Tron

Enforce the Parent Partner Rule for Lions and Tigers; you will find your replacement in one or two of those parent partners. Cut everything that someone "tacked" on to a role and recruit people to do just the job description of a position from the cub scout leader guide; don't let "the way we always did it" or "historically" restrict your packs function and form. Encourage round table and leader training for everyone. Use leader awards, they are there for a reason, and people do appreciate them.

The positional authority is that willful violation of the GTSS means the BSA umbrella policy does not cover you in the event of an incident.

The number of issues you have pointed out at one event are clear indicators that the problem is the other leadership and not you. It does indeed sound like your troop is not functioning within the guidelines of the program. I think you should raise the same issues you noted here with your COR, and then have a subsequent meeting with the COR and the SM; it's not you vs the SM, it's not you or the SM goes, it's you or the totality of non scout like behavior have to go.

A lot of them are faltering because they built out a huge annual process that requires dozens of volunteers is premised on a community need that no longer exists and then expect future generations to continue those processes even when they have no modern relevance. I am in many fraternal organizations and the hardest question any organization can answer to a millennial is "What value does your program provide to the community?" Scouting is different as the value to the community is easy to answer.

In some cases councils are snatching up district events and turning them into council events, blowing them up in the process.

So how it works is that any "camp" even day camps need an NCAP certified Camp Director and an NCAP certified Program Director, a CPR/First Aid certified Health Officer, and ratios of staff to scouts and toilets to scouts. You will have to prepare a camp NCAP standards book, and that book and your camp will be inspected by an NCAP inspection team sometime during the camp. Additionally anytime units not chartered by the same CO do things together it has to be authorized by your council. If you decide to move forward with a twilight camp I suggest you just come up with a theme, plan your activities around that theme, and then at the end figure out which advancement items are met during the camp. That advancements list will have to get cleared through your council advancement committee.

Mostly true; some awards are obscure, I have one that seems to be very rare and my registrar does not know how to enter it into my record; the registrar acknowledges that I have it, that my physical paperwork is correct; however, the registrar has no idea how to enter it into the system now that scoutnet is gone.

At the pack level the interface is designed for leaders (specific to their authority), parents (Lion through Bear), and committee members (again specific to their authority). At the troop level the interface of scoutbook is designed for scouts and parents to key enter things as completed/ready for unit review. If your scout is missing in scoutbook it might mean that their registration was synced to a different account and you will have to get the pack advancement chair or scoutmaster to give you the proper ids to have council fix the problem. At a pack level it is very common for bad leaders to skip key entry. My unit recently had 3 scouts transfer in where the previous units failed to key enter anything into scoutbook and also failed to turn in any advancement reports to council. Our units advancement chair had to work with the parents and council to fix everything and get everything entered into scoutbook which included some leaps of faith. Every scout deserves trained leaders; I say that includes scouters learning how to use scoutbook.

This is a great change. First of all why would anyone potentially want someone who is not position trained as a SM/ASM/or other outdoor leader at a campout? Secondly we need to recognize that many of the victims involved in the lawsuit have told their side of the assaults and that includes assault from a non-scouter at a scouting event. If we look at this objectively without money in the picture this is a great change to enhance scout safety. Something to chew on while thinking about this topic. Last year my unit had a parent volunteer fail a background check; not surprisingly that parents scout did not recharter with our unit. I ask myself if that parent is now tagging along on campouts with their scout at some other unit, and because of how the background check and blacklisting works(or not works depending on your opinion), that new unit is unaware of the background check failure? Is there a potential pedo trying to sneak along on a units campouts? This new rule stops that, period; this new rule is a good thing.

Finding the correct pack/troop den/patrol is critical. Never let a bad experience with 1 bad den leader/assistant scout master/scout master push your scouts out of the program. There are lots of good units out there that want the scouts who will not tolerate substandard practices.

Doing the online training is easy. You can cut it up into roughly 15min chunks and get it done in your downtime in 3 weeks(ish). SMs have a different problem; as I understand the policy a ScoutMaster must have IOLS to hold the position in a trained status; I've heard various things over the years from councils not rechartering units with untrained SMs, I have even heard that the BSA umbrella policy doesn't cover units with SMs that do not have IOLS.

Scouts have to want to join your troop; you cannot force them or play politics to get them to join your troop. If all of the AOLs from your associated pack went elsewhere 2 years in a row that is a red flag that there is a problem in your troop and the scouts/scout families view moving to a new CO as the most appropriate course of action. When is the last time your troop leadership conducted a SWOT analysis?

