Cburkhardt

Just spoke to the local pros in our council. Of 13,000 youth members in Scouts BSA, we now have 800 females. In over 75 new all-girl Troops. There is no comparable circumstance in my 50+ years of association with Scouting when we have experienced an opportunity like this -- which is available to every council and chartered organization willing to act. As these Troops swell in membership over the next couple of years and are joined by additional ones, our collective future will be a lot brighter. Our new membership directions are much better than our recent decades spent focused on excludi

Like most who comment on this site, I have a good amount of exposure to the ups and downs of Scouting through the years. In my case it is 54 years since I became a Cub and I have served in just about every role as an adult leader since age 21. I have carefully read the fine thoughts shared by all on this particular string and must say that despite some of the current issues, the BSA is going to come out of this 5-year workout in reasonably good shape. We have faced many other seemingly-existential matters before and handled them pretty well. We are now just needing to address the YPT fail

Surbaugh is right because we are actually doing (and hopefully, about to do) what is actually the best that we can do. If the BSA does not file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and reasonably soon, it will be unwound financially and operationally over a relatively short time. The trial attorneys who have filed hundreds of cases since the lifting of the statutes of limitations (maybe even thousands of cases by now) will pick the bones completely clean and the BSA will exist no more. All that will be left will be a few restricted trust-held properties, but even those will be abandoned because ther

I am more of an optimist and I take longer view. Surbaugh is doing exactly what is needed and the BSA is succeeding. We will be much better-off. Over the past 25 years the BSA has faced increasing market competition in the form of the explosion of athletic and other options for youth and high-paying parents to choose. Simultaneous with that time, the BSA was made into a cultural punching bag when an internal group forced adoption of "don't ask don't tell" (DADT). For the first time in our history the religious dogma of certain entities was being mandated on many units which, until t

Our troop is at the 8-month mark in doing exactly what you are now beginning. We are not linked and have a very supportive CO. We are not perfect, but I would say the reason why we now have 15 adult leaders and 30 girls is that a group of us developed a vision for an unlinked girl-centered troop at an early stage. The program and standards for advancement are exactly the same, but we were especially mindful of the schedule and other structural preferences of girls and their families in designing our troop operation. You can visit our site at http://www.ScoutsBsaDcGirls.org if you wan

We have 25 girls in our Scouts BSA Troop and are adding 10 more due to a successful recruiting event last Saturday. Probably 1/3 of our girls used to be in GSUSA, and a few still are (being registered in both programs). I am not familiar with GSUSA, I believe the principal difference is that we in the BSA use the outdoors as our principal classroom to teach our ethical decision making and Scoutcraft skills. A Scout in our Troop who does not camp and hike would not be much of a participant. It is clear to me that he other program does not have this same degree of emphasis. I am sure there

You are, absolutely, better off. Move forward as a brand new Troop. Pay no attention to anything other than the great Scouting you will provide to your son and his peers. This is now going to be fun.

The public position of the LDS Church did not identify the allowing our gay/lesbian/transgendered members (they have always belonged) to disclose their status as the reason for the mass departure. It further has not stated that our welcoming of all-girl Cub Dens and Scouts BSA Troops would have caused them to depart had this occurred before they made their departure announcement. I regard the departure of our LDS friends as unfortunate and regret knowing there is unavoidable economic disruption for those families of former BSA professionals. However, like any other national leadership of Ch

You bet. And no room service!

Cheers to Philmont and National! The upgraded tents for families sound great and are exactly what we need at this time. We need more of this across the BSA property footprint where appropriate and soon. The Philmont Training Base is not the back country, and never has been. Wade Phillips built his magnificent mansion complete with its own small row of hotel rooms before the BSA was ever a factor. It was used to bring in people from around the world to experience the American West who otherwise would not have ventured there. The result? The land and wildlife was experienced, preserve

Owls Are Cool: At some point in these kinds of dispute-prone circumstances a Scouter has to ask whether the potential task is worthy of what the Scouter brings to the table. You have energy, Scouting experience and a great heart. I cannot know if you are at the point where you need to ask and answer that question, but surely you have some local confidant you can download with. I think in your case the question is: "Is it better for me to exert the next 3 years of my volunteer time building a great new Troop at a different location without meddlesome interference, or is it important eno

Every Scoutmaster should develop and maintain a strong key-three relationship through regular communication and the full sharing of all disputed issues. In our case the CC and COR are officers in our CO. And we regularly consult the CO CEO on key decisions, who also stayed 2 nights with us during summer camp. Such a relationship makes very clear to parents where the adult authority lies in a unit and prevents the rise of abusive “parent clubs” that attempt to micromanage. I wish you luck in your further efforts to reformulate authority lines within your troop, but believe you need to have

You are far better off to start fresh instead of trying to overcome that kind of resistance. I endorse Barry’s essential approach, which is basically what we are currently doing as a new troop. You can check out our advance-planned yeast calendar, which our scouts will truly “take over” this fall (we started in February). Www.scoutsbsadcgirls.org. Putting out your calendar for the coming year becomes a big thing for parents and potential scouts to consider.

