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I guess that's where I differ. The last DE and I ... our spouses were colleagues, so we had him his wife and their dog over once or twice. The current DE, well, we wound up riding around on a quad during a SAR at summer camp last year. For us these were young guys who grew up in the program. The venturing DEs have been a little more hit-and-miss. But then again, they come into the program as outsiders. From time to time I've had to call them out at RTs over some asinine council policy they were parroting, but that's point, isn't it? A working district is just big enough to cover a wide geography and still provide two-way communication between and among the pro's and the volunteers. That stuff did get run up the chain, sometimes at my (or someone in the troop's) request. And our SE's would let us bend their ear. These must have been decent enough folks, because two of them made it to CSE. I have met other SE's who at times were quite proud of their brick shithouses (quite literally) and didn't mention a word of their staff and volunteers, so I suspect there can be other ways of doing business out there not conducive tight-knit districts. So decent districts should provide a little something for every unit.

Agree with @@Stosh. The only alternative is to dig your heels in and say "I'm the treasurer now. These are the rules. They are for the good of the troop. Follow them." That said, a motion approved in committee minutes for a specific purpose may count as a receipt. (E.g. "By CC: To give Mrs. X, $100.00 in advance for court of honor preparation. Seconded by SM. Approved.") That way in your ledger you can reference the minutes. Then if the woman goes on a bender with her motorcycle gang, the troop has legal recourse to demand $ if the desired product was not there.

Oops, just read your other post, and saw you are an adult, and this was the unit award that you went for. Still, thanks for letting us know the hoops.

Welcome to the forums. Glad your pack took this on with you! Let's face it, some boys are better at service projects than others. Those simple steps of getting guidance, doing research, and working with an advisor are daunting to most first class scouts. Usually, the most I expect of a first class scout is to present me a plan to take his patrol hiking and camping with maybe an hour of service thrown in for good measure. I routinely expect that of my venturers, and they are often very uncomfortable with that humble objective. Youth willing to mobilize their community are a rare breed. Keep encouraging your peers to do fly in rarefied air.. Messaging does work. And other scouts watching might contact you if their parents allow them to talk to strangers in the Internet. Alternatively, there is a way to open a blog on this site if you want to share your experience in detail ... Not that any of have tried it, but there's always a first .

it was in reply to one of Bryan's earlier thread. I don't have the patience for digging through his old posts. Sorry for not making that clear. Fairness to scouting magazine, they don't delete comments like those. Opting to let them get buried in the slew of daily threads. Cousin Robbie makes the same slippery slope argument. I don't think it's entirely fair. The permissive sexuality movement is evolving boundaries as it advances. Less permissive folks may not trust the ability of people to maintain said boundaries (adults of minority orientations with too few similar adults -- coupled with the mobility of hormonal adolescents -- does sound like gasoline on fire), but I give them credit for trying.

Folks are afraid of me culling the girls. Supposedly another adult female in camp precepts that. :/ The LGBTQIA community (I think that's the new official acronymn for the entire constituency) is indeed proposing something new. Along with the redefinition of marriage, comes a redefinition of the terms of sexual expression. This sexual expression may be latent in adolescence but society should affirm it. And that includes affirmation by inserting adult constituents into youth communities -- without actually assaulting those youth. When a fella on Bryan's blog says outright and with no shame that he had same-sex relations with his former SM (among others) once he was legal, it doesn't instill confidence among folks who aren't very permissive.

Glad to see this working. Maybe I'll use it to nudge my crew into significant action. Don't expect much from national regarding venturing, and you'll be pleasantly surprised when it happens. Most of us are used to seat-of-your-pants operation, but here's a brainstorm: I'd leave record-keeping up to the youth. Sounds like you have buy-in, so get them to purchase handbooks and work this old-school. Get them into the habit of journalling their own successes. In a couple of months, challenge them to write their resume' of their venturing career so far. If you have a Crew Historian or Secretary, try to set up a cloud-based system for recording things like this and give them privelages to write in it. Track the big things, like Discovery, Path Finder, etc ... online. Eventually, when National's IT catches up with this program (in a way that let's the youth have some responsibility for the record-keeping), you can buy-in. Or, you all can just settle for becoming the model for the rest of us. That's how venturers roll.

