Jambo Merit Badge Midway in 2013??

[mike springer 10]

Any official info on merit badge midway? Its on the map but the footprint is much smaller. Also rumors are going around that its gone for 2013.

Love to hear from any midway staff on this.

[Twocubdad 665]

Hi, Mike, actually I think we met at the wood carving tent.

 

I don't have much insight, we probably heard the same rumors.

 

I did have an opportunity to talk with the Jack Furst, I think I have his name right, at The Summit tent. He's the head guy on the project. His vision for jamboree is very different from the current one. A couple things he told me he would like to see includes no merit badges at all. He also wants to greatly restrict patch trading. Campsite assignment would be by "52-card pick-up", not by council and region. Programming would be much more organized, with entire troops going off on daily high-adventure oriented activities together. No pairs scouts heading off to do what they please everyday.

 

I shared this conversation with a couple old-timers at region headquarter and their comment was along the lines of, "yeah, good luck with that." Regarding the midway, their comment was that the current program is far too popular and supported by far too many Scouters to just go away. They thought randomly assigning troops campsites all over the site was nuts. Problems is that subcamps are organized by regions and areas and run by volunteers who work their local contacts to recruit staff. Scattering the troops would throw that into chaos.

 

In otherwords, the guys on The Summit team had a lot of ideas for how they thought jamboree should be run, but that didn't necessarily mean it was all a done deal.

 

The other thing I heard is, at least for 2013, the number of participants will be half of AP Hill, or about 20,000 boys. Consequently, stuff like the midway will be down-sized, too. Whether or not that's a permanent change is another matter.

 

Again, that was just the word on the street last summer.