yknot

Wow. YPT is pretty clear two adults always in BSA. Most youth activities do require two adults. I work with several worship houses in an interfaith council and all have youth protection policies that require two adults whenever children are present and the numbers of adults needed go up as the number of youth do and based on the activity. In the public educational environment, you cannot take youth on a field trip without a minimum of one adult per 3-4 children. There are some youth sports settings where a single coach with a team is OK but that is only because the field is ringed with parents and other officials.

Is your CO aware that you take 30 kids out with two adults? If something happens it's hard to defend under the legal definition of negligence and could leave you all exposed to liability because no other youth organization works that way. BSA itself no longer allows even small patrols to operate without at least two deep adult supervision what makes you think even larger groups would be OK? Relying on camp staffing to count towards numbers only relates if they are working with your unit and are in sight, not if they are randomly in residence somewhere in the general vicinity.

Whoa. I normally like what you have to say fred, but this is kind of out there. No, no way should 30 kids be out in the woods with 2 adults. Think of summer camp. Most camps, apart from the initial two leaders, want an additional responsible adult per 5 kids. So you send 20 kids to camp, you need at least 3 and preferably 4 adults. Thirty kids would require an additional two. That's pretty much what any other youth activity requires as well.

It's inferred. With 30 kids, the chances of something going wrong needing additional adults are pretty high. You've got to have two to stay and two to leave. From a liability standpoint you just shouldn't do it. It would be insane given today's legal liability environment.

Eh, I don't think you can have two leaders with 30 scouts any more. That's just not kosher from a YPT or liability sense. BORs -- I still don't get the value of having them staffed with people who don't interact with scouts. I think that' s the opposite of what you'd want. Maybe we've unwittingly broken some rules, but our BORs are usually all hands on deck even if that means grabbing a wandering ASM and plunking them in a chair. I've just never seen it be an issue of any kind whatsoever.

Interesting. Almost all our committee members interact with scouts. Scouts contact the AC regarding advancements, talk to the treasurer re funds, etc. We have had committee people who routinely attend camp outs, meetings, and activities. Thank goodness they do because we're a smaller unit. BORs in our units are viewed as an opportunity for the scout to talk to adults about his/her experiences earning rank and for the units to get feedback on how well the program is serving the scout. Other than that it's not any kind of quality control. One of the most important qualities for an Advancements Chair is to be detail oriented and in the past either that person or a support person has needed to be fairly tech savvy.

Absolutely. We made decisions that kept our units alive and going.

Totally get it but we are facing a new paradigm with fewer adults available to be hands on. For the past ten years our units have completely blurred the lines because it's been all hands on deck. CM in name only. SM who are nonfunctional. Roles backfilled by Committee people. Committee roles unfilled so some other warm and willing body has had to step in even if it's been an ASM. The whole program/committee structure is very top heavy. It works very well when you have a lot of bodies. Not so well when you are lean.

I think this is one of these things that will have to change. Volunteer ranks are shrinking. BSA has so many volunteer roles that they are impossible to staff in a smaller unit. What happens is that the volunteers that are available wind up taking on the functions of these roles even if they do not take them on paper. For example, I was once the Pack Committee Chair as well as the functioning CM although we had another name down on paper.

Yes, we've had a lot of scouts get caught up doing things for say, local governments, where the process can take months or longer vs. working with a private foundation/charity/beneficiary where things can be moved on fairly quickly. An issue for Eagle candidates nearing their 18th. They don't need the stress.

Thanks. That explains it. Council does not communicate and every time I have logged onto my.scouting recently I've been so focused on the @#%! YPT button for the @$%! YPT training that I have not seen anything else.

That is very good news. Where, when and how was that communicated if you don't mind sharing? I generally pay attention to news but totally missed this.

Interesting. They were in an English speaking Scouts Canada unit near Montreal. One of my cub scout dens face timed with them to fulfill a requirement to interact with scouts from another country. One of the things my cubs found most shocking was that Canadian scouts have to pledge allegiance to their Queen lol. The youngest nephew tried to continue with his old U.S. unit when he returned over breaks but it was not easy or inexpensive to do. Another way scouting could boost membership in a small way would be to make a scouting registration more portable and seamless between units.

They have had many of the same problems as we have. My nephews were in BSA in the US and then moved to Canada where they dropped out within a year or two. One of the issues seemed to be that there was not the same enthusiasm for scouting in Canada as they had experienced in the U.S. and it put them out of step with peers. They were in Quebec province where the Francophone movement has tried to diminish British and English influence to the point where there are periodic discussions about seceding from Canada.

I agree that it was certainly the plan all along. If surveys are being designed to produce a specific result, then that decision has already been made.

You are sort of making my point for me. BSA's actions weren't ever meant to uplift girls, they were simply a survival move geared to saving the organization. That's the rub for GSUSA. I think that was also the disenchantment note for scouters who initially opposed girls in scouting. It was a money grab, plain and simple, not really an altruistic social enlightenment. Although since many units have embraced it, that's what it has become, which is good.

