Oak Tree

I agree with Torveaux's suggestion that boys can get burned out on knots. As madkins pointed out in another thread, Cub Scouts can get burned out on birdhouses, too. But I don't think the solution is to artificially restrict what the cubs do. It would be to have the Boy Scouts do things above and beyond what the pack does. I've had people in the troop suggest that we not do some things in Cub Scouts, but let them wait until they're Boy Scouts. My response is just like the song says, you can't ever have too much fun!!! I should be able to say, "If you're having fun now, wait 'til you see what the Boy Scouts do!" Heck, I'd be a fan of letting the younger dens camp as dens. But you do need to keep the program varied. Oak Tree

Trevorum, I'll lend you some moral support. I grew up and was a Scout in a district that had the list. It was a handy thing to have. But it was a reasonably small town, so we knew lots of the people by reputation, and it was natural to depend on one another. I'm now in a much bigger district that runs the same way yours does. All the units maintain their own merit badge counselors. And it's not that hard - I don't think we've yet had a Scout ask for a merit badge that some parent wouldn't counsel. They might not be getting the benefit of having a real expert in the area, but you don't need to be an expert for most of the badges. So I've considered the question of how you'd get a district to switch. Or conversely, how did it get to be this way in the first place? I suspect that in our large, suburban district, most people wouldn't know any of the other counselors on the list. They'd tend to gravitate to the parents from their own troop. Parents who agree to be counselors would want to serve their own unit first. They're generally in Scouting just because of their son, not because they just wanted to give back. And maybe nobody really wanted to maintain the district list. Could be a bit of work. And if it turns out to be work that no one appreciates or uses all that much, then people will find other ways to volunteer. But I'd start by asking around your district and seeing what you can find out. Could be educational for some of the rest of us, too. Oak Tree

Madkins, You're right, it's an interesting thought experiment to consider what changes to the program might be beneficial to the leaky pipeline. And National is surely considering this question, as they seem to constantly make adjustments, small or large, to the program. From the three leaky spots identified by Bob, I'd suggest that the second-year Webelos program would be the easy one to change. If the program is set up in a way that frequently has the effect of having dens be bored with the program, go ahead and change it. But I think you're inevitably going to have leakage around transitions. Every group does. Oak Tree

There's a well-known article and book on this topic, Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam. You can see the article, or search for the book on Amazon. He suggests that there are a number of potential causes for this societal effect, including technological transformation of leisure time, mobility, higher divorce rates, movement of women into the labor force, and so on. One of my personal hypotheses is that technology has made everyone more independent. As people experience less need for others to help them, they feel less inclined to volunteer themselves. Oak Tree

Our local schools do a deal with a pizza place, where for every pizza you buy on certain nights, they donate money to the school. Sounds like the same idea, except about three orders of magnitude bigger. I think our COR could figure out a way to deal with a ton of unexpected donations. But still, I don't think I'll be doing this. Can anyone explain why this somehow feels less wholesome than the pizza deal? I too am impressed by how on-topic the spam has become. Google doesn't know about Brian Kiplinger, and I see no web site in the post, so it's not even clear how one would take advantage of this "opportunity" if one wanted to. I'll bet our troop could find ways to use up $150,000. My son would have no shortage of suggestions of trips to take. Plus the Scout Gymnasium. Oak Tree

Kahuna, I agree with you that there is a certain faction that wants to see things run very explicitly along BSA lines. But it's hard to imagine how a forum like this one wouldn't have such a contingent. It's a national forum on Scouting, so I'd expect many participants to believe in doing things the BSA way. I do grow a little weary of the comment that people "may be doing some youth program, but it isn't Scouting", when it obviously is Scouting. I'll take you one further. I don't think the G2SS is a religion, either. It changes all the time, and disagreeing with it isn't immoral. We've already had the discussion about whether it's essential to follow all of the rules all of the time. But no one got banned from the forums for arguing that they didn't need to do so, and freedom of expression was pretty well preserved. Juris is another case entirely. Oak Tree

I'm with Trevorum on this one. It's odd to see the teaser topics on the right for what look like good, juicy discussions, only to have it turn out the topics are for the moderators only. Oak Tree

Gardener, I should have also said, welcome to the forums. We're glad you're here. I didn't mean to come across with a troubling tone. I was just trying to suggest a general rule for dealing with these situations, which is to read the words in the plain way they're written. There seem to be a lot of questions from people who try to find other interpretations. I now realize you are not one of those, so my apologies. Oak Tree

