T2Eagle

I was actually pretty shocked that my council had not transferred its assets into a protected trust. The best explanation I was able to gleam was that it was a combination of lack of imagination about the possibility that an existential crisis could occur, some smugness, and some genuine concern about the possible challenges that protecting your assets can bring. Regarding the latter, for instance, place a camp property into a trust and you are committed to that property forever, and the LC board loses effective control over it. Even if it become clear to everyone that the wisest decision regarding the camp is sell it off to invest in another camp, you lose the ability to do that. As to the MTC transfer, I could be mistaken, but if I recall correctly, the transfer went through with a signed caveat that IF the BSA had a reversionary interest in the property than that reversionary interest was not extinguished. Since I'm deeply skeptical about the existence of that reversionary interest, I think MTC accomplished what they wanted to accomplish. And if this bankruptcy goes BSA only, MTC has effectively protected its assets from state claimants. I also think that if this goes national only, the LCs will immediately move most of their own assets into protective trusts.

Our troop pays for its leaders to attend. We get three free for participating in things like FOS, having a certain number of scouts attend, etc. The $400 sounds steep but maybe OK, tacking on $200 for extra travel really puts it into expensive territory. if your troop isn't doing some serious --- and lucrative --- fundraising to defray costs for the scouts and subsidize leaders I don't know what they're thinking.

No, it's not about whether some agency has your prints on file, it' s whether the person that is applying for something today is in fact the person they claim to be, or if I'm being really precise, whether the person who is applying today has any kind of criminal record that can be found by examining the fingerprints being submitted today.

The thing about fingerprints is that they're not tied to a any particular file or record, they're proof that you are who you say you are. Your fingerprints aren't going to reveal anything special about Teacher Skeptic that a search using your name, birthdate, ss#, etc. wouldn't reveal. What they do is prove that SM Skeptic is the same person as Teacher Skeptic.

Welcome to the forum. My advice before knowing anything else is no matter where you are on the continuum of patrol method, pick one or two things you want to change first, get both the scouts and one or two adults to agree that those changes would be good, then implement them and run them a couple time until you're really good at them, before you move on to the next items to change. But to get any specific advice, first tell us a bit about how your troop operates today. For instance, describe how your troop decides what they're going to do on a campout: how and who decides what you're going to eat, who is going to cook, who is going to clean up. And also how and who decides what you're going to do for the periods between meals.

"The word was invented by J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books to describe a form of teleportation from one place to another, but in derived usage it often means just to disappear completely." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disapparate

I suspect that since the original plan: 12,000 (or whatever the original number was) claimants and a quick exit has long since disapparated, the process has taken on a life of its own, and no one can bring themselves to say "stop! let's rethink this entirely"

It's not quite that COs say they can't be held liable, it's that they were indemnified/insured by BSA in the event that they were held liable. That's why they're also claimants in the bankruptcy. They have a claim against the asset that is the insurance contracts BSA has.

That was my first thought too. Your ASMs need better mentors.

I would say that if the current plan gets rejected than the threshold question really needs to be whether she needs to follow Purdue regarding non debtors. I don't know, maybe someone else does, whether there is actually a binding precedent in this circuit that explicitly is in conflict with Purdue.

i would tell them that rules don't self justify. They exist to accomplish a purpose, if a rule fails to accomplish its purpose, or worse, as I think is the case with this rule as applied to this situation, the rule actually defeats its own purpose, than the rule needn't be and shouldn't be followed. You can find all sorts of legal, philosophical, and even Jesuitical support for this position if you're concerned enough to look. And it's worth remembering that the stakes are very low with disregarding the rule. The worst that can happen is that if someone is foolish enough to make some sort of report of this to BSA or council, than the older person has to leave scouting. Which is the same result, without any upside, to foolishly adhering to the rule. I would add that during a scout event, like a campout, the basic YPT rules of no one on one, no tenting together, etc. should be followed. The rule isn't perfect as applied in that situation, but it's also not facially foolish, nor is it much of a burden or inconvenience.

I found this from the article pretty interesting. "Earlier this month, the United Methodist negotiators were encouraging those churches to vote “no,” but with the settlement, the churches are asked to vote for the plan. Those that already have voted against it are asked to change their votes, and directions on how to do that are being shared through annual conferences." I don't know how many congregations actually filed as claimants, but it could easily be 2000 -- 3000, that's a lot of yes votes.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21165443-nc-safe-act-ruling-dec-20-2021 Unless you're a NC constitutional scholar I'm not sure the ruling gives you much predictive insight. The question, as I understand it, is how closely a line of NC cases dating to 1933, which say that the legislature cannot retroactively take away vested property rights (as opposed to fundamental constitutional rights), applies specifically to SOL defenses, which are considered "vested" rights. Further, does that line of cases both apply to SOLs and is it closely enough tied to the specific language of the NC Constitution to prove to a court that the law meets the burden of being facially unconstitutional "beyond a reasonable doubt". This one goes to the NC Supreme Court without a doubt.

