walk in the woods

To lend an air of legitimacy that all voices were heard before the pre-ordained decision is approved??? Not that I'm cynical or anything .

Yeah, I'm not so sure of the premise. My little adopted and actual home towns are just a sample of two, but, my observations include: Sports: Lots of kids involved in summer baseball, basketball camps, etc at the grade school/middle school ages. Way more than participate at the HS level. It's a trade off between skill/effort and reward. Extracurriculars: During my son's HS time he saw multiple friends drop or scale back Drama Club and Scholastic Bowl in favor of a job or other more rewarding extracurricular. Karate: I see way more 3rd, 4th and 5th graders in Karate than sophomores, juniors and seniors in HS. LAN Parties: Is this still a thing? As kids get older they naturally specialize in the things they enjoy/are good at and provide a reward they value/need. BSA has been doing "older scout" programs since the 30s to try to deal with the issue. Maybe "girls, cars, and jobs" is an excuse, or maybe it's just short-hand for "boys grow up and narrow their interests."

Actually, I don't know that it's all that difficult. The local option is a decent example of how to get people pulling in the same direction. The BSA should simply give organizations a goal (support and develop leadership and independence in youth), the freedom to execute against that goal (pick your own leaders and the youth you want to work with to meet your organizations goals), a basic framework to use, and get the hell out of the way. It's only a problem when the powers that be want to tell people what to do AND how to do it.....

I think you're reading the statement correctly, but maybe the Commissioners words are a bit isolated? Depending on how we parse the language....There is this from the Q&A published by the church: To me that suggests only boys 14+ who are interested in continuing toward Eagle will be registered the the ward's Troop, not all boys. The list of activities published for the 14+ boys look a lot like Boy Scouting/Venturing in many ways. If they allow the 14+ boys to be registered in the Troop but give credit for the activities they're doing anyway in the 14+ program, rather than actually participating in the troop, it might not affect membership at all. But, if the 14+ boys have to do activities in the Troop for advancement plus the activities in the 14+ church program the results might be very different. The Q&A also said: If there's a goal to balance spending between the young men and Young Women programs, by reducing spending on the Young Men (yes, I'm reading between the lines), it would seem reasonable to me that boys in the 14+ program pursuing Eagle in the Troop might be encouraged to drop their Troop membership as soon as they completed the requirements. That would create some drain but it might take a year or two to play out. Could be a combination of both. Maybe the payment for 2018 is to encourage as many boys as possible to complete the Eagle requirements by Dec. 31, 2018 and to accelerate their troop program to get as many boys to Eagle by age 14 as possible? Hard to tell.

It's been a couple years but my district used to request the form and any supporting letter be sent to the SM or Eagle Coordinator of the troop. The expectation is the letters would be received in sealed envelops and delivered unopened, with the Eagle package.

I always find this a bit circular. The BSA is the best program, but we want it to change to accommodate different membership, because we've been unable to replicate the program, which means the BSA is no longer the BSA that created the best program. It's possible that one can hold everything else constant and convince oneself that changing membership criteria won't affect program, but, it's difficult to prove unless one runs the experiment. I don't find pointing to the rest of the world a particularly compelling argument. To pick on our UK friends a bit, the size and population of the UK is roughly equivalent to the states of VT, NH, CT, RI, MA, NJ, MD, DE and the eastern parts of NY and PA. If one were to make the argument to implement a UK style scouting program inside a circle drawn around that area, I suspect it wouldn't run into much resistance. The decisions would be driven by the large urban/suburban areas and I'm sure it would be very successful. That small circle of the US however, has a much relationship to the rest of the US and the UK does. There's probably no solution here other than local option but that requires some mutual respect from both sides

Hard to judge Stosh. With boy-mostly sports like football falling out of favor the last few years I suspect the numbers could be skewed. A young man who had previously focused on playing football and/or wrestling, might not find another structured sport in which to participate.

Your statement suggests a single culture, or even a majority culture, in the US. If that was the case, we wouldn't be having these kinds of debates internal to the BSA or across the country.

This is actually trivially easy to solve. Venturing has a 4-level recognition system. Move Star, Life and Eagle into Venturing, exclusively, with the merit badges and such, as Levels II - IV. Make the first level of Venturing recognition the equivalent of Scout-First Class requirements. Scouts coming from Boy Scout Troops as 1st Class would start working at Level II, girls and boys without Troop experience could choose to work starting at Level I. SLE could be presented as a parallel track to the other awards in Venturing to give scouts options. Expand the Eagle brand to include Ranger, Trust, Quest, whatever those programs are called. Boy Scouts would become the middle school program. This has the added benefit of removing merit badges from Boys Scouts, and therefore Boy Scout summer camps. It would turn the Boy Scout program into a longer transitional process from Cub Scouts to Venturing, eliminates the debate about mixed-age vs. new scout patrols, gives helicopter parents a chance to mellow out.

