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@5thGenTexan, are these girls starting a new troop, or crossing over into an existing troop of girls?

Crossovers individually demonstrate their skills to the Troop Guide, Instructor, or Patrol Leader. AOL are treated with the same regard as other new scouts.

Let’s start pronouncing then “nests”! Nest 2 is just one big eyrie.

Here's PA's list of categories of mandatory reporters https://www.compass.state.pa.us/CWIS/Public/ReferralsLearnMore . I think WV's is similar.

Some of these youth are indeed characters! And, come opening day of trout season, some are quite literally lords of flies. Personal growth is aided by adult association. (In GBB's revision of the BSHB, boards of review were called "Personal Growth Conferences.") But, those adult-associated moments should be a fraction of a scout's time as he/she ages. Personal growth also comes from facing obstacles and helping your peers face obstacles. I think those obstacles come in several forms: Adult-generated simulations. Sports, skills challenges, theater, choir, interviews, chores, etc ... all persist because adults replicated them. They felt better for doing them themselves, saw little harm, and felt they were things children could take and use to grow into better people. Peer-generated simulations. Son #1 is receiving "bite reports" from Grandson's daycare. I told him to expect more until one of the kid's buddies masters a right hook. Hopefully 10 years from now, it will be exhortation/encouragement from a patrol leader. Nature: A trail doesn't hike itself, food doesn't cook itself, and death won't check the rescuers' birth certificates when it dares them to forestall it. Self-reflection: through reading, listening to media, listening to elders, and prayer, a youth may discover the character he/she want's to emulate, and may discover there is a vast gulf between their current character and the one they envision. So, we adults are one leg of the table. But scouting leans heavily on the other three.

To be specific (at least from what I observe in western PA), it's severely curtailing the activity of the BSA. It's not prohibiting scouting -- which our youth are happily doing in the broadest sense without bothering to find qualified adult chaperons. Other citizens are simply postponing the exercise of scouting until they are adults -- their scouting experience simply begins at age 18. Also, this year, many more of our post-modern nomads have formed pods -- extended families who do a lot of this scouting stuff without all of the trappings of a national organization. They can assemble their own handbooks, order up their own uniforms, make their own patches (stickers, medallions), and have their own ceremonies. Scouting needs those pods, in particular, to engage in the process. But ... guess how much input BSA wants from hordes of post-modern nomads? I think I understand BSA's reasoning. The innovation in such pods impresses me. On the other hand -- with regard to child sexual/physical/mental abuse -- they terrify me. In the next decade health care professionals can expect to find themselves picking up the pieces from many of these pods that foster, rather than shelter from, abusers.

I agree, to a point. (I've given a mom or two the stink-eye for packing their venturer's pack!) I know this is the harsh reality for some of the SM's in our district. But, I find our troop reigning in dads a lot. Maybe that's because 'round here we still have a culture where year-round outdoor overnights is a father-son thing. (Me and about four other dads saw it as a father-daughter thing. I knew only one family who made it a mother-daughter thing.) So, we usually have a mom delegating to a dad (the kids' own, or an SM/ASM if she's single), and the dad trying to figure out how he can contribute. About half the dads either get it, or they are a little bit too far removed and we have to rope them into the committee via BoR's. The other half need to tone it down a notch ... or two. That whole circus is definitely not the troop I grew up in, where we could barely get one dad to be an ASM. The other ASMs were troop alumni usually attending the local college. The committee was rarely seen, and only heard during BoR's or serious disciplinary issues. Even the ASM who was a dad was one of the quietest men I ever knew. (Actually, that made him a good role model -- considering my boisterous Mediterranean family.) It wasn't until I joined a Jamboree troop that I learned that effective SMs and ASMs can have radically different personalities! So, post-modern nomadic parents are much different to work with. However, we can't blame everything on generational shifts in expectations. BSA mandates that more adults be present to run more aspects of the program. The 19 year-old college student is not adequate. The PL simply meeting up with his mates to go on a hike is not adequate. Walking to town and earning Personal Management from the bank president (unregistered no YP) is not adequate. The overhead in terms of adult-hours required per youth served has sky-rocketed. Scouting wants to be more secure -- we all agree. But, it needs to be less bloated. And right now we can't find a safe path from secure to efficient. (Efficient being youth hiking and camping independently with their mates.)

