yknot

Since I seem to be one of the ones speaking up for women this week, I would say don't make the usual BSA mistake of only looking backwards. The future of scouting, if it survives, is going to include a lot more girls and women. And since females are sexually abused at a rate 5x that of males, at least according to universally available historical data so far, this is going to have to be a youth protection area of interest for BSA going forward. If the YPC is going to do any good, it has to be looking forward as well as taking instructive lessons from the past.

Wow... Those were a couple examples for illustrative purposes. As far as Covid, I didn't think you'd dismiss the thousands of health care workers, from physicians to nurses to aides, who have died in the past few years from Covid, far eclipsing fatalities in any other profession. Infection doesn't count in your book? That doesn't qualify as bravery or a high risk profession? Wow. Those were not people who got infected and just got sick... Those are people who died. Google yourself how many. You won't believe what I post anyway.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/hospitals-health-care-workers-face-inordinate-violence-they-need-our-ncna1286705 My friend's sister is an epidemiologist who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for Doctors Without Borders. More than 75% of their workforce is female. Infection is not their prime risk concern when working in regions of conflict.

No, but as Moderator you are defending the comments of someone who essentially did. You tell me how else to read that comment and now some of yours. Maybe show some of the things that have been posted here to some random women, maybe even outside your immediate orbit, and see what their reactions are. I'd be curious to hear. Personally, I've got a houseful of livid people here. Maybe tell some of your girl scouts that the reason they can't be in mixed gender troops is because they like to menu plan too much. See how your Twitter feed blows up.

Most of these clips/posts are by male authors with self validating biases. The Psychology Today piece says women are not in high risk professions but fails to delineate comparable risks associated with professions that are identified as female dominated. Health care for example is one of the highest risk professions. In other cases, women are invisible in certain dangerous sectors that have traditionally been considered male, like farming/agriculture where about 50% of operators are female. It also neglects to mention barriers preventing women from entering heavily male dominated fields like, say, mining or logging. The James Damore memo has been around for years. Those Medieval opinions are not worth the etherspace that they are wafted upon. I think they are beneath this forum.

How so? I don't see that.

You're talking about making assessments about what is optimal for boys vs. girls based on views that are discriminatory and offensive. Differences in behaviors is one thing; claiming differences in skills and/or character development to justify excluding girls is another thing entirely. Believing that girls are neurotypically prewired to plan menus is akin to saying a woman's place is in the kitchen and she likes it there. If you don't see the problem with that then I am here to say -- you need to see the problem with that.

If you substituted race, skin color, or any religious or ethnic category for gender in this comment, it would be off the charts offensive. I don't know why the moderators continually give a hall pass to comments like these. They have no place in scouting. It's one thing to recognize adolescent behavior like showing off; it's another thing entirely when you start attempting to make broad assessments that stereotype skills and character traits in discriminatory ways.

I am sure it is because there is some reporting requirement that BSA can't or does not want to meet in order to accept the money.

Is that your video? That is very cool. Love bobcats. The rare glimpses I've had are treasured.

I don't think much unless it's related to the LDS connection to many of these troubled teen schools.

One of our local council camps does weeklong tracks so the scout can come either with a troop or patrol or on their own and do a week of marksmanship or aquatics or climbing, etc. They used to run an ATV week that was popular but I haven't seen it in a few years so maybe that's no longer in G2SS.

Yes Where do you store your personal food? Some of the local school cafeterias have started incorporating farm to table. Not everything, but it's not that hard to incorporate local fruit and produce in season. Although my kid's daily lunch food ticket is between $10-$12 and likely to go up.

These are the kinds of comments where I miss CynicalScouter. I can't recall exactly what his opinion on this was but I know he continually pointed out that the IVFs were precisely why the BSA was in trouble -- court cases found the BSA negligent for supressing their existence. It was negligence more than the actual abuse that tripped BSA up. Or something to that effect. To me that's the most sobering part. If the IVFs hadn't been dragged out into the light of day, the full scope of the abuse wouldn't have been known.

There are several issues like this that have not been addressed in the bankruptcy reorganization plan. To me, that renders it almost pointless because it's yet more BSA willful fiction. The chartered organization model has long been dysfunctional as a national strategy. The ability to rely on volunteer leadership is declining. The likely only way forward for scouting is more paid staff at a district or council level that can oversee consistent administration of the program and backfill volunteer attrition. Without reliable oversight, nothing in the program can be held to account and that includes the most important component going forward -- youth protection.

I'm on an ecumenical board with about a dozen area churches, some of whom sponsor scout units. Three quarters of them are about two warm bodies and an unexpected bill away from closure. There is no way they want to continue charters.

