T2Eagle

Being alone in a room with other scouts where other scout activities are taking place is not a violation of YPT. If there is a troop meeting, and the scouts break out in patrols and one adult is in a room with each patrol that's fine. The rule is "no one on one contact". You never want to be alone, that is just yourself, and one scout. But if you are the only adult but with multiple scouts at a scout activity that satisfies the two deep leadership rules, that is there are other leaders present but not necessarily in the room with you that's OK. One-on-one contact between adult leaders and youth members is prohibited both inside and outside of Scouting. In situations requiring a personal conference, the meeting is to be conducted with the knowledge and in view of other adults and/or youth Clearly, if you can have a personal conference that can be held "in view of other youth", you can be in a group setting with a group of youth. The same logic applies to explain being able to drive a number, but never a single, scout (except your own child).

Well, the person who was in charge of YPT also didn't provide any evidence or analysis about how changing the rule would mean over all safer scouting, and he stood by the many statements about how safe scouting is --- right up until he didn't work there. Maybe he has the evidence, if so he should share it. His lack of transparency is no more noble than BSA's. As to your personal experience, that's fine. But I have scout families for whom the $50 necessary for a background check would come out of the grocery fund. That is what I mean by it having a chilling effect on parents attending to observe their kids. The single mom who wants to see what goes on with her son when he's away on a weekend campout is going to decide not to, and just have to live with some uncertainty she shouldn't have to live with, rather than absorb that cost. For Cub age kids it would probably mean no camping at all for a significant number of them. And all that is without taking into account the complexities of what having a background check means, and what should be done with the information. When a background check turns up non-CSA transgressions what should be done with that information? Prior convictions for DUIs, illegal substances, tax evasion, etc., who and how do you decide to judge those things before saying a parent can camp with their kid? Maybe background checks for everyone is a right and necessary idea, but it's not as self evident or without significant costs and unwanted and unexpected consequences as some folks seem to think. If it's a good idea than it should be able to be shown as a good idea by evidence and analysis, not just by facile assertion.

What i would like to see is some evidence that either not having this policy today is the reason for abuse today, or evidence with some analysis that when implemented and taking into account things like what Qasze mentioned that it would make scouting safer overall. I posted earlier how this works in practice, and remain skeptical that a background check for every parent who accompanies a unit would actually turn up any significant number of already arrested and convicted abusers while at the same time having both a large monetary cost and a chilling effect o the supervision of units by non registered parents.

Am I reading this right: you don't formally recharter, but you do renew the membership for scouts and adults? Paying the renewal fee but not the council specific fee?

We need to be very very careful about questioning the veracity of someone putting themselves forward as a survivor. We wouldn't tolerate anyone questioning the credibility of the posters who have come forward on these forums as survivors. We shouldn't --- and won't --- accept it about others. There are tens of thousands of survivors, that certainly means there are just as many divergent and honestly held opinions on what the best course of action should be.

The distinction between guardian and legal guardian drawn by the G2SS seems to be about whether the child is being given over to another adult (legal guardian) or whether they're attending with an adult (guardian). Especially if mom is attending I don't think you have any issue.

For those not currently in the program, here is some sense of how the 72 hour rule works. Our Pack and Troop have a joint weekend each year. About 40+ Cubs. This is a cabin campout, all YPT rules are followed: kids in one room adults in the other. We have one cabin for scouts with dads and a smaller cabin, scouts with moms. Most folks arrive Friday night and leave after campfire on Saturday. On the ScoutsBSA side, on weekend campouts we will sometimes have an unregistered parent camp with us. This is always in addition to at least two and usually three or or four registered leaders. Anyone who camps with us this way needs to complete both the BSA YPT and the Catholic Virtus YPT so they’re aware of our expectations and the rules. We encourage parents to join us this way primarily so they can see how the program works and how we handle their scouts, and secondarily as a way to recruit new leaders – you see what we do, think it looks interesting, and take the next step to become a leader. So it’s not the case that “virtually anyone” can camp with the scouts. We’re talking about parents or guardians. If we have to go to background checks for everyone, backgrounding pretty much one parent for every Cub ever, I suppose we can make it work. But I’m not sure how much safer that makes things. My understanding is that these crimes are planned, not crimes of opportunity, and on top of that very few people actually are convicted of CSA and are then back on the street with their own kids.

