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It’s one thing to take a principled stance and not let your kids do an activity that concerns your family. It’s another thing to try to deny other families those opportunities.

@AMRC18, sorry for your negative experience. Hopefully R4LA will be a better opportunity.

Don’t stop at high school, or in education. An unwillingness to file incident reports pervades every field. Soon, when you need a urologist to examine you, a chaperon will be in the room as well.

Hoping you can still brag the same tomorrow. BTW - waiting two weeks does not mean 12 days. A colleague of a former co-advisor was 10 days after her second dose when she brought COVID-19 home to the family. Looking at the “survival curves” of any of the vaccinated cohorts, they may start to break away from placebo after a couple weeks from the 1st dose but the marked differences aren’t evident until 30 days into the trial. After the 35th day, cases of the disease among vaccinated folks begin to become rare.

The more training your volunteers get, the smoother things run. But as others mention, there are lots of avenues through which adults can pick up the skills needed to be great scouters. There can be a point of diminishing returns. At one point we had several leaders take Powderhorn. I don't think it amounted to a single additional super-activity from that lot. The untrained leaders put in more time actually planning and providing based on their hobbies and interests.

As a practical matter, this lies on a continuum. For example, the old Italian man who gave infant Son #1 a dollar while we were walking down the street was not grooming. When I cover the cost of the coffee for the young person fiddling with his/her change, it's not grooming. I'm just trying to make both of our days a little brighter by passing that dollar from long ago along. It's a Mediterranean thing. Same act(s), different person, vile motive, hideous outcome. That's grooming. In other words in a person who has never committed abuse, one only can determine what is and isn't grooming retrospectively.

Welcome, enjoy the campfire!

Works for everyone except my friend who was exploited by her grandfather. And, honestly, if whatever dollars from all of the grandparents in the world could heal that hurt, I'd pay it.

@CynicalScouter, either counter the arguments or simply downvote them. @ThenNow, consider that very few scouters bother to correspond here at all, and make your inference accordingly. From where I sit, I see that most scouters, be they rich or poor, just what some boys to hike and camp safely. The ones who see the increasing demands on their time and money to be a drain on their ability to do that will leave BSA and will continue the to provide for the youth around them without the hassle or training, registration fees, or any contribution to any victims' fund.

@ParkMan, if two scouts work on a merit badge (or 8 who happen to be in a patrol happen to hike someplace, or 8 venturers gather for ice cream and happen to discuss crew business, etc ...) and one of them abuses the other, BSA can disavow any liability since they weren't following YPT.

I applaud your fast-and-loose interpretation of YPT: If the scout calls his buddy without two registered adults online, it is no longer a Scouting activity. If a hike does not include two registered adults, it is, by definition, no longer a Scouting activity. If they conspire with the rest of their patrol to go fishing early in the morning on opening day without two registered adults, it is no longer a Scouting activity. You mention work that would count toward advancement. If a scout does it in the presence of 0, 1, or 50 registered adults, it still counts toward advancement -- except when it explicitly must be "under the auspices of BSA" ... as opposed to that night before opening day when his buddies camped independently by that sweet bend in the stream. But that is my point precisely, the majority of scouts worldwide aren't interested in doing stuff for advancement. They are interested in fulfilling the vision of the pinnacle scouting experience of hiking and camping independently with your mates. Simply put, by YPT standards, the majority of youth scouting is no longer a Scouting activity. Therefore, American youth must leave Scouting to actually scout, and they do ... in droves. In a sense, BSA over-sells Eagle and chaperoned HA bases: because it can no longer sell the vision of the pinnacle scouting experience. That (and also that Eagle was not explicitly a youth award) is why BSA amassed membership through the 1960's. That is also why predators began to target such organizations ... it was almost easier than getting a teacher's degree or grooming one's young family member.

Quick note about “line jumpers.” The boots on the ground giving the mRNA had 5 days to dispense vaccine once thawed. Doses came in blocks (I think my guy said 947 doses per block), no were thawed one block at a time. Clinics weren’t as concerned about lower risk folks getting vaxxed as they were about shots going to waste. Younger adults, like grocery clerks, have a tremendous number of contacts. So getting them vaccinated earlier makes some sense. The reality is that there was no model in which 300 million vaccines would be produced — let alone distributed by June. When I get a chance to talk to some modelers, I’m going to ask if they considered a strategy of vaccinating entire counties with the highest mortality first and then as new vaccine became available working down the list in order of Pandemic mortality.

Evidently my guy’s center wasn’t the only one, thus the CDC’s revised recommendation. I kissed a toddler last night. Beat handing an Easter basket through a screen door.

