Bando

Your points are well taken. My point is there's a difference between pointing out where ProScouter may be looking at this the wrong way and/or getting him to think outside the box in terms of the questions he will be asked and the expectations of the job, and flat-out asking "are you a good liar? Can you steal and get away with it?" These things aren't advice or helpful nudging. They're thinly-veiled attempts at venting circumstantial issues with problem DE's in order to scare him or discourage him from the job. It's helpful for him to know where the council interviewer may be leading him down the wrong path, but it's not helpful to project on him all the problems we may have had in our necks of the woods and give him the impression he's going to get stomped on by angry volunteers at every juncture. Yes, we should demand the best out of our Pros. Do we always get it? Absolutely not. But it seems to me a lot of folks come out guns-blazing, ready to shoot down a young DE just because the last one didn't work out, and the poor guy or gal doesn't even stand a chance. That's what I see in BD's post, not the kinds of substantive questions and issues you bring up, qwazse.

Just heap on the negativity. It's obvious this person is really enthusiastic about being a professional for all of the right reasons, and you're piling on all of your personal, anecdotal issues with various aspects of professional scouting as if it's the norm as if you're going to scare him straight. Are there some bad professionals out there? Sure. But there's a lot more who work this pretty thankless job with long hours and (ridiculously) low pay, helping facilitate programs our scouts use on a daily basis, and love to do it for all the same reasons we love the BSA. Why be so cynical?

"If I take this position, I fully expect to stay with it and remain within my area" It's my impression, and this was told to me straight-up when I interviewed for a DE position, is that the BSA discourages this. The idea is you spend a few years in one council, and then you'll be sent somewhere else. That may not be the case now, it's been about three or four years, but it was pretty clearly stated if I were to get the job that I would expect to move on somewhere else after a few years.

The lower-level pros do indeed get grilled on the numbers game, and it seems the likely scenario that this DE was trying to save face and not have to report a lost unit. So the DE tries to resurrect the unit, maybe has problems finding SM/ASM/etc., maybe has to find a new CO for the unit, can't get funds together or enthusiasm up for it, lets it simmer, and all of the sudden it's Fall. Good on him for being proactive and trying to save the unit, but sounds like he failed on execution. One also has to wonder why the folks who signed up weren't just as proactive to figure out why the unit didn't get off the ground, either. If it was the end of August and this is the end of October, what happened in the two months since? I guess it's easier to just assume the worst and blame the usually-underpaid and overworked DE, but there are a number of ways this could go down. And the blame isn't solely on the DE. It's unfortunate, but it happens.

I saw a kid at Jamboree that National was honoring one morning at the flag raising who had earned every single merit badge. Kid had a homemade, double-wide merit badge sash filled front and back. I think it was five or six badges across in each row. Personally, I would have gone the cape route.

LOL Stosh, indeed. That early morning mean streak was my trademark as troop bugler.

I'll join the choir and say that having been to Philmont in June-early July, I'd say you can always sleep on top of your 20-degree bag. Options are better than being cold for ten nights. As for the pack, you'll see and hear some pretty crazy stuff about how much space you really need for Philmont, how much gear you really need, weight (that insane guy who saws off the handle of his toothbrush, etc.), but the answer is always how much space you think you need for your personal gear, with plenty of space for crew gear. Use the shakedown hikes to figure this out, and know that when you get to base camp, your guides will be pitching stuff out of your pack left and right. You never realize just how little you really need out there.

Our troop did a trip out to Yellowstone many years back and stayed over at Camp Loll, which was a camp for one of the Idaho councils. Breathtaking camp at the bottom of about two miles of switchback roads (perfect for trailers!). Worked really well as a last stop base camp before we headed into the park. That's a great idea to involve the whole troop, Stosh.

We took a couple of guys along on a trip I went on as a scout. They had met some of our guys on a council-wide Philmont crew, and when we needed a couple extra guys, they were invited to come along. We ended up having a great time, and it couldn't have gone better. One of them ended up coming to our troop for help with his Eagle project because his troop was having some problems, and a lot of our guys went to both of their ECOHs, if memory serves. We all became friends. Ultimately, it was a win for everyone.

What I really don't get are the socks that don't even make it to the top of their shoes. You see a kid walking around looking like he's not wearing socks with his uniform, ask him about it, and he has to pretty much surgically extract a pinchful of sock up over the top of the shoe to prove he is. We're a long way from knee socks...

Honestly, I don't see the big deal. Sure, just like anything else in Scouting, there are Wood Badgers who love talking about Wood Badge. But it seems to me that's a lot more about individual personality conflicts than issues with the Wood Badge program itself. Nearly all of the leaders I know who have done it are better for it, and the difference you see in them before and after is pretty dramatic. But, hey, what do I know? I guess it's a lot easier to see the worst in people.

