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?

Not much meat here except a personal comment. Is the scouting caucus going to actually level a position on this?

Great observation, how do you propose to resolve the situation? Can you share what the reason was for the 3 to show up?

I can tell you fact, fact of my district and council, the units that do not meet year round are the weakest units. The only thing keeping those units around is the unit retention metric driving the DE to hold them up regardless of dipping below 5 scouts repeatedly. I've been on the committees and I've seen the metrics, the units in my council that do not meet year round have the lowest retention, are the smallest, have the least rank advancement, are not camping, etc ... literally every single laundry list red flag. Patrol campouts are official campouts. Patrol level activities are under the auspices of the Scouting America. What you're describing is a high level of other engagement. You're not shutting down and going off to something else for the summer, you're shifting gears to a different type of programming for a season period.

So the support for JAMBO is not something the department of war can just withdraw; there is a process and it has to clear congress; the actual law is that the US military has to support JAMBO at least at the level of the previous JAMBOs support. As I understand it the only way out is if we are at war and well ... we just fought 2 wars while also supporting like 10 peacekeeping forces, while also fighting a good 2 dozen "low intensity" engagements; that whole time the military was able to support JAMBO. Not thinking JAMBO support goes away. Prohibiting scouts on military installations will go no-where. First of all just plain stupid and no way enforceable considering that the US military lets all kinds of youth groups onto installations. Secondly garrison commanders have an EXTREME amount of authority as to what they allow or do not allow to happen on their bases and there are just too many military facilities out there. Toss in any potential pivot of USO to support the scouts at the troops urging. Just not worried about this at all; it's like a made up micro managing issue. In my recruiting days Eagle Scouts came in as E4; it was only 1 extra piece of paperwork and no hair off our backs to get that done for the rare enlistee that was an Eagle Scout. If your Eagle Scout is being offered less than E4 you need to take them to a different recruiter that can be bothered to press print and then sign and date a piece of paper.

I doubt this is going to affect any council. The reality of the situation is that absolutely no CORs are showing up to council meetings or even district meetings. I know this to be fact for my council and the councils surrounding my council. I have nagged the living ^&*( out of my CORs to go to district and council meetings and they all say the exact same thing "I don't have time for that.". My #1 go to line for unit leaders being pissy about our latest property liquidation has been "Did your COR bother to show up to the council meeting about that to vote on the matter?"; I have yet to meet a COR that was at that vote, or any of the previous votes, or a single district or council meeting period. It might affect some councils chartering for 2026; however, my understanding is that most if not all councils left the national meeting with a 2 year charter going forward. Maybe that kicks in with next years charter, but I was told that this years charter extends into 2026 now (so supposedly all if not most councils have a charter that covers 2025 & 2026 and recharters will be 2 year charters now).

I saw the original email, I read the original NPR story (not helping with their DEI knot and rainbow slide photo btw), and I've now seen nothing much come out throughout the day except the leak/rumor; I mean, we got nothing? Rex Tillerson just did a video for Scouting America on Veterans Day; dudes got the connections at all levels in the Republican Party. None of these muldunes (https://www.scouting.org/about/governance/national-executive-board/) have anything for Scouting America? My council has 3 flag officers on the BOD and no one knows the whole story or has seen the full policy? This all smells like some sort of manipulation scheme; at this point all of the rage baiting is going to backfire. Everyone fired up about anti-DEI Hegseth and what happens if national decides to kill the Citizenship in Society MB over this?

I think you are correct, the patrol is the fundamental, or I would say foundational group in a unit. I've seen that literature, and I've seen a lot about what was really going on with the LDS (such as the inflated membership numbers due to the LDS just cutting a bulk check to BSA). I would agree that you need the activities to keep the scouts coming. I would state that advancement is much more important than just project first class. I would make the argument of why do people hate scope creep and why do people hate jobs/careers where they just "run the business" and every day bleeds into the next? The answer is no feeling of accomplishment. There's no way to unwind the changes to the program. First the mixed age patrol method is basically dead in my opinion, my personal experience is that it can't work because it becomes a pseudo gerontocracy, especially if the troop institutes by-laws that restrict who can be elected based on rank, NYLT, etc ... so what ends up happening is that older scouts regardless of ability or charisma, or disposition end up the patrol leaders and assistant senior patrol leader, and patrol leader while everyone else is forced to wait their turn. Secondly the legal system forces us to create tenting buddy plans and buddy/truddy teams based on age. It is such a pain in the butt if the oldest and the youngest of a patrol show up for something and no one in between. So many bad troops without any connection somehow independently have created the same bad troop systems that have made national want to move to age based patrols. The path forward is unfortunately going to be age based patrols. The question becomes how do we make them work? That might be going back to DuctTape's patrol based operations. I also see some of the forced to attend scouts. In my primary unit I see them and they fall into two groups. Group 1 is the group that is a big distraction, they don't want to be in scouts at all but their parents are forcing them. They don't do outings, service never hits their radar, etc ... parents don't care just as long as they are attending meetings for some reason. The other group 2 is the group that parents tell us that they have to force their kids to show up, but once they are there they are happy, and we mostly see that in their behavior. We see these scouts A LOT on outings, these are the "camping club" scouts that hate meetings but will show up to basically anything outdoors. This is the group that I think would benefit the most from patrol based scouting; 8 scouts that want to camp 4 times a month year round with 2 or adults that can't say no would be ideal. You might lose a lot of scouts on this. The better answer might be "Hey parents talk with your scout, we need feedback, what do they say would make them want to come to more meetings?"

This isn't correct at all, not from a doctrine standard nor from a practical or rational reasoning method. The doctrine in the Troop Leaders Guides Vol 1 & 2 is that advancement is part of the routine meeting methods. From a practical and rational reasoning method you don't send someone into a "field" environment without baseline training. Rank advancement is baseline training. Baseline training happens in weekly meetings. Outings are where mastery occurs. You can't someone on a campout without knowing basic baseline knowledge: basics of setting up a campsite, first aid, basic meal planning and cooking, etc... Within controlled environments such as weekly troop meetings your PLC should be transferring baseline knowledge to the rank-and-file scouts, then at the outings the mastery of such skills should occur. A patrol shouldn't take 3 hours to cook a meal because they had to spend the first 2 hours learning how to start a fire. God help the troop that doesn't teach first aid until an outing and an injury occurs.

But that's not what this program is. This is a 12 month program designed for a certain amount of activities and meetings each month (based on program). I hear this argument in my district and all of the units that say this are single digit membership and dying. The units that meet every week and do an outing every month have above average retention and are producing AOLS and Eagles. I've seen it go both ways. I've seen units adopt a 12 month a year, every week schedule an they grow and retention goes above average. I've seen units go the other direction and reduce meetings and they shrink (or outright die, seen that happen and it happens quick).

Yeah, super fast. Never seen national respond to anything this fast in my entire tenure with this organization. That's where the guardrails need to come into place; PLC should be deciding what's going on but not to the detriment of the program. EG: PLC decides they want to do everything but advancement which circumvents the policy that every scout should have the opportunity to advance to 1st Class and Star soon there after within 12-18 months of joining. If routine and basic rank advancement items are not making it onto the calendar the adults have to step in to remind the PLC what this program is and what HAS to happen. They don't have to do First Aid every meeting but they do have to hit those rank requirement items at least once every 12-18 months, and maps, and etc ... right?