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I did not intend for this to be a comparison of my method of "long-leashing" vs. @gblotter's. I've called back plenty of teens who dashed off in a fey mood. Sure, safety could be part of the picture. More so if boys lack training and preparation. But, it's not the whole picture. More importantly, it's not the end of the story when at stake is an opportunity for leadership development. A boy leader shouldn't take advantage of adult association for spur-of-the-moment babysitting of slower scouts. In that context, it doesn't matter how well trained the SPL is or what sense of direction he has. Developing leadership includes maintaining responsibility over your boys -- all of them.

Not sure how getting lost is a safety issue. Given their age, I might understand your concern. However, I've seen enough adults get stupid lost that I'm convinced that they often don't know best. But, the aspect of boy leadership that the SPL failed to grasp is that one should not abdicate one's responsibility to tend slower scouts. If our runners want to sprint part of the trek, they need to give us a plan that includes rendezvous points, sets up trail signals, identifies which boys will serve as PL in their absence, and confirms that they have all they need to survive the night if they do take the unintended trail (which, they have done ... although it only costed them an hour -- not a day -- of their time). One time, I revised a hike plan on the spot because the younger scouts wanted to keep hiking while the older boys wanted to cut short a loop in the trail to spend the afternoon lounging at camp. They were pretty steamed at me. I told them "Go ahead, tell Mom and Dad that Mr. Q made you hike an extra three miles for the sake of enthusiastic 1st-years. Let me know how they reply." They caught on that day that boy leadership included making good on the promise of scouting -- for everyone.

Awesome picks @JasonG172! We should have a naming contest! I pick "The <CO's name> House of Scout".

On one hand, IMHO, he who does the work deserves the recognition. On the other, https://oa-bsa.org/resources/ucl-support/ttr/ttr-adviser So, there is this gap between 18-20 that doesn't come with a patch. Go figure. He should ask his lodge chief for an official title ... maybe a local NA name for "he who guides between".

^^^This. The method of scouting is leadership development. Not leadership. We expect rough edges. The real question is, "How rough?"

Welcome! And thanks for all that you do for the youth. I used to pull stuff like this on my crew treasurer all the time. It really irritated her. Oddly, what didn't irritate her was when I left her in pitch dark in a cavern. (To my credit, I came back as soon as I realized I had misplaced her.) Tell your WDL: respect whoever's doing the work. Treasury issue, treasurer's rules. If it keeps pack $ safe, support it. Have the CC doc 5% from his end-of-year bonus. Tell your treasurer: it's scary being left in pitch dark in a cavern. If she actually deposited the funds, she is complicit in all that "co-mingling", such as it is. Have the CC doc 5% from her end-of-year bonus. Instruct her next time to return the deposit with a check for the WDL's expenses, asking him to sign it back to the unit along with his deposit. Ask him to do it as a favor to her to help make reconciling the checkbook and any future audits straightforward. Remind everyone that you work for smiles. And your WDL and Treasurer your year-end bonus better be the two of them together with their boys ... the lot of them with ear-to-ear grins. Payment in advance always welcome.

@Treflienne, welcome to the forums! Thanks for your insight. FYI - If you were anywhere near the Tiber (or the Po), your daughter could join Scout's Italia today, and she would have a "Boy Scouts Italy" patch on her shoulder. At least that's what an exchange student from there had on her uniform when she joined our crew.

Welcome to the forums! It's a very tough balance because parents these days really believe in having tons of information. For troop events, my parents were content with a permission slip that we filled out by hand a few weeks before an outing. It was so much fun teasing the SPL as he tried to rattle off the facts we were to transcribe. (E.g. "Sir, how does one spell 'April'?") Patrol meetings were even more informal ("Hey Mom! We're building our Klondike sled at Tom's house. Jeff's mom's picking me up in an hour. OK?") Bless my mom, she really had no clue what I was putting in my pack until I came back and tossed it in the laundry or she went to the pantry and realized some canned goods were depleted. My distinct advantage was that my much older siblings were giving them enough grief that I learned from them pretty quick how to fly under her radar - most days. It sounds like you have is a "boy-led" troop that's a bit shallow on the patrol method. The way this should work is the boys should record events centrally. (Really, a hand-drawn poster-board calendar is best.) Then, a committee member notes the calendar, and at some point in the committee meeting they ask the SPL and SM, "How can we support the events currently on the board?" This gets trickled back to the PLC, and the PL's counsel their patrol accordingly. The harsh reality is that BSA requires adult leadership on every trip, and SMs have real schedules to work around. (Not just them, if the SPL/PL are on various extracurricular activities or go to different schools, settling on a date for a troop activity is chaos.) So, we wind up having narrow envelopes in which to operate. What's worse, for a few years, we had to fill out tour plans online, and SPL's didn't have access to them. So BSA has conditioned SM's into thinking that they are travel agents. Now, if the SM is vetoing boys' decisions to the point that the promise of scouting is not delivered (e.g. campouts dropped in favor of merit badge classes, back-country ideas dropped in favor of flushies and electricity, etc ...), then you begin to have serious problems. Charlei