I seem to remember having cookies at the end of pack meetings when I was a Cub, and maybe there was a box of Oreos or something that went around the table at our den meetings, but it was never a big deal. Honestly, don't see much harm in it.

What's wrong with Wood Badge-trained adults?

Well, my approach to scouting is to find ways to keep kids in the program, even if it means it might be inconvenient or difficult. I'd rather have a difficult time finding a way to help a kid who has problems than put it off on someone else and kick the can down the street. I'm sorry you're having this problem, but from my perspective, you might want to try to use scouting for positive, not punitive ends, and see what happens from there. There are ways of helping this boy within scouting without sending him packing. Either you or another leader (maybe both, to ensure two-deep) could volunteer to meet with him isolated from a troop situation for a while and work on a merit badge or scoutcraft skill. Use that as a teaching moment and opportunity to help him better interact with others. It might be all he needs is to know someone actually cares about him enough to take an interest. You don't know why he's being violent, or what other issues there may be under the surface. It could be all he needs is a little boost and/or attention. Maybe if he has a buddy in the troop, you could partner them up as a kind of accountability-buddy situation while he's working his way back to the full troop setting. The keys here are controlled contact and expressed concern, with reasonable expectations for behavioral modification. Stay positive, but firm, set out your expectations, and be persistent. If he doesn't want to be a part of it, let him make that decision on his own instead of you or the troop committee making that decision for him. Give him incentives to want to be better, and hold him to your expectations. These are kids. Their habits and personalities are not etched in stone. We can either take the opportunity to be part of the solution in helping a kid who isn't making good choices and decisions, or we can get quick on the trigger to point fingers, make hasty judgments, or bail altogether. I err towards the former. If you err towards the latter, that's your choice, but it strikes me as the easy way out. I had scouting buddies along the way who had both approaches applied to them by different scout leaders. Fifteen years down the road, having kept tabs on a lot of them, the ones who had an adult who took an active interest and used the troop framework to make a goodwill effort to help them through their problems made it a heck of a lot farther than the guys who were sent packing. As adults, we're not here for the easy scouts, but to help the difficult ones up the trail, right? Call it altruistic, but I've seen it work over and over and over again. Scouting is designed to help boys develop leadership skills and become better people in a world that often presents them with adversity. So shouldn't we be trying to find ways not only to nurture those ideals, but also exhibit them ourselves?

Bravo! Instead of thinking about all the ways we can try to kick a kid out of our troops, we should think about what kinds of opportunities keeping them in the program will give them in the long run. Seems to me there's a lot of folks around here just looking for ways to eliminate problems in their troops by kicking the can down the street, instead of taking an active role in helping kids grow up and take responsibility for their actions within a structured environment equipped to help them grow. Sometimes it's hard work, but isn't it worth trying to keep a kid in the program instead of making him deal with his problems without a nurturing environment like a scout troop?

Beneficiaries don't always say no to a project they know they don't want or need. Had a buddy in my troop whose project was building a little park with benches and permanent barbecues next to a local school. They said yes to the project, thanked him up and down, it looked great, and they enjoyed the park for the less-than-a-year they knew they would have it before it was bulldozed for a long-planned building addition. Never told him a thing. All that time we spent pouring concrete for nothing...

E92, well of course we all had individual experiences in our trails to Eagle that weren't conventional. That's the nature of the beast. What I'm saying is beyond local circumstance and personal experience, the paperwork, regulations, and restrictions the BSA continues to build into the Eagle advancement process is far and away more complicated now than it was even ten years ago. We all had snafus and problems along the way, but the complexity now considered the basic expectation from Nationals (and their increasingly confusing, mixed messages about how changes are to be implemented) only amplifies these kinds of things. Having worked with a lot of scouts who were trying to get from Life to Eagle, sat on a few dozen EBORs in the last five or so years, and seen firsthand the kinds of changes being made, it's a testament to the kinds of well-trained and patient leaders we have in our neck of the woods (at the troop, district, and council levels alike) that things still find a way to go smoothly most of the time. The BSA isn't making it any easier, as usual.

If clearly articulating a point using a proper amount of punctuation, clear grammar, and a viewpoint that isn't constantly trying to find fault with everything is arrogant, well, I don't know what to tell you.

The "when I got Eagle" thing just doesn't apply here. I finished in 2001, and the kinds of hoops the scouts are expected to jump through now are nowhere near what I had to do. Even with the newly streamlined paperwork, it's a new world out there. The SM simply isn't the point man in all cases in most troops I've encountered along the trail.

