District staff and number of Scouts

[CNYScouter 46]

I'm curious. How much does District level staff play in the number of Scouts in the district?

 

I was looking over a breakdown of Scouts by districts in my council.

 

The council my son's Troop is in is the largest and until this year was over twice as big as in number of Scouts the next largest district. Last over 1/3 of the total number of Scouts in the council were in this district.

 

I know many of the district staff are there because they have been around forever and don't do much.

Roundtables are the "old-boy" coffee hour and are not well attended.

There is no training staff to speak off and no has any idea of who the UC's are.

At Scouting University I was the only one from the Distict on staff and of the 35 or so on Staff at SM Specific/WLOT last year I was one of only two.

Out of the 40 in attendace at SM Specific and 16 at WLOT only 3 or 4 were from this district.

The average unit has around 16 scouts.

This year 2 districts stayed even in numbers, 3 districts had 2% increases, this district saw a loss of 28%.

 

The second largest District has a good number of UC's. Many of these are the staffers at traning.

I see a good deal of people from this district at training.

(numbers per district are posted)

This District averages over 26 scouts per units.

 

Do this numbers really tell about district level staff or is it something else?

[Eamonn 61]

I got a little lost in the numbers.

National likes to see one professional for every 1,000 youths served.

How active the Scouts and Scouter's in a District are?

Is a hard question to answer.

A lot might depend on the geographic lay out of the District.

Our District goes up a mountain, so in winter we tend not to see a lot of the people from that part of the District.

While we might not have that many members we tend to have about the highest percentage of TAY in the Council, but the area is made up of a lot of farmland and a couple of State Parks.

The Scoutmasters in the District are mostly people who have served as Scoutmasters for a very long time. Some for longer than that!!

At times trying to motivate or get these guys excited about anything can be hard work. But to be fair a few of them run first rate programs and really have no need for the support of the District and are so busy providing a first rate program that they don't have time to do much else.

Packs seem to suffer more from the "Peaks and Valleys" more than Troops do. Mainly because of the turnover of leaders.

I heard last week that Pack 155, the Pack I was Cubmaster of is down to five Cub Scouts. When I left we had 65 Cub Scouts and it went as hight as 70+. At the Wood Badge course I directed we had five leaders from the Pack participate. Of that five only one is still active in Scouting. These were the people who participated in everything that came down the pike -Maybe they found that it was all too much?

Cub Scout R/T are a lot more fun than the Boy Scout R/T meetings.

When I looked out at our Boy Scout R/T meeting, I seen the Scouter's who had been there, done that and got the T-shirt and the Scouter's who were never going to do that, go there and didn't care about the T-shirt.

Building a strong District Team is really hard.

On one hand you don't want it to become the good old boys network, but you need people who will do a good job.

Councils seem to want community people to fill the District Chairman position, this does help bring more money into the District, but if he or she knows nothing about the program or the people in the program the program will suffer.

The turnover in DE'S is really hurting the program in some areas. Two years back I sat in on a meeting to do with Council Finances, Councils from all over the NE-Region were invited to bring their DE's. Of the over sixty DE's in the room over half had less than six months service in.

I suppose we all do what we can, but when I was District Chairman I wouldn't ask a unit leader to serve on the District Committee. My thinking being that he or she had enough to do and if the role of the District is to serve the units we can't do that by taking away the key unit people.

Eamonn.

[CNYScouter 46]

I would expect to see peaks and valleys in the number of youth but this 28% seems excessive.

This was a loss of almost 700 scouts in one year from one District.

 

This area has lost a large number of people but you would think that we see it spread out among all the districts but three districts saw small gains, two stayed the same.

 

It seems that there has to be more to it than peaks and valleys.