The big black hole of this case has always been the insurance company liability. Over the years the insurers have covered, or alleged to have covered BSA, the LCs, and the COs. Given all the discovery that has occurred, I'm surprised there is so little solid information about what their actual liability may be. I suspect that the answer is no one knows. Decades old policies, subject to all sorts of interpretations. At the end of the day, no side will want to risk the full litigation of this, because no side will risk losing it all. So eventually there has to be a deal, a deal, not an imposed outcome.

I've never even thought of saying something like that, and if I ever thought I had to I wouldn't be going myself.

I don't know, but I suspect there is no such data qua data, no connection of one incident to another. If such data or a data base existed it would have come out in one of the state court cases over the years the same way the ineligible files did. It's certainly an overall organizational failing, but the lack of such data is one of the reasons I'm unimpressed with Officer Mike's tenure as head of YPT over the past decade.

To help everyone be clear, the $50 is every year. For some perspective, my Catholic Diocese charges $25 every couple years to cover the cost of the background check necessary to be a scouter or a CYO coach. I have no idea for either organization how much of that is paid directly to the backgrounding company, how much is calculated to be direct cost for administering and reviewing the background process, or how much is charged to overhead. But I would guess that the $25 -- $50 range is probably pretty much the cost any organization is going to have to charge to carry out a similar process. I posted this earlier, but I'll review it. Our Troop and Pack do a joint weekend every year, we usually have about 45 Cubs, and that means an equal number of parents attend. If we had to tack on $50 per parent to attend, on top of the $20 we already charge, that would crater attendance. Similarly, if a parent with only a passing interest in getting involved just wants to go on a campout one time or once a year with their 11-12 year old to see what's going on, an additional $50 is just going to get them to skip it. It seems easily intuitive to me that discouraging easy access by parents to campouts and outings is not going to make things safer, and would probably make things at least marginally less safe. At the same time, my understanding of how the vast and overwhelming amount of abuse comes about is from repeated contact and at least some amount of grooming or isolating, and that the vast majority of abusers are not actually going to have a prior history of arrest and conviction for abuse. So background checks for a once year participant would be expected to catch a miniscule number of abusers and prevent an even more miniscule amount of abuse.

The most important part of the appointment process is the scout is "appointed by the SPL in consultation with the SM" (emphasis added). Critical to being a good leader is being able to choose your team, and not just based on friendships but on the needs, and abilities, of the members of the troop as a whole. This is where an SM can help smooth out some of the rough patches that electing everyone, or just letting the SPL act without guidance, can produce. I have seen electing everybody be the SM's easier alternative to working harder with some SPLs. To Barry's point about leadership as a requirement for advancement, I often found myself reminding adults that it's not positions of leadership that is required but positions of responsibilities. "How can he be an Eagle, he's never even been PL or ASPL let alone SPL, all he's ever been is Librarian or Chaplain's Aide." To which my response is yes, but he was really good as Librarian, and he would not have been good in those other roles. He would not delegate, he would have been frustrated by and frustrating to his fellow scouts. Some people aren't meant to be leaders, they're meant to be solo artists.

This came up with us last year. I am the COR, and in the past my signatures were sufficient. This year, as you say, that paper was not in the packet. I was told the DE had to personally get the signature, or if not personally at least directly get the IH signature.

The thing to remember is that a lot of us didn't. The fatality rate for children is about half today what it was in the mid 60s. There are a lot of reasons for that but being smarter about safety is certainly a part of it. Sure, we never wore seatbelts as kids, and we didn't die, but that's not because it wasn't foolish or dangerous. Those commercials showing what happened to unbelted crash test dummies weren't exaggerations.

I'm skeptical the number could be that low. Everybody knows there will be a number of false claims in these types of suits, but there have been a lot of them over the years and folks have a decent handle as to how many falsities to expect. It would be really strange to have this particular case inspire such an outsize level of fraud and deceit.

Annual Planning Weekend is this coming month. I think I'll whisper this in one or two of the scouts' ears.

I don't live in the area any more, but I still read the "Inky" online, mostly for the sports coverage. Once a Flyers/Iggles/Phillies/Sixers fan always ... But I delivered The Bulletin, which was the afternoon paper. I was never a fan of getting up early in the morning.

That is exactly my version of Buck Buck, I was too lazy/inarticulate to write it clearly, so I just did a cut and paste from Wikipedia. In terms of virus and variants you couldn't be more correct. This is also clipped from Wikipedia: "As early as the 16th century, children in Europe and the Near East played Buck, Buck, which had been called "Bucca Bucca quot sunt hic?"

As a native Philadelphian I introduced "Buck Buck"* to my midwestern scouts. In hindsight maybe not my finest hour as SM. *one group of players [climbing] on the backs of a second group in order to build as large a pile as possible or to cause the supporting players to collapse."