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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?

Changing the rule to force 2 male leaders on any/all unit functions that include male youth only complicates the issue. If the argument is "fairness" the only answer is MORE restriction and regulation. There are NO circumstances where getting rid of the female leader requirement ever happens. There are exceptions to the rule; however, basic sociology has explained and it's been proven across all societies that there is a higher potential for abuse between a male leader and a female youth than a female leader and a male youth to the observed and proven physical attraction that occurs between older males to younger females. We have to protect female youth, it's plain and simple.

Going to be really hard to enforce. Garrison commanders have an extreme amount of authority and flexibility on how they run the base(s) under their command. It's highly unlikely that any order will explicitly state that US military cannot partner or work with etc ... Scouting America; instead it will likely state something like "no diversion of mission critical resources"; which plays into the garrison commanders ability to basically do whatever he wants.

In my opinion this is a sign of burnout in the leadership. In my opinion you want to meet every week unless a holiday falls exactly on the meeting day. What I have seen personally is that units who are looking for these excuses are suffering burnout in the leadership. The two week gap screams to me that the leadership is burned out and that their scouts are probably in a situation where they don't need the meetings to advance so it's just a burden meeting to those families.

This is absolutely avoidable by recruiting as many leaders as possible. If we take an honest look at most packs and troops there are very few leaders. Everyone complains but no one is asking. I forced the issue this year to recruit at least 4 more NEW leaders and it was tough to get everyone onboard, it was about 3 months of going around and talking about what adults were close to aging out, how succession plans really work, how doing a right-seat-ride (you'll like that Armymutt) enables successors to really learn a position. The reality of most units is that we're all running lean because there is a certain point where the number of leaders becomes harder to manage the dynamics between leaders. There are a lot of units running on 4-6 leaders because it's just enough to get stuff done but not too many to make administrative work; when you go to those units and say "hey you need to recruit some female leadership into your SM corps and your committee" those units balk. My gut tells me more patrol outings fixes a lot of problems.

We're going to get there. Now that this hurdle is cleared it's time to fix other things so we have more resources in place for program.

The unit level sponsorship is really easy to handle if you align your unit fundraising with the IRS rules. To be blunt the VAST majority of units are sitting ducks waiting for an IRS smackdown. National was really clear in 2015 when national comptroller stated that all units need to take a cut from every single scouts fundraising haul of a non-predetermined amount and that the cut needed to include an amount going into the general purpose fund of the unit and the campership fund of the unit. Seriously, any IRS agent that hates scouting and wants to get top marks for catching non-profit fraud just needs to "decide to audit" a random number of scouting units that are not near any free lawyers in town.

They can, badges of positions of responsibilities ;) It's a mixed bag, it always has been. When I was in the military the prior scouts fell into two baskets; the ones that actually learned something and the ones that were paper <insert any rank you want here>. We're not going to get a better program until national steps in and fixes the councils. The new background check is interesting; I wonder how many leaders in my district are going to get s-canned?

So basically anyone interested in the Family Troop option is going to hold off on recharter until right before Christmas. Looks like registrars are going to have a horrible week leading up to the normal HQ shutdowns.

It's official. If you dig through that coed group which is now the family troop group (name changed immediately) you can find posts from Angelique Minnet (various national committees including the coed family troop pilot. It looks like that letter went out Friday to SE's and yesterday CORs started receiving it, and in the coming days commissioners, key 3, registrars, and various other staff will receive the guides and other letters.

I'll jump on that OA pet peeve; how about : Everything in the OA being done by adults? I literally just saw a post by councils lodge about a great turnout for an OA event and there was only 1 freaking youth in the picture.

