Eagledad

There are many reasons for this situation to occur, but I once watched a very good boy run troop brought down to it's knees when the SPL and ASPL aged out of the troop. These two young men were fantastic scouts. They were my sons high school friends and even joined in on one of our Troop's Philmont treks, so I also knew them. They were also good leaders in OA. Where they failed the troop was passing the SPL/ASPL back and forth to each other for two years. It wasn't ego or anything like that, they were just good scouts who ran the troop program well and all the other scouts wanted to keep it that way. While they were leaders, the troop changed Scoutmasters and the new scoutmaster did what he was supposed to do, step back and let the scouts run the program. But where he failed was developing future leaders. The two scouts did everything so well, that they did everything. When they left, nobody wanted to step into those shoes. The reputation of their hard work was intimidating in of itself, but none of the scouts hand any real top level leadership experience either. This is one of the oldest troops in town and always had a reputation as a great boy run troop. To be SM was and honor. After the two scouts left, the troop lost 33 percent of the scouts. The situation verged on bit of a scandal for the chartering organization and the SM quit. The troop is back up to speed, but it took about five years to find the right SM, recruit new scouts and train the current scouts to lead. Actually, it took about five years to cycle through scouts who didn't learn to lead and get new scouts up to speed. All programs go through cycles. Identifying why and fixing is the hard part. Scouting is a game with a purpose. The challenge for adults is balancing the game and the purpose. We tend to talk about having too much adult involvement, but too little involvement can cause just as much harm. Generally leadership is actions intending to move a team to a goal. If members of the team don't have any responsibilities in the effort, they likely don't have a lot of pride in the team or the goals. Maybe the patrol needs some team building so every member relearns their needed contribution to helping the whole team reach a single goal. Accomplishment leads to pride. Pride in one self generally encourages a desire for more action toward goals. and one success leads to working toward another. I like to teach adults to work toward a program where the scouts go home saying "I like myself when I'm with the patrol". Team activities that reward success will raise up leaders. Barry

Which gets back to the subject of the discussion, volunteers trying hard to contribute possible harm of a youth. Why? Based on what, information like that from AAP? Barry

Until tent assignments are considered. Barry

I'm saying that by putting volunteers in a position to accept transgender scouts possibly sets them up as abusers simply by accepting them. Barry

My point has always been that accepting transgender scouts put volunteers in a position of possible abuse by encouraging a behavior that could be harmful. Barry

Ah, I see and understand. Barry

Here's another article of why I think a youth organization that supports transgenders is dangerous to the child. https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/pediatrician-groups-transgender-orthodoxy/ “If I had only found one alternative, authoritative source that told me the truth, I would never have taken her to a gender clinic. I would never have supported her social transition. I would have questioned this more. I am angry at myself for trusting groups like the AAP. I am angrier at these doctors for publishing this false and dangerous advice.” Barry

Hmm, ok. Barry

You are saying that if a scout comes to you to ask for advice, you are going to say no, it's not in my job description? Mentoring is not about forcing your choice, it's about helping sort out the complexity of choices. Ignore soccer, football, band, Troop, OA, piano, advancement, or even paper airplane class. Mentoring is the higher level thinking for searching the answer. Theoretically the mentor has developed mature thought process for making choices. Mentoring is guiding a development of a thought process for making choices. The mentor doesn't care about the choice, the mentor cares about the process to making the choice. Personally I believe mentoring is a process that builds rationalizing which sorts the complexities of choices to be more obvious. That doesn't make the choice easier, but it provide a base for making a choice. Barry

Responsibility is responsibility, no matter how it is titled. I'm guessing the responsibility is too daunting. One suggestion is scale back the program until the scouts want to participate. That would where the maturity of the scouts organization skills are matched with the troop bureaucracy. Then, gradually apply more responsibility to build back program maturity. Maybe the SM takes the part of the SPL for six months to get some momentum. Simplify bureaucracy. Brian and the SM should probably have the hard discussion of how the troop got to this point. Barry

As far as we know, nobody approached helping each other. My point was while cocomax was proposing the noble approach, the BSA took a different road. Barry

Fred, mentoring doesn't pick the subject. Mentoring is not active guidance of a specific direction, that would coaching. Mentoring waits to be approached. Mentoring is a torch that brings light in the darkness of confusion so that the choice hopefully becomes more clear to the mentoree. The mentoree's choice may not be the mentors choice. The power of mentoring unbiased guidance and no personal ownership of the decision. Maybe I should have used different words. Mentoring is valued hope for the hard choices during life's experiences. Most of the time the mentor may be unknowingly supporting the tougher choice, even though they didn't give any specific direction. How many times have we felt relief when making the harder choice? I guess that is the difference in us; For me, mentoring was the most enjoyable part of being a scout leader. Barry

Very nice post, thank you. Still, I wonder what kind of kids an Eagle Scout Father and an Gold Scout Mother would raise? I only propose that thought because the nobility of your post was lost when the BSA decided to change to the SA and not combine with the GSUSA to build better programs together. Of course such a suggestion would require a lot of courage from the GSUSA, but the leaders of the BSA admit their motivation is mainly self-serving. Barry

How many active scouts? How many patrols?

