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oldbuzzard

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Everything posted by oldbuzzard

  1. Here is an interesting article. https://www.minnpost.com/education/2018/07/new-approach-sparking-interest-construction-trades-girl-scouts-building-tiny-homes Power tools, scaffolds... oh my! Looks like a good learning opportunity for the scouts.
  2. How so? Plenty of scouts don't change clothes on campouts or change in sleeping bags. Other issues could go to known adult leaders. From a PL perspective, I need to talk to SM/ASM X should always be honored. The adult leader can always push back on frivolous requests, regardless of cause. Yes in a hypothetical emergency situation it could be an issue but in every day situations where is the surprise?
  3. Back to practicality and away from the culture war.... This one really is easy. The scout tents with their patrol. They are in a patrol based on the gender checked on their registration form. I've known a couple of trans scouts over the last 10+ years. They all camped with their male Boy Scout patrols. Except for select leadership, on a need to know basis, the fact these kids are trans isn't even disclosed(So maybe I've known more than I think). Tenting was never an issue. Our camp showers and latrines are stalled these days. Outings like the city pool with communal showers and locke
  4. Troop. Our camp predates any of the council camps and in fact the first Camp Director for our biggest/earliest Council camp was CD at our camp previously so there is weird overlap in traditions.
  5. Based on the sketchy facts available I wholly agree that they were not prepared. The one thing I give the group credit for is sheltering in place instead of trying to self rescue. Yes they risked the rescuers' lives, etc etc... but if they hadn't done that I think there is a reasonable chance there would be dead scouts instead of injured scouts. I think in these cases it is easy to point to outrageous root causes of the incident but it is important to highlight the good as well as bad decisions once you are trapped in the incident pit. I also like to remember: "There are old climbers
  6. No. Our CO is very clear they want us to be as close to coed as the rules allow. My wife has been a WDL for the last 2 years but is waiting to see how this shakes out before choosing her leadership role next year.... Maybe girl WDL, maybe female ASM looikng towards Feb. '19. So starting a stand alone girl troop is a non-starter for us.
  7. I agree its brilliant for the camp to raise money by sponsoring this group. I just don't quite understand its purpose. Isn't that what CAP is for? Military planes, EEA ride alongs, etc isn't that the point of Summer Encampment. Is this for STEM kids who can't tolerate the military side of things?
  8. You must have missed the all girl qualifier on that expertise. On a national basis their only real competition would be the YMCA. The Girl Scout Canoe base started in the 60's in a rented building at Northern Tier. My wife, did bike touring trips across both VT and Cape Cod as a GS. The GS offer a lot of "high adventure" trips and in contrast to Scouting BSA these are open to either individual girls or troops as a matter of course. To take the Boundary Waters as an example. Northern Tier runs something like 750 crews into the BWCA, a few years ago when I talked to the GS at our outd
  9. We shoot for monthly camping during the school year and Summer Camp. This year we missed that target and had 6 instead of 9 camp outs, so 12 nights. Any given campout has a bit less than 50% participation which isn't great. In terms of funding all camping out of Troop funds, there are two warring principles. 1) "A Scout pays his own way" and 2) "A member of a community supports that community". We focus on number 2. Just as you wouldn't only support your church on a transactional basis, likewise with Scouts. Everyone needs to contribute through dues or fundraising regardless of whether t
  10. Our troop is way under $1000. Here is my sons break down for the 2017-2018 Council/National dues: ~$150 Troop Dues:($100 Fall/$100 Spring) All waived this year due to fundraising. Fall has been waived for at least the last 10 years. Necker/Book: Troop provided at crossover Uniform Shirt: $8 from uniform exchange closet. Camping/Food: Covered by troop dues. Summer Camp: 2 weeks for ~$400 . I just paid $260 with fundraising discount. 4 day BWCA canoe trip: ~$200 pp so since I was a paying leader ~$400 Gear: Old family gear. So all told under $850 for
  11. Our troop provides all the default neckers(folks can use Gray Wolf or Eagle neckers if they want). We have red neckers for scouts crossing over, blue for after certain conditions, and green for leadership. All of these neckers still have a pentagonal patch on the point celebrating the troops 75th anniversary in 2004.
  12. You just need to rebrand that as "Expedition Cooking". If the cooking and backpacking MB books with debranded generic Kroger and other grocery store supplies isn't convincing enough, get the "NOLS Cookery" book out of the library. It details how they plan all their trips, including the 30 day+ trips in Patagonia, using bulk grocery store supplies.
