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Owls_are_cool

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Everything posted by Owls_are_cool

  1. Hypothetical...If I am selling Scouts BSA to a prospective scout, would bringing up this merit badge increase or decrease the chances of them joining the program?
  2. Correct, some scouts like a smaller group. Let distractions during meetings and more say in what goes on. On the other hand, hard to do an outdoor program when only 2-3 scouts want to participate. Leadership skill development is harder. Larger group? Easy for scouts to fall through the cracks and leave the program.
  3. I let my son choose another troop, so I went to the adult leadership of that troop and asked them where they want me to serve. Initially it was an assistant scoutmaster, but the current scoutmaster's job makes it hard for him to participate, so I got the scoutmaster job. I was ready to step back, but I can do that job for a year.
  4. I think we are all running against the headwinds of the current Scouts BSA program. The Eagle Rank has become the Aim instead of scouts deciding and running their own activities (hopefully in the outdoors)...which leads to character development, better citizenship, etc. By the end of this year, 6 of my scouts will get their eagle rank, but the negative of that is my troop will be down to 3 scouts. We did recruit extensively, but the cub scouts went to another troop. It comes down to relationships with packs or other youth groups. Since there is really no replacements for me as SM and for
  5. I have a really good job in IT, but I do not have a computer related degree or certification. 1) I grew up on a dairy farm where I learned work ethic, problem troubleshooting and solving, and how to be productive when tired or sick. 2) During study hall in the 80s, I went to the computer lab and started writing computer programs. I was really good at finding subject matter experts that I can learn from. 95% if the stuff I have learned on IT was done outside of the classroom. Training is expensive. Employers love employees that can teach themselves new skills and use them to further the unit. 3
  6. Late to this post. In my district, cub scouts are done by over half. Virtualized cub scouting did not work. Packs that continued in person activities as much as possible during the COVID fear campaign are the ones that are healthy today. Packs that did not, lost a bunch of cub scouts. Another factor driving scouts out of the program is the push towards more classroom type activities instead of more outdoor activities. Recruitment has been significantly down. It has to be all the advertisements looking for victims of sexual abuse, because of the BSA. My chartering organization will no lon
  7. My son just got his drivers license as a freshman in high school, so he is less safe today driving himself to school and to baseball practice. However, in the long run driving is an important skill to have and the more he drives, the better driver he will become. As parents, we could bubble wrap our son, but in the long run, it will be bad for our son. The program does put scouts in challenging positions, by design, so they grow in character. So by design the program is not as safe as sitting on the couch watching TV or playing video games. Did this Director of Youth Protection do n
  8. I do know that in my unit and district, youth protection is taken seriously. Compared to sport teams that myself and/or my son is associated with, the scouts are safer today. In the end, it comes down to vetting adult volunteers, which will never be a perfect process. When I coach basketball, I do have players go places in pairs and I avoid being alone with a player as much as possible. It is a good habit I picked up from scouting. Knowing that the vetting process is never perfect, it is important that those directly responsible for sexual abuse are sent to prison for a long time.
  9. My assistant has a job that requires a lot of travel. Other active adults are having trouble finding time for scouting, because they are single parents or have jobs where they work 50-60 hours a week. Cub scout numbers in my city is down 66% over the past two years, so it has been a struggle to find parents to join the committee/scoutmaster corp. I am actually looking forward to joining another troop and contributing at a smaller role.
  10. Our chartering organization (a Catholic Church) has notified us that they will no longer be our CO at the end of 2022. They got a pile of letters from lawyers stating that they are next in being forced to contribute to the victim fund. I am actively moving my scouts to another troop in the city, so scouts in my troop can continue to benefit from the program. My council has offered to charter us, but I no longer have the energy to keep my troop going after two tough years keeping the troop afloat through the covid panic and the constant advertisements on radio and tv looking for boy scout
  11. I just signed up a scout to join my troop last week and I paid his registration fee out of my pocket ($37.50) and bought him a manual. I just do not want money to be an issue for a scout to join the program and they will have a chance in Sept/Oct to sell popcorn to fund their own program the next year. Many organizations give introductory deals to get membership numbers up and the BSA should also. At some point, scouters like myself will have to give up bailing out national for their bad decisions to keep our troops/packs alive.
