yknot

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.

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 challenges they would face would help them develop life skills they would need. He told them being in scouts would develop leadership skills that would be recognized by future employees and help them get a job... I never saw a bunch of 10 year old kids deflate so fast. Parents couldn't pull out the checkbooks fast enough but all those pumped up scouts were suddenly full of apprehension and somber faces. What was thought of as fun suddenly sounded like work. I think as adults we sometimes get carried away with things that seem important to us but are not necessarily as important to kids. I do believe a lot of kids walk away, especially during those critical cross over years, because scouting at times is more what adults want it to be. You can still supposedly be a boy led, patrol based unit and have the culture largely driven by adult expectations and egos.

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 5. In recent years, grade level specific even has become more the norm. Even at the troop level, it can be a stretch to have 10 year old and 17 year old kids together.

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 BSA reorg plan is a focus on increasing membership. Historically, this National focus on increasing and maintaining membership is what has contributed to our youth protection gaps and resultant crisis. The focus needs to be on running a safe program. An increase in membership would be the hoped for result.