yknot

I don't understand underutilized camps either. I am in the middle of multiple councils. The ones who have innovative, three and four season programming open to the public and not just scouts are going gangbusters. The ones who regard their summer camps as solely a summer destination for scouts are struggling.

One thing we have to keep in mind is that scouting teaches one kind of leadership model: top down. The rank advancement system is built around that. In most cases, it tends to recognize and reward confidence and self advocacy and not necessarily competency and good outcomes. Scouting loses a lot of kids during the transition from AOL to first year or two of troop, and I think leadership plays a role. I have seen a lot of good kids leave in that time frame because they need confidence building in order to learn more about leadership and scouts is often not a good place for certain kinds of kids

That all seems reasonable assuming this precedent has already been set. I have wondered though why Eagle Scouts, juvenile and adult, who have committed illegal or unethical acts, have not had that status stripped by National. This is the first time I've ever heard of BSA tossing out a kid for something other than being the wrong gender or persuasion, or can others recall cases? One aspect of this that bothers me is that the kid sounds like he is of South Asian descent. If BSA doesn't have a history of kicking out kids and then the first one it kicks out is a minority, that is another bad look

Because I think we need to be looking at ways to make cubs cheaper and easier for parents? Practically everything else under the sun today for kids exists as a cheap pdf download. There is no reason to make cubs buy a hard copy book every single year. At the troop level they usually just buy one. That makes more sense although I don't even see the reason for a scout to have lug around a book either.

It is NJ. I can't seem to cut and paste the statement but it basically says what I posted.

Yes. Looks like it. I am unaware of any paperwork that exists at the COs that I know. Most of them are run by a vestigial group of people in their 80s. All they know is some nice scout person comes by to see them once a year to ask for a signature. In doing forensics for one of the units I'm affiliated with, we thought it was solely located at one church but about three months ago based on oral histories found out it actually started at another church in town. There is no paperwork whatsoever. I don't know how these things will be sorted out.

Our state United Methodist Church Council issued a statement today saying all Methodist churches should not renew COAs but have the council charter units instead to limit liability.

I'm not sure about that. I think LDS was partly to blame for membership declines before it left. It never should have been allowed to create a program within a program. Allowing it to do so gave the LDS undue influence over scouting policies in general, including a really onerous over emphasis on religion in the program. Without that influence, BSA likely would have been able to better adapt to changing social values. Without LDS, it would have been a lot easier for BSA proper to open up membership in general while still allowing COs the prerogative to follow their individual principles for t

One of the most alarming, although slightly funny, experiences I had on this subject was with my last AOL den. At their cross over ceremony they were so pumped and ready to be Scouts. All they wanted to do was camp, hike, shoot, high adventure, etc. And then the Scoutmaster got up and said a few words of welcome to them. He spent the next few minutes talking to them about leadership, hard work, merit badges and how Eagle Scout would look on their college applications; how important it was to "get it all done" before things got real busy for them in high school. He told them that the challeng

Combining 4th and 5th graders with kindergarten and first graders is one of the top reasons cited to me by parents as to why their older scouts stop coming to pack meetings or even leave scouts. For a youth organization, BSA often seems to know little about kids. The idea that 9 and 10 year old kids will enjoy "teaching" or "running" things for younger kids when they themselves still want to run around and have fun isn't all that practical. Most anything designed to appeal to 4th and 5th graders is likely to be too long for K-2. In the school system, we always broke things down K-2 and 3-4 or

I wish someone would make a documentary about this.

Whenever YP comes up we seem to instantly sort into these completely polarized nuclear bomb positions. Yes, BSA has improved its YP. Yes, it is harder to abuse children in scouting today. Yes, child sexual abuse is a prevalent problem in society. On the other side of the coin, has BSA done everything it can to minimize CSA? No, This forum is full of areas where BSA can and must improve. If scouting survives bankruptcy it will not survive a round two of child sexual abuse cases. That is simply the reality. One of the biggest conflicts I see is that one of the few action items in the

I keep getting confused on the fees since I'm no longer in Cubs. So National is now $72, plus there is a $25 new member fee, plus there is an adult volunteer fee of $48 -- that would apply to any parent who signed up as a Tiger den leader or assistant den leader, yes?

That's the way it has been. But maybe it needs to change. Top leadership being completed disconnected from program has been, in my opinion, a slow building disaster for BSA. I think senior leadership needs to have program on their dashboard so that they can better provide support to volunteers in the field. Focusing on fundraising totally detaches them from what scouts is all about. It hasn't been working. At all.

