Jump to content

FireStone

Members
  • Content Count

    638
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    12

Everything posted by FireStone

  1. I'd really prefer my scouts wear bright colors, I suspect their parents would be more offended if I had to tell them we lost their kid in the woods and the forest green shirt we made them wear so they didn't offend the sensibilities of nearby hikers was making it harder to spot them.
  2. I'm really not a fan of the drab colors of the BSA uniforms (Cub blue is ok but the SBSA olive/green is just dull), so when I had the chance to design Class B t-shirts for my Pack, I picked a bright "electric blue" shirt with bright yellow ink. 😁 I get the LNT idea here with regard to color, but that's also mostly focused on the concept of lessening your impact on natural surroundings. Natural surroundings. Being that we spend most of our time in Scout camps (especially at the Cub level), our surroundings include a lot of visual impact. Signs, flags, buildings, noise, cars, and lots of ot
  3. Such a shame. If any part of their intent is to force families in both organizations to make a choice, and if those families are at all like the ones in my Pack, they'll choose BSA.
  4. With Scouts BSA officially starting for girls in February, hitting Tenderfoot by summer camp is certainly well within norms in terms of time needed. Scouts who cross over from a Pack to a Troop in March an do it, so certainly if a scout signed up with a Troop in February they'd have plenty of time and (hopefully) opportunity to do so. I wouldn't even call it "ambitious", I think it's a reasonable goal for any scout to be well-prepared for the summer camp experience.
  5. Well now we're just trying to thoroughly confuse each other. 🤣
  6. I'm regularly and consistently baffled by the efforts to which scouters are currently going out of their way to muddy the terminology used to describe scouts today. At a council event recently it seemed like scouters were doing their very best to make it as difficult as possible to talk about scouts, particularly girls at the troop level. I heard seemingly any and every way of awkwardly describing scouts, including "Girl scouts" (followed by "I'm not saying Girl Scouts, I'm saying girl, comma, scouts, so it's ok.") As well as the frequent addressing of scouts as "boys" despite being in a
  7. I get the unusual nature of a typical girl troop not having the older scouts to lean on for teaching scout skills. In those situations I would think the adults have to take on more of the responsibility. And in that scenario, I hope adults are getting trained and ready to teach those skills through something like IOLS. I wouldn't worry much about getting it done before summer camp. If it happens, great. If not, summer camp can actually be a great place to work on tenderfoot (and other rank) requirements. Some camps have programs designed specifically to help with this.
  8. It's still very much a political issue, if not for us, for the general public. I was out with some scouts this weekend and a local resident decided to yell over to us, "Put the 'boy' back in Boy Scouts!" As much as it's a done deal (there's no going back no matter how many change.org petitions people start), in the public consciousness it is still very much an issue of discussion of a somewhat political nature. And just because something is done and decided, that doesn't mean that the politics of the issue won't still need to be discussed and sometimes debated. There are political issues
  9. This is disgraceful. It's entirely counter to what we (people who advocated for girls in troops/packs) wanted when this whole debate was going on. And it's in direct contrast to what we said on behalf of the BSA, the program won't change for the boys. And yet here we are... And you know how this will play out if you boycott the event next year. "Troop XYZ won't come because girls are here, the can't stand getting beat by girls, etc." I'd protest it. I know that's easy to say in the Internet and less so IRL, but it just seems like this needs to be reined in. Marginalizing boys just to
  10. Our Pack does that as a dinner option but it often gets mixed reviews. I love it, especially when we do chili in the bags. Hot chili over chips is great. But there are always a few parents (especially newer ones) who won't even try it and think we're barbarians trying to feed their kids dinner out of a Doritos bag. 😅 The funny thing is our Pack does incredible food and the taco bags are just one option. We've done steak, potatoes, dutch oven deserts, all kinds of delicious stuff. The joke is that we often eat better in camp than at home. But somehow the taco bag is what people remember an
  11. Some reasonable expectations on the part of parents and leaders would go a long way in keeping the Lion and Tiger programs from fueling burn-out. I'm pretty sure my Pack is overdoing it with Lions, they meet 3-4 times per month sometimes (1 Pack meeting, 2-3 meetings/activities). Same with Tiger. It's unnecessary and at that age just overkill. When I was a Tiger DL we had 1 Den meeting and 1 Pack meeting per month, and met for outdoor activities maybe 3 times that I can remember. Maybe to some folks that's not enough, but for Tigers, it was plenty, and we still got everything done that is requ
  12. Did he do any multi-night camping as a Cub Scout? I think this is where those cub camp summer sessions can really make a difference, doing 2-3 nights in camp with mom/dad, then maybe 5 nights as Webelos, so that by the time they cross over the idea of a week at summer camp is no big deal. I know it's a little after-the-fact in this case, but just saying for others reading this thread. If you have a scout that might be anxious (as I do as well), I view the summer camp experience as a Cub as being a crucial transitional step into a Troop.
