yknot

I think that's obvious. And what better place for kids to learn the best ways to use a tool like a cell phone than scouts.

I keep saying that cell phones are the new Swiss army knife -- just a utilitarian item that can be used correctly or incorrectly. I think this is one of the areas where BSA has to catch up with current life. We used to argue about it in our units but within the past decade attitudes changed drastically for several reasons: 1) Adult volunteers cannot afford to be detached from work or personal life on a regular basis. It's just the reality today. Too much stuff happens. It's very hard to recruit adult volunteers on camp outs without wi fi or at least cell service. 2) Cell phones are considered a personal safety item as Eagle94 notes. It is almost considered negligent not to have one on you. 3) Some parents refuse to send kids on camp outs or to camp without their cell phones for youth protection reasons. Many families also use apps like Life360 to actually keep tabs on their kids' locations. 4) Some of the campgrounds require adult cell phone numbers for emergency text alerts. There probably needs to be a requirement added on the appropriate and safe use of cell phones in scouting similar to knife and fire safety.

I think it can be very hard depending on what kind of unit or council you are in. This forum and other places on social media are full of posts from scouters who simply don't know what to do. National is telling you to keep your head down and focus on your unit, yet your unit can't operate in a vacuum. What do you do when you see malfeasance or unscoutlike behavior and even when you go up the food chain nothing is done to correct it. What do you do? Quit? Go public? Post something here or on facebook looking for advice?

I would also say in many cases a switch from a chartering organization sponsorship to a facilities use agreement really won't change much of anything and in fact simply might formalize the status quo. Most of our relgious COs think they just provide space for us anyway and many are incapable of providing any kind of oversight -- the congregations are too small and/or too old.

He said right at the top it was an update... ? You've been here awhile so you must know Schiff is our media service lol...

Today No Wi Fi = No Adults = No Camp LOL

Possibly the germ of an exciting new marketing campaign lol. It is indeed strange there is so little information available on outdoor risk in an outdoor organization. I would also say this is yet another way that BSA has never left the 1960s. While a lot of scouting is local, scouts do travel for camp and HA and with their families. Further, even if BSA wanted to push this down to regional levels, some guidance should be given about what regional information resources there are to access and what those are.

For me, the sadness is that scouting has been unable to adapt to this new landscape. A lot of other youth organizations have done a better job. Scouting has just seemed so entrenched in tradition and intractable social positions. If the focus was simply on getting kids outdoors safely, I am certain it would be more successful but it has collapsed under the weight of so much other baggage.

Liability issues kind of prevent a scalpel approach. Also, you can have false negative Covid tests but it's rare to get a false positive, so you have to assume there are more than three cases. Additionally, Covid, and especially the newer variants that are vexing everyone, have exponential transmission rates. Three cases today can be 9 or 27 cases tomorrow. And that 0.3% you cite is simply a snapshot in time. Who knows how many campers tested positive once campers went home.

We did requirements together throughout the year as a den and then everyone advanced rank at the blue and gold in February. At that point, AOLs would transition over to troops. Parents/scouts would work on requirements they missed on their own whenever they needed to so it wasn't an issue if they had to miss a meeting. We felt it was more fun to do things together. Don't get hung up on who does what, do what works for your den and unit There is no right way to do it Just make sure it's fun.

I would say many if not most adult leaders don't have the knowledge. That's the issue. A lot of people today come to scouting from urban or suburban backgrounds. They are not on listservs for state DEPs or Fish & Wildlife or public health services to get alerts about local rabies cases or new tick borne diseases or invasive or emigrating species. They are not out hunting or farming or birding or whatever in their spare time, they are at a soccer field. That's how you wind up with a scout leader entering a cave with an awake bear in it. They think black bears hibernate from December to April. Where in the BSA program is there any guidance on hunting seasons? How many leaders out there know what blaze orange is? I normally am in line with you DuctTape but not on this

We have had several serious cases in our units. Prevention really needs to include more than repellents and tick checks. BSA doesn't give any common sense guidance about camp site selection, tick activity, vegetation and areas to avoid, etc. Whether it's blue green algae or giant hogweed or rabies, there are a lot of outdoor concerns BSA is pretty silent on despite the fact that it is an organization that routinely puts kids out in the woods. There's a knowlege gap.

The problem is that the BSA curriculum is really outdated and minimal on some of these topics. Like 1960s level information. Rabies and tick borne diseases are two areas of particular concern. No amount of Be Prepared can help when there is a basic lack of conventional knowledge. We've been so focused on YPT and yet there are other areas that need to be looked at. If we survive bankruptcy....

Will send good thoughts your way. Be well.

There are so many outdoor issues that scouting does not train for or provides only cursory education about, I assume because things like rabies, Lyme disease, invasive plants that can burn you badly enough to land you in the ER, etc., would frighten parents.

How was the higher percentage of claimants filing in the BSA case over the others been determined? My thinking was that it was likely low due to the fact that many potential claimants are already dead, many abused children don't come forward until well into adulthood, and the fact that there is an inhibiting stigma attached to actually filing for a child sex abuse claim that could become public, or at least would become known in an attorney's office.

This makes me wonder how Friends of Scouting ever became part of scouting to the degree where it is utilized to fund salaries rather than specific needs. Many Friends Of type organizations often specify that their donations not be used for such. I've been on several boards -- for example, an Educational Foundation that supports a school district and a Friends Of board that supports a preserve. In both situations, requests had to be made to the board which weighed whether to fund the request. It was never for salaries, it was for program enhancements, perhaps urgent repairs, a new piece of equipment, etc. It never dawned on me how differently FOS works in scouting. It's also disconcerting how it is an aggressive 5th hand out for more money from almost the same pool of payees, the other four "hands" being National fees, Council fees, Uniform, Unit fees, and then FOS.

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 to get that. They get steamrolled. I really feel like scouts has often put itself forward as a youth leadership program when in reality it often doesn't seem to really know that much about kids. It's more what adults think would be good for kids, and the further away it gets from focusing on the outdoors and outdoor skills, the worse it seems to get. And as I've said before, if scouting was that good at producing great leaders, we wouldn't have the kinds of organizational dysfunction and crises that have plagued it for the past few decades because BSA is basically led by scouts.

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 by BSA. However, I realize this is all just noodling around but it's a rainy Sunday morning and I'm somehow back on the site looking for bankruptcy updates ...

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 their particular units. LDS influence made it impossible to adapt in my opinion. Before the CSA scandal and Covid hit full force, I really thought the loss of LDS influence would eventually be a great membership opportunity. Going forward, LDS scouts and COs would be as welcome and valued as any other religion or CO in BSA, but without the paralyzing outsize influence. Scouting was never meant to be solely a youth ministry program.