@@Eagledad, you just summarized a sort of pop-culture self-help book I've read recently called "The Power of T.E.D."

So I'll be the heretic again and ask the simple question, "So what?" It's great that you're deeply involved with the unit and want to see changes to make it more boy-led. I applaud your work in reading and thinking about scouting. I think it's great you didn't go into the committee as a ramrod and you are considering the impact to everybody involved. You've gotten a lot of good advice about how to talk with your son, his patrol, his troop leadership. And plenty of options from finding a new troop to building a neighborhood patrol. You should pursue all of them, right after you pursue whether your son is losing interest because he's just not into scouting. There's no shame in that. Full disclosure, I worked hard to keep my son in scouting, but ultimately he left his Freshman year of high school. Scouting was good for him, he learned a lot of valuable leadership and personal development skills, and we had some fun experiences along the way (e.g. Jambo, BWCAW, Cold Weather Camping training, etc.). But, he didn't shine until he found Drama Club in high school. It was one of the best experiences of my life to watch him take all those lessons he learned in scouting and then refine and expand them in something he was truly passionate about. If "fixing" the program in your troop is the only thing preventing your son from being passionate about scouting then by all means pursue the fixes. If he's just not into it, then let him pursue his future on his terms.

But why does participation in scouting create an obligation to the specific unit or to scouting at all? Isn't the actual obligation, if we can call it that, to put the principles into practice in your own life? To give back to your community? If being a scout creates an obligation to the BSA shouldn't the Eagle project be required to benefit the BSA rather than the community at large? Let's use an analogy. If a young man signs up for military service, serves with distinction for 4 or 6 or 10 years, then voluntarily separates from the service, is he less of a veteran than a second young man that makes a career of military service?

If a boy gets Eagle at 15 and then quits the troop for a Venturing Crew so he can continue his personal growth does that count for or against him? Does it matter if the crew is chartered by the same CO or not? Does it matter if the Crew is focused on Drama rather than the outdoors? He clearly left and isn't giving back to the troop, so that would suggest you'd view that scout negatively. Or since he stayed in Scouting is it a positive? And to whom is stewardship owed? Does the scout owe stewardship to your unit, or your CO or scouting or to the ideals of scouting? What if your scout gets his Eagle, leaves the Troop, but ends up mentoring another youth in his drama club, or scholatic bowl team or marching band or youth group or just his group of non-scout friends hanging out on Friday night, in the ideals of scouting? Would it be better for the Scout to stay in a troop where he doesn't have passion for the program, whether it's a perfect program or lousy, or is it better for him to take stewardship of the ideals and use them to better another young person somewhere else? Would he still be a scout of poor character in that situation? I think boys this age, whether they know it or not, are learning to build meaning into their life. And I'd argue a meaningful life comes from having a passion for something objectively good. They may not know what that passion is yet, but they are perfectly capable of figuring out what it's not. We're just giving them the tools to be successful in that search.

So when exactly in the process of recruiting boys do you tell them and their parents they owe a debt to the unit? Do you have them sign a letter of indentured servitude? I suppose one could argue the opposite just as easily. If the boys are expected to "pay back" why shouldn't we raise the age limit to 25 or 30 or whatever we determine is the correct number of years of service required to repay their debt? If a boy's interests change at 14, 15, 16 years old, and he's able to take the principles of scouting into his new interests, he's the best kind of ambassador for the program we can imagine. That should be celebrated just as much as a boy who stays with scouting until he's 18, or 21 or continues in the program into his old age. We give our service to the BSA, our councils, our units and our boys. Give. It's a gift and gifts don't come with strings attached.

It's curious. If our goal is develop character in the boys, why do we care where they practice it? I can think of several examples where boys left at age 15 with their Eagle badge. They went on to practice the leadership and personal development skills they learned in any number of other programs, school, sports, etc. Why is that looked down on? Seems to me that's exactly the kind of success we're looking for. Putting some sort of life-long debt on a 15 or 16 year old boy sort of diminishes the good work we're supposed to be doing, no? Good work, and watching a young man succeed in the world is its own reward, expecting a return on investment is a business deal.

Looks Army to me. Double eggs on the brim of the cover so "up there" a ways.

