T2Eagle

Our troop pays for its leaders to attend. We get three free for participating in things like FOS, having a certain number of scouts attend, etc. The $400 sounds steep but maybe OK, tacking on $200 for extra travel really puts it into expensive territory. if your troop isn't doing some serious --- and lucrative --- fundraising to defray costs for the scouts and subsidize leaders I don't know what they're thinking.

No, it's not about whether some agency has your prints on file, it' s whether the person that is applying for something today is in fact the person they claim to be, or if I'm being really precise, whether the person who is applying today has any kind of criminal record that can be found by examining the fingerprints being submitted today.

The thing about fingerprints is that they're not tied to a any particular file or record, they're proof that you are who you say you are. Your fingerprints aren't going to reveal anything special about Teacher Skeptic that a search using your name, birthdate, ss#, etc. wouldn't reveal. What they do is prove that SM Skeptic is the same person as Teacher Skeptic.

Welcome to the forum. My advice before knowing anything else is no matter where you are on the continuum of patrol method, pick one or two things you want to change first, get both the scouts and one or two adults to agree that those changes would be good, then implement them and run them a couple time until you're really good at them, before you move on to the next items to change. But to get any specific advice, first tell us a bit about how your troop operates today. For instance, describe how your troop decides what they're going to do on a campout: how and who decides what you

"The word was invented by J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books to describe a form of teleportation from one place to another, but in derived usage it often means just to disappear completely." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disapparate

I suspect that since the original plan: 12,000 (or whatever the original number was) claimants and a quick exit has long since disapparated, the process has taken on a life of its own, and no one can bring themselves to say "stop! let's rethink this entirely"

It's not quite that COs say they can't be held liable, it's that they were indemnified/insured by BSA in the event that they were held liable. That's why they're also claimants in the bankruptcy. They have a claim against the asset that is the insurance contracts BSA has.

That was my first thought too. Your ASMs need better mentors.

I would say that if the current plan gets rejected than the threshold question really needs to be whether she needs to follow Purdue regarding non debtors. I don't know, maybe someone else does, whether there is actually a binding precedent in this circuit that explicitly is in conflict with Purdue.

i would tell them that rules don't self justify. They exist to accomplish a purpose, if a rule fails to accomplish its purpose, or worse, as I think is the case with this rule as applied to this situation, the rule actually defeats its own purpose, than the rule needn't be and shouldn't be followed. You can find all sorts of legal, philosophical, and even Jesuitical support for this position if you're concerned enough to look. And it's worth remembering that the stakes are very low with disregarding the rule. The worst that can happen is that if someone is foolish enough to make some s

I found this from the article pretty interesting. "Earlier this month, the United Methodist negotiators were encouraging those churches to vote “no,” but with the settlement, the churches are asked to vote for the plan. Those that already have voted against it are asked to change their votes, and directions on how to do that are being shared through annual conferences." I don't know how many congregations actually filed as claimants, but it could easily be 2000 -- 3000, that's a lot of yes votes.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21165443-nc-safe-act-ruling-dec-20-2021 Unless you're a NC constitutional scholar I'm not sure the ruling gives you much predictive insight. The question, as I understand it, is how closely a line of NC cases dating to 1933, which say that the legislature cannot retroactively take away vested property rights (as opposed to fundamental constitutional rights), applies specifically to SOL defenses, which are considered "vested" rights. Further, does that line of cases both apply to SOLs and is it closely enough tied to the specific language of th

The big black hole of this case has always been the insurance company liability. Over the years the insurers have covered, or alleged to have covered BSA, the LCs, and the COs. Given all the discovery that has occurred, I'm surprised there is so little solid information about what their actual liability may be. I suspect that the answer is no one knows. Decades old policies, subject to all sorts of interpretations. At the end of the day, no side will want to risk the full litigation of this, because no side will risk losing it all. So eventually there has to be a deal, a deal, not an

I've never even thought of saying something like that, and if I ever thought I had to I wouldn't be going myself.

I don't know, but I suspect there is no such data qua data, no connection of one incident to another. If such data or a data base existed it would have come out in one of the state court cases over the years the same way the ineligible files did. It's certainly an overall organizational failing, but the lack of such data is one of the reasons I'm unimpressed with Officer Mike's tenure as head of YPT over the past decade.

To help everyone be clear, the $50 is every year. For some perspective, my Catholic Diocese charges $25 every couple years to cover the cost of the background check necessary to be a scouter or a CYO coach. I have no idea for either organization how much of that is paid directly to the backgrounding company, how much is calculated to be direct cost for administering and reviewing the background process, or how much is charged to overhead. But I would guess that the $25 -- $50 range is probably pretty much the cost any organization is going to have to charge to carry out a similar proces

The most important part of the appointment process is the scout is "appointed by the SPL in consultation with the SM" (emphasis added). Critical to being a good leader is being able to choose your team, and not just based on friendships but on the needs, and abilities, of the members of the troop as a whole. This is where an SM can help smooth out some of the rough patches that electing everyone, or just letting the SPL act without guidance, can produce. I have seen electing everybody be the SM's easier alternative to working harder with some SPLs. To Barry's point about leadership as

This came up with us last year. I am the COR, and in the past my signatures were sufficient. This year, as you say, that paper was not in the packet. I was told the DE had to personally get the signature, or if not personally at least directly get the IH signature.

The thing to remember is that a lot of us didn't. The fatality rate for children is about half today what it was in the mid 60s. There are a lot of reasons for that but being smarter about safety is certainly a part of it. Sure, we never wore seatbelts as kids, and we didn't die, but that's not because it wasn't foolish or dangerous. Those commercials showing what happened to unbelted crash test dummies weren't exaggerations.

I'm skeptical the number could be that low. Everybody knows there will be a number of false claims in these types of suits, but there have been a lot of them over the years and folks have a decent handle as to how many falsities to expect. It would be really strange to have this particular case inspire such an outsize level of fraud and deceit.

Annual Planning Weekend is this coming month. I think I'll whisper this in one or two of the scouts' ears.

I don't live in the area any more, but I still read the "Inky" online, mostly for the sports coverage. Once a Flyers/Iggles/Phillies/Sixers fan always ... But I delivered The Bulletin, which was the afternoon paper. I was never a fan of getting up early in the morning.

That is exactly my version of Buck Buck, I was too lazy/inarticulate to write it clearly, so I just did a cut and paste from Wikipedia. In terms of virus and variants you couldn't be more correct. This is also clipped from Wikipedia: "As early as the 16th century, children in Europe and the Near East played Buck, Buck, which had been called "Bucca Bucca quot sunt hic?"

As a native Philadelphian I introduced "Buck Buck"* to my midwestern scouts. In hindsight maybe not my finest hour as SM. *one group of players [climbing] on the backs of a second group in order to build as large a pile as possible or to cause the supporting players to collapse."

I've read all the BSA rules I can find, backwards and forwards, I'm pretty sure I've never seen this one before Covid. Interestingly, it has nothing to do with CO rules or CO approval of leaders, because it's up to council to approve, so there's no formal approval needed fro the CO.