Tron

Wow, just had this discussion at a troop this week. A parent was like "I want to do a canoe trip, I know a troop that will rent us their canoes and canoe trailer." and my retort was "I know that 4 of us own canoes already, why are we paying anything to rent when we can do it for free?" and the retort was the shuttle/trailer thing and I spouted back "I think we can hustle up enough people who own canoes who can also haul their own canoes." and then I said "We just need to tell all of the parents that this is a price point issue, we can provide this opportunity and adventure at a much more affordable price point for the scouts if we get more parent participation to support this event." I got the F .... you know what eyes and the stink face for the rest of the night.

But that's not what's going on here. It's This is the wrong council patch, or the kid getting this uniform didn't earn these ranks or these awards.

A lot of the uniforms I see in thrift shops here are from other councils. A lot of the used uniforms I see are also 1980s era with patches that are no longer part of the program.

They did, they were on transitional charter and lost their hat. This isn't a situation where councils get to just be a 2 yr old and say no. Instead of a merger they're now being absorbed without say in the matter.

My count is 230 councils with 4 currently known folding/merging into other councils (2 in NY, 2 in CA) right now. You're $57 is a fair market estimate of the cost to support a CE, toss in the cost of the other non district serving professionals (director of field services, director of camping/program, comptroller, staff financial accountant/advisor, registrar, etc ... )and that cost rockets up. The crazy part is that if you review the NAM videos for finance there are only like 20 councils or less that are financially stable, the majority are "stable but in trouble"., about 40 councils are ready to go bankrupt any moment.

I think everyone is on this site. Haters, lovers, perps, survivors, various lawyers and spies for the firms, and everyone in between. Patt_00's lawyer telling him to stay off of here until the case is done was wise advice.

The Methodist thing hit hard here; but it was odd. We had a lot of Methodist units, but a lot of the unit membership was not Methodist. So when the Methodist thing with the charters disrupted scouting, we lost a lot of units in my area, but the scouts were not Methodist so it never made much sense on why other non Methodist chartered units didn't pick those scouts back up? Was the Methodist church paying a lot of membership dues like the LDS was? I use to live next to a Methodist church and they were HUGE, I mean, at least 1000 active churchgoing members. They are tiny now, they had to sell their church and downsize to an old smaller church on the other side of town. I spoke with the pastor and she said they have like 100 parishioners left. It happened almost suddenly, I want to say that within a decade they went from being the largest Christian congregation in my area to the smallest and no one has a single idea why, nothing bad has ever been said about the pastor or church board. It's weird. The lack of commissioners is bad. I think my district is down to 3, the district committee is doing this at risk thing as well. The problem is no real solid definition of an at risk unit. I went to a roundtable (might have been a scouting u class) about these new metrics and the council commissioner was adamant that these metrics are not for evaluating a unit, they are for "finding discussion topics". Are we experiencing our scouting version of purple math don't test the kids moment?

Size isn't that hard of a metric to hit for a troop. If you have 12 and they are registered you're good to go, the hardest metric for a troop is growth (retention for a pack), but what I am hearing and seeing is that units are not entering their advancement or tracking their outdoor activities. So in your case, where you might have some issues with size and growth you can still look really good if you're data entry is up to date. A small troop that is stable in size year-over-year with good advancement, adult training, and activity recording looks SUPER compared to most other units. I can tell you this for a fact, the bottom 3 units (bottom third for an extended view) in my district have 1 or 0 "gos" in the new metrics. 30% is crazy bad, so so so crazy bad. Is there anyone on the national board or any council boards that have hospitality industry experience? Residential experience? A good rental market is 90% occupancy, hotels are 60% or higher, private campgrounds are 75%. I know we're non-profit here in the land of scouting; but, we have to look at our for profit near peers for guidance.

LOL, I had a coworker who would come to me with very technical questions and she would tell me to assume the position before I could start "mansplaining". The position is the "manspread" which is lean forward, legs spread apart as far as possible, arms resting on legs, fingers crossed. Then she would sigh in despair and take a sip of her coffee and give me the "go ahead, wow me with too much information".

I get that, but sometimes the only way they learn is through doing.

Basically from what I have seen and pieced together a council needs to be about 15000 scouts to be financially viable. I think the issue really is that there are far too many councils, national knows it, talks about it, had a report recommending mergers and consolidations. Everyone is resistant to it. The professionals are resistant to losing their jobs (understandable but doesn't trump saving the program and organization). The volunteers don't want change and far too many don't understand 4 season programming. As an organization and movement we have to grow past an 8 week utilization period for our camps, and our camps need to look at the hotel and for profit camping industry for appropriate usage levels; we have too many properties competing for summer camp dollars and as an organization we don't have any idea on how to run the camps the remaining 44 weeks of the year. I think I met this guy you talk about earlier in the year when the metrics rolled out. Everything about the metrics makes sense except the fact that units are not being forced to comply with data entry, and units still think they can just "not engage" with district or council. In my neck of the woods I would cull the bottom 3 troops every year for a couple years (not packs, I would give them more freedom to figure it out), but I would totally cull the bottom 3 troops for sure. 2-3 years of culling the S-heads who are not running the program and things would change so much for the better.

The files are definitely more than just perverts. My understanding is that the ineligible volunteer list includes the perverts, people who removed from scouting for fighting, drinking, etc ... while at a scouting event. My understanding is that some people also landed in those files and on the banned list from things as innocuous as a volunteer not getting along with professional scouters and being banned from volunteering to make the problem go away.

