Tron

I know quite a lot about the Scouting America IT systems and have made quite a good career in software development and data management, and business management. I can tell you that the systems didn't just lose your district or councils records; that is literally not how any system made at this level works. Someone blamed national and national played the part of the patsy. What probably happened was that someone at your council with registrar level system access accidentally deleted a mass of things and then played dumb instead of immediately putting in a service ticket with national to have the data restored. Something that everyone should be aware of is that the updates to the My.Scouting system so far last year and this year are allowing people properly registered to units, district, and council to make training updates to take this sort of task off of the council registrars plate. Every unit should have a properly registered trainer, every district and council should have a functioning and properly registered training committee.

This is a very valid point; however, the counter to this point is that the weeks blocked by the school year need to somehow get made up through other weeks of usage sometime else in the calendar year. The point I think national is trying to make is that all service industry companies (hotels, travel, camping, etc ... ) have a minimum usage/occupancy to just break even and our camps don't even try to meet that level. The larger the geographic area of councils, the better the staff to scout ratio in a council, the less dependent a council is on FOS. My opinion continues to shift towards FOS being an addiction that is killing councils. If councils had roughly 10 paid staff and somewhere near 10,000 scouts there is almost no need for FOS; however, when a council is 2,000 or 3,000 scouts and the paid staff is 10+ the professionals that should support the program spend all of their time hustling for money instead of doing their real jobs. We need to condense down to roughly 100 councils if we are going to be able to re-align the professional staff to program. This is solved by having fewer camps. The smallest camp in my area can handle around 200 to 250 guests per resident camp week. The largest can handle around 500 to 600 guests per resident camp week. If scouting ran those larger camps at 100% capacity they could afford to pay the staff well enough to draw in more, and higher quality camp staff. National also needs to find more recognition for those camp staff; some sort of knot progression to show off years/seasons of service, codify some rules to fast track OA membership, brotherhood and vigil. Fun fact, pay and recognition work.

I think this is an important point, "hadn't been in unit-level positions in 2+ decades". There is another part of this, the unit level leader without current or any historical experience at the district or council level. I got "in trouble" recently when I failed to constrain my voice. A unit leader who has never been a district or council level volunteer wanted to know "why our district sucks so much and never helps the units" and I just blurted out in response at the meeting "who the F@#$ do you think the district staff is and where do you think they come from?" which apparently this dude, who supposedly has been involved in scouting for 40+ years though the district committee was a paid staff of professionals.

You think national should be ran by the youth? I've been a volunteer for a long time now, consistently the youth struggle to stick to an outing budget, you think they could steer the national organization? You're just trolling now.

That's a low amount, the smallest resident camp in my state runs 2000+ through each season, the largest runs 3600 at 75% capacity (from what I can tell). Understandable. Perception is reality to the individual but doesn't necessarily constitute the true reality. There is one message from national that has been consistent and absolutely true in my opinion: We have too many properties and the properties we have are vastly underutilized. If you had access to the reservation calendar for your most local camp do you think it has had 50% capacity or higher in any cobbled together 8 week period in the last year? Do you think your most local camp has hosted scouts, any scouts, 25 weeks of the past year? If your area is like my area, that answer is without a doubt an absolute no. I know what you're talking about. Many from national have spoke of this at national and territory meetings. The other part of this was something like resident camps need to run Memorial Day to Labor Day or they won't be profitable. 12 weeks of resident camp is the ideal when calculating total capacity.

My council has the worst training rate in the territory. The whole region is a training dumpster fire from what I can tell. I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago and the word was that our council and the surrounding councils were all still scrambling to get May safeguarding expirations caught up and averaging 100 expirations per district across multiple councils.

On one hand Scouting America is being demonized while actually doing better than the general population. On the other hand the goal is zero incidents. Some low hanging fruit to improve the process and strive towards zero incidents would be automated revocation of membership if safety based training ever expires. If Scouting America wants credit for doing better it's going to have to do things like auto revoke adult registration for failure to gain and maintain training. Youth protection/safeguarding expires? Membership should get auto dropped before the next business day begins. Hazardous weather expires? Same thing. You're registered as an adult leader for over 90 days and not position trained, guess what, your membership should be auto dropped. Safeguarding is the main training mandate that has to be absolutely 100% enforced; however, enforcing all of the other training requirements sets the tone of expectations. Until Scouting America gets serious I don't think it gets any credit regardless of being statistically better than everyone else.