  12. This is an excellent list. Never a good idea to judge a generation as a group.
  13. First step is to determine who is your unit commissioner, then set up a meeting with him/her. Easy for me, because my unit commissioner attends the same roundtables and district committee meetings that I do. Sometimes we meet after roundtable, to be efficient with our time. Granted not all councils have their act together, but I learned what is required of unit commissioners in my district, so I make sure I am available to him and ensure he meets those requirements in regards to my troop.
  14. Much of this word for word gold standard for Journey to Excellence. 9 short term camps. 75% of the troop go to a long term camp. 2/3s of troop advance a rank. Recruitment goals. Etc. While I do attempt to achieve gold in JTE every year, it says nothing about character growth of scouts which is one of the aims of scouting. This is hard to measure, but much more important. JTE likely needs a rewrite to measure what is important. We (the Key 3) meet with a unit commissioner yearly and identify areas where my troop needs to improve (maybe needs more focus?). This document points to thi
  15. Rethinking program should be done. Scouting is too much like school, when the focus should be outdoor activities. Cub scout day camp is what got my son hooked. For my troop, work schedules of parents make it hard for them to volunteer. Father out of town frequently for work, we cannot expect mother left behind with multiple kids to volunteer for the pack or troop. Then the requirements the BSA loads on a potential volunteer is a lot! Parents that have children with behavioral issues are drawn to the BSA for its character development. Most volunteers are not ready for this. So a simp
  16. Another thought I have...since we know that background checks do not screen out 100% of the pedophiles and the BSA knows this fact also, is the BSA still liable for abuse that leaked in from an imperfect background check system? And if the BSA is still liable, then how is it possible to for the organization to eliminate 100% of the abuse, short of ending scouting?
  17. I did state this before: the BSA does take youth protection much more seriously today, than organized sports and schools. When I coached baseball and basketball, there are no two deep adult requirement, nor are players required to have a buddy to go to the bathroom, etc. All these organizations do require background checks, but we all know that these checks are not 100% fool proof and will not detect anyone that has not committed their first sexual crime (or multiple crimes if their victims do not report). It is bothersome to me that the BSA seems to get all the blame, yet very little en
  18. I always have a few scouts (out of my 11) that cannot participate, because of sports and jobs for part of the year. If they are SPLs, they are good at handing off the position to someone who can make the meetings/campouts. While a scout has limited participation, they do show up on occasion and contribute to the troop via a position of responsibility. Mostly it is training younger scouts first aid, how to cook, etc. The more I let the scouts run their own troop and let them make their own decisions, the more they get something out of the positions of responsibility. That is the spirit of the r
  19. BSA wide is every two years. My council requires it every year.
  20. There were issues on my.scouting.org in 2019 where many scouters took the YPT training, but it was not recorded. I had to send a screen capture of proof that I completed YPT to my council, so they can manually update the official status with the BSA. I had to do the same with 5 others in my unit, until the issue was fixed late in 2019. This year I could not recharter anyone that did not have YPT up to date, so for my council over 99% of the scouters are in compliance. There are a few scouters whose YPT lapsed after recharter, but they ceased involvement in scouting after recharter. (Thus
  21. That seems to me to be an impossible standard for youth organizations, in that many victims and their parents did not report to the police these criminal actions, so many child molesters fell through the cracks of background checks. Even today, the BSA must report to the police all instances, but if a prosecutor refuses to prosecute due to the lack of evidence or the victim's unwillingness to cooperate, nothing will show up on a background check.
  22. Or I can get you to pay the registration fees for adults and scouts in my troop, so we can continue to invest in the scouts' character, citizenship, physical fitness, and leadership. Or is that ceasing to be the goal in the near future?
  23. How much to you expect me and my scouts to pay into a victim fund? A thief steals my car from a driveway, so I sue my neighbors for allowing it to happen. I would be wrong to go after the neighbors instead of the actual thief. Even worse, I wait 30-40 years where all of the neighbors have died or moved away and I sue the existing neighbors.
  24. I'll keep pointing out the impacts on scouters and scouts not responsible for the abuse, but yet will pay the brunt of the bankruptcy. You can't get money out of dead people, so scouters and scouts are now being targeted, because we are the BSA today.
  25. How much of those costs to you expect me and my troop's scouts to pay?
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