Why market Eagle? Because its the one thing about BSA that intrinsically demands adult association. High school kids don't need an adult for outdoor fun. They don't need an adult to: Grab a ball/weights/running shoes, call up buddies, and condition for the big game. They can arrange their own time in the weight room, the QB can schedule additional film study without the coach if needed. Visit sponsors, go to the feed store, get the stuff to raise your livestock, and bring it to auction. To my knowledge, they can have one-on-one E-mail exchanges with adults who help procure materials. But they can make that club happen with a minimum of adult interference. Order their parts, get together and assemble your controller, build a bot to haul their gear to someone's grandpa's cabin, fish while the bot makes the fire. Bring the catch to the bot and run the "rainbow trout with cashews in teriyaki sauce 4.0" subroutine. That last one is a bit forward-looking, but boys will be out opening day of trout season on their own because it's a lot more efficient than finding two adult leader's to chaperon them. (Heck, I never went fishing with an adult until I was married and went out with my in-laws.) Older youth set aside scouting and venturing because it is good and right for well-trained fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and seventeen year olds to fulfill the vision of the pinnacle scouting experience of hiking and camping independently with your mate. Yes, I believe that those youth are at higher specific risks outside of the accountability to an SM or Advisor. But higher risk does not always mean "wrong."

If by functioning, you mean steadily losing membership -- especially among older youth, then indeed we've been functioning like some exquisite frog boil. More seriously, YPT was initially designed so that leaders could chaperon according to a continuum from children who needed the presence of adults to adolescents who were naturally gaining autonomy. It then became a tool for BSA to shed legal liability. At that point, it became a binary youth vs. adult policy. 21st century YPT is the result of directed litigation. Not the other way around.

We as a culture have relied on benchmarks to the point that subjectivity is a scary thing. Meanwhile there are some forms of service that require specific commitments of time. There are others where it’s one small thing done every day. Say a scout living near a cemetery wants to play taps for a veterans’ family. An SM might think, “Fine, that’s an hour during internment.” But, behind that one hour, there could be practicing that one song 10 minutes every day for months, listening to recordings of ceremonies, attending a ceremony or two, etc ... Maybe even practicing as an honor guard at a CoH. (See how I folded in the OP there?) The lines between what’s service vs. skill development can blur right quick. So yes, if so much time needs to be spent to get a decent haul when Scouting for Food, counting hours comes in real handy. But, if a scout is helping grandma navigate getting vaccinated, clocking hours falls by the wayside right quick.

@Kamala I hope it helps. As you can tell, we’ll keep spinning from here. A lot of us come across related issues, and we’ll keep jawing here for a while. There’s no need for you to follow every twist and turn. But, drop a while later and let us know what strategy you all took and how it worked.

This is not complicated. Stop worrying about service hours. The only reason BSA wants you to count it is so that they can for-sure-brag about the dollar utility of scouting to this nation. The scout slogan is Do a good turn daily. If scouts are doing that -- and it sounds like they are -- then they've performed the requisite hours of service. If not, then no dog-and-pony show at an ECoH or clocking hours at some project will make a hill of beans difference in the youth's scout spirit. Tell your boys to help the old folks in your life to navigate vaccine sign-up. I assure you that they will wind up putting in more hours than they need for any rank by the time everyone in their circle is dosed.

Oh yeah, they once visited the editor of the local paper. She took their picture, then they helped her write a caption, and fit it on the page for the next edition.

There have been job losses for executives, does that count?

File under: Why bean-counting of service hours should be stricken from all rank advancement requirements.

O what a tangled web we weave when we don't add 1/3 of a week to the end of each month. ;)

@ThenNow, the evolution of therapy is such that therapists determine that patients need more of it for refractory conditions. This, by the way, makes it nearly impossible for someone to complete certain kinds of therapy (e.g., strategies that require the patient participate with a family member twice a week for a couple of months are simply inaccessible to someone whose minimum wage job(s) with spartan benefits has inflexible hours). So, if the settlement is quite large, we may find that a victim of a scoutmaster has access to an expansive therapy while a victim of a family member -- especially from an underprivileged family -- gets limited treatment. From a social science perspective, it will provide a natural experiment into what works and what doesn't in a large population. From a social justice and health economy perspective it could have unforeseen effects.

Regarding costs ... I am only pointing out that the rhetoric does not match the math. To be honest, I expect the cost of therapy to rise in proportion to the size of the settlement. Victims might actually get less support if they are awarded more. Regarding properties, etc ... scouting doesn't really need them. But, I can foresee a future in which independent property owners could be sued if they allowed a troop with an abuser to camp on their land. Regarding the term "arrogance" ... note that I'm not the only one using it. BSA needed to admit that it's protections only work unto a point, but it now cannot do so in the face of litigation.

So the proposed settlement would cover the costs of therapy.