5yearscouter

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 you can is poor form, and considered poor netiquette to post photos of other people's kids online..

So....national DIDN'T get rid of tour plans. Gee @@RichardB, you wonder why people are confused?

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, due the basic fact that you could click that this or that adult had the necessary training for the outing activity, but the national system then didn't go pull data from myscouting national database of training data, to verify that yup that adult actually is trained to take kids climbing or shooting or minimal swimming safety

One thing you might consider. Once a year we have the scout's parents execute a "privacy statement" or something. I forget what we call it. Basically, it provides several options, each representing a different level of disclosure. Some parents are OK with first names, or pics with no name, or full names, or in the newsletter but not the website,  or whatever. We provide them the opportunity to tell us exactly what they are comfortable with.

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.

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 follow the rules, and filing our Plans every month like obedient scout leaders.

So even if national makes them go away completely and remove the online way to file them, doesn't mean that council's couldn't make a different decision based on their interpretation of risk.

I actually don't like the idea of them going away, they were one check that seemed to make our SM sit up and pay attention to making sure every campout had a trained leader and enough drivers, and had an ACTUAL PLAN. Our SM isn't on the very organized scouter's list.

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. 

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.

And leaving a troop that helped you when you needed it IS Scoutlike? Really?

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 so they could successfully instruct the others on doing the same, and the scoutmaster tells them that's not ok, go sit down and make the instructor figure it out for themselves.  over and over the older scouts are told to back off, don't instruct, don't help, no you can't plan campouts or hikes for your patrol, no high adventure, no challenge, only the same old same old that the 10.5 year olds have never done but the 17 year olds have done over and over every year or two? nothing in that to keep their interest. The asms and sm claim to be tired of those outings, and aren't always attending, but expect the 17 year olds to be excited to show it off to the new guys again for the 5th time? And I'm talking the whole patrol of older scouts we have 7 or 8 15.5-17.5 year olds--the guys who know this stuff cold and WANT to share it and aren't allowed to by the scoutmaster.

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 his troop.  It was working at summer camp, and OA ceremonialist.  His troop had a pretty good scoutmaster, but having outings exciting to the older boys was a struggle--because all the older guys were involved in so many other activities, that finding a common weekend for an outing at all, especially the week long hikes and canoe trips they wanted to do, was almost impossible. When at the troop meetings/outings, he was the effective teacher, big brother to all.  But that was his personality.  He has calmness and caring for others at his heart, and always has.  Having patience to teach T-1st skills every meeting for years and years is very very trying on young men, but he would just plod along, teaching anyone anything they needed.  You'd probably all say he is a great Eagle because he gives back.  But internally he groaned.  Scouting started to leave a bad taste in his mouth towards the end.

I have another son, he's almost 17, done with all merit badges and just needs his Eagle project.  He's in the same troop, but it's different, oh so different now. New SM really can't figure out how to even begin to reach the older scouts.  He really stuck it to the youth when he told them to be sure to think about giving the new guy a chance for spl rather than their trained older scouts who had just returned from NAYLE. He actually spoke kind of poorly about the older guys, that the troop needed new blood.  And then when the 13 year old was elected SPL, went on to discourage openly and loudly that SPL from choosing any of the older scouts to advise and help him as ASPLs and Instructors.  So needless to Say, the older guys went and sat down and removed their interest in running for POR unless they absolutely needed it for rank.  So I make my son go to scouts once a month or so until he finishes his project. 

Now younger son is also a kid with a different personality than his brother.  He does not have that much patience to teach others every single meeting.  He can lash better than anyone in the troop, and will gladly show that off.  Scoutmaster has taken to asking--so can anyone aside from H show the younger scouts how to lash?

And he has a bad attitude about the SM, who when the older boys wanted to plan their own backpack trip on weekends they were all available, SM refused to let them do it, unless they changed it so the younger guys could attend like one night and < 5 miles on this super easy trail.  All The troop outings are starting to cater to 11-13 year olds, and end up being field trips with a side of camping.  Older guys were talking they just wanted to go camping somewhere and hang out at the campsite and whittle, and make a fire, dutch oven cook and play some games.  SM says fine if everything you do is trail to first class skill teaching for the younger guys.

Older guys are bailing like crazy as soon as they get their Eagle and I don't blame them if there is nothing in the troop for them.