The RCA shows the problem isn't the person in the Presidency, it's the ridiculous amount of power our spineless congresspersons have abandon to the Executive Branch and the President specifically, and the leviathan monster our federal government has become. Write your congressperson and demand they take back the power of the Legislative Branch. Roll back the unaccountable beige bureaucrats sitting in nondescript DC office building writing tens of thousands of pages of law (regulation) every year. Tell them to roll back the AUMF and use the power of the purse to set the agenda. Then there's the American electorate, many of whom look to the President to be their savior and/or lawgiver, when given the choice between a politician willing to be bought, an outsider willing to buy politicians, and several other candidates, voted for the lesser of two evils because "those other guys can't win." If you vote for evil, you get evil....

I have to disagree with this as well. Authority is what authoritarians wield to control their subjects. The Board has no authority here but rather the responsibility to challenge and coach the scout. Teenage boys can be unpredictable; adults should anticipate. Based on Q's description it's not clear to me the scout presented his information in a disrespectful fashion to the board. He may have but it's not presented as such. The board members response is given as second-hand info (from the scout?) so it's not clear we can take a lot of meaning there either. It would be interesting to sit with the scout and the board individually and separately to get the perspectives.

Or this one: https://youtu.be/i4VxbnGbWbM

Why not? When I was in I had three types of uniforms, Dress (which we almost never wore) and two types of working (one for office folk and one for working folk). They all counted as uniforms and you could potentially see any of them on any given day (a guy headed to Pier watch might be in Dress, a guy who worked in an office might be in his Johnny Cash or Good Humors, and a guy headed into the power plant was definitely in dungarees. When I wasn't on duty I wasn't in uniform. So from my perspective the analogy would be BSA Field Uniform for fussy indoor stuff and formal ceremonies, reasonable outdoor gear for all the good stuff (maybe with just a necker!), and something nobody cares about if it gets ruined for service projects.

If you have boys that want to do the ceremony, and the committee is opposed, tell the boys to ditch their uniforms for black slacks and white shirts and perform the ceremony as members of the community. Deterring boys from participating in a Veteran's Day ceremony is, well, something unscoutlike.

We've done fire events to boil an egg or fry a pancake or similar. The last compass course I put together I used a ROT13 cipher to make the course into a secret message. Each control point had two letters of the message. When the patrols found all the control points they came back for the start to get the key. Maybe instead of a message the cipher would be instructions for something. I just used landscaping flags wired around tent stakes with the info written on the flag in sharpie.

In fairness, the flooding in Louisiana was right at the beginning of the school year and Matthew hit during the school year. It would be pretty tough for kids (and their parents) from outside the area to get extended time-off to travel to either to volunteer. Additionally, there's almost no way to know how many scouts and/or units did local food drives or clothing drives or fundraisers in an attempt to help. As for the local youth, did you query every football player and helper to see if they were also scouts? How many scouts and scouters were so impacted that they were busy evacuating or dealing with the issue directly? In Louisiana the authorities were trying to shutdown the "Cajun Navy" why would they have wanted a bunch of teenagers around? It feels like you are using a fairly narrow perspective to paint with a really broad brush. FWIW, when the tornado hit central Illinois a few years ago there were several scout teams that went down to help with the recovery operations over a number of months, and several more that I'm aware of that ran food/clothing drives and fundraisers to help.. Same thing happened when the tornadoes went through the local council territory a couple of years later.

I think I recall you being from beyond the cheddar curtain. If you're not too deep into the woods, the Burpee Museum in Rockford used to offer Indian Lore.

1. At the next committee meeting discuss your vision with the COR, CC and members. Explain to them what it means, what it looks like, and why they want it. Ensure they are on-board and explain that you have some legwork to accomplish to set the table. 2. At the next meeting with just your adult ASMs have the same conversation. Ensure they are also on-board. Review the youth roster to flag who regularly misses meetings, campouts or activities. Be prepared to minimize impact on the patrols. 3. Quietly take a review of your current camping patterns and equipment, ensure you have the infrastructure available to provide for multiple patrols. If you are a car camping unit you'll need two of everything perhaps. 4. Repeat Step 1, ensure everybody is still on-board and acquire whatever gear/support/equipment might be necessary. 5. If you have a Sr. leadership group (SPL, etc.), take them out for pizza and explain everything to them as well. Talk about structure of patrols (NSP vs mixed age, etc.), patrol competitions, ideas for patrol specific ideas on campouts (cooking competitions, etc.). Develop a plan with the boys. 6. Have the SPL and team start the discussion with the boys. Have them go through setting up their patrols. 7. Do a month or two of guided patrol meetings, PLCs and campout. Pick a local state park where the patrols can go hiking or fishing or whatever independent of each other. 8. After a couple months, if all goes well, maybe encourage the patrols to plan separate campouts/activities if you have the support.