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That will be a whole different can of worms then won't it? Everyone will get hit with negligence, including the parents of the victim. We have packs that have been doing this as well. I am just saying that the new program is designed around facilitating this and it's now part of the program literature. If this is the case council and national are going to hang that leader out to dry SO hard. Again every council is probably watching this.

Didn't I already?

That's not how garrisons work. Just not. I guess another non-military non-veteran thought on something this week. The West Point camporee presents a unique situation where cadre and cadets put so much into it because so many have a connection to scouting back home and get to invite their home troop. Not even GSUSA can replicate that network and process. No other scouting organization will have that relationship, it took half a century and literally millions of past members of BSA to create that network and connection to the academy. If Scouting America gets kicked out of the West Point camporee it means the camporee is dead. I highly doubt any other scouting organization will have a relationship with the military like Scouting America. Congress no longer issues charters for some reason; I've seen how this affects newer veterans groups, too late to the table and unable to fill the same space as the older groups like AL or VFW; those groups become niche organizations that are mostly filled by politically hungry people unwilling to put their time in to get district or state level leadership positions in the older groups. Trail Life in itself has some other issues that will keep it on the outside, Right now the political arm of the military is VERY protestant and pushing a very protestant position towards things; however, most of the military historically doesn't practice religion outside of boot camp (lots of "no-religion" people suddenly become "Non-denominational Christian" in boot camp when they realize the church goers go to mass on Sunday while the non-church goers scrub floors and garbage cans). Then toss in that the overwhelming largest religious group in the military is Catholic and you have a big problem (The Catholic church endorses Scouting America as it's partner group through NCCS, and Trail Life is anti-Magisterium).

I have also heard that there are a large number of councils under conditional charter; that came out of last years NAM and was related to some sort of discussion related to the financial health meeting. I believe the number was somewhere between 20 and 50 councils left the NAM being told that they might be placed on conditional charter before the end of the year. As I understand things national is looking at a handful of metrics: rolling 90 day cash-on-hand, unrestricted endowment contributions/growth, membership in relation to total-area-youth, and an amalgam of safety. Based on the councils that got merged out last year and so far this year the trend seems to be that if a council is surviving off of their endowment national puts them on transitional or if a councils membership shrinks below some ratio they are put on transitional. A good example of the financial is Suffolk Council in Long Island and their financial situation. A good example of the membership was Ohio River Valley (who had everything going good except the whole council was basically a district in membership).

Awesome, you know you're wrong so trying to build something out of nothing now. Go read the article, get informed, follow the rules or get burned. You're welcome for my warning.

These numbers are highly suspect; except for the past 10 to 20 years in the United States universally transexuals have been a fraction of a percent of the human population across all cultures and ethnicities. Similarly the historic gay population has always been roughly 5% across all human populations regardless of culture or ethnicities. The United States is in a weird state. Personally I think it's all the medication and the agency producing power of the situation driving the increase. I have a teenage relative that was all in on being gay, using they/them, living an extremely alternative lifestyle and as soon as "they" stopped taking a cocktail of anxiety and depression medications "they" became "she" again, and suddenly had a boyfriend. I know it's anecdotal and 1 case, but watching it happen and hearing her mother describe the sudden change as soon as the medication was out of her system was an eye opener for me. Normally the supreme court only takes cases that have a national implication. I would suspect it's going to apply universally.

The lawyer and family are fundamentally reading the division by age stuff wrong. Cub scouts meet roughly weekly 2-3 times a month in dens (which can be but might not always be divided by age due to leader or program limitations); once a month cub scouts meet as a pack where all dens participate together. This will get ripped apart by any competent defense/litigation attorney. The lawyer and family are also misunderstanding the reporting requirements. The council is not at fault for the unit not following reporting rules. The fault is going to fall on the registered adult leaders (most likely the key 3 will get hit by the bus), and then the charter organization. This is simply logic, how can council be in the wrong if they were not notified because the unit was violating the reporting procedures? This right here is why our YPT/Safeguarding is online only; the councils lawyer will point out the youth protection training part that mandates reporting and will show negligence by the leader(s) and not council. Again the council cannot be at fault for the leaders not following the guide to safe scouting and allowing a prohibited event. The councils lawyer will again reference the mandatory youth protection training segments. Erie Shores and national are going to spend a bunch of money redirecting everything to the charter organization, unit leaders, and parents (involved that night). The entire organization is going to get a lesson in how everything is siloed and compartmentalized post settlement. The only risk to Erie Shores council that I can see is if the plaintiffs attorney can show that the council has a chartered obligation to ensure all leaders are trained and that the leaders present were not trained past 90 days so the council is at fault for some sort of oversight in ensuring trained leaders. If that happens it might actually help the rest of the program and force all councils to protect themselves by washing out all the F grade leaders who can't be bothered to do free online training.