I can tell you all the following based on my knowledge of my district and council. Our linked troop plan was ok, but not optimal to bring females into the program due to the 5 girl minimum that has been enforced (my DE will not allow 3 female 3x3 units). My pack has crossed female scouts into the void for 7 years now. The females that did cross in my area were forced to cross to units that were not convenient to get to (long drives, bad meeting nights, etc ...) it seemed that all of the not so great units got linked troops first and then the district and council protected their first to the table status. Membership is going to tick up due to female retention, and to some degree brother of sister scout retention, simple rational logic; we're going from a system where female scouts had no path or a poor path to the troop level program to a literal buffet of troop choices. We're going to have better female retention and better female recruitment. My primary unit has become the strongest troop in the district and they were basically barred from having a female linked troop. We have run the numbers, we've talked with the families, and now that the unit charter won't get yanked the second someone ages out or moves we'll recharter in December as a Family Troop starting with 5 female scouts. In March we're picking up at least 2 crossovers. The 3 linked troops in my district have about half of their female membership commuting in from my town, we expect to get half of those scouts transferring in to our new Family Troop in 2026. The critical mass that this will create is already spreading through our local scouting community and we think before the end of 2027 we'll have somewhere between 12 and 20 female scouts in our troop. The downside is that we'll experience a considerable amount of cannibalization in 2026 as female associated scout families reset into their home communities. We are going to see some troops collapse and not recharter in 2027. Some troops that thought they had a good program because they were pulling in female scout families will have to face the fact that their program sucks but they were the only option for people. I spoke with a family this last week, they were ALL going to drop from the program due to their female scout struggling in the only option unit. They are going to stick it out for the Family Troop option. That's 4 registration that we were going to lose on Jan 1st that we're going to retain at least for 1 more year.

I think the rule might be or might have been that 18-20 is youth in the exploring/venturing/seascout programs so they qualify as youth and youth can wear rank badges.

My experience is that council doesn't do much more than get the final signature and send the package off to national. In my council everything is done at the district level, I am not even sure if we have more than a paper council advancement committee.

The cautionary tale is you have to have the boys troop(s) onboard with supporting the girl troop. I've witnessed girl troops fail to launch because they didn't have the support or planning in place in a timely manner and by the time resources are in place the girls have lost interest due to the interim s-show. If you do not want to be co-ed you should adopt the boys schedule of events for the 6-12 months to give the girls troop time to learn the process and get a plan. I'll echo Eagle with if I were a betting man I would bet on coed going live by February. I will say that my primary troop is setting up a plan for a linked troop right now for a small crop of female crossovers and our plan is if national doesn't authorized coed we're just going to have a linked troop that functions as a female patrol regardless of the situation in our first year. We're in a situation where most of the female scouts in our district are from our town but have been feeding out to towns 1, 2, or in a couple cases 3 towns over and once we get a female or coed troop up and running past our DE we know we're sucking the air out of the room because all of the parents have voiced that they are sick of driving so much.

What I am seeing with troops above the "32" scout headcount is that they seem like they are doing great on paper but once you get so big a lot of scouts start to fall through the cracks. Scouts with parents who have stepped up into a scouter role always achieve and advance at their personal optimal rate but the bigger the troop the more the scouts without a scouter parent start to fall back and not advance at their optimal rate. My primary unit is very large these days and I've really noticed that the older scouts who are stuck at Tenderfoot or less are all scouts without a scouter parent. We have some really good leaders that are trying to help as many scouts as possible but there is literally only so much capacity in each person to help so many scouts. Right on. I've worked with troops that do the age based and the mix patrols, and the age based for a couple years and then mixed patrols. I had a really bad experience with a mixed age patrol troop and ever since them I am not cool with the structure; toss in the safeguarding rules and it just works better for scouts to be in age based patrols in this era. I like this PL/APL stance. Too many troops only have the PL involved in the PLC.

I see what is going on here now. This is being redone based on the demographics of the people surveyed in the first study in 2023. Check out the demographics of the people surveyed in the Scouting Edge study; there are 3 chart slides squeezed on to 1 and a half pages of the study in the appendex. The 2023 study was basically a random subset of the whole national population; they probably wanted that to be a marketing survey to see how to capture new or emerging markets (especially when you notice that the non-white male population was under represented in that study based on who historically and currently dominates the membership ranks of Scouting America). This new study is about Alumni and current membership. So in the R3 cycle of membership they did the Recruit emphasized on emerging markets, this is probably the Re-engage or Retain stage of the R3 cycle.