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I would respond that I leave scouting as a volunteer as of 12/31/20 because I don't have a way to answer those questions. An organization that has so many good people in it can't be evil but I have lost faith in its ability to manage itself and prevent more crises in the future.

I wish they would get rid of Cooking. It has turned so many camp outs into tailgating in the woods.

I think it's OK for scouters to feel that way but I think we ignore the broader public perception at peril. People who are older tend to have better views of scouting and some connection to it. Younger people do not. BSA, or whatever survives bankruptcy, has a huge PR question ahead of it that can't be ignored.

I think if BSA had been more true to its core statements, it would have avoided becoming such a lightning rod. Be a good citizen, be of good moral character, on my honor, do my duty -- those tenets should have resulted in a more inclusive organization from the beginning. I don't know why BSA became so closely aligned with religious connections to the point where it lost its independence and ability to follow its own moral code, but it has certainly caused a lot of strife.

I think over the decades scouting became such a stalking horse for so many social issues, whether religious or otherwise. Instead, it should have just stood on its own and focused on being relevant to children. A lot of these headaches never would have existed if so. We could have easily staked out the outdoors/conservation ground and never did. It's not necessarily too late to still do so.

I think there is so much discussion and hand wringing on this site but it is focused on the wrong things. We're all talking about organizational structures and what we think kids need, but what scouting needs is to focus on is why kids don't join in the first place or drop out if they do. If kids loved our program, it would survive bankruptcy and abuse scandals, but the reality is that it's hard to recruit kids.

I think we need to be careful about overlaying our adult opinions on things. Part of the challenge with scouting is figuring out why so many kids drop out. I am/was a completely gung ho scouting parent, although my focus was more on outdoors and service. I had kind of a shocking moment with both my kids recently, now 20 and 15, when they both told me they loved cubs but mostly hated troop. It just stopped being fun. So you might think kids aren't getting anything out of cub scouting, but our target audience -- kids -- might have a different opinion.

That's today, or at least this December, but next year or the year after might be different. Cubs have no commitment to a larger scouting goal that would motivate them to stay involved. Few Tiger scouts or their parents are thinking I have to keep my kid active in Cubs so that he can make AOL. The higher retention at Troop levels is like due to scouts and their families who are a couple of years in and are focused on making Eagle. That same motivation won't exist a year or two as these scouts Eagle out. My point is that the lower attrition rate isn't a function of the Troop program -- it

I knew John Wayne's cousin. John's real name was Marion; his cousin's name was Maurice. He used to play the piano for us at the Farmer's Grange for our 4-H Christmas parties. Somehow both an artist and a mountain man type. He was famous for his snapping turtle soup, which he caught himself. Interesting family.

Ahhh... well the days when everyone who was born in a village and then stayed in that village are long gone. I think the difference I see in BSA vs. other youth organizations is that in other organizations every adult is actively, visibly, and continually answerable to someone else. That kind of supervisory relationship doesn't exist in BSA because they kind of farmed it out to the COs but then provided no managerial follow up. You cannot blame a legacy CO, that has been in operation for decades for having no idea the extent of their assumed responsibilities if BSA doesn't inform them and try

IMO the chartered organization model should never have existed simply because it had too many fatal flaws. I can't remember all my early scouting history, but I hardly think having churches use scouting as youth ministry is what BP had in mind. And not to say that we should be overly concerned with what BP had in mind because what worked then doesn't always work now. But if the general concept is that scouting is a game with a purpose, where does scouts as perpetual Sunday School fit into that? Some COs exert too much influence on scouting to suit their own needs, to the point where units can

I think BSA needs to stop relying on infrequent Bryan on Scouting blogs to kinda sorta clarify unclear YPT issues. I think the online training module needs to be condensed and redone for higher impact. I think some kind of regular communication on YPT issues needs to come out of BSA. There are a lot of things that come up that BSA could educate on or use to reinforce YPT more than take this test and you're done. And, of course, fix the tech issues. There are times that YPT seems to defy common sense such as when you see a leader bolt out of a meeting of 30 kids because they suddenly real

Troop seems down maybe 10 to 20% but Pack is decimated.

