ham_solo

1) It sounds like a good idea probably in the boardroom, but frankly I just don't see there being enough volunteers to staff totally duplicate programs. Maybe I am wrong, but based on what I know from my own troop, and what I know of our sister cub scout pack, there just aren't enough people willing to help out to make this happen. 2) How long until certain merit badges are dropped now because they have "sexist" content, or are labeled as "not fair" for the female scouts... I am not trying to be a chauvinist here or anything, but come on, we all know how this works these days a

A good question I always had was when is it appropriate to wear these hats? Weekly Troop meetings? COH? Only when hiking and carrying your hiking stick? Sitting around at camp? To the grocery?

More and more evidence points to the massive benefits making the scouts outdoor experience be a formal "electronics free" zone and makes more sense to have a formal 'leave the phones at home' troop policy. I believe the more we give the youth time in the outdoors away from being 'connected' the more the benefits of the program. It is disappointing to see some camps and troops, etc so quickly try to 'embrace cell phones because they are so popular'. I feel it is a disservice to boys to allow them to not be enjoying the outdoors, but to instead all be huddled around a picnic-table o

The BSA is just plain ignorant here. They are letting themselves be dragged into constant LBGT discussions and arguments, and having to come up with all these stupid rules of this person can be a member, that person can't be etc.. that just makes them look bad. The real solution that the BSA seems determined to ignore at ALL costs of course, even though it is screaming in their face, is to just change to "US Scouts", and allow ALL young people to join, just like every single other scout organization around the world including Robert Baden Powell's original scouts in the UK. The only s

Any opinions on how the G2SS would apply if we took some boys "jeepin"? A bunch of us in the troop have jeeps and I have been asked if we could consider taking some of the older boys "jeeping" offroad, but I am not sure how the guide 2 safe scouting might apply. I don't think these would count as the same rules as the little ATV type vehicles that some council camps let the scouts drive themselves, and that people are always flipping over etc.. yet, I don't know if this would count as normal vehicle driving. We are talking about some pretty mild off-road trails in a park, not extreme r

Just the other I was thinking to myself.... if BSA is so worried about membership declines, then WHY not have a national TV commercial campaign?!

I want to move my troop records online and I recently over the last few months, did an evaluation of all the options out there, signed up for trials, imported troop data into them, played with them and here is my results. (as if anyone really cares, haha). 1) Scoutbook - totally not ready for prime time. Its hardly even ready for any use. Personally as an IT guy myself, I would not have considered it ready to show to anyone yet. It's "pretty", but the fact you can't even do basic features such as repeating calendar entries is just a good indication of how much work it has to go to be r

That is an easy one. You follow what they did in the original boy scout group. Lord BP's scout organization was called "The Boy Scout Association", they just changed their name to "The Scout Association". So I would suggest the BSA, change to something similar like "US Scout Association". People get all uptight about these sort of issues, but in reality they are not a big deal. BSA, just needs to go live with UK Scouts for awhile and learn what they do, they have decades of experience at running a very successful co-ed scout program that is growing better than ever since they d

If it works fine for just about every other scout organization in the world, including the one founded by Robert Baden Powell himself, and our closest neighbors in Canada, it pretty much makes any arguments that it would not work in the USA kinda silly to me. Most of the questions I see people put up have already be answered or figured out by other scout organizations. BSA could learn from UK Scouts and Canada Scouts, as well as almost all other scout organizations in the worldwide scouting movement how to make coed work.

I had a meeting at the council office this past week, and while I was there I was talking to a group of training chairs from several of the area districts that they all went to training recently where they learned that starting in 2016, EVERY troop will be required to have 2 people with Wilderness First Aid certification. I know this was required for Philmont etc, but it sounds like starting in 2016 it will be required for all outings. First of all is this true? Has anyone else heard this? If so, can we all complain that this has not been communicated to anyone and it is only 3 m

I have discovered that there is a bug in the site, that makes it impossible to view any threads on this site from behind any type of web proxy server. Behind the proxy server I get this error: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e57' [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver] String or binary data would be truncated. /forums/viewThread.asp, line 80 Without the proxy server, then it works fine and threads can be viewed on the forums. 1) My guess is something your doing with user tracking, or ads or something is not working behind any reasonably proxy serv