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5yearscouter

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Everything posted by 5yearscouter

  1. We've had issues with cubs in a domestic violence abuse situation where posting photos of the cub online put them at risk because they were hiding from dad. So we didn't post any pics of that cub, with our without his full name attached. That is common decency. There is also such a thing as needing to have a model release to use photos of other people for certain purposes like advertising. So you can't just take photos of kids and use them how you wish. A scout (and scouter) is friendly and courteous, getting parental permissions would fall under that. Using photos just because yo
  2. Yes I believe that is what @@RichardB was referring to, that you didn't have to do a tour plan for everything since likely 2012. But he is WRONG that they went away completely in 2012. If National is the one doing the research on tour plan helping the outcome from a safety point of view, were they looking only at National Tour plans? Or all tour plans including the 1000 I've done for our local council over the years for regular campouts and the trip to the local pool and climbing wall etc? Filling out the little piece of paper/online form would be highly ineffective to help with safety,
  3. But keeping track of who can post what about which scout becomes a nightmare when you are dealing with 70 scouts on the troop website. Waaaaayyyyy easier to set a default for your unit to do no harm--which means as adults trying to protect the child's privacy in our troop website and online interactions. If a youth gives away his own privacy-full name, etc. by choice after being trained on the possible repercussions and parents given the same training, then it's on them. not on us as unit leaders.
  4. So on a National Level, the requirement for Tour and Activity Plans (AKA Tour Plans that replaced Tour permits) went away for every single campout. They were only required for a specific set of campouts, out of council--and that requirement is still listead as required on all BSA docs/websites/blah blah. But National allowed Council's to set their own Tour Plan policies. MOST council's including Grand Canyon Council (AZ) required Tour Plans for every overnight campout, Climbing and Swimming/water activities, plus anything over 25 miles from home. So we've been plugging away trying to fo
  5. I laugh a bit that our troop has one of the oldest asms (he's 65 but not really tech savy) as the go to guy to show completion of cyber chip. It should be on the older scouts, but the BSA Cyber Chip program is not good enough to truly teach these guys how to be safe online. Even after the training, most don't have a clue what a safe password would be, or why in the world anyone would have issue with things like Instagram or snap chat, or why tagging everyone with their full names in pics might be an issue.
  6. check your local OA chapter and see if they have a bridge you can use for this purpose. That's what all of our district packs do except one that has a huge storage room and have their own bridge. The order of the Arrow ceremony team performs the ceremony for the crossover and brings the bridge with them.
  7. When that troop turns it's back on you? When that troop and scoutmaster talks poorly about the older scouts when they try to step up and lead and doesn't want the nylt and nayle trained guys to do anything or be instructors or to actually teach the other guys what they've learned? Why would any scout show up to stand there and have someone teach them trail to 1st class skills that they already know with their eyes closed, someone who doesn't know what they are teaching, and if they stand up and take the youth aside and suggest that they could show the instructor how to actually tie that knot s
  8. This idea that a scout can only be a good Eagle if he gets his Eagle and then sticks around isn't very scoutlike or kind. To get an Eagle has a certain set of requirements, and staying around in your troop to teach younger scouts is not one of the requirements. Additionally, we do a disservice to the older scouts when we seem to require teaching younger scouts in order to be deemed a true scout, or worthy of Eagle. I have one Eagle, he got his January of his Senior year. He was active in his troop for the most part all the way up to the end. Most of his scouting, however, was not to hi
  9. We have a scoutmaster who has not been very proactive on this. He's barely mentioned it to the scouts. After a BOR during 2016 I sent each scout and their parents the pdf for the new requirements they now had to use, but the sm asm team didn't really pay attention to that, and we had to catch scouts for subsequent BOR using old requirements. EX: 1st class on old req in January 2016, so for star they had to use new requirements but nobody reinforced that to them during the year and sm did sm conference and completely forgot about the change. Luckily it's virtually the same req with a littl
  10. Cannibal patrol. Patrol yell was chanting forks and spoons over and over with an ending about humans being the other white meat. Currently we have the Blue moon patrol, which is the collection of the oldest guys in high school, most are eagles already. Not named after the beer, instead named because they are the guys that joke about all of them showing up to the troop meetings once in a blue moon. they were going to be something about being the back up patrol cause they are the back up plan to always make things happen if any of the green bars don't show to a meeting or outing. not
  11. yah prior two scoutmasters were spot on. We could tell when a scout was wishy washy on scout skills as the scoutmaster would be in there going thru stuff fast but thoroughly, discovering a missing piece of the scout's abilities, then finding an instructor to fix the issue or teaching the kid himself what he was missing. Then sending him home to practice, to teach his patrol next week and then come back and try again for a sm conference. Current scoutmaster Is our problem child who looks over that stuff was signed in the book and doesn't catch the errors and omissions and holes in their
  12. I've had a fairly good relationship with one unit commissioner, when he asked what he could do, as training chair I asked him to point out to the sm that he actually had to re-take training frequently. That it wasn't a one time deal with weather hazards and safe swim for instance. The sm had been told, but he knew it all, and thus he didn't take training. The unit commissioner spoke to him in a meeting with the cor and cc and next thing you know bam all training was completed. And I've had a horrible relationship with another unit commissioner. He showed up to our pack that was having
  13. In our troop the sm "trains" the troop guides and they sign off on T2first class material. The training is hit or miss, but most of the troop guides take it very seriously and make the scouts show that they really know the stuff. There's always a TG that just signs everywhere someone points, but the SM usually catches that in SM conference when he reviews the stuff was really completed. The is a TG assigned to each patrol with scouts below first class. Anything above first class the sm reviews for completion and signs those requirements in SM conference for the rank.
