Tron

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.

What is this? What is the complaint here? Is this Microslop generated grief mongering?

It depends on how the district event is set up and where. If it is an NCAP governed event it falls on the Program Director for the event. The buck passes uphill and downhill to the Program Director in those scenarios. If it is not an NCAP governed event it falls on whomever "the lead" is or the council program chair/camping chair/director of field operations/<insert one of the various titles given out council-to-council>. If you have a non NCAP governed event on an NCAP property the ranger can get pulled into the mess; however, it really depends on a bunch of stuff. It's all in that second level of training now. I learned this when the lack of recruitment for my district committee hit a fork in the road and I made a "unscoutlike" comment about how I didn't understand why the DE didn't have a nomination committee bringing in new prospects and was resistant to even the discussion. It turned out that the DE was not trained because it's in that level 2 training (which btw these days is not automatic, a DE has to be recommended for it after serving no less than 2 years).

What parts do you feel do not work well any longer? I totally see this. Here's a good story to illustrate. One of the doctors my kids were seeing was very supportive of scouting. I asked her why she didn't have her kids in scouting. She replied that her husband was an eagle, a veteran, and an accomplished outdoorsman and they simply couldn't handle how poorly every unit in their area functioned so decided to just focus on family camping. I have noticed that the more competent people who have management experience or operational coordination experience struggle the most with scouting. Also key 3 often are selected based on random attributes and not how Scouting America recommends (skills and ability based selection); it becomes impossible to intellectually or emotionally handle dealing with incompetent people who can't handle coordinating enough car space for a weekend campout let alone the far more complex issues that arise within scouting.

The councils pass the core fee in its entirety; councils only retain the council fee. DE's are not trained very well. To both of you I want to comment that the DE training is horrible. National waits until a DE is level 2 trained to train them on how to recruit a volunteer district staff. This is a volunteer run organization; the #1 thing every DE should do is know how to identify and recruit volunteers to run their district. I think the training for cub scout volunteers needs to emphasis multiple troop visits to a much larger degree. Not just multiple visits to 1 troop, but multiple troops. As Eagle94 says the program loses a lot of crossovers; in my experience it's in two stages. Stage 1 we plain have scouts just not want to go to a troop because they didn't find a troop they liked (My pack is still sorting this out but it looks like we just lost 5 of 7 AOLs on Dec 31st, they didn't bother to renew because the pack did 2 troop visits this year (versus 7 last year) and the AOLs and families were not interested in either troop.). Stage 2 we lose crossovers at troops who never rank up past AOL before end of year/renewal (my troop just lost somewhere between 6 to 8 crossovers, we're still sorting out if some families didn't renew on time; however, those 6 to 8 have the same thing in common, they were all AOL on Dec 31st). To be clear lack of advancement or recognition is a big deal for these crossovers and I think we lost one of them because the CC was his MBC for a MB and ghosted the kid on a MB he completed. I tried to step in because I also MBC that MB and I got ghosted by the CC. (See the other thread where I complain about fiefdoms and not delivering.)

This isn't true at all. My buddy had to attend every game and practice his daughter played in league volleyball (which cost him $3200 every "Series"/"quarter"/"league period" aka she played 3 a year outside varsity volleyball for all 4 years of high school). There may be some leagues that you can dump and run; however, that is becoming the old standard much like it was the old standard in scouting. As the lawsuit sharks circle dump-and-run is going away even in league sports. I remember him calling me going "I am driving a day and a half to St. Louis right now because if I am not butt in bleachers they will bench my daughter which will threaten her varsity slot when she returns to school.". Dumping and running might have been true in the interarm, but it is going away. It's not declining due to value perception. It's declining due to lack of delivery. On paper the programs provided by Scouting America are among the top youth programs in the world; yes, the world. The problem is that execution of this program is highly variable (even from one side of the town to another), there is no quality control, and councils are too weak to do anything about it because they are too busy trying to survive instead of running the program. Scouting America just lost somewhere between 300k and 500k of it's youth membership in the past 90 days; that membership churn is not a value perception, we sold those families on the value, they where here, they saw the value, they left because we didn't deliver.

You should take some time to understand that in the market basket of extracurricular activities scouting is competing with everything from a pack of kids in a basement playing dungeons and dragons to $400 a week private league sports. If people are getting a good return on their time and money, they will spend the money. League sports are growing 43% year-over-year while scouting is shrinking and currently at 20% of it's peak membership.