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FireStone

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FireStone last won the day on October 4 2023

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About FireStone

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    Eagle Scout & Den Leader

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  1. Need to see the requirements to really understand how this will play out across the ranks, but my first thoughts: Arrow of Light looks like a lot as a full six-required-adventures rank, considering that most Packs don't do a full year of AOL (crossovers happen around March). Bear seems to have lost the 2 favorite adventures (at least in my Pack), Baloo the Builder and Bear Claws. Hope those get rolled into these new adventures in some way, especially Bear Claws and Whittling Chip.
  2. Side comment: I'm still legitimately surprised that the uniform isn't more enthusiastically worn by today's youth who are growing up with video games and digital achievement badges. We offer the IRL version of that, but they don't want to wear it? What the heck!? My son with "grind" on a video game challenge until he gets it, to earn some digital achievement badge, but I can't get him to "grind" on a merit badge or some 2nd Class first-aid requirements he still needs to do. Ok, rant over. 😄
  3. Throwing a random thought out there: I see a lot of comments about costs, registration fees, uniform costs, etc. And when I go on social media I see a lot of people commenting on photos of scouts with incomplete or improper uniforms. Scouts wearing jeans, non-standard insignia, missing badges, etc. Many of these comments come from adults, and one recent comment I saw came from a council executive. I feel like we've gotta let it go with the uniform policing. At the local unit level, if a troop wants to maintain some kind of uniform standard, fine. But at an organizational level,
  4. I'll never be convinced that the modern BSA is any worse than most other youth organizations when it comes to prevention. YPT isn't perfect, and nothing is. But it's still miles ahead of what your local sports, clubs, and other youth orgs are doing. So the idea that the BSA "is still not safe for boys and girls" is unfair. There will never be any youth activity that is completely safe. And I'm fine with the BSA paying for past sins, for the coverups and failures of leadership. But I hate that today's youth and families are paying for it, too.
  5. When is the crossover? Assuming something like February/March, you have time to try and recruit. Grab some flyers and promotional materials from the BSA Brand Center website, post on social media, get the word out around town and see if you can get some other interested girls and parents on board. If it becomes prohibitive to establish a local troop (not enough interest), the best thing might be to just find the nearest existing troop and get her involved there. I know from parents here that were faced with similar situations they ended up not being willing to go out of town, just be
  6. Look up ScouterStan on YouTube, he's got a lot of OA videos, I think one is specifically geared towards parents and getting to know what the OA is.
  7. Seems like that would be very prohibitive to a lot of part of the scout program that rely heavily on outside help. I think there's a Webelos adventure that also calls for meeting with a government official. And unless the mayor or a town council member is willing to sit through YPT, that won't work. Forget about visits from first responders, animal/reptile programs, teachers, etc. That's not a thing, unless as mentioned your chartered org created such a rule.
  8. I'll just reiterate what others have said, that scouts are coming to meetings from a variety of situations, which include scheduling challenges, sports practices, financial difficulties, etc. Just something to keep in mind when setting Troop policy. I think a uniform standard is great, but with a reasonable amount of flexibility to accommodate all of the circumstances that scouts and the troop might encounter. At the end of the day I'd rather see scouts in meetings than not, so if the uniform policy is in any way prohibitive to scouts coming to meetings, that would be something that I thi
  9. One of the things I've been struggling with is this "how to" part of it, the possibility of training adults to look for recording devices. Which apparently is harder than it would seem, because Camp Winnebago had found a recording device in the trading post bathroom in the summer of 2021 and despite then starting to regularly search bathrooms, they clearly missed new devices being placed and used. So it sound like either devices are tricky to find or that the camp just gave up on their searches after a while. Because clearly this guy was able to resume recording and continued to do so in
  10. Is there a gap in YPT training for this sort of thing? YPT is really good at equipping adults to better identify risk factors among adults and scouts for abuse and bullying, but this tech component seems like maybe it's a vulnerability that YPT doesn't adequately address, especially if there are other cases of this happening in and out of scouting. The camps involved have said they are going to increase regular searches and inspections of bathrooms and other areas of concern. Personally I would consider it valuable to have some training myself on how to conduct such a search or inspe
  11. My Pack does not send any money up to the Troop at crossover, nor have we ever been asked to. In fact it was the Troop that informed me that no money was expected because dues were paid to the Pack in the fall and that would carry the scouts through to the next fall. And that because this Troop does their fundraising in the fall and winter, crossover scouts don't have opportunities to fundraise and so they shouldn't be expected to be financially responsible for contributing until they've had a chance to fully participate in the troop.
  12. We're confident that this man will see justice and will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. Even a single charge and conviction could get him 20 years. Multiple charges and convictions will likely be coming. I'm still angry today but that's mixed with the sadness that as a Pack we're having to communicate with parents today about how to send in photos of their children to an FBI email address. That any of us have to do this is sad but I have to admit it hurts more than I expected to be talking about this with other parents regarding their kids. We always want to keep all of our s
  13. My kids are members of units that camped at Winnebago during the time these recordings were made. My wife and I discussed it tonight, and we will be sending the FBI photos of our kids and hoping they don't get matched to kids in the videos. I've never had to really confront anything like the feeling of the possibility that my kids could have been victimized by someone in such a way. Or that I personally know many families that are going through the exact same thing tonight, filling out the FBI forms, sending in photos, and hoping they tell us they didn't see our kids in these videos that
  14. Even at the most basic level of participating in the BoR, it seems the scout did not fulfill that requirement. The content, tone, or delivery of the questions almost doesn't matter. If there was basically no participation by the scout, regardless of how the board felt about his responses he really did not "complete" a BoR. The requirement doesn't say "show up and sit there". It says "successfully complete" a BoR. Even just saying "I'm sorry, I'm a bit nervous," is more useful to a board and can at least initiate a conversation or allow the board to adjust their questions to make
  15. The faith component is weird lately. I get parents coming to me saying they want nothing to do with it, which I then have to kind redirect to say, "Well we have a reverence requirement but your family can choose to approach that however you see fit, just let me know when you and your scout have completed it..." And then I have parents who want to do a group prayer at every meeting, and they're not really interested in a prayer that isn't specifically Christian. Meanwhile the BSA seems to give us very little in the way of guidance on this other than that note in the Cub handbooks sayi
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