qwazse

Punctuation matters … the parts are : … to do my duty … (semicolon) … to help others … (semicolon) … to keep self … (period) The parts of are three verbs: do, help, and keep. One could argue they are in order of increasing immediacy: Physical fitness, mental alertness, and moral rectitude prepare a scout to Have the strength, wit, and ethics to provide aid to others, thus enabling Obedience to the scout law, thereby honorably fulfilling one’s religious and citizenship imperatives at one’s level best. And that, kids, is why you should put your necker on first and slip your uni underneath! 🙃

So, when I lift my eyes from the scouting bubble, I find this: There is a tremendous amount of trust in BSA. For each soul who can claim dreadful harm from it, there are 99 who’ve benefited. For many of those, their scoutmaster was/is someone to come home to and catch up with … just like you would a coach or favorite teacher. Scouting itself will happen with or without BSA. BSA simply offers a structure to make it happen without reinventing too many wheels. The bean counters see the organization as a complicated network of properties. Most of us see it as the phone numbers of a few farmers and municipal or state park rangers. There is a lot to lose. If youth are traveling longer distances to camp, their lives will be at increased risk. Folks who volunteer with BSA don’t like losing. On the other hand, Americans are innovators. They’ll come up with something. I suspect that, lacking BSA, a federation of scouting organizations will fill the void.

The local orienteering club sent an update with a new control … POTUS found it.

It has to do with leadership style and availability. For example, the SM couldn’t come to camp two years ago, so I covered the conferences for scouts so they could move to their BoR ASAP. Sometimes advancement is a trickle; other times, a flood.

Family matters got in the way of camping this weekend. Agree with the above. Keep in mind that there’s no one-size-fits all. And as our body changes, we need to adjust. Which means we tweak our gear from season to season. If you’re less mobile, you need more insulation. If you’re more active, you need wicking layers, and enough dry spares … especially for sleeping.

So, it’s a little more nuanced than that. There were clearly early depictions of American scouts’ uniforms without a neckerchief. Like most things, it moved from trend to essential over a number of years.

Depends on country. Looks like it was part of the English uni at the outset. Scouting Magazine said it became standard for US scouts around 1920. https://scoutingmagazine.org/issues/0210/d-wwas.html

Making me wonder ... does BSA have any non-fungible tokens (e.g., insignia designs that were never deployed but could be marketed for others entities to use)?

Also, if there are any badges that require fitness tracking, rehab is a good opportunity to do that sort of thing.

Glad someone got a laugh. But for anyone who wants to take this seriously … One line of thinking is that this rechartering delay is an adult debacle. So, indeed, if the scouts pull of their camp out, even if it’s essentially under the auspices of he CO with no help from BSA, they should be recognized for it. And chances are, your council advancement committee would agree. On the other hand, when I was a kid, campouts — especially in winter — were just for fun as @MattR described. If you told me the night would not meet the “under the auspices of BSA” requirement as written, I’d still show up with my pack ready to go. Given what I now know about about the current training that the Catholic Church requires of their volunteers, I’d be happy to send my kid on an overnight with their youth group. Hopefully you’ll hear back from the council’s registrar and all of this will be a non issue. But, if requirements for advancement are malleable rules “written by second graders”, why let 6th graders pursue the award at all?

Then there’s my adult children who play WingSpan.

The dropping of Bird Study from the required list occurred shortly after National enforced the age limit on rank advancement. The more people thought of this is a badge for kids, the more they thought that what needed to be required was what might not have been taught in school. It took 30 years to get Cooking back on the required list. One of our ASMs is a birder. He’s a great example to the scouts, if they take note of how he does things.

If only scouts were required to learn to track such beasts. Stats for MBs earned 2016-2020: Bird Study 5,199 4,965 5,101 5,629 3,950

So, like what my troop was camping in last November. Truth be told, it was a little rough on the boys.

We’re getting a lot of that here, too. I think partly because it’s risky business demolishing a church. Renovation can be, in the long run, cost effective. It’s interesting to see churches spring up in warehouses while beer gardens move into some old church buildings.

Sell off church camps?

It just won’t count for camping nights!

@InquisitiveScouter, ours seems to have gone through. But, maybe because we were merging troops (again) this year and transferring a lot of scouts, we got pushed through. We made sure clearances were well organized three months ago. I haven't seen a certificate yet, but that's not much of a surprise. The transferred scouts are now visible to us, so something worked.

