Oak Tree

Neil, Right. I can appreciate that there are some individuals in government offices who have a customer focus, and I'm sure that a number of agencies have conflicting goals (e.g., keep taxpayers happy but collect all the taxes). However, the thing about government that bothers me most is the lack of competition that drives any change in behavior. I'd like to see the government open two DMV offices, one run by private enterprise and one by the government. Maybe even use the same examiners. I'd like to see the private one offer longer hours, guaranteed time slot reservation (for a fee, even), and whatever other service innovations they could come up with. Give them both the same base funding, and let the private one charge more for things if they want. I bet they could draw most people away from the government DMV. Same thing with the post office. Let FedEx and UPS deliver mail and use the mailbox. Because they can't lose customers very easily, most agencies just have no incentive to improve all these little things. So the employees don't either. I've had government people look at me strangely when I asked them if they ever worked more than 40 hours per week. And yet people in private businesses do it all the time. Our state parks lock their gates at 6pm now (in the winter). That's dang frustrating. Can I pay extra to get a key? To arrive late? Any way I can get into the park after 6:00pm? Well, maybe, if I ask the ranger nicely, and he's a nice guy, but he has no real incentive from a career perspective to do so. So I accept it might be a challenge to politely uphold standards - but the lack of incentive to be more efficient and more responsive can be maddening.

I think I'm going to have to side with Neil on this one. Any good customer-serving business will try to provide services when they are most valuable. Since Neil has observed when people mostly attend meetings, it seems entirely reasonable to schedule the meetings when the most people do attend. (As an aside - government agencies aren't focused on customer-serving - it just amazes me at how unresponsive they are to consumer demands.)

Various marketing activities - being featured in Boys' Life, or various other places - can require the uniform. Our summer camp requires the full uniform if you want to participate in the flag ceremony. NAYLE does require it, I think, Beav. "As a NAYLE Participant, I will: [...] -Wear my full, official BSA Field Uniform or proper clothing as required" I can imagine any number of specific instances where you might be required to wear your uniform in order to participate in some specific activity - "report to the governor", or local town flag-raising, or teaching a class on Scouting, or whatever. That's not the BSA making some general rule - just local people using their discretion to keep things at the appropriate level.

"At present, the knots devices are: Cub Scout, Webelos Scout, Boy Scout, Venturing, Sea Scouts, Varsity Scout, Commissioner, and District." As Eagle92 referenced, there are more. There are also two devices that can be attached to the James West knot. The 1910 Society ($25,000) and the Founders Circle ($100,000 via will/trust/life insurance). http://usscouts.org/awards/jameswest.asp#1910 Philmont Training Center has a device that goes on the PTC Masters Track knot. http://usscouts.org/awards/Philmont.asp You can also wear Eagle palm devices on the Eagle knot. There are bronze, gold, and silver palm devices. There is a crossed palm device that goes on the honor medal. I don't see an indication that it can also be worn on the knot, but I'd say if you've earned it for medal wear, it would be appropriate to wear it on the knot too. The Distinguished Eagle Scout award comes with a small Eagle device to pin on the Eagle knot. (for some of those I can only find semi-official evidence...if any of it looks wrong to you, please correct me.) emb021 correctly identified the seventh knot that I was referring to (Venturing Leadership). I suspect that some of the knots may not specifically be restricted to adults, but are just defined in a way that makes them virtually adult-only. However, I could imagine that an older Boy Scout could work really hard to get a pack started and qualify for a new unit organizer knot, and I'd guess that a Venturing "youth" could qualify for even more. Interesting facts: The religious awards do not correspond precisely to the age groupings in Boy Scouts. So a Catholic youth, it appears, could earn Light of Christ in grades 1-2 and wear a Cub Scout device, and then earn Parvuli Dei as a second level award and wear the Webelos device while in grade 3. The Churches of Christ second level award can be earned in grades 4-6, so apparently a Boy Scout in sixth grade could earn the Webelos device. Older Boy Scouts are able to earn the Venturing device, even if they aren't Venturers. If you only earned one religious award, then wearing a device is not needed. Devices are meant to signify more than one award. This is certainly the traditional usage, and it is the only way to signify that you've earned an award in multiple programs (you can't wear multiple of the same knot). However, you can certainly wear one device on a knot if you want. From the Insignia Guide: "[devices] are worn on the knot to designate the phase(s) of the program in which the award or key was earned." Since the plural "phase(s)" is optional, the device can designate a single phase. And yes, roughly $2.99 each.

There are various places in Scout literature that explain that you should file a tour permit and why that is the case. In none of those places that I've ever seen is the word insurance mentioned. Our council will routinely approve tour permits on the spot. Our normal policy is to fax it in, then call the office and ask them for the approval number. They always give it. I don't know that they even glance at them. They appear to feel that the purpose is to give the unit leaders a checklist to go down, and that's how we treat it too. But it definitely doesn't take any time to get them approved. We've offered the opportunity, even scheduled "patrol outings", but I don't think we've ever had a patrol go on an overnight trip without adults. I'd be happy to have them do it, but I don't know that all the parents would be, and it seems like there are always some parents who are happy to go. I concur that a national forest would offer great opportunities in this regard.