In my council the SB is just another good-ole-boys club award. A few years ago a person got the SB who was not even position trained, never did anything other than make up his own non-sense, had to be removed from a committee due to incompetence. There is a very active volunteer scouter in my council who has a group of about 20 of us (this year, the number varies by year) trying to get him the SB for several years and we can't even get any feedback as to why he keeps being denied. And councils and national wonder why volunteers take their time and money and walk away from the program.

Rural units are struggling due to young parents moving to metro areas to have consistent work. We have a very geographically large rural council in my state. They are fighting demographics which is not their fault. Where I am at the further you get from the big city the more socially conservative the people are; this VERY rural council decided to jump into the fight against Hegseth and pop off about DEI publicly. I expect that they will hemorrhage several hundred youth and adults before the end of the year and accelerate their march towards being merged out. Sometimes these council leaders need to shut up and just let all the arrows hit national. We're going to have mega sized councils regardless; we actually need them. The administrative infrastructure and overhead of Scouting America is a pre-technology based structure that is BLEEDING funding away from program. National needs to force mergers, tell councils they need to embrace remote work and tele/video conferencing. Every DE should live and work in their district, not at council HQ. Every council HQ should be a tiny hole in the wall or a cabin on the council camp used as basically a logistical hub to feed the districts.

Having eagle is a good thing for people enlisting in the military; when I was on recruiting detail we always did the extra paperwork to get the enlistee E4 (not E3 as a lot of other people claim) which was a HUGE pay difference. But there is no seal of approval. We would recognize that a skillset should be there, and we would reward you like we would reward college education or high physical fitness; however, once an eagle shipped to basic they were garbage just like everyone else. There is literally no mechanism to block scouting from operating on military bases; none, why do people keep saying stuff like this? The on base school PTOs, the FRGs, the USO offices, the Legion posts off base, the VFW posts off base, are all the charter orgs. "Derpy derp derp, can't meet on base." -- Random Politician, "Why not? Is there a youth based risk to the garrison that we need to evaluate that we need to assess multi-dimensionally across all youth groups?" -- Garrison Commander It's all about the money. Plain and simple. Where is @Armymutt on this, he's still serving.

Breaking people out into different groups does not solve the problem. Since the beginning of the movement we have used things such as uniforms to make it easier for everyone to blend in together. We're supposed to be on the same team; however, it would appear that we're not. Special interests have been trying to create special sub groups for a long time and it has repeatedly floundered or outright failed. We've had all these other groups, and all these other groups are barely hanging on. If all the trans kids wanted to be separate they could be, over in Rainbow Scouts; if all the hardline religious scouts wanted to be separate they could go join Trail Life or one of the other church based youth groups. As bad as things are in Scouting America, the other groups are worse and they are all an example of how division into sub-groups only weakens the opportunity to youth. We don't need separate groups, what we need is equal opportunity and a focus on the true mission of the organization. Notice that no one is being kicked out of Scouting America; Hegseth didn't demand it, Roger Krone didn't say anything about that in his letter. What is clear is that in order to maintain millions of dollars of support from the military we have to re-align towards the military; that is what was clearly said by Hegseth and Krone. I think that's the real problem here, that's what people are really angry about but too cowardice to state. The scouting movement is born from Western military tradition, and scouting in America just got it's wake up call.

Could it be that the number of eagle scouts has stayed consistent because the number of adults is consistent and thus the support inside the program that is needed to get a scout to eagle is still in place regardless of total number of scouts?

Read this and see if you agree with your previous statement. https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2014/12/03/individual-scout-accounts/

If giving away 2 million in free memberships is cheaper than paying for things like the West Point Camporee and JAMBO it's still a win for scouting. Not really, there is no such thing as "ball in our respective courts" in a franchise based organization. Councils, districts, and units either align to the national program and directives or eventually get burned. I would suspect that if the national debt is retired at the end of 2028 as planned we will see significant changes in how national responds to all of these rogue councils doing their own thing. Right now national is too busy trying to keep the house from burning down to worry about the outhouse.