Not so much that as this .... Dated September 2, 2016

You are likely to hear/read a post-modern nomad say, "Adulting is hard." But, they are also doing some astounding things: Serving multiple tours in military reserves. Learning business without business school. Building their own computers. Living in one part of the country while attending classes in another part. Picking vaccine targets. Participating in the outdoors, assertively preaching "Leave no Trace." Printing rocket parts. Caring for immigrants and the indigent. Participating in the political process -- as candidates. So, don't be too quick to discount the "Why won't the world revolve around us?" perception. It also comes with a dose of "How can I make the world revolve better?" I'm getting a lot of advice from my children. Half of it is pretty good.

Sorry for your pain. But, this is what corporate information officers do, eventually. They make a show of squeezing efficiencies from the system by showing how they no longer need their staff to do the tasks that they've just offloaded on users. Liquidation will only make it worse. As a general rule, it's always better to perform scouting as if National doesn't exist and be pleasantly surprised when they do something that benefits your scouts.

I think it is important to note that BSA National is distinct from local councils. It’s been a pretty firm belief for quite some time now that the leaders of local councils are the media facing side of the organization. Some leaders do that better than others. Even more significant, we are very interested in youth leaders being the face of the organization. You may have noticed that many of the talking heads when we opened Cub and Scout programs to girls were girls themselves. In spite of a few flourishes there’s been a lot of P-R chaos. Expect that to continue.

I’m not sure what you mean. Mr. Washington is a career man. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ymca-of-the-usa-president-and-ceo-kevin-washington-to-retire-after-43-years-of-service-301186198.html BSA currently have a CEO (as opposed to chief scout executive) who was recruited, not promoted. I suspect that it recruited Mosby specifically for the purpose of presiding in the face of multiple legal actions. BSA tends to cycle between “inside” vs. “outside” guys at the top. It seems they agree with you.

Nice to know that someone in this country doesn’t take umbrage at being guides!

No need to apologize for reacting to mine or anyone else’s “devil’s advocacy.” Boots-on-the-ground bluntness deserves it. On the ground, eventually, scouts and alumni ask why scouting costs so much, why their favorite camp is gone, and why it’s still better to come camping with us than to that cabin of their uncle or their cousin or some family “friend.” This is just an attempt to draw out that explanation. If that gets confounded with victim blaming, my apologies. Regarding your question about a professional vs. a volunteer perpetrator, I don’t see much distinction. Predators find their way into positions that are most advantageous to them. The best predators might seek to infiltrate the organization with the best defenses out of whatever perverse desire makes them be predators in the first place. An organization would be hard pressed to screen out all of them from their professional pool, and if their liability is greater when perps are professionals, the organization might simply move to an increasingly volunteer-only model. That could increase their odds of vetting every pro, while still leaving predators content as volunteers to do harm. In that scenario (which is close to BSA’s), the organization is still responsible for a poorly supervised volunteer pool. @DavidLeeLambertRegarding membership stats. I found a couple of sources, and misplaced them! Still working on that.

As did the very first non-reporting victim of every abuser. So, why not sue them? Or their families for not training them to report? Is it because they are somehow innocent by not being part of a corporation? We have warped the word "allowed" until it makes no sense. Find any documentation anywhere where any BSA official grants permission to abuse kids. In fact it forbade it to such a degree that children in their were 10-100 fold less likely to be abused than elsewhere. Let's not whitewash this. BSA is on the line because it has money. Having money is not the same as "allowing this to happen." One could make a better argument that certain publicists have allowed this to happen -- practically giving perpetrators a manual of operations. But, victims can't get at them for it. Show me TCC's plans to provide kids someplace safer, to make them more resilient, better reporters, with more accountable caretakers.

The letter is largely an incoherent regurgitation of facts in evidence. And they are up to interpretation. Saying that funds pay salaries is effectively saying that there is not nearly as much capital readily available as one thinks. Saying that camps are run down implies that they won't get as much value upon resale as one thinks. Saying that it costs money for youths to go to camp is a justification for funding councils more and leaving their resources untouched. (Am I mistaken? Are the survivor's groups promising to build up scholarship funds for kids to go to camps -- not necessarily BSA's -- at a steep discount?) So, pointing out BSA's wastefulness without comparing it to other things (e.g. -- the TCC's fees, etc ...) does not get us anywhere. What's important about the letter ... in 1994, staff should have been trained about reporting sexual harassment. Either this person was not, or this person did not follow his training. I've seen young staff do this repeatedly -- with small infractions. This not to blame the victim. It is to point out that if the victim is not part of the solution, history will repeat itself. But, for organizations, the bigger threat at the time was being sued for libel/slander. And @johnsch322, that's where enabling the victim went straight out the window. I have seen the 21st century BSA provide counseling, but I don't think anyone expected an organization to provide anything of the sort before then. To do so would have meant instant litigation. And, perpetrators can and did argue that a person in counseling wasn't fit to testify ... making achieving convictions even harder on victims and families.