  13. We're getting ready to go through round 2 of this with our kids. We are in a school district with a *very* firm Sept 1 cutoff for K. My kids both have early Sept birthdays so they can crossover in March as AOL with 6mos in their dens since turning 10 or ~9months total as Webelos and as 4th Graders. For older son this was a great option. The other choice wasn't waiting a whole year, it was to join BS in the Fall as an 11yo with or without AOL. Instead, he's been to summer camp and every monthly camp out. Tomorrow he'll finished 5th grade as a 11yo and Saturday we head off for his crew's Boundar
  14. Maybe 6 sigma/iso9000 whatever, but certainly nothing to do with lean. Lean, TPS, continuous process improvement, Covey's sharpening the saw, whatever you want to call it is actually a bottom up process for improving workflow and capturing innovation. Scouting actually tries to do a good job with this. Both the plan-do-review framework and Thorns and Roses are Lean by another name. The problem with JTE is the rigid top down metrics that don't allow for small scale organic improvements that are likely to be more meaningful long term.
  15. Maybe our scouts are jaded. We're taking 3 crews into the BWCA including a 12yo crew I'm helping to lead. The only thing I've see inspire them is when our long emeritus SM came to talk. When he started out saying "I was part of this same church and joined Cub Scouts in 1949 and earned Eagle in the the mid-50s and was hired on at the Region X canoe base in the late 50s base solely on my experience in troop xxx." You could see the scouts eyes go wide. The path between 11yo new scouts and 16-17yo(then) charlie guides became clear. I doubt a celebrity could have been more "relatable". All tho
  16. OK. The best media celebrity on that list is Steve Fossett(RIP). Maybe there are great scouts that BSA could build into media spokespeople. Maybe we could pull in celebrities like Jon Krakauer to be spokespeople. But I think using actors who happen to be scouts is a terrible idea.
  17. I think this is the whole problem with folks like Mike Rowe. Any media personality has had to whip up controversy. The whole "safe space" thing is a effort to insult liberals while attracting blue collar conservatives. That's not helpful. A real adventurer to me would be someone like Cliff Jacobson. Regardless of being a NESA Distinguished Eagle Scout and all his BWCA and Arctic canoe trips, a scrawny 70yo former high school teacher just isn't mediagenic enough. Navajo's aren't midwestern.... If I couldn't find mediagenic Scout(er)s., the the people with little to no scouting
  18. BSA, national and local, clearly sees an existential threat and is taking a broad approach to countering it. I think the BSA is intentionally making two changes under the transition to "Family Scouting" and is making another change as part of the broader approach. I will term these three changes inclusion, institutionalism, and consumerism. 1) Inclusion: They clearly want to quickly juice the numbers by admitting girls. This is part of the reboot around gays etc. I assume that in the next few years all the added God bothering in the requirements will disappear and we'll end up with a
  19. Not really. We know they are all "Real Scouts"... I think the goal here is to prove or disprove the credentials of the "liberal" wing. From the responses so far it should be clear that the inclusive group is just as involved and hence we can move on from the "no true Scotsman" fallacy...
  20. Right. But what kind of success? I view Scouts as an apprenticeship to adulthood... lots of opportunity to experiment and fail in adult tasks. My sons will be adults in a pluralistic society with bosses, peers, and subordinates who are female, gay, trans, ethnic minorities, etc, etc. Women's colleges and HBCUs have been declining since many students have taken the greater opportunities at previously male/white schools. Does anyone doubt Harvard, and probably America, benefits from taking some of Howard's best kids. Likewise Princeton and Bryn Mawr. This is how I view the Scouts transition. I w
  21. I agree with this. I support going coed on the merits but I think having a good analogy for this situation could be helpful for more conservative/traditional Scouters... In threads on a classical homeschooling board I'm on, the more conservative members mirror opinion on this board with a strong pro GS/AHG bias. Interestingly some of the more liberal female members have a pro GS view based on mourning for the likely loss of "safe spaces". This is usually framed in terms of the decline of women's colleges. Vassar gong coed, Radcliffe merging back in with Harvard, etc, etc... They generally
  22. GRRR... the previous language stated the online version was authoritative and the pdf version was dated. Either way is fine but they really shouldn't flip the authoritative copy at a whim...
  23. Do you have a link for this? National G2SS still says Which allows parents not register leaders which is a huge difference and no mention of meetings. https://www.scouting.org/health-and-safety/gss/gss01/
  24. Have you gotten that rate as an out of state group? Online they list it as $10 for WISCONSIN non-profit youth groups and $40 otherwise. I don't see any discount for other Scout groups. Plus parking passes for all the vehicles... https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/parks/camping/group.html
  25. Then maybe you should try to shame folks for not being obedient not trustworthy. Our pack was originally planning on having separate boy/girl dens who did almost all joint activities, just like our multiple boy dens. But as time has gone by, we've moved to plans for full co-ed dens. I don't know what that'll look like on paper. We aren't an early adopter pack but we are a concentrator/congregator or whatever the term is for next year, a welcoming pack that council refers girls to who can't find viable dens in other troops. Our CM and IH have discussed this with council and they know,
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