  13. I'm convinced there is a way to maintain that same allure without the NA references. Plenty of groups already do this, although sometimes in ways that are far from scout-friendly (think secret societies). What is often so interesting about these kinds of things isn't their accurate depictions of cultural references. It's the ceremony itself, the unique presentation, the costumes/regalia, etc., which often times are unique to the group itself. Some were derived from rituals and/or regalia of other cultures, but they often bear little resemblance to them anymore after evolving over time. I
  14. Definitely seems like the beginning of the end for NA ceremonies all around. A phased-out approach.
  15. Throughout this whole thing I've kept thinking there's no reason we should have to drop ceremony from the OA entirely. It just needs to change, and maybe not all that much. To me, the mystique of the ceremonies was always the draw. We leaned heavily on the Native American themes, but you could create that same vibe with other themes. Not every club, organization, "secret society", etc that uses ceremonies uses cultural themes, and they still manage to create a similar vibe as OA without them. I don't know exactly what this would look like, what our new theme could be, but I feel like it's
  16. I'm not sure what you mean by "leave the kids out of it". Leave them out of the social media aspect of it? Or leave them out of the photo?
  17. Who says that's not what is already happening here? A leader could post a photo with that hashtag and leave the scouts out of the discussion entirely.
  18. Part of our membership numbers struggle is public relations, and making people aware of what scouts do. Like it or not, informing the public about scout activities, accomplishments, and service to the community is important. If someone undertakes a service project entirely for social media posting, obviously that's the wrong motivation. But if it happens that there is an opportunity for some good PR while doing something positive, I see no issue with taking advantage of it. We often invite the press to scouting events, Pinewood Derby, etc. This is just the modern day version of that.
  19. Where does she currently manage things like advancement? Is she the only person with access? Kind of unusual that in a whole troop there would only be one person tracking advancement records in Scoutbook or something like that. If she hypothetically left and handed over nothing, you'd still be ok. It might take some digging but you'd be able to get access to your unit records with Council. Same for anything charter related, rostering, dues payments, etc. Keys can be replaced. This might be a headache in the shirt term but it will be a blessing in disguise long-term. Once you get acce
  20. Thanks for the update. It's not surprising that the background check came back with problems. It was hard to imagine he wasn't avoiding it, with so much time having gone by and it was still not done. Hard to imagine someone isn't trying hard to avoid a background check when they act like that. This still seems like a massive failure at the district and council level to adequately support the Pack in this. You essentially had an unregistered, non-background-checked adult pretending to be a CM. And seemingly refusing to allow a background check. That should have been a huge red flag for eve
  21. There's a story that floats around my Pack about a scout from years ago who made it all the way through Arrow of Light without officially registering with the Pack. Not sure how accurate the story is at this point, could be he was registered but didn't pay dues the next year or something. Who knows. The point is, it has become a sort of cautionary tale for leaders. Make sure your scouts are properly registered, everyone is up to date, rostered in Scoutbook, etc. As for the scout in question here, I would use the dangling carrot of advancement. We do all advancement tracking in my Pac
  22. My daughter is 4, going on 5 this year, and she's skipping the Lion year. I don't see the point of it, and it will only contribute to burnout, possibly hers, more likely mine. Maybe this is a little selfish, but I don't want to learn the Lion program and end up running it, which I will since I'm already a DL and I'm sure I'll get pulled into that role in the Lion den too. So I'd rather just skip that whole year. And I doubt my daughter will miss much. I doubt my son would have missed much skipping Tiger, and half of his Wolf den was first-year scouts, many who had older siblings and knew
  23. I discovered my career because of the BSA. And it has nothing to do with the outdoors. The BSA has been in the business of offering exposure to a wide variety of topics for a long time now. STEM is just the latest addition. It's certainly not "idiotic".
  24. I still never thought there would be any "jump" involved, a jump in numbers or a jump-start of any kind. This is going to be a long process, rolling out the opportunities for girls and building a culture of girls in the Cub Scouts and Scouts BSA programs. That's ultimately what will drive membership increases, more girls seeing other girls doing things in Cubs, SBSA, etc. There are still a whole lot of those "Well how is this going to work?" questions on the minds of parents. I hear them often, from parents of girls who are interested but still unsure about participating. Because they hav
×
×
  • Create New...