eisely

It is a general requirement for all float trips that all participants should pass the BSA swimmer test. If your scouts are all at least first class, or earned the swimming merit badge, or passed the swimmer test at summer camp, you are OK with the youth. Adults should set the example and pass the same test. It is permissible to take a non swimmer on a float trip if you have a qualified lifeguard to buddy with them in the canoe in which that person will be riding. You need to confirm the swimming ability status of all your participants and make suitable arrangements for testing if necessary. These are general requirements for all float trips. I don't know if the BW high adventure base does anything more or differently.

As a scout I went to Camp Pa He Tsi on the Lake of the Ozaarks in Missouri. This was actually an army facility that the army gave to the State of Missouri after WWII and the state rented out to various non profits. Three years as a camper and four years on staff in the 50's. The camp was used by what was then the Lake of the Ozarks Council and the Great Rivers Council. I know the Great Rivers Council still exists. During my last year in scouting there, the Great Rivers Council acquired some rural property North of Moberly, MO for its own camp which became Camp Thunderbird. As an adult I have been to Camp Three Falls (Ventura County Council), Camp Pitchess (greater Los Angeles council), another camp operated by the LA council whose name I forget, Camp Royaneh operated by the Greater San Francisco area council, and Camps Wolfboro, Silverado, Herms, and Lindblad operated by the Mount Diablo Silverado Council. Oh yes, Philmont twice.

You can do both. You may not wish to do both after this group of scouts about whom you are concerned has completed the merit badges in question.

Good metaphor...or is that a simile?

There is little to add to all the comments and advice above. Do start over and do not waste time, energy, and emotion trying to recover what may be lost. Hopefully the losses were not too great. The first adult volunteer position I held fifteen years ago was that of a pack treasurer. The same principles apply to other units. Establish a clear and simple procedure for reimbursement. Original receipts should be required. Establish a new bank account with dual signatures required for checks. It is a bit of additional hassle, but it is worth the effort. Depending on the attitude of the bank, you may be able to pay some checks below a certain threshold with a single signature. Pack treasurer and committee chair or cubmaster should be from different households, not husband and wife. Require regular treasurer reports. These reports can be as elaborate or as simple as you wish, but just requiring a regular report will impose discipline and accountability on the process. Where possible all cash receipts taken in at the pack level should be in the form of a check. They are easier to keep track of, and the purpose of the payment should be noted on the check itself. However, one of the first things I did was to acquire a receipt book that made duplicates so that I could take in payments in currency. The receipts protected the pack, the person paying in the funds, and me. The duplicates created automatically when I accepted the cash made it possible for me to easily track the funds and apply them to the proper activity or account. Make sure the treasurer deposits all cash receipts at the earliest possible moment. Cash and checks left lying around tend to get misplaced. In January of this year I was presented with a check I had written to the troop over a year and a half earlier for a deposit for a Philmont expedition in 2001. The troop treasurer had never deposited the check and I had lost track of it. (I have to admit that I do not regularly reconcile my own checking account.) I was asked to provide a substitute check to keep the troop whole, which I did, but I was shocked to think that the troop's finances were not being handled as well as I thought they had been.

Speaking only from experience with no direct knowledge of how councils look at these things, when a council enters into a chartering agreement I would presume that the chartered organization has to be a legitimate legal entity. I am personally aware of one instance in another district in another council where a group of parents formed their own non profit corporation to obtain a charter for a special interest scout troop. This was a group that was particularly into cycling and wanted to focus on that activity more than an ordinary troop would. As pointed out by CubsRgr8, public schools and PTAs (sometimes labeled PTOs) have been backing away from chartering units in some parts of the country. Such units have been forced to find another sponsor or get creative. I suspect that parentally organized non profit corporations may be the wave of the future in scouting. In the case cited by CubsRgr8, there may well be a non profit corporation in existence that he (she?) just doesn't know about. There certainly is no reason to suspect foul play if the council is doing its work. Twocubdad raises an interesting question. It is correct that ordinary for profit businesses can obtain charters to operate a scout unit, although I personally have never encountered this. Would the BSA council involved in such an arrangement issue a charter to a sole proprietorship? If I were making the decision I would not do so because then the unit would be totally dependent on the life, good health, and good will of a single individual.

One of the longer threads in this forum dealt with camouflage suits and uniform parts. I was amazed at how controversial the topic was. I don't think anybody ever claimed that camouflage was disallowed, but then it is not part of the official uniform either. Legal or not, troops have, and take, a lot of latitude in designing their "activity" uniforms. Mostly that means troop t shirts, but there is no reason that camouflage could not be included. Before BW jumps back in, I am using the term "uniform" loosely here, and am not narrowly refering to the officially sanctioned uniform.