The first time I heard "fail" used as a noun, I believe it was from kids. As for who decides these things, the answer is "no one" and "everyone".

I had three ACMs for most of my time as Cubmaster. I wouldn't think of doing the CM job again without that kind of help. Worked out great. Just try to give each one some clearly defined role.

This particular phrase in the guidelines allows for a bit of parsing - "Scouters should neither seek awards designed for youth members nor wear them on the Scouter uniform". There are a number of awards that can be earned by either a youth or an adult. As such, those awards are not really "designed for youth members", but rather are designed for everyone. The historic trails award, the jamboree patch, and many knots fall into this category, for example. The guide specifically lists the five knots that can *only* be earned by youth, but there are roughly seven other knots that can be earned by either youth or adults. No merit badges, no ranks. Otherwise, I'd say that anything that could be earned as an adult could be worn by an adult, regardless of his age when he earned it.

Brent, Thanks for the tip on un-archiving. Just tried it and it works. It's not ideal from my perspective, but it's good to have. I'd like to be able to look at these Scouts in the archive and see what they attended, and I'd like to be able to see what our event attendance was for events in the past without having to un-archive all of the Scouts who were in the troop at that time. But the information is there, which is more than I knew before. Thanks! As for attendance varying throughout the year, I checked. We've had nine Scouts join our troop this year at some time other than crossover, mostly arriving one at a time in all different months. We had 16 join at crossover (I'm not sure how many we dropped.) We've had three Scouts move away, one Scout age out, and we've had five Scouts tell us they have dropped out - although we won't officially drop them until recharter time. For purposes of calculating percentage attendance, we've been told not to count those who have dropped out. I believe that our number of Scouts eligible to attend a camping trip has changed every month this year. So the new system will certainly be easier for us.

TroopMaster

I've asked this question at some of our leader training sessions. The majority answer I received is that the boys are in Scouts because they like the chance to hang out with their friends while getting a chance to participate in some cool activities. I try to remember that when we discuss how disciplined, how organized, how much advancement we want to do. We work all that in, because just "hanging out" with no purpose quickly goes astray, but I also don't try to push too hard to make sure they all get Eagle, or drill them repeatedly on Scout skills, or worry about having some idle time in the schedule. So far it's worked amazingly well for us. We've had more word of mouth recruiting than I would have ever imagined. We have around 25-30 Scouts on our current roster that joined our troop from somewhere other our feeder pack. Maybe half of those are boys who had not been in Scouting before they joined us.

The number of knots that will fit on a uniform varies dramatically with the size of the uniform, the particular style, and the number of other badges one wishes to wear in that space. In addition to the world crest, the centennial ring also takes up space here, as do the service stars. Even on an extra-large shirt, this can significantly limit the number of knots that can be worn unless you move the world crest up. If you have a shirt that has ten inches or a bit less from the pocket seam to the shoulder seam (my XXL shirts range from 9" to 10"), and you wear a World Crest vertically centered, with no ring or stars, you can fit four rows of knots. If you add in the ring (takes about 3/8" on bottom) and stars (take about 1" = 5/8" star + 3/8" space over knot), you can only fit two rows of knots on any shirt with less than 9.5" from seam to seam. So some of my XXL shirts would take two rows, some would take three, given that I wear the knots and the ring. In practicality, though, I've moved the World Crest up to accommodate a fourth row of knots. A good sized Webelos Scout barely has room to correctly wear the WC, the ring, the star, and the knot. A smaller Cub Scout could not "correctly" wear all of those, but I wouldn't tell him that.

Eagle732, You don't need to send someone to NYLT to be a gold unit. My unit has sent someone one time, I think, but it looks to me like we would qualify for gold every year even without that. I can't see how it's wrong to encourage NYLT. If we don't want to encourage it, we shouldn't put it on. Brent - one of the problems with TroopMaster is that when you archive someone, you lose the history of the events that they have attended. I agree, with 14 Scouts it isn't bad (but even then, membership can vary from month to month as two Scouts leave at various times and two new Scouts join in different months.) It was a real pain trying to calculate monthly attendance percentage for every event for the past year, even with TroopMaster. Find all the archived Scouts and review their records on which trips they attended (assuming you saved that list). Create a history of how many Scouts were in the troop each month. Make sure all your leaders have entered attendance for all the events that they led. Etc. Now - if it's just a question of who attended summer camp and how many Scouts we had at that point in time, that's not so bad. Even easier for the smaller troop.

