yknot

I think if kids liked wearing the uniform and found it functional and comfortable, it wouldn't be such an issue. You often don't really have to fight a kid to get them into a sports uniform -- they don't mind wearing it because it fits and is more functional. Many people look to the military and law enforcement as a parallel, but just last week I noticed patrolmen in my town wearing khakis and a navy golf shirt with reflective tapes on them. Not a traditional form, but they looked good, comfortable, and the reflective tape is a no brainer -- why doesn't BSA put that on uniforms for safety instead of one of million patches when we are the only youth organization that actually does stuff with kids in the dark.

You can't just cut down the Tree of Heaven because it root sprouts and instead of one tree you've suddenly got a dozen runners. There is a process for killing them. The trees are almost as invasive as the SLF. Our county extension agent advised us on how to get rid of them. Chickens, gray catbirds, northern cardinals and preying mantis have been identified as preying on the nymphs and adults so do what you can to keep them around your property

I think most of those things are things that adults think are great marketing for scouts. However, most kids who go to the supermarket with mom don't think, "Gee, I'd like to dress up in that dorky uniform and ring a bell..." Or stand around a flag... or ask for soup cans... or march down the street in the hot sun... or give a talk in front of adults... Those are not naturally fun kid things for most kids. I've recounted this a couple times but the last den I crossed over, they couldn't wait to be scouts. They kept hearing how fun it was going to be, that they'd be camping and hiking and shooting, etc., etc. But at the crossover, all the new scoutmaster (who meant well) talked about was Eagle. What an honor it would be. How it would be really hard work, and they'd want to give up, but that they should persevere because it would help them get into college and they could put it on their resume when they went for a job... They were 10. They deflated before my eyes. We aren't just bad at marketing, we are the anti marketers.

There is none but it seems some councils/conferences have had their own interpretations. It's very unlikely any of them will be able to go rogue longer than the October deadline.

I don't recall specifics and can't find the thread -- maybe because it happened in one of those tangential discussions -- but a year or so ago people were trying to clarify mandatory reporting requirements and there were a lot of comments to this effect. Sadly, it's not really new just not well publicized.

I think the original question was what kind of tools should you carry for breakdowns. The best, cheapest, and most portable tool is always prevention so I like your hitch idea. There is no BSA safety training regarding trailers and towing and unit competency is all over the map as is how units deal with having a trailer.

I don't have much to add to this other than that I know a lot of people with troop trailers who maybe don't do enough routine preventive maintenance, don't use them enough and let them sit too long, and don't have a pre departure check list. Don't let it sit over the winter or for several months because you only use it for certain kinds of camp outs. Hook it up and pull it out for local trips. Have a pre departure checklist which includes looking under the trailer, checking the floor and the load distribution/stabilization, checking lights. Don't be the only one who is always hooking it up. Always grab someone to doublecheck you. The stupidest thing -- and it happens not infrequently even with experienced people -- is forgetting to hook up the brake plug or the safety chains or not snapping the pin or some other minor, obvious thing. It's not hard to get distracted when a ton of kids are around.

I watched the zoom meeting with UMC/BSA when they detailed the plan and it was pretty clear option 1 was not viable. However, councils and churches have gone rogue before so I wasn't surprised to read that some councils and churches were coming up with different interpretations. There have been several UMC COs in various places that have refused to drop their units although I expect a similar result as this. The UMC is having a lot of problems of its own.

I definitely think it should be an option yesterday.

Realistically the only way to manage evolving youth gender issues is to have blended dens and troops. Otherwise units would practically have to maintain up to date spreadsheets on their scouts orientation and identification preferences, which is not only intrusive and icky but can change and/or evolve within the year, sometimes multiple times. Some of the evolving youth identifications also no longer fit into clear cut boy/girl gender or orientation categories. If you are claiming to offer single gender dens and troops but an incident happens because a leader is not aware that a youth's situation has changed and made adjustments, it opens up a possible new level of liability for leaders, scouts, and BSA. There is also liability in trying to be any kind of gatekeeper, such as "You identified as boy at the beginning of the year, so according to BSA you are a boy on paper and belong in this troop until the year is done." There is also the volunteer issue with units not able to come up with the necessary volunteers to run gender segregated dens or troops. My preference would be to allow units all options -- single gender boy or girl or blended -- but I think liability and volunteer management issues will push scouting towards blended, or family, units soon.

