Tron

I am starting to think that Scouting has done this to itself. Scouting is without a doubt significantly cheaper than club sports (which some estimates state are growing at as high as 43% year-over-year for membership); however, summer camp is expensive, way more expensive than a troop setting up it's own 7 day long term camp. I can simply not blame a parent for wanting their scouts to come home from any resident camp scenario with maximum merit badges and awards. Over the last 3 years, summer camp has cost me $350-$500 a head depending on the year/specific resident camp. I know for a fact that I can feed the scouts like kings and set up a 7 day camping experience at a state park for $71 a head. At the same time the Camping MB and OA eligibility require long term camping, not resident camping. My kids and I might stop going to summer camp after 2026; they are getting tired of the experience, and I am getting tired of the price and lack of ROI. My youngest would rather go on a family based wilderness campout, my middle kid would prefer cooking higher quality meals for himself, my oldest is sick of all the younger scouts, and I can't believe how horrible the cost to return ratio is. Summer camp 2026 is going to cost my family $1600 and a week of missed work (if we even go in 2026, my oldest is currently pitching a competing national park trip to my other two 😛 ).

Yes correct. I think the answer is national needs to start telling the councils that are not meeting their charter agreement that they are not getter recharter.

Is it wrong that I am now picturing Beavis in a scout uniform after reading this?

Yeah I am not sure if that number is accurate (not your fault, nationals lack of transparency). My understanding is that a lot of councils do not have SE right now. I know that in my CST there are 5 without an SE right now, two have not had an SE since 2024. I think you assumption on salary is correct (barring some outliers). I work in "captain business land" and if I were at national I would literally just announce and start forcing the plan to merge down to 1 council per state. I was looking at what they did in Michigan and it doesn't look perfect to me but it certainly is a great start to the overhead problem. My council is cutting headcount right now, we're supposedly negotiating "shared services" asset pooling, and cost sharing with surrounding councils. I wish they would just rip the band-aid off and just tell us which new CSP to buy 😛

The reality is that BOR really are a feedback session. The board should ask questions to the scout to gauge their experience; so instead of "Here's a rope, how do you tie a bowline?" the question should be "Tell us about the last time you tied a bowline and why you did it?"

Council Service Territory maps were updated last night. It's not clear which councils merged but it looks like at least 1 council in California is merged out and 1 council in Pennsylvania or New Jersey is merged out as well.

So with your free time, and your buddies free time, it sounds like the perfect seed to start a takeover of the troop.

Every time I have seen a structured removal of voting ability or removal of input ability it was caused by the ruling bodies desire to remove or reduce dissent to a pending action. I've seen this in other non-profits and in local governments. This type of action always preceded a controversial policy change. I wonder if this is the fallout of the Nassau and Norfolk councils voting to not merge and then being forced to after all of Long Island scouting went bankrupt? There are a lot of councils just digging in and refusing to be part of the team right now. Is this a mechanism to remove the dissent at the various localish levels?

That's not what any of the numbers state, it's not what I see, it's not what national reports as seeing, we're at 25% of peak headcount and it's a known fact that lack of meeting = lack of engagement = program decline. Open any of the guides, the cub scout guides, the troop leader guides, the committee guides; national tells us in every publication that meeting as much as possible, weekly, is the optimal method and that not meeting like this causes a negative affect on retention.

This is the sort of stuff that causes scouts to quit as soon as they find something more satisfying and less stressful to spend their time on. With leadership maneuvering to set this scout up for failure this hard it is without a doubt a guarantee that this scout drops before this time next year.

That might be your area, or you're defensive. I am telling you hard fact from my district. Units that don't meet year round, that don't meet as many weeks as possible, they are failing. I can also tell you that national believes the same thing because all of the leader guides and training tell us to meet year round and meet as many weeks in a month as possible to have a healthy unit. Everyone on this site likes to complain about meeting, everyone on this site likes to complain about Scouting America being at less than 25% of it's peak size in 1970. Leadership 101: You can't maintain engagement without meeting regularly and on a schedule.

The text book answer is: CORs, the District Key 3, Members-at-Large, People registered in function roles (advancement committee members, training committee members, etc ... ). I've never seen it done by-the-text-book though. My personal opinion is evolving into the opinion that DE's never even try to run it by the text book because they don't want a committee complicating their unilateral approaches to everything.

I guess that's reason enough for district/council leadership to have a distro list and send out actual agendas eh?

Ugh these stories hit me hard in the gut. That chairman was taking the easy way out. He should have manned up and went to the SM and asked him what he needs to make sure all of the scouts can tie the core knots.

Yeah, .00000000000000000000000000000001% of the military budget; good one, they'll just order 1 less box of $10,000 toilet seats. I'd just be surprised if they had any fortitude? Fun point about this administration, Trumps approval rating is like 10% above the projected percentage of likely voters who were going to vote for him. He's actually polling better now than before his re-election. Seriously though, what's the position of the scouting caucus? I don't see one, someone throw me a link to a real position. As far as I can see they're not taking a position on this. What's the point of putting time into having a scouting caucus if they're just going to roll over and take it?