Bob White is correct. Scout units are not legal entities and cannot own property or insurance policies. Any insurance agent or company who sells a policy to a troop is doing so in complete ignorance of whom they are dealing with. If there were a claim the insurance company would probably have a perfect out from paying any claim. Do it right and do it legally or risk having no real insurance at all.

Things happen for a reason. We seldom understand, and should not pretend to understand everything always, but the deaths of 9/11/2001 transformed this country in ways we are only now beginning to appreciate. When I came home from Viet Nam so many years ago, all I wanted to do was forget about it all as quickly as I could. There were no parades. Families were left to mourn their losses privately, as if the larger society was embarrassed at their losses. As indeed the larger society and its highest levels of political and military leadership should have been embarrassed...but I digress. The following piece from the Wall Street Journal on line opinion page describes huge turnouts of strangers for young dead marines who gave all their tomorrows so that we might have ours. Who would have thunk... I am proud to be a small part of the scouting movement that contributes so much to people everywhere. __________ A Marine Comes Home Fallen warriors remind us why whiny celebs are irrelevant. Thursday, May 1, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT The battle of Iraq may be over but the warriors for peace struggle on. Theirs is not an easy road, particularly, we hear, in the entertainment industry, which is packed with notables fresh from their vocal campaign against the war, the president, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney--objects of scorn in all the best circles, from Paris to California. Now, it appears, some celebrities worry about damage to their careers. The Dixie Chicks have taken a hit. Sean Penn thinks his views have cost him jobs. Tina Brown, whose main concern about the war seems to be that it caused the postponement of her new TV show, announced last week that it would soon air and that she planned to decorate the set with an American flag bigger than anyone else's. She had to scrape up as many core American values as she could, declared Ms. Brown, "to have any hope of being allowed on TV at all in the current climate of punitive patriotism." No fear. Americans aren't likely to concern themselves much with Ms. Brown's flag--in the event they actually encounter her program. Most of them have matters more pressing on their minds. For some, these days, those matters include funerals and mourning rites for people they have never met. On April 14 in Vermont, for example, mourners gathered for the funeral of 21-year-old Marine Cpl. Mark Evnin, killed in action on the drive to Baghdad. A thousand people attended the rites at Ohavi Zedek Synagogue in Burlington, at which the Marine's grandfather, a rabbi, presided. Reporters related how the Marine Corps League color guard and local firefighters flanked the walkway into the synagogue, where mourners included the Roman Catholic bishop and the governor. Crowds lined the streets in salute--some with flags, some with signs--everywhere the funeral procession passed. But what struck the Burlington Free Press reporters most were all the strangers who had been impelled to come to the cemetery to honor the young Marine. One of them was a mother who had brought her two young children and stood holding two American flags. "Every single man and woman out there is my son and daughter," she told the journalists. "He could have done a lot with his life. But he gave it to the nation." Two days later came the funeral mass for 25-year-old Marine First Lt. Brian McPhillips of Pembroke, Mass., killed not far from Baghdad. Three Marines died in the firefight at Tuwayhah described by Dallas Morning News embedded reporter Jim Landers. The 2nd Tank Battalion had run into an ambush by a band of Islamic Jihad volunteers--Syrians, Egyptians, Yemenis and others. Lt. McPhillips went down firing his machine gun. The knock that brought the news home in the early hours of April 6 had caused the walls to reverberate, his mother recalled. His father, a Marine veteran of Vietnam, knew at once what the 5:00 a.m. visit meant. They never come because somebody's been wounded: "They want you to know as soon as possible." Neither of the McPhillips was surprised at Brian's choice of a military career. His father had served, his great-uncle had fought at Guadalcanal; and Julie and David McPhillips had been the sort of parents who wanted to imbue their children with a consciousness of history--that of their country's not least. So they took them to places like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg and other national shrines. David McPhillips nevertheless used all his powers of persuasion to keep Brian from enlisting in the Marines right out of high school. Heeding his parents, Brian went off to Providence College, a Catholic institution, where he thrived, compiled an academic record most people considered enviable, his father included, and looked to the future. Shortly after graduation in 2000, it arrived, with the commissioning ceremony that made him an officer in the Marines. He would go to war, his father reported, carrying his rosary and his Bible. At his funeral service at the Holy Family Church in Rockland, where Brian's mother attended daily Mass, David McPhillips recalled his son's generosity and enterprise. Mrs. McPhillips would deliver a eulogy of her own, afterward carried in the local papers, on the subject of her son's life and death. She saw herself, Julie McPhillips said, as one of the fellow Americans for whom he had given his life. It had been her great privilege to be his mother: "To you my dear and faithful son, from earth to heaven I salute you . . . ." As at Cpl. Evnin's funeral, crowds lined the streets. Brian's uncle Paul Finegan pondered the problems getting to the cemetery in Concord--a 150-car cortege traveling 50 miles on the busiest highway in New England. He had, it turned out, nothing to fear: 50 state troopers, many of them coming in from days off, had closed most of the road for them, a stretch of 35 miles. Then came another sight he could scarcely believe. At the side of the road, near their halted cars, stood streams of people, standing at attention--paying their respects. "They stopped all these cars, and people got out to stand holding their hands over their hearts," he marveled. He should not have been surprised. Scenes like this are the reason all the celebrity protesters can stop worrying about public wrath and punishment. Americans have other things on their minds all right. September 11, for one. What they have on their minds, too, since the just-concluded remarkable war, is the consciousness of who they are and what this society is that it should have produced men and women of the kind who fought in that war and died in it. People got a powerfully close look at their fellow Americans in uniform these last weeks. This is what impels them now to stand at roadsides in tribute, heedless of where else they had to go. And this is why strangers flock to funerals.

