Bushmaster

I just wanted to say that this is a really impressive site! I have a son who is a Bear this year, and we have been in scouting since he was a Tiger. Our Pack is small but growing as we discover how a Pack really should be run. When we joined in 2002, there was no Pack Committee, just the CM and ACM. They left next year, and the whole thing was dropped in the lap of the new CM, who was also a Den Leader, and who also had a full-time job with lots of responsibility. The finances were a mess and there was no liaison with the Charter Org, either. Well, we formed a small Pack Committee to help her out, got a Chartered Org Rep, started working with our Council and going to monthly Roundtables. We started up a small Tiger and Wolf den, too. Next year, our CM will be a Webelos Den Leader, and she has announced that she will no longer be Cubmaster, so it looks like I will take that role (there are a lot of hands pushing at my back). I'll admit, I'm a little nervous about it, so I'll be "scouting" (hee hee) for good Cubmaster ideas from the experienced ones here.

When my son started as a Tiger, we had almost all the meetings at the Den Leader's house. She worked Monday through Friday and couldn't really have a meeting except on the weekend when the school was closed. The parents were there, of course, and they did usually participate when we had a craft or kite flying or something similar going on. When he was a Wolf, we began to rotate the Den meeting to each parent's house. Since the parents drove the boy to the meeting, they stayed, and again, they participated when we were teaching something to the boys (i.e., compass skills, knots, etc). It was nice to have Dad helping his son or Mom helping her son, too. Now that he is a Bear, we have kept this mode. We alternate places (the parents are asked to volunteer for at least one meeting, but they don't have to). They (we) almost always stay for the meeting. We recently built the toolbox, and each boy had a Dad there to help hold the wood while he hammered the nails. We have found that having the parents there keeps them involved in their son's activities and advancement. It is also good when we have a discipline problem to be able to turn to the parent and ask them to help us enforce the code of conduct. We also benefit from the parents "bonding" together and joining in with other Pack responsibilities. Mike

Thanks for the info! I did a search on "USSCOUTS" thinking that it would have been discussed, but I couldn't find anything. I like the forums here, and I intend to "hang around" and learn a lot from the participants. USSCOUTS is a good reference site, too, and a lot of the NetCompass links point to locations there. Hope they get back up and running again soon. Mike

I have been trying without success for several days now to get to this site. Ditto with cubmaster.org, macscouter.org etc. Does anyone have any info on what's going on? Thanks, Mike