Eagle94-A1

One thing about 4-H, and least in my neck of the woods. 1) there is no registration costs, just costs for supplies and events and 2) You can do whatever interests you want under the 4-H umbrella as long as you have the volunteers to run that particular interest. HOWEVER once the volunteers are gone, that program ceases. Local 4-H has a multitude of programs: envirothon, electric club, shooting sports, leadership academy, ad nauseum. No fee vs $75 fee PLUS council fees ( $100 in my neck of the woods) I can see why 4-H is growing and BSA is not.

I am on my second one. First one I had for a year+ and it was stolen. Second one I have had for 21 years. Had to replace the leather strap, used paracord, and had to fix one small hole. I highly recommend it. It has survived hurricanes, snowstorms, ad nauseum over the years.

Does that work in your council? It has not in 2 of the councils I was in. One person yelled at by a pro was a member of the exec board. Nothing happened to the pro until COVID-19, about 18 to 24 months later.

OK, death threats are uncalled for, need to be investigated, and punished by the law. That is way over the line. Too far over the line. Obscene calls are also over the line. And need to be dealt with. As for abusive, it depend on the definition the pro is using. I had a SE state that publicly disagreeing with the council is abusive, and had the individual removed from Scouting. Whereas i have been yelled at and told I do not know what I was doing, etc by volunteers, but to told to grow a tougher skin by the same SE. The reason why folks are upset with national is that there is no transparency. Decision are made, and no one knows who is making them or why. When asked for input from volunteers, the results of that input are ignored, never posted, or responded with "double speak." Volunteers were ignored regarding Instapalms as 94% Against (18%) or Strongly Against (76%). The poll regarding membership changes by the members and volunteers has never been published AND a segment of the Scouting population, Western Region LDS members were excluded form those results. And look at the "double speak" of the Churchill Plan survey that national had to do because someone posted a slide. A lot of folks think Sea Scouts, OA, and Venturing are safe for the 18 to 20 year old members, when the "double speak: says they will continue talks on the matter. Further there are times when the national level volunteers making policies are overruled or uniformed of the decisions National has made or plan to make. Philmont being mortgaged but not informing the National Philmont Committee, nor the Trust about the mortgage is an example of National pros not being transparent with national volunteers. Another example is the National Sea Scout Commodore being completely taken off guard when the Churchill Plan was leaked. Not only should he have been informed, he should have been on the Churchill Committee. IMHO. Then there is the 411 Committee that redid the Cub Scout Program in June 2015. They were not informed prior to the December 2016 Cub Scout program changes. Volunteers are upset and angry at they way they are being treated by councils and by national. You have volunteers who will do anything in their power to help Scouts and units, but will do absolutely nothing for council, let alone National because of the treatment they have experienced.

My Responses will be in red Do you really believe that national has little input into the councils? National narrows down the choices a council has for SE and DFS that a Council Executive Board (CEB) chooses. National provides the growth opportunities for the professionals. National provides the training that professionals take. National sets the goals professionals need to meet. National [provides the recognition professionals get. As for executive boards and committees, why is it that SE's push "yes men" into those postions, and encourage DE's to push "yes men" into district roles instead of the best qualified? Why is it that when things do not go the way the council professionals want because the volunteers oppose the decision, national intervenes by threatening to revoke the council charter unless the pros get their way, i.e. Chicago and the camp sale a number of years ago? If that is the case, why wasn't the National Philmont Committee informed of the Philmont mortgage until several months after the fact? Why did members resign in protest? Why was the Trust not informed of the mortage and is now involved in the lbankruptcy? Why was the 411 Committee on Cub Scouts, the ones whos pent years working on the June 2015 program, not advised about the December 2016 Program changes? If policies and decisions are made by volunteers, why are the volutneers not being informed? From some of the decision national has made, this does not seem to be true. Unless the NEB is hiding things? There is no doubt that volunteers care at both the local and national levels. But I have seen volunteers manipulated on the local level, and that example must be coming from somewhere?. I have also seen volunteers forced out of positions at the local level because there have disagreements with professionals. That too has to come from somewhere? I have seen at both the local and national levels professionals overrule the decisions of volunteers,. And I have seen local and national volunteers resign in disgust over decisions of the local and national council. Instapalms, 411, and Churchill Plan, are some of the examples I can give of professionals ignoring the volunteers. Sadly this is not just a local issue. You may not be seeing it at this time in your council, but that can change with the next SE.

