etc. Given that all of our equipment and funds belongs to the parish we would be of course be sharing that with the new troop. We're going to survey the parish to see what interest there is for girls at both the pack and the troop level. The decision to turn the key on a new troop will likely depend first and foremost on the willingness of someone to step up to be the scoutmaster.

The insurance would be the same for this event as for virtually any event a council puts on. Non registered folks, kids and adults, come to virtually every event of any size that any council puts on, insurance policies are purchased to cover that. Very few, if any, individual events involve their own policy or rider. A council insures against all the things that might happen in the course of their operations. There's virtually no difference in the risk to council between a registered or non registered youth getting hurt during an activity. It would cost the council the same amount to pay for an injured 12 year old girl as a 12 year old boy during a sawing contest. Whether the council would be liable wouldn't change based on registration --- either you're negligent or you're not, and therefore liable or not.

Nice job and good advice for all of us.

This is on the docket as a team building exercise for the ILST group. But maybe even a better idea for the new guys. The persistence with which some kids will attack a log with a hatchet always fascinates me. This will definitely be on the menu.

This weekend the troop is doing "Tenderfoot Weekend" which concentrates on helping our newest scouts learn to camp as a Boy Scout. Because of scheduling challenges, our oldest scouts are going to be holding an Introduction to Leadership Skills for Troops ILST session Saturday from right after breakfast until lunch time. Contrary to what we all know is best practices, this means that rather than having our older scouts leading the program for our younger scouts that morning we will instead have some adults work with the newest scouts on some basic scout skills. We know it's not a great idea, but it's the best we, and by we I mean the PLC and the adult leadership together, could come up with to get in some badly needed leadership training for our older scouts. After lunch the adults plan is to retire to our camp chairs and turn things back over to the way they should be. Setting aside all the approbation about why this is a bad idea, what do you think would be the most fun skills to work on for scouts on their first troop camp out. I'm going to start with fire: how to find proper materials, how to build, how to start without matches, etc. But I need another hour or two of subject matter. To really offend your sense of the way things should be, we're probably even going to do dishes for the regular patrols so that they can get to the training quicker that morning.

So the new YPT rule, quoted a couple times on these forums from the Early Adopter power point, and duplicated in the presentation our council gave last week is: One registered adult leader and one other adult, one of which must be 21 years old, and a Youth Protection trained adult female must be present. So, essentially one adult female, YPT trained, at every meeting, outing, trek, etc. that involves female youth. I doubt that any higher number of folks today are going to ignore this rule than ignore current YPT guidelines about adult numbers and presence. As for what to do, I think it will depend on the individual units. For my unit, I think we'll end up with two troops under one CO, it's more a question of when not whether. My hope is that the two units operate separately for the most part. There are a couple of activities: fundraising and a weekend we camp jointly with our CO's Cub Pack, that I think would make sense to do together, but I don't think the troops should otherwise assume that they're going together. Of course as with all trips, that will be up to the respective PLCs and not my call. As I'm typing this, I think my last sentence answers the question for me. The YPT rules need always to be followed, if they can't be met for both units than it is up to the respective PLCs to decide if they both go or only one goes. I guess I disagree with what seems to be the underlying premise of your question, which is that there will regularly be trouble finding females to attend outings. I am part of a very middle class, middle of the road, mid west troop. We regularly have women camp with us, including at summer camp, some of them are registered leaders, occasionally it's just a one time outing for a mom who wants to see what her son is experiencing. If they instituted a rule tomorrow that our all boy troop needed to have a female on every trip I can't think of a single trip that I'd have trouble fully staffing. Do the rest of the units out there have some dearth of scout mothers who are willing to sleep in a tent ?

The short answer of course is the same thing that would happen any time you don't have enough adults to conduct an activity --- you either find them or you don't conduct the activity. 1) This seems the least likely and the easiest to avoid or correct. You don't really need a female scouter, you need an adult female who has taken YPT. I don't think I've ever been at a meeting where there wasn't at least one adult female; troops will probably need to get more women to take YPT, but that's a 45 minute online class --- hardly a difficult ask. 2) This one will be harder, but we've had occasional weekends when we couldn't go because we didn't have enough adults; when that happens you just don't go. 3) Harder certainly, but since this is a once a year phenomenon scheduled months in advance it really shouldn't be that difficult. Parents who want their kids to experience scouting are going to make the sacrifices necessary to enable them to experience scouting, that's what happens today. Parents who want their daughters to experience scouting will probably be self selecting as a group willing to make a bit of extra sacrifice to make that happen.