Powerful stuff. I do miss Hitch. It is true. You can substitute BSA for Catholic Church and the issues with denial and lack of institutional honesty sound the very same. Violence condoned in pursuit of a higher goal is not pardonable.

It's a reminder that there are many children, like his friend, who did not survive to make a claim and he also came close to ending his life. I think of that whenever anyone attempts to use the 82,000 cases as an absolute number.

When we stopped doing popcorn as unit fundraisers simply because sales were declining, we pursued other fundraisers and then still gave council/FOS a modest lump sum from each unit. It was generally around $250 per. We heard similar noises because our new fundraising options were more successful, but it was about the same as what they had been getting with popcorn and we had asked them come up with some other fundraiser options, which they had refused to do. A thank you would have been much nicer. This is an inherent problem in the BSA structure which manifests itself when it comes to fundraising and local support. BSA, Councils, and units should be on the same page, not separate pages, when it comes to fundraising. Units are preventing from picking low hanging fruit in their own communities because Councils don't want them asking anyone for support. However, my local pizzeria will not give $ to Council. Never will. It's not their target market. But they will give $, or at least $ in the form of pizzas, to the local scouts they know come through their doors the same as they will do for the local PTA or soccer team.

Exactly right. Which goes back to the original post by @qwazse this was responding to and why the issue with the Catholic church came up. Children are not somehow 10X safer in BSA -- or perhaps even more so in the Catholic church, if you are following his logic and basing that assessment on similar criteria. There is not a "moral" imperative for children to be in scouting, or any organization with a similar track record like the Catholic church, because they are somehow bastions of safety from CSA compared to society. That is an Alice in Wonderland claim.

At the same time someone also posted a slide that showed that as of March 2022 there were only 650,000 kids in BSA. Post Covid membership went down not up. Then someone else pointed out that the BSA had just said on Bryan on Scouting that its membership grew by about 300,000 girls, which means that only 350,000 US boys are currently in scouts. Apart from the tragedy of that, those numbers shoot a hole in the bankruptcy reorganization plan.

Like many things on a national forum, people have had pretty varied experiences. In the northeast I would say my experiences are not unusual. Young active priests are less common today, and I've seen a rise in deacons taking on some of those educational roles, but they are still around. When my oldest was working on Ad Atare Dei not long ago he interacted with multiple priests and deacons as well as went on an overnight retreat and visited a seminary. They were part of that process because they were also very involved in youth outreach of all kinds in their home parishes. Many of the orders are very active in underserved communities and the main focus is youth.

You inexplicably excluded many, many millions of touchpoints among children who attended Catholic schools, participated in school or CYO sports, attended CCD, or grew up in Catholic run orphanages as well as the many orders that do direct community outreach with youth. The vast majority of Catholic youth have quite a bit of contact with priests, deacons, and other leaders in the church community. Based on overall statistics which are widely available, there are far more kids historically and currently that have been involved in the Catholic church and yet the tallied abuse cases are lower than scouts. Not that that means anything at all to victims but the point remains is that the last organization I would look to as an expert on youth protection is BSA. On a numbers basis, it's the worst of the worst. Even now, right out of the box as part of the bankrutpcy reorganization plan, it has already recreated a historical conflict of interest for itself between growing youth membership and protecting youth. Whenever membership is a priority in BSA, youth suffer.

It' can be a difficult process to manage. We had one really fun year with the 2015 program changes where the AOLs essentially were prepared to enter troop as Scouts. Those changes had not been communicated to the Troop leadership though and their program revisions didn't occur until 2016 I think so they'd had no reason to focus on it. When they crossed over, ready to operate the way they had been doing as AOLs, the troop basically sent them back to kindergarten and made all the AOLs attend Dan Beard at summer camp where they repeated some things for the third or fourth time. I think by the fall, BSA watered the AOL program back down and took out some of the Scout level camping requirements and the troop reverted to that process. A lot of those kids left from sheer boredom and disillusionment with what they'd been promised.

We always crossed ours over in February, the rationale being it gave them plenty of time to acclimate to troop before summer camp. A problem with that was that their first campout was generally in March and often the least pleasant camp out of the year weatherwise. Kids would sometimes never come back. They were also kind of young for the troop level scouts to handle. On the other hand, there is a big developmental shift by 4th/5th/6th and I always saw older cubs practically climbing out the windows to get away from the younger kids. Parents too. We would start to get a lot of no shows in 5th. If we had tried to keep them in Pack until the end of their 5th grade year, I think we would have lost some for that reason.