I can't agree. These kinds of things don't repeatedly happen in well run organizations. Just one example : the CO structure has been dysfunctional for decades and that dysfunction helped enable child predators to infiltrate the organization. BSA has never addressed it. It took an outside organization -- the UMC -- to force a substantive change as part of a bankruptcy proceeding.

I frankly don't care, within reason, if people are paid or volunteer. I care much more about whether they are doing a good job. I think in scouts we have seen that there is no monopoly at the top, on the part of either paid professionals or volunteers, regarding poor leadership, miscalculation, and mismanagement of the organization. The good folks that have been there trying to swim upstream have just kept getting pushed to shore apparently.

I don't think adult regalia has a place in a youth organization other than a particular color shirt or lanyard or lapel pin to indicate who is an adult leader/coach/official and who is not. In scouts, there's a legitimate use in identifying council, troop number and program. I have a hard time, though, appreciating what the purpose is for signifying anything more for adults in scouting. To me, the often cited idea of using patches, badges and pins to start conversations or to try to publicize a program aspect is like trying to communicate by semaphore or some other obscure method: There are more direct and effective ways, and it makes the purpose suspect to do otherwise. I don't know of any other youth organization that does this. The focus is better kept on youth accomplishments than adult ones.

I'm not sure if this will post here or not, but this was posted on discussions.scouting.org before all the non scoutbook threads were deleted a couple months ago. It was the actual BSA number as of March 2022 after some of the post recharter reconciliations had been done. The actual membership number shown is about 647K. I believe the projected numbers are/were what are in the BSA reorganization plan.

Here are a couple of interesting articles on Native American connections to scouting. I've seen them before but there are some points covered that seem relevant to some of the discussions here, especially those raised by the Lenni Lenape pastor. While some of the examples included in these articles are more archival, there are a lot of other clips and examples that are current within the past few years. I think one of the key points that the pastor makes, which was what I was driving at in one of my posts, is that even without a religious ceremonial connection, in his opinion, we are allowing scouting youth to wear, display, sing, play, or brandish cultural items which they did not earn the right to do in their proper context. The other article touches on a point someone else raised: Why in the modern day are we so attached to symbols and traditions from another century when we have a rich scouting history of our own to draw upon? https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/order-of-the-arrow-is-a-secret-scout-society-in-the-spirit-of-the-lenni-lenape-a-lenape-leader-disagrees?redir=1 https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/solutions-for-moving-beyond-appropriation-in-the-21st-century-scouts-star-wars?redir=1

Exactly. My thoughts were connected to using it to signify something -- a rite of passage, a rank advancement, an honor -- when it has no real connection to the activity or the honor. Face paint for the sake of face paint at a carnival or sporting event is different. Nothing is being implied by its use other than art, fandom, or function unless of course you use it to mimic or signify something.

The only other nonethnic youth activity I know apart from scouts that incorporated something like face paint as a rite of passage was foxhunting. Young members of the Pack would get "blooded" the first time they managed to arrive at a kill with the rest of the field. Their faces were marked, sometimes with fox blood, sometimes with something more benign. However, modern day outlooks have changed and fox killing is viewed differently and blooding, or the simulation of blooding, has like many other dated practices pretty much faded away. It's hard to understand then why proponents are so determined to keep things like Native American inspired face painting in scouting, particularly OA, when it has nothing to do with what youth actually do in scouts. Scouting is patch, badge, pin, sash, flag, and ribbon mad: There must be some impressive regalia unique to scouts and OA, and in keeping with the organization's own insignia traditions, that could be created to replace using symbols of Native American culture like paint or feathers. In the present day, putting war paint on scouts seems as odd and out of the mainstream as putting fake fox blood on young riders.

