yknot

I don't know exact national membership numbers but the latest I saw from earlier in the fall was around 915,000 and that was down about 90,000 from the same point the year before. There are some district positions that can access the membership totals on an ongoing basis and would know what the current number right now is. There used to be someone on here who would post them but I haven't seen him/her in awhile.

I couldn't agree more. The increasing focus in scouting on earning more well marketed advancement bling in talkfest meetings vs. doing something active, preferably outdoors, is such a self evident turn off for youth. I cannot comprehend this perspective at all.

I think you are choosing this hill to die on for some reason. If it works for your youth, great. But you can Google troops and units all over and see for yourself that many very healthy, active units, including ones spotlighted by BSA/SA, follow school schedules as they have done for decades and do great. Not meeting every single week is not a relevant cause of scouting's decline.

I have to believe the vast majority of units probably follow school schedules to a greater or lesser degree for simply pragmatic reasons. And most units can still manage to keep scouts engaged and active without a formal meeting every single week. People have posted examples here. There is generally plenty to engage scouts over a summer break, from camp to high adventure or volunteering. When units are failing, it's because of a hundred other problems that currently exist in scouting.

Two weeks? I'm really struggling to see that, especially over holiday weeks when there is so much else going on.

It really doesn't have bearing on anything if units meet a few more weeks or few less weeks in the course of a year and isn't an indicator of unit health. This is a mindset that has been pushed by National moreso for marketing, membership, and financial reasons than for any real reason.

Some units just follow local school district calendars because it affects meeting locations or, for certain families, school holiday closures affect child care, transportation, etc. It's not new or linked to burnout. It's just local convention in some places.

I don't have statistics but I don't think it matters much and it can go both ways no matter what kind of configuration you are in. We've had single district units, multi district units, and units with a mix of private schools. They can all work. I will point out that some legacy youth sports are increasingly operating in this way with many mergers of leagues or traditional local associations across town boundaries to keep player numbers up. It works. Kids make new friends from other towns.

Scouting America still selling cringe Indian Lore merit badge craft kits through online store... complete with medicine pouch and "proud hunter" necklace.

BSA "haters" would not be trying to deflect blame, though -- they would be doing the opposite.

That's a disturbing comment. While not pleasant to think about, it is certainly possible that some of the commentators on this forum over the years probably were involved in some of these cases. It's perhaps good to remember that a tactic of the guilty is to deflect blame elsewhere and weigh comments in that light.

Glad to hear it will still be maintained as an outdoor resource vs. being developed

I agree. I have had the same issue with, for example, calling venomous snakes "danger noodles" or "spicy noodles". It's an attempt to Disney-fy things that are real world risks whose dangers should not be minimized.

BSA/SA. In order to achieve Scout rank, a scout has to recite the Outdoor Code, which explicitly delineates appropriate behavior in the outdoors and being conservation minded. WOSM: In addition to what Awake Energy posted, there is an explicit directive from the WOSM website: https://www.scout.org/what-we-do/young-people-and-communities/environment Additionally, WOSM is partners with the World Wildlife Federation and the United Nations Environmental Program. Partnership means that you share the same philosophies. As a parallel example of what codes and partnerships mean, BSA/SA has a youth protection code of conduct and partners with youth protection groups. Youth safety isn't explicitly written into our mission statement, but that doesn't mean BSA/SA would participate in events where youth safety would be at risk because you can find great hammocks and rice plants.

Is the US and international scouting community hosting WSJs on any of those sites and providing de facto political endorsement of those locations and activities by their presence? The answer is no. I'm not clear what line of argument you are attempting to follow. Is filling in of remaining US tidal flat habitat universally bad in an environmental sense? Yes. Is US scouting blatantly supporting those activities? No. Or at least I hope not. I haven't seen or heard of any US scout units participating in "Yay, we support destroying tidal habitat" service projects lately. But we did send a US contingent to Saemangeum and to a similarly problematic although smaller site in Japan in 2015.