In my opinion the source of GSUSA's anger, or sour grapes, is embedded in how the whole issue unfolded. I don't know if anyone remembers the lead up and roll out of this but at the time we were all being invited to attend "conversations" with Mike Surbaugh and others about the possibility of adding girls to scouts. We were told research was being done, that any changes would be given full discussion, everything was years down the line, etc. Surveys were going out that they wanted you to respond to, which many of us did. Unfortunately, they were all guided -- a strategy that BSA has utilized before. What that means is that the survey is designed in such a way that questions and responses are often manipulated to support a desired position. This is pretty much survey design 101 and is a strategy frequently used in politics, marketing, whatever. So while we were all still in the middle of this supposedly initial examination and conversation phase, BSA abruptly pulled the plug on it all and said the research results were so overwhelmingly positive that the decision was made to allow girls to the program within a relatively short time frame. This change happened around the same time that some disturbing membership and financial numbers were made public. I have a family member who was fairly high up in the GSUSA organization who inferred that the fact that BSA had no actual interest in the development of girls but was simply pursuing this strategy to fix its own declining revenue stream was apparently what enraged some of the GSUSA leadership. I think BSA does have something to answer for here regarding its real intentions on why it opened scouting to girls. As always, I think the unit level people have always had the best and most altruistic reasons for serving youth and many, even though perhaps initially resistant, are very happy or at least tolerant of seeing how much our young girls love BSA style scouting. However, I think National's ... duplicity?... has once again created some unnecessary bad blood between the organizations and the current legal strife is simply chickens coming home to roost.

Having been in publications management and having had many of my publications and competitor publications close, I can say it is mostly likely not self supporting through subscriptions and advertisements. Most of the product review articles are likely paid placements -- meaning the product manufacturer probably pays something for having the product reviewed and included in the article. Or, conversely, they review the product and then solicit an ad and if none is forthcoming likely drop the product out. The magazine is probably considered a marketing and recruitment vehicle and is probably subsidized out of those budgets. I think Scout Life is a great choice. Many older teenagers would not be caught dead reading a publication titled for "Boys" Once my kids hit Webelos they wouldn't pick it up.

Not answering this just saying happy Christmas Eve and Merry Christmas to all my forum friends.

I know, I've seen that but we've done it for decades at a few key community service events -- parking, carting Xmas trees to cars or escorting people to their cars after blood drives etc. Our district and council people don't have a problem with it, they have been at these events and commended our scouts on helping the community. It's just a jar somewhere -- it's not like a scout at a popcorn table actively asking someone to donate or get some free popcorn with their donation.

The trend in my area is to move to basically a self funding option supported by fundraisers that do not involve product sales. Most activities are pay as you go although the fundraising we do allows us to often defray costs for certain activities. Our fundraising is mostly connected to service where scouts are out in uniform doing something in the community and we set out a tip jar. A few random things: Council sites need a freecycle feature where units can donate used flags, stands, camping equipment, etc., to defray start up costs for new units. Councils should also even offer seed funds to new units. Family bonds are used in other activities, especially in sports. You pay in an amount and can work it off through volunteering and get it back. If not, they use it to hire help or pay for equipment. Scouting should look into this more. Advancements line item was always a challenge for us, first when I was Committee Chair of the Pack and later at Troop. Our units always paid for advancements, but some scouts would earn way more bling and that was an issue for some families. Some kids are just not that interested in merit badges they just want to camp. If you do go a family bond or promised fundraising option, you need to balance that with not making some volunteer's job more time consuming by tracking such things. Scouting is not 'dirt cheap'. It is pretty comparable to other activities. You can always find examples that reinforce that message, but those examples often don't include items like the fact that it is not really a drop off activity and most parents need to volunteer far more than they do than with other organizations, or that you can't compare the accommodations of a campground in the woods with a stay at a Marriott at the beach or ski resort. We need to stop using that mantra because it's not true and eventually families figure that out. We need to focus on what scouting offers that no one else does instead.

This is the ideal but in our units the scouts are in charge of running each activity so things get a little messier sometimes. They have an adult mentor who is supposed to help them but depending on the adult they are sometimes no more organized than the kids. There is a punch list for activity planning and a templated calendar of what needs to happen and when, but oftentimes these things happen last minute. Unless we morphed to a more adult run system, we would not be able to budge this way because too many things change. We also seem to have a lot of families with very irregular schedules between work, recreation, sports, or other activities and I think they would be reluctant to commit lump sums ahead of time. We had some similar holdouts but most younger families do not even have paper checks anymore so they had to switch to be able to accept Paypal, Venmo, and the like. Also, once Covid hit, we did not want scouts handling cash or checks. We have tried to be as touchless as possible.

I am sensitive to people's feelings -- I have friends who don't want their children to even know American slavery existed because they are concerned it will warp their budding self esteem and I can see that -- but on the other hand I believe in history in all it's warts and beauty. I believe it's contextual. I believe it's living -- so that a name that meant one thing for one group centuries ago now means something else for other groups today and that needs to be acknowledged too and not just wiped out. We have a lot of veterans who went through military bases with names that have been found to have negative connotations but that wasn't their or their family's connection to them and their personal experiences were very powerful. I don't believe history should be erased or hidden. All these statues, all these names. all these places aren't any one person's or group's history, they are all of ours. I think we have a duty to look, to ponder, and to try and understand. Some things may be so egregious that they absolutely need to come down, but other things maybe need to stay until cooler and calmer heads can assess their historical value. While I don't want to see statues come down, I am all in favor of more statues. We have so little public art any more. Let's just keep telling the stories, including the new ones we find, instead of bringing down those that are problematic.

I think that's kind of sad because unless the names were established in some kind of annoying way -- the made up name would seem to fall into that category to me -- it's just losing history. In the Northeast, almost every other place name has an indigenous origin. I don't think it's offensive to keep those names in order to remember who was here first. I do think some of the NA hookum hokkum aspects of scouting need to go, no matter how many NA locals sign off on it. I'm not Canadian but I've spent a lot of time there and I like how they frame this issue as First Nations because it seems accurate. Although from what I hear that also has some controversy.

I read somewhere that some YPT style adult training on this is coming for leaders. Seems to me though that should have come first.