Scouting is becoming more expensive but it isn't super expensive. One of my units recently got a family back from sports. They had pulled all of their kids and pumped them into baseball and after a year of the costs of organized baseball they came right back to scouting. I think the expensive part of scouting is hidden by bad units and units that are too reliant on district/council based programming. One of the troops that I help with is getting ready to do its big fall campout and the cost for a weekend is currently at $70 a person. I'm struggling to understand why, with our state parks and how cheap it is to camp in them the cost should be more in line with $20 a person (for a 2 night 3 day campout). The council fees are ridiculous. Michigan is $85 a person which is the highest in my neck of the woods. I look across the council line and I have no idea what they are getting for that $85 that we are not getting in my council and we're barely paying a council fee here.

The timeline is definitely fuzzy. National isn't pressuring enough change at the council level, councils are far too independent. As a franchise national does not control market saturation well enough. The Churchill report recommended 100-150 councils; my assessment and the huge improvement in telecommunications since that report make me though we should probably have less than 100 councils.

I am a big fan of running the rainfly to the ground instead of outer poles. It's hard to describe and for some reason I have no pictures of it; however, there is a way to make a short rainfly with nothing but 2 hiking sticks, some paracord, and 6 tent stakes that can hold up in moderately rough weather. I've been involved in the logging/lumber trade off and on for over 40 years and I get what people say about axes and hatchets and how to properly use them; however, a tool is a tool and if you wear it out "early" from actual functional use then so be it. If you're backpacking and you need to use a hatchet to work the ground or pound something it I find that preferrable to carrying an extra 10 pounds of weight that could harm your (or a youths) back. After a trek you can always work a hatchet with a bastard file, stores readily sell files and hatches but not new backs or knees.

Generally speaking in all non-profits when you complain you are really volunteering. There is certainly a nicer way to say it, but sometimes you just have to tell these mouthy parents that if they want change they need to step the-f-up or shut up.

National is not "publicly" releasing membership numbers. It's not hard for volunteers to get those numbers though, just have to ask your district leadership. My understanding is that membership is down nationwide; however, with the new membership method we won't have a really good apples-to-apples look until December 31st. My council just did a hard shift from fundraising to recruiting, and every unit in my district was given a made up recruitment number that was arbitrary. My understanding (if the numbers being shared in my council are correct) is that my council isn't even trying to recruit to keep membership stable. Even if we hit these made up recruitment numbers we're (the council) going to come in something like 5-10% below our previous post covid membership peak for this recruitment push. I think the most alarming thing about what is going on is the number of units folding. All of nationals numbers, analysis, etc ... from the CST's and NAM meetings were tied to the fact that packs and troops are roughly the average same size for various reasons and that "super units" are anomalies and we need more units to actually gain more scouts.

Typically I am pretty hawkish on why is this coming up/dredged up/being made a thing but this time ... geez. This is the sort of guy that needs to get hit as hard as possible and this case needs to be publicized as much as possible. So from what I can tell we have a relatively wealthy (at least compared to the rest of the US population), well educated, law degree, politically connected, strong arm sort of d-bag. I wonder what/how he threatened the council back in 2014-2016 to try and keep this from the police? Did he threaten to sue? Did he threaten to dry up donations? Epstein junior here needs more spotlight.

If we went way way way back to the original structure we'd be better off. Back in the beginning councils only provided support in training leaders and starting new units. When you start reading historical documents about scouting in America, the pre-war scouting was one or two adults taking a whole troop to random places for weeks on end in the summer, and meetings the rest of the year preparing for that summer adventure. I am not sure if our culture can handle that today; in the era of digital record keeping and zoom meetings I think we have too many councils and too many council level leaders. The district is the heart of scouting and the money hustle and need to be seen in the office is keeping district executives from building up the movement in the communities. We don't have to screw good paid scouters out of jobs; if we could get on the same page we could just eliminate non-district executive positions as people retire/move on. It could be as easy as every time a scout executive quits/retires national should just force a merger if it makes sense/doesn't make a council TOO big. And then let natural attrition work the other duplicate positions out. National is hearing it. It's the councils that don't hear it.

What we need is fewer councils. There's a lot of executive staff that can be eliminated and their salaries can be used to fund program. In this age of telecommuting and cloud computing I am not sure if we even need council HQ buildings anymore; just shift that maintenance line item to camps and let everyone work from home in the communities they are supposed to serve.

There are several charging over 200 just for the council fee.

There are 4 according to beascout.org, which considering the size and density of Syracuse I will admit is a pathetically small size. Syracuse is weird though as the city is sort of starfish shaped with a lot of urban sister cities (14 total counting those cities) packed in tight to it comparable to how a midwestern city of the same population would just have neighborhoods. I would be less concerned about the troops and more concerned about the very low number of packs. It takes 2 or more packs to sustain a troop and there are only like 6 packs in the city, about 20 in the metro. The city itself only has a population of 148k which for being the hub of a 600k metro is tiny; the "suburbs" significantly out number the "big city" compared to other metros. It's not the last troop, there are at least 3 more according to beascout.org the city isn't as big as it seems. The fact that the city has only 6 packs is the real problem, I would say that at least 2 of those 4 troops are going to fold within a year or two because there are not enough packs to sustain the troops. This "last troop in Syracuse" might become true within the decade.

But Marx, Lennon, Mao, and every other communist leader would. BP would probably say something far worse than me considering his views on socialism and communism in his original guide to scoutmasters.

Why is this repeating? This is an old story and not true, this is not the last scout troop in Syracuse, it wasn't true when this got originally posted and it's not true now. WTF is going on here?

$170 sounds cheap compared to several other councils. District staff actually helping to set up a show and sell sounds awesome, my council could get way more sales if they did that.