A typo, or his estate filed on the victim’s behalf. When I get a chance to punch in the numbers, I’d probably just peg that at 2010.

From Heritage Reservation (apologies if, since it looks like a draft, this link quickly changes) no vaccine mandate, but a mask mandate: They incorporated the layered mitigation strategy that has been widely circulated. There are exceptions for strenuous activities, when other social distancing is in place, etc ... all of which are pretty consistent with the CDC's recommendation for schools. There are a few moving parts to put in place (meal service, emergency procedures), but there are enough details that we'll be able to walk through everything with parents and kids.

@yknot, that’s more the case for some vaccines than others. For example, I don’t think the response to HPV is any more robust in childhood, but it is offered early because the concern is that the probability of a child being able to decide and get it in advance of any unchecked sexual encounter is low — especially since for 1/5 of girls and 1/20 boys the encounter is unwelcome. @walk in the woods, I think titers will be the wave of the future if costs keep dropping. This could spare quite a few children unnecessary boosters. Or, better, allow for effective timing of boosters. But it won’t happen in our country. We don’t have the cradle-to-grave info-tech to help all patients navigate it.

I think that was one of my pandemic guy's first lessons learned. While a pediatric fever is disconcerting to parents, it translates directly into lost income in parents with terrible jobs. Those same parents have the nation's lowest math literacy so it's difficult to tell them how likely things can go bad by forgoing vaccines. (Since you mentioned hearing loss, here's an article about viruses that drive permanent or temporary hearing loss https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4222184/ .) Furthermore, since many people feel pressured to contain costs by minimizing visits, the pediatric vaccine schedule is aggressive. The sole reason for this is to give a fighting chance to kids whose parents may not bring them back to the clinic often enough for a staggered schedule. A pediatrician friend of ours arranged a less aggressive schedule for her kids, and pulled it off because she was a very good time manager. Most of us simply don't have it together that well to manage frequent returns to the clinics for different shots.

The problem long preceded Wakefield's infamous paper. Some of us didn't notice it because we were in communities who put a lot of stock in medical advice -- and understood risks, roughly. When I first met my pandemic guy in the 80's, he was trying understand why minority parents were often vaccine adverse -- which often led to their children more likely to suffer from preventable disease. This storm has been brewing for some time. But @walk in the woods it was heartbreaking to see families facing autism having their energy wasted spurning vaccines. The very decisive Danish study (https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M18-2101 ) was aggressively challenged by correspondents who regurgitated stale facts. The saddest thing that I saw after reading of that article was slightly higher rates of autism in older unvaccinated children. It captures what you've described at the beginning of this century -- as no doubt many parents who had a family member with autism struggled to "protect" their children from the same, and they hoped in vain that not getting vaccinated would do the trick. However, these are our fellow citizens. They dread "big pharma" to the point where they may fall prey to those who need a population debilitated and dependent on the alternative treatments that they claim to offer.

I was on a church board meeting last week. We are asking childcare staff to continue masking regardless of vaccination status. It was a contentious decision, albeit consistent with CDC guidelines.

No. But to be clear ... I am very much in favor of the mRNA vaccines, but that’s only because acquiring immunity to SARS-Cov-2 naturally comes with a 10-20x higher risk of death and disability. The shots are not fun. Neither is going to pay last respects to your neighbor. So, if someone has to take a pass on the shot, I encourage them to find 4 out of every 5 folks around them to get it on their behalf. In general however, vaccine mandates don’t sit well with Americans. Historically we have had more success on a national level by giving folks the information they need and time to process it. That is why you have not and will not see a mandate from Council or your CO. The unit committee however is facing youth and depending on the situation in which those youth live, they have a concern about transmission among unvaccinated and potentially from unvaccinated to vaccinated. We now know that he vaccine slows transmission. So, if a higher portion of folks are immunized we could see 50 to 100x reduction in the risk of disease, disability, and death. So, I could see why a unit my put something of the sort in place. One would still have a personal choice of participating in another unit.

I work a couple blocks from the town cathedral and rectory, boy's high school, girl's high school, and the collegiate center. I all but trip over priests and seminarians on my way to afternoon coffee. The Catholic church right now is seen very positively -- almost better for having their warts revealed.

Around here, it is not uncommon to discover tornado ‘blow downs’ across a trail as if a giants finger pressed down a piled rug. And those are disorienting. I saw the burn scars in the Smokies a few weeks back, and would not want to hike through those ravines. I could only imagine the challenges of a fresh burn in the Rockies.