If our friend Cynical Scouter, whose name is still attached to many of these threads, were still here I think he would remind you that BSA's fraudulent concealment and negligence has already been proven in court. It was the cause of several large judgements and is why BSA saw no other option than to file for Chapter 11. It would have been unable to defend itself against the legion of lawsuits that were already on the horizon then.

BSA and OA lost a good opportunity to strengthen its relationships with tribes with the disposition of council camp properties. Many of those properties were and are in traditional tribal areas where the land was appropriated from Native Americans and in some cases only a few changes of hands away from its tribal origins. Instead of selling to developers, BSA and OA could have offered some of these properties to their local OA tribes at advantageous terms. There are local tribes in our council area that have been looking for land to use for their own ceremonies and uses. That would have been a much more impactful way to honor Native Americans and the connection BSA claims with them.

In the late 70s I was in a lot of those other youth organizations -- 4-H, US Pony Club, drill team, catechism classes and CYO, sports leagues. I recall no such similar literature, manuals, or attitudes. The only corollary would have been in the Catholic setting where priests were revered and to a lesser extent with individual ex-cavalry military officers who were involved with mounted youth Troops and Pony Club. Their involvement however was more arms length as they were generally judges, officials, chef d'equipes.

Things are indeed different now but comparing an epidemic of child sexual abuse to some of these other issues isn't really a defense. It really falls apart when you look at environmental or health issues, because there are many similar situations where government agencies, corporate entities, or other organizations noted, collected, and yet failed to act or do the morally right thing with the information they had and often tried to hide because it was inconvenient, just as the BSA did. Whether it was a cancer causing substance or an abhorrent medical practice, we don't attempt to excuse it with the defense of "Well, that's how it was back then." Enrolling minorities in medical trials without their knowledge or dumping a chemical into a water source that resulted in human cancer clusters was wrong on some basic human level, even if prejudice, environmental awareness, and personal health issues were viewed differently back then. Whenever society has found that entities tried to minimize or even hide these kinds of egregious results, they've been called out for their actions and often criticized and sued just as the BSA has been. You know something's wrong on a basic human level if a lot of people are dying of cancer, or they are suffering from a disease you know is treatable, or a lot of children are winding up sexually abused. I don't why there is this defense that basic humanity should have applied in these cases but not when it comes to the BSA.

Whoa...

It's in a couple of councils and camps. I can't fathom how it continues. BSA is lucky the people who made Leave No Trace seem to be unaware of it and didn't cut images in to juxtapose with some of the interviews.

I don't think it's honest to say that an organization that can produce and still to this day perpetuate and protect a situation like Mic-O-Say isn't outside of the norm and doesn't foster, closed, cultlike subsocieties and mentalities. I'm not aware that the Y's of the world or the Little League have anything even remotely comparable. If BSA can close ranks around something as ... I'll be nice and call it questionable ... as Mic-O-Say, who could trust that it wouldn't have closed ranks around anything else it deemed inconvenient to acknowledge?

To me this is the similarity with the abuse cases in the Catholic Church and to a lesser degree other religious denominations. Even more so than other religions, the position of the Catholic priest in a community was revered as above reproach, as was someone who embodied the highest of scouting's ideals, the scoutmaster. For that matter, even at the youth level, rank and file scouts are given a measurable level of higher regard by their community. How many times have we heard something along the lines of, "It will be fine, he's a scout." We still default to it here to this day on this forum, most recently with our pride in the two scout troops who assisted the dying and the injured during the recent train crash in Missouri. Of course they would be heroic, they're scouts. This similarity in viewing priests and scoutmasters as being on a higher moral plane than everyone else likely contributed to the abuse scandals in both institutions. Parents couldn't believe such things of the people they held in such high regard, in some cases even questioning the claims of their own children. The community at large also often couldn't comprehend such behavior and was perhaps exceedingly reluctant to act on reports. And we all know how the leadership of each institution reacted to the decades of claims.