Please rethink your thought here, Fred. Mentoring is the scout's valued hope of Adult Association. Scouts' struggle painfully through these kinds of decisions. Where else can a scout find unbiased direction? Friends? Parents? Imagine the quenching relief that pragmatic wisdom brings to the chaos of a young mind. Scouts don't need adults to learn scout skills for adventure, but how valuable is the mature unbiased wisdom when wrestling with complicated life decisions. Adult vanity is the most powerful adversarial force scouts face during their scouting experience. Barry

Favorite Scoutmaster? Barry

Of course. I have a lot of respect for you. My response was after considerable thought and reflection. Barry

Sadly, american society (culture) compares the boys and girls in these ages by maturity. But the differences is not maturity, it's the instinctive world view and growth. My experience is boys of this age view themselves in a world of families. Girls view themselves as a member of a family. Boys are worldly and think big. Girls are organizers, detail oriented. Girls tend to dominate and lead combined groups of this age because details drive organization to reach goals. Girls appear more independent because they are systematic with their thinking, while boys are very much herd instinctive because safety is in the herd. Adults naturally conclude by their instinctive organizational tendencies that girls are more mature and better leaders. No, they are just good at organizing. Boys on the other hand are big picture thinkers. They are dreamers thus appear flighty in their desire for adventure to fill the dreams. Girls in general are happy with day to day organizing. Adventure, OK, but its not necessary to be content. Not until puberty do we see some balance. Boys, while still not great organizers, instinctively turn from the inward herd mentality to the outward protector and provider. It's fun to watch if you know what to look for. How many scouters have stories of awkward annoying scouts who turned into great servant leaders around the age 15. Girls instinctively bring balance to the herd, family, tribe, or whatever you want to call it, through organizing and taking on detail task to assist reaching the group objectives. Scouting for boys has been a program where boys are forced to develop organizing skills for developing a functional team for the goal of adventure. Girls, by instinct, not maturity, will push the boys away from that growth because they will dominate organization, and the adults will encourage it. We can already see it in boys who came from adult led troops. Adults by their nature also compensated for the boys lack of detail skills. I can tell how much the adults are involved with the boys side of the program simply by watching a few of the older scouts during planning. Scouts from mature patrol method programs could run meetings for any Fortune 500 company. The program will change to adults forcing boys to play with the girls. Boy will become frustrated from the constant behavior comparisons and pressure to keep up. Just like the troops that are more adult driven, most of the boys who continue scouting past 13 are being forced by their parents, not because they like the program. I am curious though, while families of girls say adventure is the major reason for the membership change, my experience is female driven troops have noticeably less outdoor adventure. I know the European troops seem to have mastered human instinct differences, and I wonder how. But, after visiting Europe, the family is valued very differently than American view their families. It is certainly a different culture. Barry

I admit I'm caught off guard. Superiority? qwazse? Oh, I remember now. The Eagle. We are only human I guess. Shinny things. Barry

You have the right idea, it's about inertia. But isn't that the older scouts running the program. I don't understand why you don't see taking on more of the troop responsibility isn't boosting the flywheel that will keep them engaged. This is where I see adults fail, they don't know how to build it up. Everything, I MEAN EVERYTHING, should be reviewed to improve for the next time. Especially the adult part of the program. They should also be reviewing how the "Planning, communication, feedback, dealing with negative scouts". I've said before that to most common questions ask by participants in my Scoutmaster Specific class was uniforming and discipline. Discipline is complicated at the adult level, so you can imagine how it is at the scout level when trying to get the scouts to take on the responsibility. The way we handled discipline when we started our program was 180 degrees different from how we were dealing with 10 years later. To mature as a boy run program (to keep the inertia continuing), the adults and scouts have to strive to do it better than the last time, every time. This is a major problem with adults. They always want to make things better by making them more complicated. The treasure wants to use a new computer program they they have used in their business, and that nobody else can touch after they leave. The Advancement Chair always has a new and better way to track advancement. And on and on. We eventually developed a philosophy that a scout had to be partnered with each committee adult every time the adult came up with a new idea. That force the adult to look at ANYTHING from a more simplistic perspective. I used to teach, "if you are going to make changes, ALWAYS simplify to the scout level". Don't let boy run got overrun with adults' good ideas. Very well said. There are a few successful Crew/Troops out there, but very few. Running two programs together is complicated and requires an adult with a good understanding of the big picture to make the concept work because it does require more adult intervention overhead. Personally I see no advantage of adding a crew. Our troop planned more high adventure than most of the crews in our area. Our youth leadership is more consistent because the Patrols supported the troop leadership structure. The only ONLY advantage I can see with adding a crew is to get girls into the program. Adding a crew to the troop boy run program just to add girls is a huge risk because the troop requires the older scouts and youth leadership to mixed into the program, not just close or nearby. The patrols still need older scouts in the patrols. Sadly, many (most) adults think see a crew as just high adventure. It's not. It's character development just like a troop, and part of the development is running the program. Not just showing up friday night to camp all weekend. Boy run is about about youth taking a group of youth to youth planned activities. When the youth start leaving any of the decisions to the adults, they are stepping back from a boy run program. Three out of five crews fail after the first four years because they didn't have good adults who understand how to build a boy run style program. The programs turned into camping clubs, and even high adventure gets boring. As I said eariler, what keeps older scouts in the program is the challenge of running the program and growing from the challenge. The best programs are the ones where the scouts go home saying to themselves, "I like myself when I'm with the troop, or crew". That kind of feeling comes from achieving above what you thought was capable. Adding a crew to a troop program to improve the troop program is the WORST reason for combining the two programs. Success requires putting the two successful programs together to build a more successful program. As I used to advise units around here, if you can't build a successful boy run troop program, what makes you think you can build a successful crew program? I know of only one successful true boy run program that combines the crew and troop together. Cliff Golden' of Troop 33. Cliff is the most boy run scouter I know of and was one of my mentors when I was a Scoutmaster. That program has a reputation for being as active with the community as it is with outdoor adventure. Cliff added the crew so he could bring in girls. They are the luckiest girls in scouting. Cliff used to be member of this forum. But he wasn't very active here because he was busy doing scouting stuff. Barry