The official line does appear to be "75 Years of Fun, Family, and Friends", but I also doubt that anyone's going to complain if you claim that it's an adventure, too. In the pack materials that support the 75th Anniversary celebration, there's a chronology. At the end of the chronology (page 4), it says: 2005 Cub Scouting celebrates 75th Anniversary, "75 Years of Fun, Family, and Friends." It probably occurs elsewhere, but that was the only place I saw it in a quick overview of the material. A google search on this phrase also finds a number of sites using it: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2275+Years+of+Fun%2C+Family%2C+and+Friends%22 and no site is using the tagline with "Adventure". Oak Tree

I'm trying to imagine how this lesson actually went. "Let's say you're lost and hungry out in the wilderness. You know you need to eat to survive. One thing to do is to look around for a chicken nest. Once you find the home of these wild food-on-two-legs walking dinners, you'll need to catch it and kill it. But for now, let's skip ahead and pretend that you've managed to become lost while still possessing a wire cage and you've managed to entice a fearsome chicken to trap itself inside. We'll move right to the next step where you kill the animal." How much sense does this possibly make? It sounds like some odd combination of hunting (kill a deer and eat it - that's pretty much legal in the U.S.) and farming (raise and kill a chicken and eat it - also, pretty much legal in the U.S.) Oak Tree

The requirement seems pretty clearly written. The boy who is getting the badge should be able to say that he cooked a trail meal for his patrol. It doesn't say "help cook" or "cook a part of a meal". So I'd think that if six boys get the badge, there should be six meals cooked. I understand that people want to help their Scouts get the awards, but take a step back and think about whether stretching the requirements is really the way to go. If you're the counselor, you can interpret the requirements yourself, naturally. Oak Tree

I certainly do take it on faith that my sons are better off for participating in Scouting. But that report doesn't really give strong evidence. Certainly it shows that people say that the Scouting experience is good, but if a similar study had asked them about school, maybe it would have had the same result. Or sports teams. Or church. Still, the report is a good reminder of some of what people find valuable about Scouting. Oak Tree

"It's not the program, it's the adults." But it may be that if the great majority of adults aren't following the program, there just might be some reason for that. But that would seem to lead back to the Loosey-Goosey thread. Oak Tree

I'd be interested in seeing some of the numbers broken down into categories. Of course, given that we can't trust the top level numbers, it's mostly just a wish, but I'll hypothesize anyway. First, the basic premise... John Leo had a column in US News & World Report sometime back about how organizations are tending to become either liberal or conservative. The column wasn't about Scouting, but talked about groups like the NEA, and how they end up taking liberal positions that have nothing to do with teaching. Many national churches have experienced this, and have split at the national level into conservative and liberal wings. In the case of churches, the liberal branch is what is often called "mainstream Protestantism". And even though there are obviously conservative teachers, and conservative Episcopals, and liberal Baptists, those people don't make up the majority and don't seem to have much influence on setting policy in their organizations. The interesting thing in the church growth area is that the liberal, mainstream churches are pretty much all shrinking. You might think that the more open, tolerant attitude would attract more people, but it actually appears that the more demanding denominations, the ones that are more likely to say "X is wrong", are the ones that are growing. Boy Scouting has clearly chosen the more conservative side of the equation. So my hypothesis would be that Scouting is probably doing all right, numerically, where the chartering orgs are chuches, and particularly conservative denominations. But I'd guess that sponsorship among more liberal organizations (let's say PTO's/schools, for example) would be coming down. Our district units are now overwhelmingly chartered by churches. So while the overall numbers may come down a bit as some of the liberal units fold, the core conservative base will remain strong. Changing some of policies at the national level - things that might alienate the conservative base - would be more likely to engender an even greater dropoff. Hey, it's a theory. Oak Tree

We certainly don't apply the buddy system to adults at summer camp, and based on the number of adults wandering around, most other troops don't seem to, either. And at our summer camp, there's really no way for us to have the boys follow it during the day, either, since the Scouts all go off to different merit badge schedules. Oak Tree

Many thanks to those who've agreed to do this work on behalf of the forum. May your tenure be smooth and uneventful. Oak Tree

To quote one section of the G2SS: "A responsible adult supervisor, who understands his or her responsibility and the elements of safety, can exercise discretion regarding certain procedures while maintaining safety." Oak Tree