Younger scouts are starting to do the same (next up eagles are about 14)  That will leave no experienced scouts except maybe maybe 2-3 who have younger brothers.  and the rest of the 50 will be young.

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 little wording changes plus cyber chip and the how to prevent child abuse.  It did postpone a scout so he's now going to finish star in January this year instead of November.

Monday we are supposed to have a bunch of the pdf of req changes printed.  Why is that PDF so annoying to use? like nobody wants it in their book with top stapled so that every other page prints upside down?  The scouts don't want to flip it up to sign off stuff that way when used to turning pages right to left to sign. and they have to cut the pages in half and it seems they get kinda out of order when you do that.

And even printing in color on my fairly good printer, the eagle info that is printed in the blue box is barely readable.

I think I'm going to have to scan the pages out of a new scout book and make a new pdf

where people could choose to print just part of the requirements pages, like maybe they only need the life and eagle pages.

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 always so politically correct, the border patrol.

pink kitty patrol

bronies patrol

I've seen the same kind of incompetence in ASMs and the occasional SM. I find, however, that folks are less upset about a youth who needs correction vs. an adult who needs correction. So saddle your lead youth with sign-off responsibility, uniform inspection, etc... When they screw up, you'll have to put up with less jaw-jerking from your adult leaders.

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 scout skills. sigh.

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 a field day with all dens outside, everyone in class b uniforms and playing games.  He complained nobody was in uniform.  that we didn't have a flag ceremony (they said cub scout promise followed by let's play ball).  Then he started quizzing people about why we were meeting at this school instead of blah blah church and went on and on about finding us a new chartering organization and recruiting from different schools in the area and how we were all doing it worng

.  He turned everyone off.  The cubmaster was ready to quit if that guy was in charge in any way and den leaders following. I spent the next month reassuring and talking them down.  I was cor of that unit and told the DE to get rid of him cause He did nothing to help, only hurt the pack.

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.

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.

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.

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 protocol.  We took it that any time the boys could get up on stage and do something cool in front of everyone, it helped them to grow and thrive and be proud of being a cub scout.

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 need for a smaller trailer that can take half the stuff (or less) since most of our outings are now running at about 20 people.  Just unloading the extra gear out of the trailer that isn't needed on a campout doesn't help the gross weight enough for SUV's to pull it.

"Tempting though.   I like the idea of having the troop roster at the push of a button and then a push a button to dial the phone from the roster.  Nice feature."

 

The best part is the data stays local on the phone so a leader can access medical records even out on the trail out of Internet service.  Yes, the "one touch" dialing for anyone, or texting, is very very nice.  The whole "Did you credit me for those service hours yet?" is now always answered with a "I can't remember, did you look it up on your smart phone?" reply.  The TM Mobile is a free application, unlike their Dot.Net add on.   

 

Still playing around with the new beta version web product.  One great add one was a link to a Pay Pal account.  Yes, Scouts should be responsible for bringing in checks for payment for outings but there are some family functions that the Troop has where opening up to easy electronic payment to the Troop's bank account would be wonderful.  I just can't imagine ScoutBook having functionality like that anytime soon. 

 

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.

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, cause people wouldn't log in to sign up for events on twhost.

they could log in on their smartphone and have it remember their log in credentials, but I guess that's too much work.

the gmail forms they don't have to sign in, just fill out the name and yes or no for events

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 sure they'll really access this.

We have 68 scouts so while I don't like entering stuff into troop web host and then into scout net, it's automated, uploads are pretty efficient and printing an effective roster out of either place, scout net or twhost are both useable.  If scoutbook can't do a roster then it won't work, esp a roster for event sign ups.  We actually use gmail forms to make sign ups for most events and then the scribe enters the attendance on twhost. 

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 BOR actually approve the rank ON SCOUTBOOK for it to go thru? Or will there be one person who actually makes it go thru (like current Adv Chair?)

And have they fixed it so that ONE email address can sign up for scoutbook for everyone in a family? Cause we don't use Scoutbook cause that was what we were told, that each person had to have a different email address, and we have families where ALL emails ONLY go thru one email address to mom or dad only.

I will check, how many do you need?

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.

An awesome update has been published for your reading pleasure.  

 

http://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/HealthandSafety/GSS/toc.aspx

 

Enjoy,

 

RichardB

It would be really nice if all scouting volunteers would get a notice when changes are made to documents like the GTSS or GTA

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.