walk in the woods

Yeah, the opening/split/closing thing was mentioned for Cubs. I may have inferred it into the Boy/Non-Boy program. I do suspect a single charter though would have a single meeting night, especially if they don't have full patrol/troop of non-boys . And I agree, I typed 11-14 but should have typed 11-18. Although I wonder if it's not the right time to make that age split and 14 and bring everybody into Venturing then.....

The presentation I saw and the follow on discussion was about: Cub Scouts: Boy-Only Pack, Girl-Only Pack, Mixed pack with gender-specific dens. Boy Scouts: Partner with a separate organization for girls 11-14, create a parallel BSA organization for girls 11-14. That was the extent of local option offered. The suggestion for both was they would come together for opening/closing ceremonies, then split for Dens in CS, split by gender for 11-14 year olds. Basically the Trail Life/AHG model.

It's at https://www.glaacbsa.org/Scouting_Accessibleif your interested.

I'm not as confident that a separate track for girls, even if they use the exact program as the boys, will be viewed as a positive. If the BSA launches a separate-but-equal program, I think two things will happen, first, Justice Warren will be quoted to no end and second, the headline story in HuffPo will read something like: "The good news is today the BSA finally dropped their long standing sexist policy of excluding girls from their programs. The new program will finally allow girls to participate in all levels of scouting and earn the Eagle Scout award. The bad news? The program is

I attended my council's meeting this weekend and am supposed to get the survey as a result of my attendance but haven't seen it yet. One gentleman, during the Q&A asked about timing. The Pro in the room said all the presentations were supposed to be done by next week, survey results tabulated and delivered to the National Board. He wasn't sure if they'd get the results for their October or February meetings.

Well, the entire conversation started with an article in a fairly known magazine. A quick google search for Sydney Ireland finds a change.org petition and articles in the last 6 months from Huffington Post, NPR, Affinity Magazine and Scouts for Equality. Another search for BSA considering girls finds a few more articles from NBC, home of that anti-BSA writer whose name I forget. And there was a divisive speech recently at the Jambo, or so I hear . So yeah, if not pressure there's certainly some press. But, even if there was no pressure from outside and no press, if the BSA adopts a separa

IDK, one of the things I learned a long time ago is effective leaders don't give orders they know won't be followed. If the BSA makes the separate-but-equal decision. What's a CO to do when they get 3 girls interested? Seems like their choices are: - Send them 15 miles away to a different troop, separate from the one their brothers and other friends are in, defeating the purpose of the change - Ignore the policy and go co-ed. I think the BSA likes it when their policies are challenged from the ground up, it gives them an out from making tough decisions. Whether one agrees wit

There used to be info in the back of the scout handbook about APO, which was kind of pitched as a stay-active-while-in-college option.

Thanks. I'd almost fully suppressed my memory of those garters.....Back to therapy I guess.

One (at least) interesting at least to me paradox in the video. As separate times he mentioned that parents want activities they can do as a family, but, parents don't work with their kids on advancement. Anyway, just struck me as odd to say we want more time with our kids but won't spend more time with our kids on that. Separately, I think separate but equal programs at the Boy Scout level could quite possibly be the worst decision of all. I think it would be roundly ridiculed. This feels like a in for a penny in for a pound kind of decision.

Yeah, just stuff the bill of your ball cap down the back of your pants, problem solved .

To be clear, the email I received was from the DC, not the council directly. That's the $100,000 question. If in fact Cubs is co-ed by the beginning of next year the Boy Scout solution will need to be in place by March/April to prevent this from happening. The Girl's Pack/Boy's Pack is a non-starter is small communities. One of the units I UC for has about 20 boys, with sister sibs and friends it might go up to 25 or 30. So we'd have to run two packs with that number of kids? Double the leadership, double the charter fees? Multiple too-small dens in multiple packs? Right.

Just received my invite to our council's meeting. It was mentioned in the email that the discussion of Family Accessibility would likely lead to girls participating cub scouts potentially as soon as this coming January.

Instead of staff week we should have staff boot camp! Three days bread and water for fraudulently signing off a blue card!

$10-$15/day is more than enough walking around money for supplementing the bag lunches, odds and ends, etc. Definitely order keepsakes from the catalog if at all possible. Let FedEx ship to you vs. him trying to schlep it home or get it shipped from there.

to rival roman aquaducts!

I'll echo what others have said. Ankle support for the seen and unseen hazards in the water. The portages aren't exactly groomed hiking trails either. I paid the weight price to carry a light pair of shoes for around camp so I could get my wet footgear off and dry/air my feet at the end of each day. It was worth it to me. I didn't buy special boots for the trip because I figured it would likely be my only trip up there, but, I did destroy a pair of Vasque hiking boots in the process.

Have a plan for setup day and get away day. Who's doing what when you get to the site (tents, awnings, cots, etc.), and the reverse for get away day. Everybody will be tired on get away day which makes it more challenging.

I'd never heard the beautiful and dangerous explanation but I like it! It was common where I grew up. Basically anything that was associated with men (guns, cars, tractors, ships, etc.), that had any sort of association with aesthetic beauty (or orneriness), was often referred to as "she." It wasn't as common to give the objects names, but, I'm not particularly surprised by it.

I'm sure if the young woman had a daughter she would be looking for male role models, but that doesn't necessarily imply scouting is the place for that. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't have daughters so I can only speak to what I've observed, the father-daughter relationship is different than the father-son relationship. Scouting volunteers would have to deal with the difference. It's not clear to me that men mentoring boys regarding respecting, listening to and interacting with the opposite sex requires a co-ed environment. I think it's possible the discussions are more open an

Schiff, I think you're using an outlier to make your point. I think it's equally likely, maybe more so, that co-ed scouting turns into something much more like this, https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wdC0/2017-volkswagen-alltrack-that-feeling-puddle-song-by-grouplove.

Maybe it says as a society we recognize that there is value in single-gender programs for developing healthy and happy boys, which leads to healthy and happy men, which is ultimately good for society. Just because a boy and his parent(s) prefer a single-gender program doesn't imply the boy can't handle a coed environment, it just implies the family found more value in the single-gender option in that case. It also doesn't imply there's less value in a coed program for different families to find a different value proposition. I was getting what's left of my hair cut last weekend. To ma

My council holds a council-wide event every couple of years at a local fairgrounds. A couple years back they started allowing RVs but I think it was mostly for staff/campmasters who were coming in early in the week to keep an eye on things as equipment and displays and the like rolled in.

To build on MattR's idea, Put the Webelos in a fire line. First exercise would be to move water from the "battery" using cups to fill a 1 gallon "bulb" on the other end (or have two lines filling two bulbs as a race). Put 5 scouts in the circuit and one acting as the ground/return to get the cups back to the start. Second exercise would be to use the two lines to fill a single bulb. Simulate component failures by having one scout stop working for a short period of time. Compare the time to fill in a serial configuration against the parallel configuration. More of a high availability exer

We did a mix. The troop had a few tents for scouts to check out but many of the older scouts bought their own. Pros: It required less expenditure from the unit and the boys took better care of their equipment. Cons: When we car camped we ended up with a 1:1 ratio between scouts and tents. I'll second the recommendation on the Taurus AL 2. My son had one that was pretty durable. We used it for a variety of trips (plop, canoe, winter) without issue. Same footprint as the REI half-dome but much less expensive.