  14. That tents have to be a certain distance apart in case of fire, no coleman fuel at all ever or that only adults can fill the coleman stoves. two deep leadership means you have to have two adults in the car cause you might have an emergency stop along the way for a blown tire or similar.
  15. That scouts are not allowed to carry their own medicine on a campout or summer camp even if they are perfectly capable of taking care of their own meds on their own. Esp silly some troops try to collect all the adult meds for a campout, and have the one troop leader person dispense all meds for everyone scout and adults alike.
  16. I think they need to read up on den flags in the Den Leader handbooks. I don't have my old cub scout leader guides, pow wow books, cub scout ceremonies book, but I recall there are lots of protocols for flag ceremonies done with den flags along with the pack and American flag. Our pack often had scouts from each den come up to present their den flag at the big cub scout events of the year like blue and gold. As long as the American Flag and state flag take precedent, Pack flag next, then rank flags are certainly ok to present as well. That may be more Pack tradition than actual Flag protoc
  17. We have a beast of a trailer, picked out when our SM and a bunch of committee had 1 ton diesel trucks to pull it fully loaded with 7 chuck boxes, dutch ovens, 20 tents, and all the gear and food for outings with 40 or more scouts at a time. Now we have a huge trailer and next to nobody that can pull it up a grade. Sure I can pull it to the scout lodge from my house with my F150, but not up the mountains. For that we really need an F250 at least, but the people with brand new F150s with trailer breaks and engine still under warranty are welcome to try it. I keep talking to them about the ne
  18. You have med forms electronically? BSA says we shouldn't do that with med forms... I received an email about scoutbook that it's incredibly slow and timing out and went down etc because they have now 1 million users and have 20% of units and that's bogging them down. This does not bode well for being able to keep up if the useage continues to grow as BSA pushes us all to use scoutbook.
  19. We use troop web host for the website you can make some pages and allow calendar or other info to be viewable to the public. also tracking your advancement and uploading to council works pretty well. Nobody except a handful of adults log in to the website. others look at the calendar on the homepage. or wait til they get the automated calendar of events that can go out as often as you want it to. It has so many features we don't use cause nobody really logs in and uses websites. We actually use gmail for direct communication in the troop, and use the gmail forms for sign ups for events
  20. we don't use scoutbook yet. Our feeder pack has used it for a little while, so as more boys cross over and their parents are used to it, that may be where we go. our biggest complaint when we started is that to be fully functional everyone has to have their own email address, and we have whole families with lots of boys that only have one email address. have they fixed that yet? well and we paid for 3 years of troop web host and it's working pretty well even though parents won't access it if they don't have to. they just wait to get the automated newsletter of events each week. Not sur
  21. I got an email from the council advancement guy today that said National is working on making Scoutbook talk to internet advancement directly so what you see on the scoutbook app is what Scoutnet has for your scouts. That the IT dept decided it needed to be approached differently, so the process was going to be postponed by a few months. But that when you enter anything into Scoutnet it will show on internet advancement automatically/immediately. My question, where are the checks and balances here? Like for advancing a rank you are going to need to have SM and at least 3 people on a
  22. Talk to the Scoutmaster to run it past him that an asm is going to do a SM conference and sign his book. Then everything is completed before his 18th birthday that is required for eagle. The signatures on application and eagle project book etc can all be done after the fact without issue. Scout can also go to his eagle board without sm signature or sm conference, so this won't hang him up.
  23. It would be really nice if all scouting volunteers would get a notice when changes are made to documents like the GTSS or GTA
  24. Yeah if the itinerary changes on your tour plan, you just log back into the system and simply make changes on the tour plan as long as the changes don't happen the day you leave for the outing. Usually you know about changes the day before so you can think about it and have time to make the changes.
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