Good for you and your son.

Aside from being perceived as having "difficult volunteers," how is that council doing? Does it have a successful program or is it floundering. OGE's advice is fundamentally sound. Have a direct conversation with the selection committee and others in the council to ascertain their expectations and goals. You have a great at stake.

We do both, although personally I tend to prefer backpacking or canoe camping. We just had a very successful car camping event, a "pre camporee" where we practiced our skills and trained younger scouts. For that kind of training situation, where you have to have a lot of gear, you can't really backpack. You need your wood and ropes for pioneering, materials for a compass course, first aid stuff, etc etc. IMHO, a healthy well rounded program includes both backpacking and car camping. By the way, we ate very high off the hog too. I am still full and it is getting late Sunday evening.

Free maps!! Yet another subsidy by the government to a "religious" organization. Shocking. Don't talk about this too loudly, Merlyn Leroy may be listening.

KS, Since you are the only person I know of currently on active duty with the military I need to ask you a question. Maps published of the United States by the US Geological Survey are, to my understanding, oriented on True North as it lays in the center of the printed area of the map in question. If I recall correctly the maps the military prints for its own use are oriented on Grid North. Is that correct? For those who may not know what I am talking about, there is a metric grid system using a Universal Transverse Mercator projection that was created for military use back some time in the 50's. More maps printed in the US are showing these grid lines these days and it is a really useful, easy to use, system once you understand it. The system is referred to generically as the UTM grid system.

Isn't St. George usually depicted slaying a dragon? PETA would not approve. After all, dragons have rights too?

How many adults can recall everything they have learned but not practiced or used? These guys were way out of line. Youth who have earned a badge should be expected to be able to provide instruction to younger scouts, but given time to refresh and prepare. Likewise, boards of review are NOT supposed to be retests of knowledge.

I would expect that kind of fluctuation from year to year in Alaska, but not in the lower 48.

G2SS is very clear that the use of liquid fuels for fire starters is prohibited. G2SS is silent on the subject of gel products. Also, G2SS would appear to prohibit the use of liquid fire starters for charcoal. Anyone else have any thoughts on this subject?

I am not an attorney, but from my observation these need to be customized to the laws of the states in which they might be needed. In your case that probably means Florida and New Jersey.

Did you try this website? This appears to provide avenues to many methods for determining the declination for almost any location. http://www.geocities.com/magnetic_declination/#DETERMINE

le V's method clearly will work, but it will only be as accurate as your compass. I am somewhat surprised that your maps had no declination data in the margins. What was the scale of these maps? Were they USGS maps? Did they possibly have a compass rose imprinted somewhere on the map? I am not aware of a web site that gives such information but I am sure such must exist.

I agree with the prior posts on this subject. If a "waiver of liability" is what is being talked about, it is generally worthless and not worth the trouble. The best protection against personal liability is not paper, but proper training and reasonable conduct. "Permission to treat a minor" forms should be on hand for every outing. The form will vary with local law and practice. You should be sure that you know what is required and have those properly executed and available. I am puzzled though by the statement in the original poost that a tour permit was not required by the local council for the activity in question. This has come up in other threads and I get the impression that local councils vary a great deal in their policies regarding when a permit is required and when it is not. I tell all my volunteer colleagues to err on the side of caution and always get a permit. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable on the tour permit question can shed some more light on this.

Probably the most popular event at our camporees has been a wall climbing event. This is the kind of thing you see at team building activities where a group has to go up and over a smooth wall.