And the funny thing is that the Music MB is one that a kid can knock out in about an afternoon (or less) if he's involved in a school music program or has any modicum of musical inclination.

The two best scouts I've known, two brothers, were the same way. One got to Star, the other got to Life. Couldn't get them interested in going any farther, and it was a miracle they got as far as they did. They were better campers than anyone, better hikers, spent their weekends building bikes and fixing kayaks... And they found advancement got in the way of doing the things Scouting gave them opportunities to do. They loved going outdoors with their buddies, and loved doing things like Philmont and Northern Tier. The older one was the best SPL we ever had. It drove the adults absolutely bonkers that they both just stopped advancing, but I'd argue they got more out of the program than any of us did. It's not what you earn, but what you use from the training Scouting gives you.

Not sure why it matters, but in a troop of about 120+ very motivated and impressively high-achieving kids (we are and always have been a big troop, even when we spun off new units to try to bring numbers down), we get about 5-8 per year, I'd say. Sometimes more, but usually never less than that. Most guys finish between ages 15-17. We'll have a group of about 25-30 new scouts every year, and by the time they graduate, there will be about a dozen or so left. And it's amazing how the seniors, on their own accord, go out of their way to motivate their buddies to finish their Eagle. We're a town with a very strong scouting tradition going back to the 1920s, and there's no shortage of great opportunities for projects with local organizations and agencies that absolutely love working with our kids. It's really a great thing. And RememberSchiff, that's definitely something our scouts learn from the process. But the BSA always doesn't make it easy for them to do so, especially when there are district and council egos that can get in the way, or project agency contacts that drop the ball or do something screwy along the way. The Eagle Coordinator isn't a crutch, but a last line of defense (and occasional advocate) to make sure the scout's efforts towards fulfilling the process are successful. He hands the scout the all-important BSA packet, gives him some pointers on the basics of how it works and the right order of doing things in terms of what needs approval and what doesn't, and it's the scout's job to follow up periodically with his progress. The kids usually find a project that interests them, though if they need some guidance or a good contact or two to pursue, they'll ask, and they'll get it. Especially if the troop has been contacted by an agency with a specific need (for instance, when the local food bank we often work with was in crisis mode and desperately needed a food drive so they wouldn't have to close their doors to needy families). If scouts need help along the way, they'll ask, and they'll get it. If a kid gets a packet and disappears for six months (which sometimes happens with kids who are playing sports, doing other activities, etc.), he might get a phone call asking if everything is OK. And if there's a problem, it often gets caught early enough to not waste both the scout's and the council's time. A little vigilance on both parties' parts can go a very long way, especially with the way the Eagle process is now constituted. In sum, the scout does the work, but the adults are there to help him along the way if he needs it. Emphasis on needs. Some kids are total self-starters, while some guys need a little prodding along the way. In this age group, that's normal. Not all scouts are created equal, and holding them all to the same standard of rugged individualism isn't always fair or useful. It's the Eagle Coordinator's job to know the difference, and to know how to best handle each situation. After all, we want our scouts to be successful, right?

Exactly. I'd say about 75% of what my troop's Eagle Coordinator does is expediting paperwork back and forth from the council, navigating approval processes, and meticulously going over every little part of that packet to make sure the kid did things correctly so it doesn't get bogged down or rejected once it gets to the outside folks. It's better that these things are done correctly, and the process as it exists today makes it very hard for a teenager to do that without some difficulty. It's more streamlined than it used to be, but it still leaves many opportunities for snags and hitches. There's nothing in the Eagle requirements that says a scout can't or shouldn't get help from an adult. We're not there to do everything for them, but we're not there to sit on our hands and watch them screw up and waste their time just to teach some twisted life lesson. If they ask, and they often do, we help.

If only the world was an ideal place, the kind of place where kids carefully read a confusing pamphlet, where adults used one period instead of thirteen, and the difference between "your" and "you're" was easily understood.

It's not as much chasing after their progress as making sure they're doing things correctly and safely. For the number of Eagle candidates I've seen just go ahead and do a project without going through the proper approval process, then get ticked because they have to do another project, or who messed up the complicated paperwork because they didn't read through things carefully enough, it seems to me having an adult look things over and explain the process is an important, if not mandatory part of becoming an Eagle Scout in 2013. Having someone in your troop with contacts at the council to sort out any paperwork snafus, who has read and worked with the material over and over and over again, and knows the best ways to navigate that horribly convoluted Eagle packet, is an invaluable thing for your scouts. "Hard lessons" are great and all, but the "back in the day" Eagle process no longer exists. There's no need to throw teenagers to the wolves for paperwork, technicalities, and BSA "cover-our-ass" legalities.