I am not sure what you're trying to illude to here? By quoting both posts are you trying to say youth should lead local lodges AND the national BOD?

I don't know, I took some time this afternoon to research the BOD and it's pretty solid. All members seem to have done well in life and are pumping a lot of money, influence, time, and other resources into the scouting movement. I'll break the BOD down into 5 sub groups. Of the 42 members currently on the BOD, 22 are Eagle Scouts, 1 other that was a scout as a youth but didn't make Eagle; all have been highly recognized in and outside of scouting with awards or decorations. 4 non-scouts that are decorated military veterans; not sure if I would be able to find any other non-scouts that could understand scouting better than people like this. 2 highly recognized professionals in the camping and camping management industry (not counting the ones that are Eagle above). 3 bankruptcy, restructuring, and merger legal experts. 8 highly recognized, decades long volunteers, who have received awards inside and outside of scouting. 2 super rich dudes just doing it for scouting and America. A lot of these people live fairly private lives so there could have been more that were scouts, more that are parents of scouts, this is just a summary of easy to find information on the national website. Over half are Eagle Scouts, seems like a good amount.

I get the whole shift away from anything first nation related/culturally appropriated; it's an unnecessary headache. I don't think it's the biggest issue at hand though, useless lodges and garbage advisors should be the #1 priority to fix. National was supposed to fix the advisor issue this year but decided to just make it easier for adults to join the OA. There really needs to be some sort of max tenure for advisors to get the old rotten blood out of the lodge leadership structure (yes, let us face it, the youth are not leading the lodges).

You're correct. Commissioners are supposed to go into units and basically figure out what is going wrong and helping the unit identify solutions. Again you're correct, no stick; the lack of action in part by professional staff means there is zero motivation for a unit to correct even the easiest to correct issues.

Unknown at this time. Most camps in my neck of the woods will continue to run traditional resident camp until the last week of July or first week of August. I can say that the camp my troop went to this year was at capacity the week we were there. Reports were that they are running an extra week this year and that so far the camp has been at and is scheduled at capacity.

I think Scouting America has a good product, a high quality product. I agree with you that there is a consistency problem. Let us compare Scouting America to Walmart for the sake of argument. When a unit, district, or council are doing horrible, recruitment is down, retention is down, fundraising is down, engagement is down, etc ... what does Scouting America do? From where I am in the organization I don't see Scouting America doing a single thing. Contrast that to Walmart. When a Walmart store is doing bad, high theft, above average complaints, low sales, etc ... Walmart sends in a corporate trainer to evaluate the situation, temporarily take over certain aspects of the store, and correct the problems; if the problems cannot be corrected the trainer recommends closing the location. Could Scouting America learn something from Walmart?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/pentagon-scouting-america-lawsuit.html It's just a rinse and repeat of the same people looking for any way to throw mud on scouting from any angle. Look at this guy suing to get the MOU from the pentagon. Literally nothing changed on the Scouting America side so this dude is on a fishing expedition to see what he can sue about next. This is what scouting is up against, a constant barrage of people who hate the movement and will do anything to dredge the name of through the mud at any chance. This MOU non-sense was basically over-and-done and we were all moving on, now Hegseth is going to get a burr up his you know what and the movement is going to come under fire again.

We're basically wrapping up the very tail end of crossover season here in my district; we know right now that arrow of light scouts who have not crossed are basically never going to join a troop. This time period has led my district to look at who the "winners" and "losers" of crossover season are; the results are staggering. Over half of our districts troops received ZERO crossovers this year. When we (district committee) looked into this we noticed a trend. The units that received ZERO crossovers had all of the same attributes in common. Units with untrained leaders, small leadership groups, and little to no advancement of current scouts were the big losers that received no crossovers. We also identified "super losers" in the crossover situation; these were units (we had multiple) that have not received a crossover in 2 or more of the past 4 years. We are very concerned with those units as they are in a situation where they have a structural gap of little to no young scouts for the older scouts to lead, and in a few years (if they troops survive) they will have no older scouts to lead the potential younger scouts. I know other activities are pulling families away from scouts; however, I think bad units are also pushing families away.