Tron

I am not in the troop, I am third party that was approached for advice.

All of last year the national and regional meetings discussed consolidations of use and more days of use on existing camps. I get what is being said, a lot of camps are literally used for only 6 to 8 weeks a year and then they sit unused drawing resources for maintenance.

Long weekend, I was out of town on scouting business. I had a scout parent come to me with a unique problem that I am really chewing on. The parent is pissed and ready to pull his three boys out of scouting (transferring troops is not an option). Two of the boys are just along for the ride, the third boy is the scouting engine of the family; however, the third boy has flatlined on advancement and it doesn't make sense. The scout is in a nationally highly ranked high school, ranked in the top 10 in my state, competitive entry, he beat out 750 other kids for his freshman slot in the school. That tells me that the kid is smart and driven. You don't get into schools like this without being smart, having drive, and being able to complete tasks. The scout has been in Scouts BSA for 4 years come March, has 49 camping nights, reportedly has participated in every service project for the past 3 years, and has dropped out of sports to focus on scouts. Scout has wanted to go to NYLT for a couple of years now and the window to register is quickly closing per my council website. The scout is stuck at 2nd class, and for some reason can't get simple things like 1st class 5a and 5b signed off. The parent swears that the scout is not being held back on purpose, he said he's long term friends with a lot of the other troop leaders, he's a member of the charter org, etc ... None of this makes sense to me because outside looking in it sounds like the scout is being held back on purpose by the troop leadership; however, how can I argue with the parent. What does the crowd think?

This is a good method if the instructors are clear that "Hey you're doing this pretending to be the members of the PLC, you're learning through their eyes". That's not often clear though right? WB will help if your council actually runs WB correctly. My local WB is so disgusting that leaders are starting to travel out of council in order to try and experience the process correctly. Here's a juicy quote from a fellow leader "I'm going to PTC to do WB because I want to be able to come back and audit the local WB and tell these idiots how they don't have a clue as to what they're doing."

LFL is not considered part of the unit based numbers, and unit based numbers are where national counts membership. LFL is like a bonus thing or something (I don't quite get it). This is correct, what has been shared with me is showing that Jan 1 dump, and slow uptick of people rushing to renew; however, those Jan 1 numbers were real as a drop-is-a-drop and there are no guarantees that those people will renew. When they do renew, the membership is backdated which often presents issues. Some parents are lapsing on purpose to try and change their scouts membership dates and that only works if you lapse for over 90 days; however, that also presents a bigger problem for renewing. I was just helping with a scout who lapsed after Sep 30th and it was a 2 week nightmare to get him back on the books; the parents wanted him "covered" in the lapsed period so national back dated him and now the parents are pissed because his renewal date is back in September again. There are a bunch of lapses because parents are trying to cheat the system for some reason. The whole lapsed period versus expired thing is a nightmare and in this digital age national should just get rid of both and just terminate membership when they expire.

Wow, go out of town for a couple days and wow a lot was here to chew on. The all merit badge issue is in my opinion a matter of money. The scouts that I have personally seen get them all basically bought their way through it by having the cash to go-go-go. I don't believe a scout should have to master a skill to get a merit badge; however, at the same time I don't believe some of these scouts have retained any knowledge of the harder merit badges which defeats a huge part of the purpose of the merit badge process. The merit badge mills (MBU, etc ... )are less of a concern for me. They're such a mixed bag. Some scouts are coming in with pre-requisites and meeting the base standard, some are exceeding the standard, some are just being tossed a merit badge (which plainly sucks and hurts the scouts and program). I think the difficulty here is that there is a base standard, a minimum; we often get lost in the haze of debate over a scout who over achieves and people believing that should re-baseline the merit badge requirements. Merit badges are not on a bell curve, you do the standard you get the badge. I sat in at a MBU last year and I had a handful of parents and scouts lose their mind on me because they came in with literal reams of pre-work and while great, demonstrating above average achievement, it was a lot of work that was not required. I had to tell a scout and his parents that the standard was X and they did X+10. I had to tell them that the other scouts who just did exactly the requirement for the pre-requisites would get the exact same merit badge. They lost their minds, to them because little billy did more, so should everyone else. The requirements to become a MBC are horrible in every way. The standards are arbitrary and subjective. There are very few if any audits of skill going on. There are fiefdoms for certain merit badges. My personal hate is being told I was not qualified to be an MBC for a merit badge and I came back with "I have over 40 years experience and certified training in this, wtf do you mean I am not qualified to be an MBC for this?". When national rolled out the Citizenship in Society MB and all the hoops you had to jump through to be an MBC for that, where the heck are those hoops for any other MB? How can people get signed off to be an MBC without doing the 15min free online training? Too wrap this up I just had to talk a troop leader off the ledge who was going to lose his $%^& on our councils "MB Dean" when the MB Dean told the troop leader that he wasn't qualified to MBC Citizenship in the Nation; the troop leader is teacher who literally teaches a course called "Citizenship in America" at a local high school. The whole process is broken.

I think a lot of new leaders really need to take all of the training (like SM & committee & COR & etc ... ) to get a real good picture of how a troop should run. There is also the issue of the training doesn't quite line up with reality due to a lot of leaders just doing their own thing; which in turn confuses new leaders. It also bothers me that NONE, absolutely NONE of the online training ever mentions any of the troop leader guides.