Apparently this young man had more friends than one would have guessed. ________________________ More than 1,000 pay respects to immigrant who died a hero By Sandy Kleffman CONTRA COSTA TIMES LOMITA - Jose Antonio Gutierrez spent his early years as an orphan living on the streets of Guatemala. On Monday, more than 1,000 people packed a Southern California church to laud him as an American hero. The quiet, dedicated and fun-loving young man, who came to the United States seeking a better life, became one of the first two Americans to die in combat in the Iraqi war. His extraordinary story, including a 2,000-mile trek through Mexico by train, bus and foot to reach the United States, clearly touched many who never knew him. They filled the pews of St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church for his funeral Mass. Several people saluted as uniformed Marines slowly carried in his flag-draped coffin. Many others dabbed their eyes as the Mass ended and friends and relatives left the church to the tune "I'm Proud to Be an American." Members of the foster family that took Gutierrez in after his arrival in the United States say he joined the Marines out of gratitude. "Here he lived his dream," said foster sister Lillian Cardenas as she sat in front of their home over the weekend. "He wanted to give back to a country that's given him so much." Lance Cpl. Gutierrez died March 21 after he was hit by enemy fire during a battle near the southern Iraqi city of Umm Qasr. He was not yet a U.S. citizen. Also killed in combat that day was 2nd Lt. Therrel S. Childers of Harrison County, Miss. When Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony learned of Gutierrez's story, he contacted Gutierrez's foster family and offered to officiate the funeral Mass. Mahony told the crowd that he faxed a letter to President Bush on Monday morning requesting that all immigrant men and women serving in the Iraqi war be granted immediate citizenship. The United States awarded posthumous citizenship to Gutierrez and another Southern California Marine last week, but Mahony called such efforts inadequate. There are nearly 40,000 noncitizens serving in the U.S. military. "They should not have to wait until they are dead and brought home in a casket to be given the citizenship which they truly deserve," Mahony said to loud applause. He noted that noncitizens take the same risks as anyone else. "They are genuine brothers and sisters," he said. Mahony added that he hopes Gutierrez's story draws attention to "the very special and heroic role played by immigrant people in our country." "We have many men and women who come here seeking something better and they come with a generosity of heart, like Jose Antonio, in giving themselves to help make our country better," he said. Gutierrez became a homeless orphan at age 8 after his father's death. His mother died earlier. That left Gutierrez and his older sister, Engracia, to fend for themselves. In the mid-1980s, he entered a program in Guatemala run by Covenant House, an international organization that provides shelter and counseling for street kids. He left Guatemala with a buddy in the 1990s to make the long trip to the United States. They hitchhiked and hopped as many as 14 freight trains, Cardenas said. There are conflicting reports about Gutierrez's age at the time he left Guatemala. When U.S. immigration officials detained him in 1997, he told authorities he was 16 and without parents. That cleared the way for him to become a dependent of Los Angeles County and receive permanent residency. The Los Angeles Times reported last week, however, that Gutierrez was 22 at the time, based on a copy of his birth certificate obtained from his hometown in Guatemala. That would have made him 28 at the time of his death. Family members continue to insist, however, that he was 22 at the time of his death. Officials here eventually placed Gutierrez in the foster home of Marcelo and Nora Mosquera, immigrants themselves who had begun to take in a number of foster children after their own were grown. He learned English, graduated from high school, briefly attended a junior college where he played on the soccer team, and dreamed of becoming an architect. Then he decided to join the Marines. "He yearned for a sense of family, career and belonging in the United States," said Cardenas, reading from a statement prepared by the family. "Here in America and in our family, he found both. He joined the Marine Corps to defend the freedoms that were so important to him as a resident of the United States." Nora Mosquera said after the funeral that she was overwhelmed by the support from the community. His sister, Engracia, flew to the United States to attend the Mass. The Mosquera family said they will make efforts to enable her to remain in the United States. The family will honor Gutierrez's wishes, however, and bury him near his parents in Guatemala. Some of the Marines who were in boot camp with him said they had no idea of his past until they read newspaper accounts after his death. "It wasn't something that he flaunted," said Lance Cpl. James Boone. "On the personal side, he just enjoyed living. He didn't let all the things that had happened to him in the past affect his day-to-day life. He was fun-loving and enjoyed life. But at the same time, he knew as well as all of us do the risk involved with joining the Marines." Father John O'Byrne of St. Catherine Laboure Catholic Church in Torrance, called Gutierrez "just a fabulous young man. "He said somebody has to go there and make a better life for the women and children of Iraq," O'Byrne said.

Our troop subsidizes summer camp for all boys who go. The amount varies from year to year. Except for a particular annual event, all our other outings are self supporting.