Tron

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.

This is what I understand. The membership churn is killing the membership numbers. We did recruit 260k "new" scouts in 2025; however, based on the numbers shared with me we lost somewhere between 300k and 500k existing scouts. If we don't deliver on our promises of an excellent outdoor leadership program scouts and their families will keep voting themselves off the island and leave scouting. National needs to enforce quality control and modernization; how can expect a unit to properly execute the program when 4 out of 5 adult leaders are so incompetent they can't do free online training? Paid scouters are scrambling to save their jobs, they don't care to save the program; national must force council consolidations to get the focus back on program and off of fundraising.

Perhaps, but those days might be coming to a close with the new compartmentalization of risk post bankruptcy.

LOL travel leagues $1000 a year! That's not even close to what a travel league costs for 8 weeks in my region (YES REGION!). Those prices are outrageous. Our troop is one of the largest in our district and we're charging $25 for a weekend outing. No troop dues. If the PLC picks a big fancy expensive trip it's AD HOC to the regular monthly weekend outing to prevent pricing families out of any needed monthly campouts.

I think this is the issue. Due to so many factors we have this atmosphere of permissiveness. Sometimes it's not even permissiveness; it's just burnout. How many of us have reported something because we had valid concern or outright knew someone was willfully violating SYT/YPT or the GTSS and were ignored by people at the district or council level.

I think your first sentence hits the nail on the head. I would add that before there was any relationship with the US military we at the ground level were already doing the duty. To your second sentence: I know that my council is in life support mode and is mission inaffective; however, based on what I read online and the interactions I have with other scouters throughout the country I wonder how many (as a percentage of the total units) are not even trying to run the program as designed? I would even go so far as to say originalists that are trying to run things out of the original scoutmasters handbook fall into the program as designed bucket; and, in that situation, are the number of units trying to run the program as designed less than 50%? I horribly fear that to be the case.

What would be more surprising is if we never had another YPT/SYT failure.

I'm going with an attempt at quality control. I wonder how many people bombed the survey and had their SYT revoked?

But the mergers are going to come slow, they're all fighting them, they only do it (looking at you Long Island & Northern MN.) when they simply have no other options and national forces them to do it with no cards on the table.

How does leaving the council work? Is there some sort of petition process?

Last night I saw a dashboard and it had way different numbers. My understanding after asking some questions is that the numbers reported by councils and national in their annual reports Year-over-Year are not "current registered youth" and have not been "current registered youth". So we might have 877k right now but that number is not directly correlated to the membership numbers reported by national at the NAM. The number to compare against nationals year end number that they reported at the NAM is a "count of uniquely served youth in the previous calendar year" which currently stands at 1.2 million according to the dashboard I was shown last night. I am not sure if every council is doing the same thing or not; I suspect based on numbers I have seen that confused me in the past that my council is doing this as well.

I get this, the numbers I have seen is 70% come from cubs but argument is solid. What I am seeing is a pay-for-play type experience with the club sports. SInce the coaches are all in league with each other there are these play club and we guarantee so much play time here and then that translates to making the varsity team, etc ... What is our join scouting and we guarantee so much <insert what parents want here> ? Would making participation mandatory improve the program? OMG, that's a recipe to kill scouting, not from cost, but from indignation. Let us just be real for a moment; a lot of us come out of the business world, we don't raise the price point of products unless there are no other choices. So many of us parents have been through restructuring and downsizing in the private sector, refusal to get operational costs down and instead passing the cost directly on to the consumer kills companies.

A different thread made me think of this and I think it fits here better than there. I think my pet peeve is the scouter who claims "My program is great, my troop has X number of scouts!" and this literally comes from a discussion I had with an SM recently. The SM's troop went from single digits to over 40 in 2 years; he's running the same program he has always run. He refuses to consider that some of the success is not his program but the fact that his town went from 6 troops to 2 troops and the other troop is ready to fold. The dude snaps and screams at scouts but he's become the only option in his town because he has a solid charter and a dedicated donated space to hold scout meetings 7 days a week 24 hours a day.

We have the infrastructure and paid staffing of 1970 when the program had 4 to 5 times the participation rate. I think we could increase participation but I don't think we're ever hitting the 1970 membership number. We could perhaps reduce some camps to primitive camping only and mothball them for brighter days; however, we just don't need the number of camps that we have. In my state we literally have double the number of resident camp slots each summer than there are scouts in the state; the councils are fighting each other for scouts, all of the camps are suffering. FOS is already dead in many councils, the constant money hustle has everyone burned out. We have to address the central office problem of scouting; too many chiefs, not enough indians, we need to consolidate councils to save the program. What exactly is a unit fair share fee? Is it different than a council fee somehow? Costs are nothing in scouting. Literally nothing compared to everything else. We lose scouts every year to club sports (especially baseball). Parents in my area are ponying up literally thousands of dollars a year, sometimes every few weeks for cycle after 8 week cycle of club sports; mandatory attendance policies for parents in the bleachers and driving. Some sports are worse than others, the sports leagues are in league with the varsity coaches; my daughter is being told that "it is heavily recommended to play at least 3 seasons of club soccer at $800 a pop if she wants to retain her varsity slot"; my buddy is ponying up $3200 every 8 weeks for club volleyball to retain his daughters slot on the varsity team. I'm lucky that my daughters league(s) are all local, my buddy is being forced to go to regional events which takes him sometimes 3 states away as a mandatory driver, and then he has to fork over extra for hotel rooms. Club sports are growing exponentially; what are we doing wrong that club sports at their insane cost are growing and growing while we are retracting and retracting? As I started stating above, I don't think costs are driving their choices. I will channel my inner Stan Lee and ask the question "What If?"; what if the issue is results based and not cost based? I would make the argument that if we (as a program) had a guarantee that if a scout was truly active and attended X number of meetings and Y number of weekend campouts, and at least 1 resident camp a year that the scout would X ranks and Y merit badges in every 12 month period our recruitment would double and our retention would move into the 80% range. I was just looking at my troops roster due to renewals coming due for most of the troop in a few days. We have 6 scouts dropping for sure, no chance in hell of retaining them. 4 of them have no chance of making it to Eagle, 2 have been lost to club sports at age 12 and did not make Scout rank since crossing in March. We have another 10 potentially dropping; 1 made eagle and is moving on, the other 9 are all inactive due to club sports and are way off any reasonable pace of making eagle. This is going to be a tough hit and a big ego bruise for the SM if we really lose 14 scouts in 15 days; it's going to cast a shadow across the whole troop.

About 2 councils worth of scouts. Look at all that administrative bloat. That's easily 1.6 million more for program if they merge down to 2 councils and fire 8 scout executives.

This is bad. I don't think the program is dying; however, when is national going to institute some quality control to end the membership exodus?