I think that is the Dec 31st number. I saw a Jan 3rd(ish) number that was 40 or 50k lower.

How do we translate these threads to scouting?

Yeah yeah yeah; you found it right? You found one of the gray areas. You have to be careful, there is so much gray area; this stuff doesn't mix well with 22 year old professional scouters just trying to not get fired while they pay off their college loans.

Based on what I am reading the general consensus seems to have shifted from the issue not being cost but the youth/families interest and a limitation on time. I want to point out that I and others have mentioned the limited space at the top of the sports (varsity). I really like the baseball analogy since there are so many large scale feeder systems throughout the whole country. Most towns have a little league/peewee baseball league that has hundreds of kids in it; and that feeds up to the local team which at most has 18 kids in most states. In my area juniors and seniors can get dumped down to JV or FROS/FROSH due to less roster restrictions. Normally being demoted down is a punishment for behavior or grades; once in a while I'll notice a kid dumped off of varsity and it's because they have an injury and they're basically practicing at a lower level to stay connected to the team in active recovery; kind of stupid in my opinion. What are these sports and clubs offering that scouting does not? If your kid is 1 in hundreds at the grade school level and their only shot is to make 1 of 18 spots at the varsity level; what's the connection? What's the draw? I think it's that the sports are basically saying "your kid will get X" and they deliver.

You guys have to be careful here. A "day camp" is also an event that 1 day but "recurring". So say you have a 1 day skills tournament district event. If you repeat that within the same calendar year months apart and with a different name but exactly the same "whatever" it is now a "day camp" and must follow NCAP. Like I said, there is a lot of gray area out there and there are too many 22 year olds that can pivot to a different career and nothing worth a lick out there making decisions and spouting non-sense.

We have a very good relationship with our CO and as long as we continue to support their service program to the community they not only charter us but cut all of the units a check to cover advancement and administrative costs. This allows us to focus all cost on the average cost of an outing; we do make adults pay their own way on outings which also keeps the costs down for the scouts (part of that is so many of us leaders would be camping regardless so we've created low cost for scouts troop). My troop is also in a state where there are ways to get state campsites for free/super reduced for youth organizations; so when we use state properties for camping we're basically cutting the site cost out. The troop in the past has had campouts as cheap as $4 a head, there is a neighboring troop that does this as well. To be clear we've average the cost of outings to $25 to make everything easier and more consistent for parents. I personally think we could get the cost down closer to or below $15. We have a very large troop so there is an economy of scale that we have yet to leverage correctly. This methodology becomes a success-begets-success situation. As the average number of scouts and adults per outing goes up, the average cost of site rentals spreads thinner and thinner across more people. We still have some outings where portion sizes are out of control; we need to get better at teaching the scouts to read portion sizes (especially on dehydrated foods) more accurately; we could shave some cost off of food as well. Circling back to adults paying their own way; I know that there are units that can't do this. We have an economy of scale situation where we just re-registered 34 troop leaders and we're looking to pick up at least 4 more at crossover in March. There is a core of about 10 of us that go on every outing, we have about another 5 that do some outings. The remainder of leaders perform that more administrative purpose. A troop that has 6 leaders period can't do this right? If you have 3 leaders that can't afford pay their own way on every outing the troop is forced to figure something out which is often that the cost is passed on to the scouts. This economy of scale situation also keeps costs down for the scouts as there are so many of us that just order something online and donate it when the troop needs it instead of the troop having to budget a lot for equipment maintenance and replacement.

What I have learned is that you cannot gauge the health of a council based on camping or resident camp participation. Think of it along the lines of population clustering phallacy. There are times when populations are clustered together which makes people think the observed population is robust and healthy; however, when that population redistributes back to its normal range it becomes obvious that the population is few. This isn't exactly accurate. There are ways to avoid NCAP governance by limiting the window of "joint function" for lack of a better way to explain it. It's a insurance gray area. It is the #1 reason why will never staff for a district/council/national event ever again; I am sick of the gray areas formulated by some 22 year old district executive that thinks he's smarter than the world putting my home and retirement at risk.

This is a lot, a lot of good thought. I am not sure if the program can function this way. In order to master skills the instructors have to know the skills that they are teaching otherwise the youth are set up for failure before things begin. How can adult leaders model the program for the youth leaders and pass on the skills for the older scouts to teach younger scouts when so few adult leaders know the skills. Scouting America knows this is a problem but is moving far too slow (BSA Fishing, NRA Partnership, LNT Partnership, etc ... bringing in outside experts to rejuvenate the skills base). So much of the training is poorly done. The training should be based on a level 1 (online) training with level 2 (in person) practical demonstrations. IOLS and BALOO are garbage. They should literally be several hours of online modules followed up by a simple 12 hour overnight testing experience. Enforcement of training needs to become mandatory; national needs to start dropping people from the rolls after 90 days of not being trained. The commissioner corps is broken; not because of anything the commissioners have done, but for what the professional scouters have failed to do. If a district has a commissioner reporting that a unit has sub standard adult training, sub standard program, etc ... it's the district executives role to step in and start doing unit visits to determine if the commissioner is a moron or if the unit needs to have its charter revoked.