I think it's probably a desperate move borne out of the fact that so many COs have dropped units this year in the wake of the bankruptcy filing. I think it was a rude awakening to many COs to find out they actually may have some liability for sponsoring a unit, especially for the many many legacy units where the role is already viewed as simply providing a place to meet and benign support. In some ways, the "rental" agreement isn't much different than reality. Where the problem is going to crop up is for those organizations that have utilized scouting as an extension of their individual

BSA undoubtedly has major issues with the care and feeding of volunteers, training and tech support just being a couple of them. The parts you can't blame BSA for are the inexorable and widespread changes in liability issues over the past few decades. Liability issues are not just driving BSA's policies but those of virtually every government, business, nonprofit, or community organization in the United States. It has become an ever escalating game of gotcha that is increasingly pervasive in every area of life. BSA has been reactive rather than proactive, largely due to having very entrenched

Do you mean the email reminders? I get them. I started getting them in August for an October renewal. However, I can't seem to access the training.

I wouldn't be worried about the tinsel but the chemicals are an issue. You might want to talk to your local watershed association first before you do it. Christmas tree growers spray their trees extensively with pesticides and other chemicals. In addition, many people add chemicals to the water to preserve them which stay in the tree's phlegmatic system long after disposal. Neither of those practices are good for healthy waterways and fish. Another place I've seen them used is to help prevent beach erosion. But again these are not random "clean" trees or brush from a property clearing or power

I agree. No touch policies don't solve anything if you still have predators in your midst. Think Jurassic Park think the Malcolm character think his version of chaos theory. Bad actors will always find a way to do what comes naturally to them. Rather than no touch it ought to be no tolerance for folks that don't follow the rules. There are still so many scouters that despite all the scandals and bad press and YPT training and exhortations who still do questionable things or flaunt YPT. These folks need to be called out. If they don't stop, they need to go. Even if completely blameless in inten

I think this is going to be the heart of the problem. There are no signs that there is any kind of volunteer groundswell to support even a skeletal level of organized scouting. There are a lot of highly committed individuals, some even in pockets, around the country that will attempt to run local programs. However, I think liability and PR issues are going to make even that very difficult post bankruptcy. Things will survive for a few years, but long term it is probably not viable. What has been leaked out of the Churchill documents is very disappointing because so far there has been nothing i

Well that makes perfect sense, but that's something that is pretty individual to you. It's not really an argument against allowing two female leaders for boy dens.

Does that come up for you much though as a leader issue? Never did for me other than maybe a random eww...

Interesting point. There are a couple other things to consider as well. It's not just that far fewer women are abusers, it's that the type of abuse they perpetrate is different. Profiles for female abusers typically include a woman who is participating in an abuse situation under the direction of a dominant male or a woman who is targeting an older child -- teacher/student type relationships. The Me Too movement has also shed a lot of light on the incidence of abuse in women and girls. Girls suffer abuse at significantly higher rates than boys: 1 in 4 vs. 1 in 6 by adulthood. Since abused chil

In scouting, I think it's partly a practical reason based on biology. I don't know too many unrelated males who would be comfortable instructing a 12 or 13 girl on first time tampon use while on a hike or camp out. There really isn't anything similar to worry about with boys. It's also likely that if BSA was dealing with claims perpetrated by women, it would have a different policy. It will be instructive to see if any of the 95,000 claims that have just been filed involve women as perpetrators. If so, that might drive a change.

The statistical reason is that less than 5% of perpetrators are women and it's generally a different kind of abuse than we've seen in scouting. It's more often an older female taking advantage of a juvenile male. The other sad statistic is that while in BSA we are hyper focused on the horrific abuse of boys, in reality girls are five times more likely to be victims of abuse and the abusers again are almost exclusively male. Apart from the statistics, I think the practical reason BSA has allowed two women to take boys on outings is because if they didn't a lot of cub scout dens wouldn't be fun

I think if scouting survives it will be a much smaller organization. I think it's clear the only kind of scouting that will continue will be more family oriented experiences/camping because that's what millennials and younger want and liability insurance and issues will likely demand. I think it's clear we are headed to mixed gender because that is what millennials and younger want. It also just doesn't make any sense to try to run this bureaucratic/volunteer heavy organization with different groups of volunteers just to preserve the illusion of segregated units when that's not how