I have over 30 years of engagement as a Scouter. I take on things for three years, find my successor during the fourth year, then take on a new three year challenge. This has worked well for me above the unit level, where there is often a need to get a specific task figured-out and achieved. My current “gig” is forming and optimizing an all-girl troop. The change has always been refreshing.

I did a quick Google search, and there are hundreds of media accounts on this that will be present over the next several days. Most seem to be written in a manner to lead the reader into thinking that there is a current problem (couched as an "epidemic") with sexual abuse in the BSA, when the suits are related to events from the 60's, 70's and apparently some from the 80's. We have had our YPT act together for a long time and those who read this blog know it. Individual reporters on the far right or far left can be motivated to allow such a misunderstanding for reasons previously and fully

I would like examples of an annual health/consent form. This is obviously about making sure the parent/guardian has notice and has given specific consent for activities and events a Scout engages in. There would be precise ways to do this in a document. Some might list every pre-planned date and activity for the year. Others might reference categories of activities. In any case, please post some links to documents or web sites.

We just did not experience that. We were at a high-quality camp run by a best practices council. We are a racially diverse Troop and there were other racially diverse Troops as well at the camp. Nothing will ever be perfect on those topics, but I am glad to wee everyone maintaining an awareness of not wanting those matters to get out-of-hand.

We are a 30-girl, non-linked troop. We had 21 in summer camp -- mostly 11-13. We had strong leadership from co-SPL's aged 15. Many of these girls have been together since we formed an early adopter Webelos group in January '18. We prepped our kids for camp, had three camping trips this past spring and almost all were Scout or Tenderfoot. Maybe our girls just had more comfort and confidence because of the rigor of our start-up. Hard to say -- but my view is that the program works very well as-is for our girls.

Different girls in different groups in different camps. Sorry to hear you had such concerns. Our group turned out to be quite "boy like" on these issues, including the spiders and competitive matters (our girls beat several all-boy Troops in soccer). It was fair play all around. Your points #1 and 2 were largely absent in our experience last week. Our 21 girls were a pretty tight team that hung together. We had several female leaders with us to ease the way, which I believe helped prevent those problems in our case.

All-Girl Troop Report from Summer Camp Our all-girl, non-linked Troop just returned from a week of summer camp. We had 21 of our 30 Scouts go with a total of 7 leaders. There were 17 Troops and 350 Scouts in camp. In addition to our all-girl Troop there was another 6-girl group. Every Scout earned at least 2 merit badges, with a couple of superstars earning 6. At this particular camp there was an objective point-based system to determine a few "honor troops", and our unit was one of three that qualified. The co-SPLs figured out the point system on their own without adults running th

These are month-to-month statistics and are only the Scouts BSA program numbers. What they show is that there continues to be slight incremental net growth of Scouts BSA youth members and Troops on a national basis since adding girls. My interpretation is that -- for the moment -- Scouts BSA program statistics are holding steady as incoming female membership and all-girl troops join and partly offset other membership losses. We need to be cautious in our optimism, because there might be significant "bulk" LDS membership and unit losses in Scouts BSA as we approach the end of the year. The

Numbers released today show Scouts BSA still expanding. Youth membership up net 1.4% and units up net 5.6%.

Sorry, Eagle. That just does not add-up. I think there has to be more than that at stake in your council. Either that or they had a good number of “paper units”. Sounds like they are in a tough spot.

Statutes of limitations have an important function. They prevent the abuse of lawsuits being filed decades after an alleged event -- when so much time has passed that the party sued cannot provide a reasonable defense. State policymakers are eliminating those statutes of limitations, which will consequently allow the BSA to be sued by anyone in relation to events alleged to have taken place many decades ago. If the BSA lobbied to explain what the impact would be of such a change, that is entirely reasonable.

In addition to YPT, I personally spend at least an hour over a cup of coffee with every potential member of our committee. I get into why they want to be involved and talk about YPT quite a bit. I want to use my own personal common sense on these folks as well.