I've brought this up before and it's not entirely the same context, but there is a certain degree of forensics that can be done that can provide some validity even to claims that are missing information. If you know that Scout X claimed abuse during period Y in Z vicinity but is lacking some key data, you can match that up against similar claims made during period Y in Z vicinity. Meaning, if a scout forgot his unit number but knew the time period and location, if there are a dozen other incidents within those same parameters, it lends credence to his claim.

I was a Pack Committee Chair for many years, plus a Den Leader throughout, so I heard the parent feedback while also having to ensure the health of the program. - Be careful about fundraising. This was one of the biggest sources of parental dissatisfaction. It is good you are offering a buy out option. Many families will go for that. Others, however, will have to fundraise in order to participate. My advice is to offer a menu of options so that no one feels stuck with a fundraiser they can't succeed at. - Try to do pay as you go as much as you can. That way families can opt out if t

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2021/06/23/619808.htm

Welp, I hope the focus stays on youth protection and that if there is any good that comes out of this horrific mess it's that fewer children are harmed in the future in scouting and elsewhere. I hope eyes have been opened and that things are learned from this. I'm not a survivor so I can't presume to know how any of you feel about that but that to my third hand perspective would be at least some kind of nameless but worthwhile monument to your pain. BSA cannot forget what happened. It can't keep happening.

We do and we don't. The unit is advancement focused. It's youth led, but with adult expectations that the boys internalize. The scouts prepare hard prior to crossover. Then there is a standard camp out or series of meetings in the spring post crossover where the material is gone over again before anyone will sign off on anything, so to their minds they've done it twice. Then in the past they've been told they must attend Dan Beard/First Year scouting at summer camp so they do it all a third time. Then, none of the SM/ASM team trusts camp sign offs, so they have to sometimes do it a fourth tim

4H offers pretty much everything depending on where you are so if you are in a camping club or are working on a high adventure type project, yes they do unit like things. However, there is generally a lot more parental involvement and it's often more of a group setting. It's also not as much tent based. When I was a kid we camped a lot but it was in everything from group cabins at summer camp to empty barns to pop up campers and the backs of pick up trucks. It was usually a bunch of kids stuck together and a leader somewhere. I was not in a camping club but we often camped to be near our proje

Maybe this has been their strategy all along and why they have fought losing the HA bases. If you look at the problems with youth protection, liability, structural issues with oversight, insurance, BSA may have concluded it really can't run anything other than a family program at the national level. This way it will preserve the charter, preserve the boy scout name and legacy to some degree, and leave local scouting to whatever councils/unit survive or are able to continue on their own.

I don't think it's credible to claim it's due to search engine issues. It would be pretty magical if 4H was somehow invisible throughout the interweb. 4H historically has also always served far more youth than scouting. Right now the membership is somewhere around 6 million to BSA's 700,000. Even if many parents, lawyers, and the media somehow colluded not to link the 4H name to abuse cases, there would still be a lot of cases out there. Activities in 4H can be similar but the program dynamics are completely different as I outlined above. It is largely a group activity done in public. T

4H members can also do high adventure and more outdoors oriented projects depending on the state and county but the process is very different and there is more parent involvement. 4H offers almost everything, so it is a fine slice of the membership pie but then again 4H enrolls many, many more kids than scouting. I think the membership now is over 6 million. Many 4H clubs, regardless of what subject, still camp as part of the experience and also attend 4H camp. When I was young, we camped with an adult leader, but it was generally a group bunkhouse at a camp. You were never really alone with a

That's why I said Google yourself for headlines and cases and see what you think. I find very few. Google Scout Leader Sex Abuse and 4H Leader Sex Abuse and see what pops up once you get past the recent mass filing. If cases were as rampant in 4H as in scouting, wouldn't someone somewhere have been filing more cases than the handful that come up? It also was and is a different environment. Before two deep, the whole advancement process in scouting with scoutmaster conferences, sign offs, skills demonstration, etc. created a lot of opportunities for a predator to cut a kid from the herd. In 4H,

One of the differences to explain it might be that 88% of abuse perpetrators are male. Scouts, especially at the troop level, has been predominantly male. 4H leadership gender varies. There is plenty of camping and outdoor activity in 4H, but the leader/member dynamic is also completely different. Most of the 4H I was involved with was also kid run, but the program really didn't have a lot of opportunity for one on one contact with a leader. Just based on headlines, there seem to be very few cases of abuse in 4H. Google scout abuse and you get dozens if not hundreds of hits for cases filed or