Was there with the wife and kids 8 days before. Made a dash up Elk Mt. But, it really wasn't hard to see what was coming and what the window of opportunity was. Just like with scouts, I used weather.gov two days before then the day before. That was enough to tell me that we would have to review plans the morning of. (Mrs. spent a lot of time drumming up alternate destinations. Noble attempt, but useless.) Morning of, we saw that the Wildlife refuge was the least turbulent. We set our noon turn-around time. Son #1 had been in a 100 MPH winter storm before, so I knew he would not linger at the peak. If it wasn't for the slow service at Meers, and everyone wanting to swing by our hotel before returning to Daughter's apt, we would have been holed up before the heavens let fly. Oh well, pitted van roof souvenier. The rangers there are pretty conciencious, so they have a good idea of who is setting up where. Just because a dad was clueless doesn't mean the SM didn't review evacuation routes with the ranger.

Picky picky ... Sorry for those of you with red-blue colorblindness. Didn't feel like changing fonts. Not everything that a district does will be of value to every unit. A district shouldn't do anything that is of no value to any unit. But, it sounds like that happens a lot outside of (the great) Seneca district. For that, I feel sorry for you all.

We're small, like @@Stosh's troop, but older. Sometimes the boys like to have a theme. (Lately, that's been cooking.) Sometimes they just want to focus on the next event. Like backpacking, when the straps start rubbing, adjust them.

I don't find this a problem, unless the unit is EDGE-dependent. The boys will learn by the SM's and PL's example that the ideal way of mastering a scout skill includes looking up a reference. "I don't know, let's see if we can find it in this field guide." ... Perhaps the best phrase a boy could ever hear. When my crew was hiking around Lake Arthur, we came upon a tall tree that had dropped some odd nuts, and the MC and I stopped and spent a good while talking over what it could be. It thoroughly perplexed my daughter and her friend (the MC's daughter) to see us haggling over this identification. That evening I looked up a guide, then e-mailed everyone to let them know, that I narrowed it to English hornbeam. If the kids see us on our little voyages of discovery, they won't be embarrassed to make their own journeys.

Things I get from the district that are no small feat ... someplace once a month for scouters of all sorts to get together, a list of counselors for every MB (not just the ones my troop has experts in), someplace to send each pack's best PWD car day camp an advancement chair for every Eagle BoR a means for my crew to invite every scout in our community to help them place flags on veterans' graves in the city's not-for-profit cemetary camporees fliers printed on council's ink council calendars a place for good men to serve when their time in a unit has run its course my boys get to know that the SM and I aren't the only adults that expects them to suck it up and carry their weight. Yes, sometimes my people get guff from high-handed UC's. (Ron, if you're reading, love you man. But, we're not about to be bothered by the burrs up other folks' butts.) And they have to put up with me yanking the chain back. Small cost of doing business, I figure.

'Skip has a point. The reason BSA is in this state of arrested development is that 25 years ago homosexual rights publications were holding up some of their constituents who were model citizens, one of whom happened to be an SM. They used his association with the BSA to ask society at large to be more tolerant ... not to suggest that that boys were an impressionable source of future members.

In one of Bryan's forums, http://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/forums/topic/adult-free-outings/#post-39683 an fella used "Jimmy the Retarded Scoutmaster" in reference to someone who would endorse scouts enjoying the pinnacle scouting experience. Well, rather than getting sour about this lemon, I thought I could load my water gun and squirt off a little lemonade here ... Growing up, one of our ASMs had a moderate to severe learning disability ... sorta like Down's syndrome. Nice guy. Not really good for camping. (Some of the older scouts recalled some mean stories from his boyhood days.) However, he was great at keeping track of stuff, jotting down notes for the SM, organizing material for activities, etc ... And he genuinely like us. Which, as a boy went a long way, considering that some of the other ASMs were not as expressive and others were kinda corrupt. As an adult, it helped me to expect the best from learning disabled youngsters. I thought it would be good to hear from other scouters about their learning-disabled adult leaders. How do you involve them in your program?

The "Build an Adventure" pitch to parents and Cubs might work. But for older youth, I think adventure has been oversold. Until BSA returns to the pinnacle scouting experience of qualifying to hike and camp independently with your mates, kids who don't have Jambo or High Adventure Bases in their sights will say "Why Bother"?

My favorite JTE peeve is an example: Silver has been the highest value in BSA. Why would they put gold at the top JTE level? Do they think committee members are girl scouts? But, why does JTE need levels anyway? Just get your score. See if you can beat it next year. If you're a commish, call your units whose scores dropped the most. 'Nuff said. Sometimes, I feel that the problem is not not necessarily writing inconsistently, it's writing too much.