Sadly I do not see the BSA fulfilling "the ability of boys to do things for themselves and others, to train them in Scoutcraft, and to teach them patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred virtues, using the methods which are now in common use by Boy Scouts ." The Patrol Method died on October 1, 2018 when patrols could no longer do day activities, i.e. patrol meetings, patrol hikes, patrol shopping etc. And as noted the Advancement Methods has been destroyed by the "One and Done" mentality prevalent in Scouting today. Scouts no longer have to "Master the skills," like my generation and older did. The badge no longer represents "what the Scout can do, not what the Scout has done." Summer Camps, MBUs, and now the online MBUs are a joke. The problem is that we did lose over 20% of our membership as a result of this decision. Some of those longtime , experienced Scouters that left still have not been replaced, and it left a vacuum. Others who disagreed with this decision have slowly backed away from non-unit positions, focusing on their units. And again this leaves a void. I have seen this happen. Do not know the stats, by they do not call FOS 'Fund Our Salary" for nothing. When My district could no longer raise enough money to pay for a DE, we lost them I know a DE who was trying to start a SCOUTREACH program in his district. When one company found out, they were willing to make a donation to help equip the the units started in the program. When the DE attempted to find out the process for this with his DFS, he was chewed out for attempting to start these SCOUTREACH units and was told they cost more money than they bring in. Several other DEs told me similar stories, the focus is on payroll. National encourages the awarding of advancement, and turns a blind eye to its problems. In one recent video, National was bragging on the number of belt loops and merit badges being earned virtually, to the point of publically praising the council that had the most awards "earned." Worst case was the "Eagle" whose district BOR found some major problems, and followed procedure to come up with a plan to rectify the situation. The council advancement committee upheld the decision when it was appealed to them. BUT when National got the appeal, they overruled both the council and district decisions, and gave the Scout Eagle. Their rationale was " You do not penalize the Scout for the mistakes of the adults." Sadly I wish this was true. I have found some challenges. I have found names of youth still on the charter after I had removed them twice on previous recharter documents. Sadly that is also not true, not only on the local level, but national level as well. You can read about some of the experiences I have had regarding local level. The 411 Commitee and the Philmont Committee are the best examples of professionals not informing key volunteers what they are doing. My personal beef is Instapalms. 94% of those polled were either Against (16%) or Strongly Against (78%), yet they did it anyway. Agree Agree with you. Some states did have Mandatory Report Laws that affected Scouters and others did not, prior to and during that phase of YPT. One of the challenges of a national organization is having multiple jurisdictions to deal with. Yes, the volunteers love Scouting. But the professionals as I have shown actually run things. And for some, it is just a job.

I want to apologize for my snarky comment. I had just read a FB post stating that 18-20 year old ASMs serve no purpose in a troop. I am sick an tired of folks denigrating young adults, and I took out my frustration on you. Regarding the brain and development until age 25. Something that appears to be conveniently forgotten is that is that lifelong learners and folks starting new professions, basically anyone still learning stuff, has the same brain scan patterns as those under 25. If I can find the study's report, hopefully on PubMed Central, I will post the link. Unfortunately I no longer have access to the medical databases since I left the hosptial.

I think you meant ASM. JASM is a youth POR for 16-17 year old Scouts. Once they are 18, they are an adult, and an ASM. And yes, they usually carry a lot more weight in the younger Scouts eyes than us old fogeys.

Especially with all the changes that occurred in June 2015 and December 2016. Cub Scouts is a completely different program now.

I hope they still plan on having a wilderness area for Scouts.

Just wait. I see locker cubicles coming in the future.

None whatsoever. Instead of people with experience in the program they either look for warm bodies who get promoted, or folks with academic credentials. When I worked for national supply, my boss started off as a warm body, a sales clerk, and gradually moved up to manager. But the boss has 0 field experience in the program. When she hired me to be part of a trial program, it was because I had experience in the field and working summer camp. Every single proposal she questioned because she had no idea how summer camp operates. When I tried to explain why I suggested things, I was ignored. Best examples include shutting down the trading post during night time activities when no one shops and closing the trading post after the last camper left instead the scheduled staff departure. Try to explain the staff leave after the last campers do. This went on for two summers, until she was selected to work jamboree staff. She freaked out at the "long hours" she had to work, but had to remind her that she had the summer camp trading post open for longer hours, and that using sales stats, we could have cut 1/4 of the hours and still worked over 40 hours. As for academic credentials, I have been told that a national training director had 0 field experience, but a PhD in educational leadership. While there are a lot of good PhDs out there, there are also a lot of PhDs who have no real world experience, and their theories are not viable in the real world.

For the moment I am in. Middle Son is Life and Youngest is Second Class, and wants to be an Eagle after seeing Oldest Son's court of honor. Plus my Scouts need me., especially since we are a small troop and every active adult is needed. BUT, "always in motion, the future is." . IF BSA becomes "Family Scouting," we are gone. The last troop I was in turned into that, and it caused major problems that you can read about if your wish. Both sons involved in that troop were seriously affected by "Family Scouting," and I will not put the older two through that experience, nor have the youngest go through it. My family comes first. And I do not want my Scouts to have to deal with it. We had 1 Scout transfer over. The SM talked to me after my sons and their friend's SM Conferences, asking about the situation in the old troop, was it really as bad as they described it. And I said yes. "Family Scouting" is NOT Scouting.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-18/boy-scouts-aim-to-settle-95-000-abuse-claims-before-cash-crunch?utm_source=google&utm_medium=bd&cmpId=google

There is info out there. SCOUT'S HONOR by Patrick Boyle is one book. It is from 1994. so it is "old," but it covers the time period the lawsuit is coming from. That is the one I remember of the top of my head. I wish I had all my stuff from undergrad, cause I did a paper on this topic. Sadly the stuff I kept got thrown away after Katrina.

My thoughts. #1 Looks like Kosnoff is vying to take over as lead attorney against the BSA in this case, and he will get his wish for the complete dissolution of the BSA. #2 Regarding the name change, I do not know. I do know we need change at the National Office. Kosnoff is right, BSA did not handle the bankruptcy process correctly IMHO. #3 Corporate donors are gone and will not be coming back. They have moved on, and the current negative publicity would hurt them, even with a name change. #4 I think BSA has been looking at family camping since before allowing girls, hence the term "Family Scouting" when they allowed girls to join, and the push to create family camping programs. This would be a tremendous loss to BP's vision, and everything thousands of Scouters have worked towards over the past century: developing youth physically, mentally, and morally. I have seen first hand the problems "Family Scouting" can cause, and left a troop over the matter. If "Family Scouting" is the future, then like @Sentinel947 , I too will be out. I have fought too hard to preserve Scouting as I had experienced it as a youth. I will not allow my sons to suffer from 'Family Scouting" any longer and will leave if this become the norm. I have dealt with national ignoring volunteers in the field. I have dealt with the loss of the true Patrol Method. I will not deal with the death of true Scouting as envisioned by BP, expanded upon by "Green Bar Bill," and practiced in the rest of the world. if you compare the experiences of foreign Scouts to BSA's Scouts, it is a vast difference.

If memory serves, some time in the 1970s, National agreed to take responsibility for councils liability insurance in exchange for councils paying into the insurance fund. Just as national promised to protect COs, they also promised to protect councils.

Actually what I find sad and deeply ironic is that the only legal way to protect youth the BSA had time before mandatory reporting laws, the Ineligible Volunteer Files, is now being used to show they knew abuse was prevalent and should have been reported using todays legal standards, and not he legal standards of the time.

From the article and doing the math, the 93 year old suing the BSA was abused sometime between 1936 when he was 9 years old and 1944 when he was 18. That is over 80 years ago. Folk involved are long dead, including the parents who would have made the decision to press charges or not. And from my research many parents chose not to.

If I seem pessimistic about this topic, it is because I have seen a lot of fudging over the years in multiple councils. And it seems as if National turns a blind eye to the matter until forced to look. Does R. Holmes and Greater AL Council ring a bell? From experience and talking to pros over the years, DE WILL be pressured to short cut the process and get those units and numbers. Doing things the correct way does indeed work. But you may only get 1 new unit a year out of it. And most SEs and DFSs want more. You may have a few councils, and it sounds like yours is one of them, that may do the right thing. BUT that can change, SEs and DFSs set the tone. As the folks in those roles change, so do the methods. After I left the profession, my SE was replaced a year later. New SE, cleaned up the membership mess. It stayed clean for a while, but eventually a new SE came aboard. I agree it is poor Senior Management. But they are the ones setting the tone, and because most Senior management pros are in a council 3-5 years, they believe the problems they have caused will be someone else's problems to solve. As for council boards, well al lot of them are "yes men." And there are ways to hide the fudging from the exec board, unless they are also involved on the unit/district level. As for unethical salesmen getting fired and ethical salesmen getting promoted, sadly I do not see that happening. I see the unethical ones getting promoted, and the ethical ones leaving, or getting lateral transfers to other councils. And the councils they move to tend to be smaller, no chance of promotion, councils. Best example I know if is the DFS of a metro council who found some issues, and corrected them. As a DFS, he supervised 2 FDs, and 14 DEs. He was "promoted" to SE of a 3 county council with 1 FD and 3 DEs.