One of my WB ticket items was to observe PLC meetings of other troops to learn and improve our meetings. One of my observations was that most troops don't teach using a meeting agenda in the PLC meetings. The adults basically threw the scouts in a room and expected a perfectly run meeting. When the SPL stumbled, usually adults jumped in and many times took over. When I researched this a little farther, I learned that the SMs didn't expect an agenda because they didn't run their own meetings with one. Now that really struck me because I've been using some form of meeting agendas ever since I can remember, and our unit committee meetings are run with meeting agendas. It's not like the agenda isn't talked about in training, the SM Handbook talks about meeting plans as well as the SPL Handbook gives an example. The issue is many adults don't respect it as an important tool for the scouts to run the program because they don't rely on them in their personal life. I guess my point is that training can only go so far. The leaders need to respect the material being presented enough to use it. What the adult doesn't use, the scouts don't learn. I was able to help the problem a little through our JLTC (NYLT) course. The scouts in our courses created ticket items. We called them something else. Anyway, we required each troop to send an adult (preferably the SM) to review the scout's ticket items with him and develop a plan to how they would accomplish the scout's objectives before the scout went home. This way, the scout was the teacher and the adult was the student. It worked pretty well and I never heard a negative comment about it from a leader. I agree that the quality of a unit is directly relational to the quality of adults working with the scouts. That challenge is developing quality scouters. I'm not saying that BSA training is satisfactory in developing quality adult leaders, but I have seen adults run their program against what they were taught. I'm not sure how to change that. Barry

I agree, but the stages of a mature troop aren't as systematic. I should have went into more detail, but I was just trying to get to a different point in limited time. Scouts in an experienced troop are going through the three stages all at the same time. True, they are focusing a lot on the core skills, but they are learning the skills of the other two stages simply by watching the older scouts in action. We humans instinctively learn most of our behaviors and skills by watching our role models. That is why older 15 to 17 years old are so important for a program of scouts ages 10 to 17. Learning from role models is so powerful that mature experienced troops running perfectly would require no training for a scouts to learn all their skills the program offers. My philosophy for our program was to only using training to pass along new information or to fix a problem that had a negative impact on the scouts activities. I used training as a Red Flag to indicate areas of the program that needed special attention. Role models are why the Patrol Method is so powerful for developing growth. I also like Sentinel's post about the Scoutmaster roles. Just how much adult coaching, mentoring and guidance does a troop of scouts require with 16 and 17 year old scouts running the program. Typically a 17 year old scout is sharper with scouting skills than adults. So, what advantage, if any, does a 21 year old adult have over a the 17 year old Eagle in running a troop? The answer is life experiences. Which means that a 17 year old man still has something to learn from the older adult with a few mores years of life's experience. And if the troop is encouraging scout growth with experienced role models, the Scoutmaster's responsibilities become very limited to mentoring senior scouts and training ASMs. As the SM of such a program, I spent a lot of time just sitting around the campfire allowing the scouts do their thing. And while Scoutmastering for such a program is extremely rewarding, it was also the most stressful responsibility I ever experienced. More than any other person in all of the BSA, the SM has the most responsibility AND POWER in the development of boy's physical, mental and spiritual growth. That is a lot of responsibility. It was one of the most fantastic experiences of my life, which is why I love this scouting stuff. Barry

I wonder if texting and email pushes the problem. Texting wasn't popular 15 years ago, but I ignored emails. My communication with adults was either face to face (preferred) or by phone. When the parents see your body actions as they listen to your reasoning, they learn how far they can push. Barry

Scout must be close to Eagle.If the scout were 14 or younger, dad would be looking for another troop. I'm surprised this didn't happen a few years earlier. Barry