Seattle Pioneer, We do about 4 campouts per year. We're located in North Carolina, so the weather is fairly cooperative. Even when we do a "family" meal, we're still camping at a group campsite, and we have a scheduled mealtime. So the dads fire up the camp stoves, generally around one picnic table, and the Scouts are around to help/play. It comes off kind of like a group meal, just with each family eating different food. At the younger ages, I tend toward Scout Nut's interpretation - that the boys can help do all kinds of food preparation. They can cut things up, stir things together, etc. They can help serve and help clean up. I don't know that I've actually seen the issue about them cooking ever come up - the Scouts appear to assume that it's dad's job to handle fire. But we do allow Tigers to cook marshmallows on sticks in the campfire. I think we'd have a riot if we tried to overrule that. Oak Tree

Seattle Pioneer, We've done the den cooking in a variety of ways, and we've seen many dens be creative with their meals. Some will do foil packets, some will do cardboard ovens, some will do dutch ovens, some cook on camp stoves. And some will do hot dogs. Sometimes the Cubmaster will walk around and have a little contest to see which den has the best meal, adding in some factor for how much help the Scouts provided - graded against their age expectations. In your case, it appears that one of your concerns is that you don't have a good sense whether your dens/families are all that experienced in the process. I don't have that concern, since I've been through many campouts with my group and I know what all the experience level is. Sure, the Tiger dens tend to do simpler meals than the Webelos, since they're just getting the feel for it, but that's fine. We've also done pack meals. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. The advantages I see for the den meals are that it's easier on the pack leadership - we don't have to find people to cook at the pack level. It's easier for each den to plan, based on their attendance, to have the right amount of food. You don't end up with a bunch of extra food to deal with, or, heaven forbid, not enough food. It builds den camaraderie. It allows the dens to experiment with meals (like cardboard ovens) without worrying about how to feed the whole pack if the experiment doesn't go so well. And it prevents the entire pack from hanging around the cooks asking when dinner's going to be ready. Pack meals did build some more pack interaction, and they do let most people off the hook for the meal. They can also, if you have the right people doing the cooking, allow for better camping food than you might get with a set of inexperienced dens doing the cooking. I've asked around the pack, and my den leaders have generally been in favor of cooking at the den level. But we might mix it up some. Oak Tree

Trevorum, The ignored user list I get. But what is this "low forum rating" of which you speak? I mean, I get the concept, but I don't see any rating button anywhere. And can you set a threshhold at which you ignore users? Oak Tree

In the end, this is going to be a judgement call. But that's why they pay us the big bucks. I'd probably read the rules to the boy and let him decide, since a Scout is trustworthy. All of your examples would be ok in my opinion. As long as the boy can say "I thought about and decided what I was going to do, but I didn't actually begin doing it until I got Life" then he should be ok. Oak Tree

I had to laugh when I saw that you said that cooking by den might be too complicated. Not because you're wrong, just that we did exactly the opposite. We have dens do their own cooking because we find that cooking for the pack can involve some logistical challenges. Most dens devolve the meals even further, and have families do most of the meals at the family level. I suppose it will depend on what types of campers you have in your pack. We do encourage the Cub Scouts to help out with the cooking, and they do, depending on their skill level. Cub Scouts can certainly flip pancakes, with proper supervision. Oak Tree

CNYS, I'd say the attitude on following the program is something that generally emanates from the top of the organization. Typically if the Scoutmaster strongly believes in the rules and wants everyone to follow them, the unit is far more likely to go along. It's a relatively tough sell to go the Scoutmaster and argue with him that he should bend the rules. Sometimes it could come from the Committee Chair as well, depending on how involved he or she is. Probably more effective to talk to them behind the scenes about their philosophy than to argue in front of a group. Just one man's opinion. Oak Tree

SWScouter, I'm in the same boat. Two charters, two totally separate sets of paperwork, two CORs. Oak Tree

Adrianvs, Nice post. But even in those terms, people have been trying to answer the question. Or at least giving what they think is an answer, whether other people accept it or not. My answer would be that I don't expect my boys to act differently than I do, so I don't see the hypocrisy. Core issues of right and wrong, I expect them to follow. Other items, use their judgement. The default is to follow the rules. One of the criteria is how seriously the organization making the rules takes them. I'm pretty sure that most of the parents in our unit agree, because I've had the conversation with many of them. Let's see if I can avoid the ad hominem attack by phrasing things in the subjunctive (I can see all kinds of possibilities for this) If someone came on the forum and called other Scouters lazy and self-centered, said they were duplicitous and could not be trusted, would that person be following the Scout law (a Scout is courteous)? If not, would that be a rule that could justifiably be ignored in these circumstances? Oak Tree