While it is not dumb to encourage strategies to increase membership, setting quotas is because it WILL (emphasis) lead some professionals to cut corners, have creative membership numbers, ghost units, ad nauseum. You will have some unscrupulous pros who will do whatever it takes to meet these quotas. I hate to be pessimistic, but have seen it as a volunteer and as a professional. It does happen.

Sadly the professional overreach is real in my area. When I was a DE. my SE and DFS were telling me I needed to get rid of folks because they did not toe the line with them. I told them we needed the best people for the job, even if they didn't agree 110%, and that some of their ideas I thought were valid ones. That also did not go well. In the 17 years i have been back in my old district, only 1 SE did not push volunteers out of the way. When he left, a lot of folks got sidelined because they disagreed with the pros. Others got so frustrated with the overreach, they resigned from district/council PORs, although they may have been kept on the council books in those PORs. I stepped down from all district duties except MBC due to pro overreach. I was still listed on the district charter in the POR that I stepped down from for 3 years. And I was not the only one who stepped down. We lost a district commissioner, several district chairmen (I think it was 3 in a 18 month period. I remember 1 lasted 3 months), and several district committee members. One guy, a camporee chief, got so ticked off with the pros interfering, he quit and told them to run it. They did nothing. Only a group of SMs getting together to come up with a fun weekend did the camporee continue, and with no support from council.

I know all to well. Reason for not fixing core issues is variety of issues. First and foremost it takes too long. Creating a program takes several years. Majority of pros only care about the here and now due to the pressure to meet goals. Plus more and more Pros have little to no experience in the Movement. They have no idea what Scouting is suppose to be like. Heck, I found out that Pros are no longer required to do any program training, i.e. DL, CM, Pack Committee (Cub Scout Basic Leader in my day), SM Specific and IOLS (SM Fundamentals in my day), or Venturing Leader Specific ( Exploring Leader Basic in my day). That leads me to the second issue: lack of program experience among professionals. Let's face it, the majority of DEs are fresh out of college, desperate for a job, and have no experience in Scouting. In my PDL-1 class of 80, when we broke out into those with Scouting experience and those without, about 16 of us had experience. 3 months later, at the All Hands Conference that every single professional had to attend, between 25% and 30% of my PDL Class remained. Out of the number 3 of us with Scouting experience remained. And don't get me started on the national level. While in some areas folks with outside experience are needed, IT immediately comes to mind, other areas like program and training, we need folks with experience in movement. PhDs are nice, but they are theory based, not reality based. trust me, I work with a bunch of them. Third, it takes a lot of volunteers to do the job, and you got to get all of them unified in the vision to fix the problems. Recruiting the right people takes time. Gathering their ideas on the problems and coming up with unified vision takes a lot of time, debating, planning, and organizing. Especially with the problems we have. It is not just one issue, but many. Sadly pros will hyperfocus on one issue, and ignore everything else. If folks try to bring up the other issues, or try to discuss different solutions, they get removed from their positions, and replaced by 'Yes Men." Fourth, folks who have been doing it their way will resist any change. Unless councils and national are willing to get tough, and potentially lose units, these folks will continue with their weak programs. Worse, if enough complain National will cave in to their demands. Anyone remember when the June 2015 Cub Scout Program got revamped in December 2016 without any prior warning, including to those on the 411 committee that came up with the 2015 changes? Anyone remember how the 411 committee's January 2016 to July 2017 First Class Rank requirements that 6 camp outs needed to be First Class, which was downgraded to 4 camp outs in August 2017? All because the 411 committee's changes were too hard. Five, pros, especially National, ignores the volunteers. The 411 committee above is one example. It takes about 3 years to fully implement change. The 411 committee got a lot of input from those in the field because I am told many were still involved in the field. I know my contact on the 411 Commitee was still involved in Cub Scouts at the local and council levels. They came up with a program that actually improved the quality of the program. The units i am familiar with that attended the RTs prior to implementation, and actually planned accordingly had some challenges, but to be expected. In fact my sons' pack refused to implement the December 2016 program changes immediately because they had already planned their year out to May, and were not going to create havoc by changing midyear. And don't forget the Instapalm survey where 94% of the polled were against (18%) or strongly against (76%) instapalms. Just as volunteers have been ignored by national, the boots on the ground see this for what it is, realize it is a joke, and will follow national's example: ingoring it.

Didn't National give out recruitment goals back in the 1980s and 1990s and some pro came up with "creative ways" of meeting those goals? The powers that be do not appear to have a clue what is going on.

Don't forget first, and only(?) Chief Scout Citizen.