Pray. Sorry. We've seen a variety of these boys. And they will take a while to get better. Nothing we've done as scouters changed that course. Tell dad to make sure he get's professional help if it's more than just scouting. If it's only scouting, tell dad it's okay to lean in to the other activities the boy likes to do.

True story: last weekend, I had cracked open a new mini flashlight that came with its own AAA battery. I was having a heck of a time closing up the light until I realized the battery was wrapped in plastic. I gently pulled it out with some pliers, peeled off the plastic, and re-installed the battery. No light. I unscrewed it and tried to reseat the battery, which was gradually feeling warmer ... then hotter! (I thought it could be my paranoia, so I had my SM check it.) Sure enough, the somewhere in the process of packing and removing that battery it became what I'd call a "short" stack. I dropped it in a mini-solo cup (a.k.a. hillbilly demitasse cup), scooped some snow in the thing, and set it out side. It melted about half the snow until it decided that I wasn't going along with its mission-impossible antics!

You will have days like this. The balance between discipline and fun is always hard for young ones to figure out. (My poor Webelos DL ... we kids sure gave him a run for his money. And this was back when parents dropped off and picked up.)

Many buttons, e.g. T.V. Remotes and older calculators, have lodestones in the plastic buttons. They were used to close circuits without worrying about narrow guides that would wear away after repeated use. Those little buggers have pretty weak fields, however, and make for terrible compasses.

$100 on the spot would go the the scout who could fashion me a wide brim (3.5") leather hat ... or patch the gaping hole in my old one. I can't even find my make and model in any western store or online.

It is the Committee's job to support the Unit Leader as he/she delivers the program. I would tell the CC that tails don't wag dogs, but as I'm watching mine, I'm not entirely sure that's true.

Some scout associations in he world do not use advancement as a method, especially for their mid teen and later programs. The youth I've met are fine with that. @gblotter, you may have missed some of my musings on the subject, but I'm of the opposite perspective. Not only do I favor rank advancement, I favor granting direct-contact adults the privilege of working on rank advancement while they serve our scouts. First class rank should be a goal for all SMs and a requirement for any member of the national advancement team, and no member of that who hasn't earned Star, Life, or Eagle may draft policy regarding that rank. A lot of us sit in judgement of MB programs, but our only evidence is our boys who go through them. I've actually been quite pleased with the experiences our scouts have had with their various counselors (be it district, camp, or MB pow-wows) - rarely needing to complain about it. But, I do wonder if I missed something that could be caught if adults were motivated to try and master the same skills as the boys.

They always to seem to find something ... Hang out and give sage advice to younger scouts. Talk with adults around campfire after taps about how to solve the problems of the world. Master a specialty like BSA Guard, Medicine, Shooting Sports, Climbing, Snorkeling, ... Ask the camp director for a service project. Retake a favorite merit badge, helping out the counselor in the process. Walk around the lake (it's a 5 mile hike) with some younger scouts trying to master land navigation. Walk around the lake and chat up the girls running the trading post at cub camp. (I later conveyed my troops apologies for that one.) Build a giant hamster wheel out of lashings and sticks for a scoutcraft competition. Convert a tarp named Bruce to a coracle named Kaitlin for an anything-that-floats competition. Use up my bailer twine to rig a lakeside bivouac in the trees. (Think basket weaving, but beds instead of seats.)

@UncleP l feel your pain. During the rechartering process, I have generated far more detail than BSA has ever published. For example, for each member who doesn't renew, I have to explain why. There are some check-boxes and one open-ended field. Those data of how many quit for which reason have never been in this report to the nation. The annual report does include financial statements. If you have nothing better to do, you could fish through those and see how they stack up over the years. I don't like the belligerent tone this POTUS takes, but I wouldn't mind if he asked our VIP scouts, "Where have the rest of your mates gone?"