As you've seen, no schedule is perfect. We've tried all different kinds of things ... including a meeting at a coffee shop by the grocery store so the PL's can plan the next few months, then provision for the weekend's troop activity. Try to guide boys in running meetings more efficiently. It's a very challenging skill, which I confess to doing poorly. Get a sense of their priorities, and guide the SPL in ordeing the agenda accordingly. We do try to have the boys bear the brunt of poor planning. This is very hard with adults on your committee chomping at the bit to fill in some gap.

Haven't read the training sylabus in a decade, and I'm not comfortable simply saying I have some gnostic understanding of the requirements that a scout doesn't. This is one of those situations where I'd talk to the PLs about "letter" vs. "spirit" of the law, and let him think it through himself and decide what's best for his scout.

That was the best part of my experience in my troop's Leadership Corp (aside from the honking big red patch with the oil lamp on it). I had no interest in the local explorer post (which some of the girls in band mates were in): everything I needed in terms of adventure was with the LC on a ridge-top in the middle of winter making pizzas from scratch with an improvised patrol mess kit. Then, I could pass down those stealth-acquired skills to any PL or other scout who would listen. Reflecting on my sons' troop, I think that was one of the reasons some older scouts told me they didn't like the patrol method. They kinda grew out of it, yet they really did not want to bother committing to the crew. None of our boys like the idea of forming a "Venturing Patrol" because to them it felt like they're being snooty. They like the younger scouts, and don't like feeling "above and apart", except maybe after lights out when they want to hang out and finish a game of cards, reflect on life, etc ... So, letting boys establish their own patrols won't necessarily lead to age-based. And being flexible with the older scouts won't necessarily undermine your patrols. Trying to micromanage both just seems to make for ephmeral partrols from my observations.

OK scratch the insects and arachnids. The PLs are the ones who actually sign off, and they take the requirements quite literally. I usually encourage the boys to note off-list critters anyway. If they are attending to lesser fauna they may soon find a robin or jay or largemouth bass that will do the same. However, I'm easily mesmerized by rare items cleaverly identified. I wouldn't be beneath counting anything with a "cool factor" to it.

Oh thumbslips! I meant to +1 this. sorry for tarnishing your rep, Pack.

Additional question: does anyone let the boy spread this out over a number of days? I always thought it to mean in the space of an hour or so. (Like Kim's game, you have only so much time to look in the box.) But, there's really no time-frame listed.

Although this is a great activity for a patrol to set out on while at camp, I also encourage boys to do this with a buddy in their neighborhood. Like @, application of all five senses to identify trace is good. (E.g., if near a lake, spot the bluegill nests. Smell of the skunk or rat-snake. Feel the scale insects on bark. Hear crickets, cicadas, deer whistle, etc ...) I am satisfied with common names that get them down to the genus/species for most vertabrates .. to the order for most insects/mollusks. "Wild" simply means untamed/uncaged. Invasive or not. So zebra muscles, and feral dogs and cats count. Basically, I'm after the excersize of observation, not taxonomy. I consider it a real win if a boy reports back with something like "I don't know what it was, but it sounded like, moved like, and tasted like ..." to the point that after an improvised "twenty questions" from his buddies, we can work out an identification based on his description. I've had scouts years later on a day leave from base send me pictures and descriptions asking for help with identification. P.S. - I have yet to have anyone try to figure trace out based on taste!

Our boys are older, and use their meetings to plan campouts and other weekend activities. Many of us from Pittsburgh have family who came from Poland, so Polish food is popular, and our boys will often put it on their menu. While camping this winter, the boys in my troop realized that they didn't purchase the peirogi, so they modified their schedule and made a 5K hike plan up a frozen stream to the nearest store while the scoutmaster and I hiked in the opposite direction to the nearest coffee shop. The boys called us with a request to modify their return trip so as to avoid the stream. (They forgot to bring a pack to carry the peirogi and had to improvise one with the shopping bag and some rope ... so they were afraid of their dinner being lost if they slipped on the ice.) We provided them an alternate hike plan on paths that they never knew about, and we met them to make sure they (and our dinner ) found their way.

No, @@TAHAWK, I have a core value ... the at-large meaning of "patrol" ... that undergirds everything that the great scouters are trying to say. But maybe that's a trivial idea. Maybe the important thing about the patrol method is not "patrolling" per the dictionary. Maybe it's the administrative "subdivision", detached from any action that may only coincidentally relate to the meaning of "patrol" prevalent at the time BP decided to apply it to boys as well as security forces. Why don't science teachers call their student divisions patrols? ... Because when it comes time to break into lab groups, they don't need the class scheming to march perimeters around the school district. :!: