CubHerder

8 hours ago, DannyG said:

Yes and no. It is still the culmination of Cub Scouting, even if your child joins in 5th-grade and does the abbreviated version. There is extra work they have to do to catch up if they joined late. They have to earn Bobcat first; they have to earn Whittle Chip; then they have to do all of the other requirements including the things the other scouts have to do to prepare them for a Scouts BSA troop. It is a lot to accomplish, especially if you want to transition your AOL scouts into troops by early spring.

Yes, this is true, though I have not seen where it says that scouts need to earn their Whittling Chip to be awarded AOL.

I agree that AOL can be a lot of work, and it should be, they are 5th graders. My issue with treating it as a BIG DEAL is that you get the same award if you have been in Cub Scouts for six months or for six years. We have scouts who have attended every meeting, since Lions, for six years. We have other scouts that joined Cub Scouts late in 4th grade (too late to earn Webelos rank), and will most likely earn AOL by March. It is fine that they get the "5th grade rank" which is what the new program seems to imply, but personally I don't think the latter deserve the "Highest Award in Cub Scouting" compared to what the former put in. 

10 hours ago, Armymutt said:

Wait, seriously?  You regard standards as "just words on a page"? 

For Cub Scout standards, yes. Unless the organization, i.e., the BSA, provides provides resources to execute the plan, such as people or money, they are quite literally just providing words on a page.   

7 hours ago, Eagle94-A1 said:

The  original version of the current program had a committee of volunteers working on it  for over 2 year ( I thinkit was closer to 4)and getting input from other volunteers in the field.

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend anyone who had a part in the developing the current program.

7 hours ago, Eagle94-A1 said:

If you pack likes boating activities, or your Webelos/AOLs like the CASTAWAY ADVENTURE, you're welcome.

Our scouts love the Castaway Adventure! Thanks for that!  They would love to do boating as well, but our Council basically told us that the safety rules around swimming and boating are so complex and impractical to enforce at the Cub Scout level that they basically don't allow it. Part of me believes they want to reserve those activities as selling points for the Council's Cub Scout Day Camp.

7 hours ago, Eagle94-A1 said:

As for the hoopla, prior to June 2015, you had to earn the Bobcat and Webelos Ranks in order to earn AOL, and symbolized your readiness for Scouts. They changed that because folks thought it discouraged 5th graders from joining. 

It sounds like the pre-2015 model made a little more sense. In the current program, calling Arrow of Light The Highest Rank in Cub Scouting isn't consistent with the requirements to earn it.

8 hours ago, Eagle94-A1 said:

WHOA. Each adventure was designed to take a month, not a single meeting Giving away awards is not cool, especially at the Webelos and AOL levels. Webelos and AOLs are suppose to be transitioning to Scouts, getting prepared to do things, not just their best. 

Yes, that is what the handbook says. But those are just words on a page, the rubber meets the road when Den Leaders and parents to donate the time to deliver the program. We are grateful to our leaders who step up even if they can't execute the program to ideal standards, and to our parents even if they can't supervise a month's worth of Cub Scout homework. 

I really like this new organization. It looks like someone has actually thought about and designed a six-year program, as opposed to the current structure that appears to be made up of one band-aid solution on top of another. I'm also glad to see Arrow of Light as simply one of six rank badges. The idea that Arrow of Light was some great culmination of Cub Scouting never made any sense to me. Any kid who joins a Pack in 5th grade and participates for six months can get Arrow of Light. Whoop-De-Do. 

I also agree about eliminating the random awards. In the past six years I think our Pack awarded two or three of them. They add nothing to the vast majority of Cubs' experiences.

Requiring eight adventures for each rank I think is a good move. Frankly, many of our Den Leaders hold one meeting per adventure regardless of difficulty or whatever. Eight Adventures means at least eight Den Meetings, which at least gets them together once per month for the duration of the school year more or less.

The Protect Yourself Rules seems to have disappeared as an adventure. This also makes sense. It is not the same thing as the other adventures, it's more like administrative work for the family. I assume it is still required but it belongs in some other bucket. Maybe families will have to take it online and get credit like YPT.

I am very hopeful that the content of the new adventures will reflect modern times and will have self consistency, i.e., that the adventures in a given area progress in a clear way (e.g., increasing difficultly) from Lion to Arrow of Light. We will have to wait to see however.

Being able to show parents a very consistent plan like this on a single sheet of paper could really help families understand that there is a well-thought-out progression of growth for their child, and thus may help with retention. 

@BetterWithCheddar, @mrjohns2, @MattR, @fred8033, thank you all for your suggestions.

@Armymutt and @5thGenTexan, thank you both for your well-considered comments.

Our Pack is struggling. Number-wise we are OK but the program we offer is not great. I do think if the Cub Scout program were delivered as designed it would be a great thing for the kids. I have taken basically every Cub Scout training class on my.scouting.com. The problem isn’t about knowing what should be happening, but instead about how to make it happen. My goal here isn’t to bash any part of the program, but to get help in dealing with these issues. Here are some specific concerns:

1. Not enough adult help. I’m sure this has been an ongoing concern for the past 30 years, at least. The my.scouting.com videos are frustrating, in a sense, because the highly-staged photos show about a 1:1 ratio between adults and Cub Scouts, and the adults are fully uniformed and highly engaged. Our pack looks nothing like that. We have about a 10:1 ratio between scouts and highly engaged adults, and maybe half as many adults again who are kind of phoning-it-in. I once calculated a realistic estimate of how much adult time would be required to deliver the program per the training videos. I came up with 66 hours per week. To try to monetize that somehow, if we use the average hourly wage for a substitute elementary school teacher ($14/hour) that comes out to $36,000 per year in volunteer labor over a 9-month program. About $700 in effort per kid per year. How is one supposed to commandeer that level of in-kind support for other people’s kids?

2. No venue. Our chartered organization signs the documents when required but that’s it. We are on our own to find meeting locations. At someone’s house, a park, etc. That kind of works for dens but it is really a drag as a pack. The well-dressed, highly structured pack meetings shown in the training videos really aren’t possible when you are meeting at a playground. How do other packs in a similar situation deal with this?
 

3. No council. Our council has been effectively MIA since before COVID, except for emails to recruit and to sell popcorn. I’m not sure there is any advice to give here (don’t tell me to talk to the District Executive, we don’t have one), but I’m willing to listen if there is any.
 

4. Cost. The absolute cost of cub scouting is not that high, but honestly families don’t get that much benefit back. I think Cub Scout families are being exploited by BSA. Somewhat related to #3, I think Council and National are really about BSA (I’m not even sure that’s the right term, I mean the older kids formerly known as Boy Scouts). But most of the money to support the BSA adventure bases, BSA summer camp facilities, and paid BSA support staff comes from Cub Scout dues. Between national and council dues our families pay over $150 per year per scout.  That’s money that goes out and doesn’t impact our program in any visible way. On top of that we need another $200 per scout to actually execute a program. If you buy a new uniform and handbook every year that is another $200 per scout. And if you want to participate in a field trip that is pay-as-you-go, about another $140 for 1 scout + 1 parent. I realize back-in-the-day folks have some image of scout costs being $5 per year or something like that. It is closer to $700 per year now.  Yes, we could do more fundraising but that is really just shifting the cost to #1. As I said $700 is not an unrealistic family expense, at least in my area, but it is big enough that parents are essentially expecting a full-fledged weekly drop off program like they get from soccer or karate. We don’t offer that though. Any thoughts on how to reconcile this for parents would be appreciated.  
 

5. Too wide an age range. My understanding of the premise of BSA is that it is boys-helping-boys to succeed, with some light input from adult mentors to teach skills and keep things safe. I can’t see at all how to deliver that to our Cub Scouts. Maybe for Webelos, if it were something like Webelos 2 teach the Webelos 1. In reality, Lions and Tigers is just a playdate. Wolf and Bear just repeat the Lion and Tiger activities at slightly more complicated level. I realize the idea that you should catch them at a younger and younger age before families discover other activities. And in a sense there’s not anything wrong with just offering structured playdates for the K-3 kids.  But in the sense of really offering what the BSA (or whatever we should call it) claims to be offering I’m thinking our pack should eliminate Lion through Bear and just have Webelos 1 and 2. There’s nothing in the first 4 years of the program that a Webelos 1 couldn’t learn in a couple weeks. What do you think?
 

6. Outdoor vs. indoor. What is the right mix here? If you really look at all of the beltoops for Cub Scouts, 90% are indoor arts-and-crafts type things. I think 100 years ago the program was supposed to be focused on outdoor activities. Our pack kind of struggles to reconcile that.  
 

7. Religion. I’m sure this varies dramatically from community to community. I’ve not done a survey, but I think only a handful of families in our pack are bible-thumpers, maybe another handful are religious-when-convenient. The rest essentially are not.  But we are stuck in a weird place where the BSA materials have a religious component, though at the same time they weasel their way out of it by making the definition of religion very broad. Rather than force most of the Cub scouts to go through the motions by saying “I’m reverent toward trees and plants and stuff”, which is basically the same thing as lying, I’m wondering if we should completely drop all the religious implications. We would keep the scout oath and law as it is for historical continuity and respect, but just pencil whip scoutbook for the rest. If a family very much wants religion in cub scouts they can go to a different pack. In reality I think we will gain more families than we will lose. I don’t see any way in which the rest of the program is necessarily impacted by your religious beliefs. Of course people can bring their personal baggage into anything, like to appreciate the outdoors you need to thank God for the gift, but in the society where I live it just ends up being weird and somewhat alienating. How do others handle it?

 I will appreciate any feedback on any of these points.

It looks like COVID will be shutting the doors on our January Pack Meeting. Any suggestions for fun things to do outdoors in winter? We have no snow and none is forecast, so anything involving natural snow is out. Temperature should be in 30’s during the day, 10’s at night. We just did a hike so I would prefer something else, unless there was something special about it.

Hello all. I am a leader of a Cub Scout Pack and I have been following this for the past few months to try to anticipate the impact to our unit. As things stand now, it appears that short-term impact to our unit will be minor aside from increased dues and maybe one less camp in our area. Long term … well the headwinds associated with Cub Scouts certainly haven’t disappeared but that is a different topic from bankruptcy. But nevertheless we have volunteers who are committed locally to Do Their Best for the scouts regardless of what is happening at higher levels of the organization.

I want to thank everyone on this forum for interpreting the legal proceedings, making it available to the public in a useful way, and providing color commentary from different viewpoints. There is no where else practical to find this information. Obviously BSA has communicated nothing useful on the matter, and our Local Council has been completely silent on the issue. To be fair, at least with the Local Council I suspect it is a conscious decision that since the day-to-day muck of bankruptcy proceedings really has no impact locally it is the better of two evils to just pretend it doesn’t exist and encourage units to carry on. Though I don’t always agree with some of the opinions, I would particularly like to thank CynicalScouter who seems to have found his calling in summarizing and translating legal documents into a form mere Cub Scout leaders can understand.