Just make sure the laundry that you need for the week gets done before he comes back! His will deserve special treatment. ☢️

I don’t like your situation, but I do like your attitude. For yourself, see if the scouts or other youth group near where you are could use a volunteer for “one hour a week”. Think outside of the box. You never know what opportunities may be there. For your family, bust hump keeping them in the loop. Nice thing about the Army, you got plenty of folks who know that drill. Get your replacement up and running. The Mrs. should do the same. That’s gonna be the hardest job. I wouldn’t commit to any specific committee job besides being a sounding board for the new CM. You’re about to find out how well you’ve done advising OA, if they keep rolling without you, great. If not, well, you’ll learn to do it differently the next place that you land.

I’m going to be my own opposition’s advocate a bit in this reply, but in the service of understanding what befalls our youth and young adults … Some US studies showed that parents who abuse alcohol (severe substance use disorder) are twice as likely to commit child sexual abuse as those who do not. However, the causal chain is uncertain, substance abuse doesn’t capture a spectrum of users, it’s hard to generalize from parents to youth leaders, and our health system doesn’t track people very well. A recent study of Swedish men found other factors (age of parents, low education, prior convictions) to be significant in predicting child sexual exploitation while — after accounting for these primary factors —substance use was not (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6225987/ note that compared to Americans, the rate of substance use disorder was quite low.) Many young Americans have severe substance use problems, and there is concern that they don’t realize it and allow it to persist well into adulthood. This means that a Cub unit is likely to have one or two parents on the severe end of the spectrum. It’s not sufficient to not register that parent who always has alcohol on his/her breath when bringing their kid to a meeting. We need to convey to that parent that somethings not normal, and for the sake of their kid, they need to change. We are likely to fail, but doing nothing ensures things will stay the same or worsen, with dire consequences for that youth — one of which may be physical/sexual abuse. Many more young Americans have mild substance use problems. If they have mature parents, made it through college, and steered clear of the law — they won’t think they have a problem. And in terms of child sexual abuse, they might not pose any additional risk to anybody’s kid. Be they raised by shot-and-beer-after-work steel mongers or wine-before-whiskey-after-dinner professional, they will find an alcohol free culture to be foreign. We ask them to step into a new culture, and they find it strange and silly. Hopefully we bring it up in training and they’ll reply (maybe with a snicker) … sometimes it’s not until after the fact. Given that a lot of the folks with mild alcohol abuse eventually will make good committee members, scoutmasters, counselors, we suck in our breath, repeat in our heads “friendly, courteous, kind …”, and tell them something has gotta give and it’s not going to be the camp-out free of booze. If they say “no way”, I say “okay, we’ll leave you at the trail head.” And I have left otherwise very good parents and young ASM’s at home for that reason. I haven’t blacklisted them. or asked the police to do a second check for child abuse.

There is no such provision https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title36/subtitle2/partB/chapter309&edition=prelim

The official description of FBI identity history, and how to check it, may be found here: https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/identity-history-summary-checks

Let’s just assume that both both girls and boys like having you as SPL and elect their own PLs. And, they don’t see much point in two SPLs considering how tightly you all operate. You’ll wind up picking an assistant SPL to fill in for you. (Sticklers to current rules will say their should be two SPLs. Fine. Determine who will make your best female counterpart and run with that. Some would say you need two PLCs. Fine. You’ll be two PLCs who work together. But, if you all are really that tight, you’ll be effectively one PLC. ) You, the ASPL, the two PLs and the two APLs will form a PLC. Whoever’s scribe will also sit in on meetings and take notes. Your mission is to keep those PLs talking to one another and deciding how they will implement your troop’s program (which sounds like fun,). Each of those PLs should should help their scouts make patrol-specific plans. This would include the meals for their patrol, what equipment they need, what they will do as a patrol to contribute to the activity. This will impact your meetings as your patrols will need more time to plan stuff and have less time during meetings to work on merit badges. It’s up to your PLC to decide what parts of an activity they will do as a troop, what will be each patrol’s responsibility, and what things will be patrol competitions. You’ll learn as you go. But, one thing that will help is how you all set up camp. If you have a big field, a good set-up is with each patrol camp 300 feet apart from each other and the adults. You might meet in the middle as a troop to raise a flag and have troop announcements, but patrols would separate to set up camp, cook, plan a skit or game, etc… The exact distance doesn’t matter, and safety standards usually mean you should at least be within viewing distance. But the way to imbue patrol spirit is to give them the space to be their own groups. Do this, and you’ll see a lot of the other things come together. Keep it simple, Have fun!

On the other hand, now that PA’s law is in place, I find working with it to be very convenient. It’s very handy to have a standard process for every youth organization I volunteer with.