It really depends on where you are but you could probably get a tour for any US Citizens at a consulate or embassy without much difficulty.

Every pack in my area that is shrinking or on the brink of folding has a history of shutting down shop on June 1st. There is no coincidence.

Meeting as dens is tough to do if you want to follow YPT. My sons pack meets as a pack and breaks out into dens simply to have YPT coverage. When I hear a pack leader state that they still meet as dens 2-3 times a month I ask them how they were able to recruit so many willing adult leaders; the typical response is the deer in the headlights look and some sort of response along the lines of "Why would we need a lot of leaders?".

Pretty much the OWL/WDL training is gone and no one knows it. The best advice I had, and I pass it along to anyone who reads this that is a Webelos Den Leader is to go take IOLS, and read the Troop Leader Guides. The 5th grade year I advise you to do Scouting Adventure first with your Den; everyone seems to do it last and it sets the scouts up for failure.

So is the accused a pervert and a queer? Did Eagle1970 post that or is it a glitch in the matrix?

Probably the easiest option is to run units slim: minimal equipment on the property book; liquidate rainy day fund into action now to prevent LC snatching later on.

The advancement chairs responsibility is primarily to ensure everything gets recorded properly. It is a functionary position of responsibility with little to no authority. In my role as an advancement chair I simply cite the GTA and tell the direct leaders to fix the documentation or I will.

Navy must be far less competitive than the Army. There are many branches in the Army where if you do not get picked up on your first look you will get kicked out of the Army. For example the infantry, you need to get promoted on first look at O2 or you will get kicked out for lack of career advancement by O3.

Some of it makes sense, I never knew that the grapevine game was called chinese whispers, changing that seems like a good move; some of the other stuff though, wtf.

We literally just wrapped up LGBT "Q" + month. Q = Queer, and the point of everything about last month and the panels, discussions, wokeness was to recognize people who identify as that were treated in the past. There are all of these narratives around the abuse where these queer folk were supposedly ignored, covered up for, etc ... but at the same time roughly 5% of the population just held rallies and parades where part of the whole thing was to bring the other 95% of the population to task over how we brutalized and had absolutely no toleration for their existence let alone presence. There are 2 conflicting narratives going on. You're the one who has the narrative that the person who abused you "was a pervert and queer." Help me to understand how at a time when anyone overtly perverted or queer, let alone both could walk down the street without getting the shit kicked out of them was tolerated and ignored.

There is a lot to unpack here. I am going to assume that you were a scout in the 60's and 70's based on your alias; and assuming that is true I struggle with your narrative. Those of us old enough to remember how perverts and "queer" folk were treated prior to the 1990s know that toleration would have been a dream for them compared to the outright romper stomping and GTFO of town treatment they took from everyone in society.

It was not hard to find the 2021 Annual report on my LC or the neighboring LC website. A couple of take aways are that: 1) Youth membership bottomed out last year, we're now rising back up, about a 1000 more than the floor we hit last year (but no where near historic levels). 2) The neighboring LC has 100 less youth members that my LC and my LC has the highest population density of all of the LC's in the state. I am not sure what that means.

@scoutlaw74 After reading more of this I wonder if your son is being targeted because of his faith? The reality of Scouting is that there are varying levels of "reverence" and we do have some people who have a declared faith but are in reality not religious at all, and some even claim to have a faith but lash out at those who truly do. Something to consider. To the comments about the military and the Eagle Scout status. The official document says E2 these days due to a higher priority towards valuing college education; however, that is not the end all be all. When I was in the Army and on recruiting detail we enlisted Eagle Scouts at E4 (Specialist), some people didn't like it, but it was within the discretion of our recruiting command. There are a lot of ways to gain extra rank when you enlist and being an Eagle Scout normally encompasses all of them. We valued the outdoors experience (regardless of quality) because we could safely assume that the enlistee was at least mentally prepared to face the BCT experience. Going to an academy as an Eagle Scout will not matter as much (it helps you get in, but what you do while you are there matters more); ranks at the academies have more to with school year, performance, and popularity. Assuming that a person is offered a commission and accepts it post academy, then at that time being an Eagle Scout will matter again when being reviewed for promotion; those extras as a high school and college student (Eagle Scout, CAP, Sports, Volunteering) can help get a person promoted on their first look because it helps fill in the picture of the quality and character of that junior officer. Those things will be in their career jacket and will become tie breakers.