Yea, about that Venturing growth ... 2008 was about when we insistedd that our DE stop feeding us numbers from paper crews whose youh hardly even knew they were registered with the BSA. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of Venturers who actually ever read their oath/code never exceeded 1/4 million. Registration fees, adult applications for 18-20 year olds, and YPT demands didn't help. But, I was surprised last year when my crew couldn't drum up even five youth who wanted to engage the program.

Contact your district or council advancement chairman. You might not like hearing what he/she has to say. But he/she is the one who schedules Eagle boards of review. In general, I have been coming across more 17 year-olds who just don't do paperwork. We had a boy come back to us in consecutive weeks with an incomplete Eagle app. You'd think at SMC #1 when we said, "Go home, look at all of your blue cards, and fill in the dates," he would do that that very evening, call the SM the next day for a signature, and take that paperwork downtown as soon as office hours opened! But, evidently that's not how post-modern nomads operate.

Good luck. But, I suspect the name will get changed to something like "mats and macrame" -- which is the art ... of which paracord is only one medium.

This ^^^ The method in Venturing is not Leadership Development, rather, it is Leadership. (The equivalent of "Don't try, do.") The working assumption is that from age 11-13, youth have been picking up skills from different spheres of life, and the Crew becomes a crucible where youth can leverage what they've developed, learn from one another, and grow. So, when those freshmen come together with some of them having picked up just enough of a "take care of your mates" mentality, and I suggest "To achieve X, Y must occur by Z date," they step up and begin to soar. It really is something to behold. When that leadership development hasn't been happening ... or when your natural leaders break bad ... collapse is imminent. Also something to behold. And, if I knew how to stop that train wreck, I'd write a book on it.

If the current distribution of arms has given our communities well-regulated militias capable of, for example, defending school-children or concert-goers from nihilists bent on robbing souls of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then we have achieved the goal of the 2nd amendment. If, on the other hand, we give such enemies of The People an unbalanced advantage in their assault on free society, we collectively find ourselves in violation of the 2nd amendment. The question then becomes: how to bring us all back into compliance with the intent of a well regulated Militia? Wrapped up in this is a profound mistrust of government, neighboring communities, other nationalities, recent immigrants, the opposite sex, bloggers, etc ...

And join the 10,000 other scouters who've had that door slammed in their face? Great strategy for masochists. Exactly ... that's what rogue troops did. BSA4G is the result. We're all victims of their success. ^^ Understatement of the decade!

A case from this weekend ... A couple of boys wanted to work on 1st class navigation requirements. The ranger had a binder full of headings and copies of camp maps, so I borrowed those and told the SPL I would be available before lunch for a refresher on compass parts, etc ... and after lunch to start anyone on the course. It was damp and snowy so I told the boys they could use their phones to take pictures beside each marker. Four boys took me up on the challenge, which was fine by me. I wasn't prepared to run a full-blown timed and scored course. Two, slightly older, came to get the refresher before lunch. After lunch they found 4 of 5 markers and were able to explain what threw them off of the other two. I later learned that the one boy's compass lost its numbers from the housing (which were decals, not painted), and he and his buddy had to adjust by brute intuition. We reviewed what they did and they had a clear understanding of what went wrong. I let their PL know, and he signed off. Two first-years skipped the refresher and consequently found 2 of 5 markers. They had pictures of themselves beside 3 markers for other courses! The one scout asked if he passed the requirement. As kindly as possible, I explained: Cub Scouts try, Boy Scouts master. I did offer them another course for them to try, and they turned it down. I was available that evening to train both groups of boys on the SM's GPS. The SPL was getting increasingly vexed trying to get them to see me to complete one more requirement. I called him over and encouraged him to just put out an invite once for each opportunity that arises during a weekend. It's not his job (or mine) to force kids to do requirements. It was a bit hard for him to grasp because he came up in the spun-off troop that did a bit of pencil-whipping. In another post, I'll go over how I (hopefully) laid the groundwork for this group of scouts to improve their approach skills mastery.

Everybody wants adventure, few want to condition for it. Girls are beholden to generations of moms who have been taught not to sacrifice creature comforts, their great grandmothers are shaking their heads. But, if across this country, there were 1000 girls who will master camping and hiking and camping with their mates, what should someone who's sworn to be helpful do?