Tron

5 council service territory maps were recently updated. I think the safe assumption is that 5 councils just merged out.

Cash is king is absolutely true. My district has one of the most useless human beings in existance as one lf the vice chairs but he's always going to be a vice chair because of his matching cash donation.

Some vacancies are purely the result of professionals not building out the team.

In my area that old guard is still staunchly in place. More to your point I see many units with new parents willing to step up but they then recede when the old guard wants to use them as worker bees in a dictatorship instead of a collaborative environment.

This is good on you, but really bad on the organization. I do know that national is aware of this/these problems; last year Glen Pounder made mention of digital ID that would be the landing point for all leaders to prove who they are, current registration, position, units, and training. I wonder how long it will take the organization to get there though.

Patently wrong approach. Like you said this sends a message. Is the unit going to fold or is the DE allowing the scout to eagle (we dont punish scouts for adult mistakes) and then revoking the charter? From a liability standpoint hazardous weather is related to outdoor activities and not just camping. Without hazardous weather the unit is technically not allowed to go for a walk around the block.

Where are you seeing your numbers? Like I said I would like to see their real numbers.

No one except club sports are flourishing. I'd like to see the real trailife numbers, what's available online shows initial great success peaking over 100k but then also decling back intonthe 50 to 60k range. Same pattern for girl scouts and BSA. 2021(ish) spike followed by linear decline to current numbers. Scouts Canada is also in decline. The only english speaking scouting group doing well is scouts UK which has a significantly different org structure with growth throttled by lack of leadership.

Correct, membership is on a near linear decline 10%(ish) year over year. From what I have seen its fairly uniform across the whole country, no single council or region is responsible. I'm increasingly believing that the issue is just a significant amount of untrained or poorly trained unit leaders pushing families out of the program by not running the actual program.

Samoset council in WI has a big provisional program. I think canyon camp in IL has a provisional week. I think NE IL council has a provisional week at their big camp in Northern WI as well.

Totally. My council has this BS membership number based on "unique members" in the previous calendar year; which causes some bleed over year-over-year that inflates membership numbers above any single headcount in the past 365. EG: We had 5200 unique scouting expeciences in 2025! But in reality at no time in 2015 did headcount on any given day or hour exceed 3500. 5200 is very low when conaidering our population and total area youth.

Yeah but those previous annual reports were odd though right? The public facing annual reports always use total unique individual counts inside a time period. Truest headcount for non profits are typically measured as a year over year comparison of actual headcount on the same day.

Didnt something similar happen last year in the lead up to the NAM? I do recall membership numbers going off line for a time last year.

What does bottom look like? I think we hit 730,000 with the Mar 1st membership roles cleanup. Is bottom 500k? 400k? I mean we're losing on average 100k a year right? Is it all hands on deck, the ship is burning in 2 - 3 years? There is no doubt that a key part of the problem is leader training: is when we hit 400k that national makes position training truely and absolutely mandatory?

So the meat of all three of these really leans into why scouting america has such low membership numbers right now. Think about how many dads/moms/guardians that have just rolled with the punch and walked away from scouting instead of transferring? Think about how many families meet a scoutmaster and experience a troop like your old troop and after that 1 year of membership just lapse and move on because they think the program is designed to be like that and how they can't expect something better in a different unit? I hope someone from national is monitoring this thread and packing this situation away for discussion at the NAM in May. Armymutt, you're doing right by your son and not giving up; and you're taking on all this stress and BS; most parents don't have the knowledge of the program and think it's the S-head unit or walk.

The cross council issue. That might be driven by the cross council reporting requirements. So as I understand it (by unfortunately being involved as a witness to an incident) if a reportable incident happens in a cross council scenario (resident camp outside of council for instance) the incident is automatically a national level incident and investigated by national (probably mostly through the involved councils investigating and reporting to national).

Wow. That's a rough situation, I think you're handling it the best you can. The only thing I think you should pursue is an email to your DE and whomever he is reporting to. You want to make sure that they are aware of the unprovoked threat against you by the SM. Dont do this to pursue punishment, do this for a paper trail. Make sure the other witnesses are listed in your email. That SM has a problem and the professional staff needs to know; that SM is going to escalate, it's just a matter of time. You dont want him stepping down as SM and then sliding his S-show into a district or council position.

When I asked my council about this it was explained to me to be more of an emergency clause. Things such as a scout becomes ill on a campout but cant abandon back to home for some reason, or perhaps a series of catastrophic equipment issues on a backpacking trip and the youth and parent must tent because its the only option to not violate other tenting rules. I was told it is not meant to be an alternative to managing a known persistent issue or condition that would be considered routine outside of scouting.

I think that has been replaced with only "opted out".

This is going to be a tough one right. Does supervision mean a leader can never step away even if there are at least 2 other leaders present? Let us spitball here with real situations that have happened in my presence over the past 2 years. What if the cubmaster (they call him the scoutmaster in all the news articles) had stepped away for something other than to vape outside? Same duration away, same timing, but instead of vaping he had to take an emergency call from work? Instead of vaping he had to take an emergency call from a family member? What if instead of vaping he was having an asthma attack and stepped outside to get fresh air and use his inhaler? What if instead of vaping he had to step away to eat on a medical issue based eating schedule? Left field scenario: What if the cubmaster had a scheduling conflict and someone else had to be the unit leader for the night and this had happened? In the last year my packs cubmaster has had to miss pack meetings due to work based scheduling conflicts and the CC or COR has had to step in to run the monthly pack meeting.

It's ego, ego pure and simple. I've literally put the current BSA document right in front of an unaware/trained leader and been told to take it away because the person already knows better. Unit training coordinators and commissioners can also do this (well mostly, EG: Wood Badge has to be entered by a registrar). Yes/No. In moments of reflection it can be tough to recognize lack of interest and care in a person with a person being overwhelmed right?

Totally correct. We (at least those of us at this level) are not privy to what exiting families are stating as to why they are quitting the program. We can guess as to the reason, I think a lot of us have a good "feel" but can't really prove what we think the issues are. Does anyone know, are there any real exit interview results out there for scouting? In all my time I have only been able to get 1 family to openly tell me why they really quit scouting and that led to a leader being terminated (but the damage was already done).

I saw in the news this morning that the family is now also suing national. I think I just heard an old dirty diesel bus turn over.

A lot of these problems are caused by poor or no training for "the professionals". I went to national training and my training records went to the wrong council. Years later I realized that my training was not on my official record. When I went to council about updating my records the first problem was council didnt even know that the training I took was a thing. I had to bring in all my paperwork and then educate my registrar on how the program exists and why I was trained.

Im torn here. I get that just adding units makes no sense from the standpoint of some new units just "steal" scouts from existing units. The flip side is that we do have scouting deserts that need new units. Perhaps there us a flip-flip side? What if our 40% churn and lack of retention is caused by all those stuck in their ways garbage units we all know about? What if the retention issue is literally only solved by having these rinky dink 1 patrol troops running around?