I inherited an Air Scouts handbook circa 1943, it is really cool.

The first part of your statement is correct, the latter is sadly not. Think of excuses like "what was she (he) wearing" "how were they behaving" "why didn't they say no, fight harder, scream more" etc. "Why did they lore an otherwise good man to do this" Imagine if the victim happened to be gay. The amount and ubiquitousness of victim blaming in the not even distant past was incredible, and sadly still can exist today.

He genuinely cares, he thinks he was right and BSA should have agreed with him; he either reached out to the folks presenting him or they reached out to him, and they found kindred beliefs and a desire to act on them. There's no reason to think there are any ill motives here. And at the same time the lack of ill or ulterior motives doesn't make his views or his interpretation of his experience the only accurate or legitimate ones.

When I hear stats that not only don't comport with my own experience but that also seem really high even if I credit that my experience may be sheltered I start to wonder about definitions. Earlier there was a discussion about folks' personal knowledge of YPT violation cases. The only two I've known of personally were not in my unit but came from my involvement in summer camp and Jambo. One was a case of a group text chat the was explicit and then also involved "sexting" pictures. The other was a slapping of genitals that a group of scouts was doing. Both these incidents were bad behavior, both involved youth in the same age cohort, both would probably fall into a broad definition of abuse (the latter was probably better classified as bullying) but I don't think they really qualified as the type of abuse that we've been discussing, and I don't think we should conflate the two. An overly broad definition seems to me to diminish the seriousness and horror of what victims making claims today suffered.

Scoutreach units are treated as a district because they operate differently then, and need different services and resources than a traditional units. They use paid leaders to provide the program, and at least in my council are always a part of council events, and are certainly welcome at other district's events.

To be clear, what I said and what I say is that to my knowledge it has not happened in our unit. Even today none of the cases in my council involve my CO. I don't say I've never heard about it. If you're conversing with someone about it it's obvious they've heard about it. I'm curious, how many, as a percentage of units, do you think this has occurred in? Even if the victims and BSA was advertising about it, which parenthetically they actually have been doing, how many scouts and scouters do you think would be able to say that they were within one degree of separation from an abuse or abuser. For as terrible as things have been, and in no way downplaying either the seriousness or terrible negligence involved in how big a problem this is, as a factual matter the overwhelming number of scouts who have passed through the program weren't abused, weren't near abused, weren't parts of units where abuse occurred. Abuse has been and is a terrible problem, it is a widespread problem, but it is by no means what could be considered a "common" problem under an objective understanding of that word.

First, virtually no one asks about the former. But if they did what I would say is that it's a mess, it doesn't really have anything to do with us, and my belief is that in the end, after long and arduous negotiations, some deal will be worked out that compensates the victims and allows BSA, our council, and our troop and pack, to continue. Ultimately, like all large bankruptcies and huge complex lawsuits, there will be a settlement. No one will really like it, but there's actually no way for one side or the other to "win" it as a matter of law. As to the latter. Past abuse doesn't really come up often. When it does I tell them that to my knowledge we've never had any incidents in our units' past. Talking about preventing abuse, that does come up, and even when it doesn't I always talk to new parents about YPT and how we implement it. What I tell them is there are rules and training, all leaders have to take the training and I encourage parents to at least look through the highlights of GTSS. I tell them the main rule is that no adult is ever alone with a scout, and that we take the rules seriously and adhere to them --- period. But the most important thing that we all can do is be vigilant, and transparent, and communicate. If you have a question --- ask. If there's something that you wonder about --- ask. If you think you see something untoward say something, and if you really think there's a problem there are all sorts of ways to report it beyond us. If you have kids today none of this is new or unusual or something that you're not encountering with every activity that your kids are in. I'm not someone who buys into the notion that somehow people didn't know how wrong this was in the past and somehow that provides some mitigation of any organization's responsibility back then. What I do know is what is different today is an awareness of just how common this can be, especially if treated the way it was in the past, and how devastating it is for kids if it happens. I believe that awareness is THE thing that makes kids safer today.