My initial reaction to these goals is that they are pretty good. The old idea of setting your own goals was useful for making progress, but was pretty useless as telling you anything that would let you compare one troop with another. I like the more balanced requirements - adding in camping, service projects, etc. I really like doing this measurement at recharter time. The old system produced some very strange calculations. Here are some specific comments: 1. Advancement - This is a reasonable requirement, although it gives more benefit to younger troops that have lots more Scouts working their way up to First Class. More experienced units can still meet it, though. It is odd that you take total rank advancements and divide by the number of Scouts, and this is acknowledged in the comments. I believe Eagle palms should be on the list - otherwise having Eagles in your troop is a detriment to this measure. 2. Retention - The definition here makes sense. It does penalize units that have Scouts that move away. Not a huge deal for us - maybe 5% of our Scouts move away in a given year. But some of the military bases near us have troops where I'm sure the percentage is more like 25%. It seems like you could also remove those from the potential recharters. 3. Building Boy Scouting - at some point, we get big enough that we don't want to get any bigger. Those troops can't earn more than Bronze here. Maybe that's ok. A big, strong troop is probably earning enough points elsewhere. 4. "hold youth officer elections and installation before November 15." That's a very strange requirement. Most units hold elections twice a year, at all different schedules. 6. Calculating the exact percentage can be a bit of a pain, because it's not easy to immediately identify how many Scouts were registered at that time. But it's easier than the old system which required you to calculate the percentage attending events throughout the year. 10. For item 10, what's the deal with May 31? Does that presume that there is some particular budget year? If we do our budget based on a calendar year, does that mean we have to have 2012's budget in place by May 31, 2011? Very strange. Also, the requirement states that you need a budget "that follows BSA policies." It would be useful to list any specific requirements that are needed for this award. One odd thing is the timing. I'd like to be able to earn the 2011 award in 2011, and wear it for most of 2011. But we have to wait until 2012 before we can wear the 2011 patch. It always feels a bit out of date. Still, I can live with it - but that would be my number one request. Let's just skip the 2011 patch and go straight to 2012. My unit recharters in February, if that matters. Eagle732 has some reasonable suggestions for new requirements, but there are always more things you could add. I don't think that any of these would be necessary - a good program should result in good retention, for example. So overall, I say that this is an improvement over the previous program. It's more sensical, it provides different levels of achievement, and it's easier to calculate. Thanks for your work on this, Neil. Fun to hear your voice on the webinar, too.

In some states its a crime to simply have someone elses medication in your posession unless you are the parent. Really? Can you point me to an actual reference on this? I don't know it to be wrong, but there just seem to be so many situations where you might want someone other than a parent to hold on to someone's medication, that I find it hard to believe.

We do ours four times a year, at the beginning of March, June, September, and December. I view it as a chance to build support among the parents by giving them a chance to be proud of their son's accomplishments.

How would this change anything? If your statement still outlaws homosexual behavior, groups will still very much object to it. I don't think it buys you anything in terms of good will. You would now welcome people who openly said they were non-practicing homosexuals. Is there a large pool of those people to draw from? I don't think you would actually see benefits 1, 2, or 4, and I don't see how 3 is a change or a benefit. I think that such an open "Declaration of Family Values" would accelerate the perception of Scouting being a right-wing organization. There is inevitably going to have to be a local option.

So how do you protect yourself and gear from becoming infested?????? Don't camp in cabins.

From the G2SS: "Pointing any type of firearm or simulated firearm at any individual is unauthorized." My interpretation of this is that they are talking solely about devices like paintball guns and laser guns, where the device is actually intended to resemble (simulate) a firearm. I don't believe this refers to sticks or fingers or completely pretend weapons. Later in the paragraph the G2SS states: "The use of paintball guns, laser guns or similar devices may be utilized in target shooting" - again emphasizing the type of simulated weapons that they are talking about.

Hard to imagine how I could agree more.

I agree that troops are all over the place on this, and there is no "right" answer, nor is there something a troop "should" do, but different styles will work for different troops. What we do: Annual registration fees - troop covers these for adults cost of facilities on campouts - youth and adults each pay their share cost of food - adults pay for their food cost of gas - this gets split among the Scouts training fees - covered by the troop Are the rules for summer camp the same as weekend campouts? - the camp itself offers a couple of free adults and the rest pay a discounted fee, about equal to the cost of food for the week. We have varied on whether we want to pay for the adults' summer camp fees. What about Assistant Scoutmasters? Other adults attending campouts? - all treated the same on weekend campouts. Sometimes summer camp will vary.

Scoutfish - that's how it's supposed to be! Fun! Good work.

We camp every month. Sometimes we'll even have an extra event. We probably offer 15-16 outings per year on average.

Gary: We sure would not like the boys to have us time, where they can bond, stay up all night tell stories and Jokes, make lots of noise, or just have some fun playing games. Its all a matter of knowing your YM and trusting them to make good choices on their own. Well, I have an award for people who put things in other people's mouths. All I did was relate my experience, but hey, feel free to mock me all you want. Do you always trust all of your young men to make good choices in all situations? Never have to ask any of your Scouts to quiet down when other Scouts are trying to get to sleep? Ok, good for you. The two-man tents do work great for backpacking, canoe camping, car camping, and essentially, all of our activities. Then we let our young men have all kinds of time to bond, tell stories and jokes, makes noise, and play games. God forbid they do it somewhere other than their tents.

We found that larger tents tended to collect Scouts in them, kept them up longer, made more noise, and allowed for more secretive activities (what kind of card game are you playing in there?) Hence, we do all two-man tents with two zippers and two vestibules. Works great for us.