Not all inoculations "convert" that is they don't always trigger enough of a response to confer immunity, and immunizations can wain over time. I was inoculated for pertussis as a kid, but ended up with it in my forties, almost undoubtedly because one of the kids in my son's preschool was not vaccinated. My wife recently had to prove all her immunizations for a new job in health care. There was no practical way to get her childhood vaccination records so she got blood work done to show her titres. Turns out she did not have immunity to mumps and had to get a new MMR shot.

That's a very unfair assumption. The record was expunged, which means for all intents and purposes it never existed. In order to find out about the incident(s) you would need to conduct an independent investigation of him going back nearly a decade --- not interviewing references but rather pursuing people who may have known him and were themselves no longer associated with his previous employers. I worked briefly for a United States Attorney and they weren't even that thorough in backgrounding me. This guy worked for one police department, was fired, worked for another department and the returned to the original department where he was rehired and conducted the behavior he was eventually, ineffectually, charged with. Short of a deep investigation involving law enforcement officers with compulsive powers there's almost no way this guy would have been discovered by background. What's not answered is how the abuse happened despite YPT.

So, I'm the COR for a Catholic Parish. For our parish, scouts is only one of many ministries for youth. We have our own version of YPT, and it is required of everyone who volunteers: coaches, choir directors, catechism teachers, parents on field trips, etc., so the idea of having volunteer run youth programs is neither new nor unusual, and of course all Catholic parishes are well aware of liability for abuse. So it's not unreasonable some version of the CO model will exist going forward. The challenge of liability is insuring yourself against it. That is probably the biggest issue going forward between COs and BSA. What I would like to understand, and where the failure of BSA transparency is so acute, is how abuse occurs today in light of YPT rules. I doubt it's in background check failures, there are actually few convicted abusers who are slipping through those cracks. Can anyone give an example that they know of how the abuse occurred despite the YPT rules? In my units it would take a very determined predator, actively fooling all the other adults, and certainly conducting the abuse not at a scouting event, for all the protections to fail. I know it happens, I just wish I knew more about how -- especially in whatever common, predictable ways --- so that as scouters we could even better protect against it.

Welcome to the forum McHugh. Looking back through this thread it seems the consensus ended up being that insects would be included. Frankly, insects are harder to truly identify much of the time. "I saw a mosquito" is no more sufficient than "I saw a sparrow".

Still not illegal, and since they're widespread in homes from before 2018 a good skill to have and perform correctly. I have roughly 20 of these in my house, and no toddlers, infants, or small children. I'm pretty sure that I would repair rather than replace, and the supplies to do so are readily available from any number of sources. From your link: "The standard's new requirements segments the market into custom and stock, and requires all stock products, sold in stores and online, to be cordless or have inaccessible or short cords," said WCMA Executive Director Ralph Vasami. "Stock products account for more than 80 percent of all window covering products sold in the U.S. and CPSC incident data shows that requiring these products to be cordless or have inaccessible cords would have the most significant and immediate impact on reducing the strangulation risk to young children from certain window covering cords." Corded window coverings will only be available on custom-order products, as corded products are still needed by a wide range of consumers, including the elderly and those with disabilities, those short in stature, and those with windows in hard-to-reach locations. The revised standard imposes new restrictions on these custom-order products such as requiring operating cords to have a default length of 40% of the blind height [currently it is unlimited] and a default to a tilt wand instead of a tilt cord. "

Corded blinds aren't illegal, and in fact the correct installation and replacement of older cords is critical in making corded blinds safe or safer. ANSI/WCMA A100.1-2012, National Standard for Safety of Corded Window Covering Products, was approved on November 30, 2012. The revisions include: requirements for durability and performance testing of tension/hold down devices, including new requirements for anchoring; specific installation instructions and warnings; new requirements for products that rely on “wide lift bands” to raise and lower window coverings; new requirements for a warning label and pictograms on the outside of stock packaging and merchandising materials for corded products; and new testing requirements for cord accessibility, hazardous loop testing, roll-up style shade performance, and durability testing of all safety devices. CPSC staff believes that these changes should increase durability of certain components, encourage creativity in design, help improve consumer awareness of the strangulation risk associated with cords, and improve awareness of the safer products that should be used in homes with young children.

Neither the court nor the legislature is rewriting any contractual obligations. Oversimplifying a bit, the contract between the insurer and the insured is to provide indemnification to the insured for the costs of the torts (acts of harm) that they commit during the period of the policy. SOLs don't actually cover or not cover that contract between the insured and insurers. The SOLs cover two DIFFERENT parties, the insured and the victim of their tort. The insured and insurers could write a policy that limits coverage based on when a claim is made or on possible changes in the law. SOLs change in both directions, if not frequently at least in some manner forseeably, usually every few decades. If a legislature shortens the SOL, a fairly common occurrence when doing "tort reform", nobody expects that insurance companies will recalculate past premiums and offer reimbursements based on their now lower risk of having to pay claims. That insurance companies might misprice their risk is , well, their risk. It is part of the reason that they themselves purchase reinsurance.

Welcome to the forums. You clearly have never lived in an old house.😀 The 100+ year old houses I've lived in have each and every one of them needed all of these repairs.

I took out an umbrella policy because of all the kid related things I was doing: scouting, coaching, driving kids on field trips, etc. I recommend to anyone involved in kid programs to get the coverage. It's relatively cheap, whereas when kids get hurt it's very expensive..

The reason time barred claims are being allowed, indeed solicited, as part of the bankruptcy, is that the intent of this, or any other bankruptcy is to discharge all of the organization's debts, even if they haven't completely ripened yet. Specifically, BSA knows that not only does it have potential financial liability to claimants who are newly empowered by changes in SOL periods, it also knows that it faces potential ongoing liability if/when more states change their SOLs. Let's say that all time barred claims were stricken, and only currently open state claims were allowed to be paid, and the bankruptcy proceeded with just those claims. The magnitude of just those claims would exhaust all of the assets available to pay them, including all of the available insurance coverage. If, the day after that bankruptcy ended and all the non barred claims were paid, a state like Texas changed its SOL laws, the claims from Texas, now not time barred, would be sufficient to drive the new BSA back into bankruptcy, with even less assets and no insurance proceeds available to pay claimants. And this would happen every single time any state changed its SOL. Bankruptcy law is designed to prevent just such serial bankruptcies and proceedings. The goal of bankruptcy is to have an organization emerge free of ANY pre-existing debts. So, claimants, even from time barred states, are entitled to some compensation now in exchange for the discharge of any future claim they might otherwise have had. The specific value of that claim is probably less than that of someone who is not time barred because of the greater uncertainty. But all of these claims are to some extent uncertain because even the most perfect claim would still be reliant on the many vagaries that can arise in any trial or legal proceeding --- that is to say there's no guarantee that any individual would prevail in court at the same time knowing that some are more likely to prevail than others.

it's not entirely accurate to say the attorneys' job is to maximize the amount their clients get. An attorney's duty is to zealously represent their client. Whether that means maximizing a monetary award is for the client to determine. if a client wants his attorney to advocate for a settlement that awards compensation equally regardless of the SOL differences among claimants then the attorney is duty bound to advocate for that irrespective of their view of the wisdom of it or what effect it might have on the attorney's well being. One of the challenges of contingency representation is that the attorney's pecuniary interest may not align with a client's desires. An additional challenge comes when an attorney is representing a group of clients because an individual client's desire may diverge from the group's.