5yearscouter

Last time we did raingutter regatta we just used the cheapo kits from oriental trading company. the time before that an adult cut out a bunch of wooden parts for the kids to put together boats.

If I have any webelos come the changeover, I will work in the existing book for webelos badge, and anything else that looks similar to the new requirements. When the new books are actually ready to be bought at hte scout shop, I will buy each boy a new book and go thru and sign everything in the new book that they have completed. If they have earned any of the new adventures/badges, I would award those in addition to any of the old webelos pins they have already earned and are wearing on their colors. then evaluate how to finish the arrow of light plan in the amt of time remaining. Then the scout could decide if he wants to wear old or new awards on his uniform. Basically if a boy does work as a webelo I will figure out how to count it in the right place and not make them redo anything just because national changed the books. Hopefully it will be easy, but probably not. Luckily I've been thru webelos every year since 2005 so I have a good idea of the requirements and can compare them more readily once I have both books next to each other. I won't overthink it until the books are actually printed though.

it wouldn't let me type anything longer than a sentence- I get error message. My comments are that the name should be first, with emergency contacts room for 3 adults (mom, dad, stepparent), allergies with more room for info, and meds on front page. signature stuff on the back. move health history stuff to front of page 3 with dr signature and review on back. just a bit of rearranging and get rid of all the blue shaded areas. they are too big and waste too much printer ink! But it's an improvement. My son just did one on the old form last week and dr commented that in an emergency it would be annoying to read thru to find what you needed to find it was too wordy. This is better.

can't enter anything

Our out of control commissioner was a unit commissioner. I sent a note to his bosses, the District Executive, the Scout Executive and the District commissioner that if I saw that unit commissioner at another meeting he would be finishing puttig the nails in the coffin that he started when he trashed the unit leaders. We never saw him again. What he did was unscoutlike behavior whether the info was true or false.

I really like the idea of Horsemanship and Shotgun, Black Powder, Rifle and/or Archer badge

Your unit top 3, Committee Chair, Chartered Org Rep and the IH for the unit can all add training records for you on my.scouting.org If you have copies of the training cards, provide them and they can upload a copy of the card when they enter the date just to be sure. If you changed positions since you did training, BSA would really like you to take the CURRENT training for your position.

Basically my DE told me as long as the felony has nothing to do with kids or violence the person may still pass. So the 18 year old that stole a car who had a felony conviction became one of our den leaders as a 30 year old adult. The sticker was the dad with felony conviction for drugs that led to him having his children removed from his custody permanently due to neglect, well that one we didn't even put in the application, but he was upfront, honest, and admitted it all and completed the application so I could have it on file. The DE told me that because it had to do with kids, if he submitted the application, it was likely to be denied, and if it was denied, BSA may make a rule that he can't come to meetings at all, so it was up to us. After a few years (tiger thru bear) got to know the guy and he was ok--very immature, a bit stupid perhaps in some of his choices in life that he'd openly share with leaders--maybe no filter was his real problem Discussion within the unit we decided that he was allowed to come to meetings, but preferably not be a big part of the meetings but come and hang at the back of the room or help his son with projects. We tried to put a bit of distance between him and the kids for most of the meeting because ever once in a while he would say something totally inappropriate (like reference to his police arrest when doing the Bear fingerprinting that made others uncomfortable). In this instance it looks like a witch hunt. The guy is making waves the unit committee/leaders do not like. So they want a way to discredit him and send him packing. Then his background seems like a useful tool to get rid of him. BAD idea.

Do you have a meeting place that can handle a few people? do you have anyone in the troop that looks like Santa claus? I'm asking cause we are debating dying my husband's hair the rest of the way white and dressing him up as santa and seeing about a meet santa claus for a few bucks thing at the scout lodge. charge $1-2 at the door. give em a cheap picture of kid with santa, offer better pictures if you can get a good printer and ink cheap. sell some hot cocoa and a cookie and a candy cane. Or if you think there is anyone within a close by area that is looking for an hour or two of childcare for cub age kids while they go christmas shopping, you could set up one or two saturday mornings before christmas. again offer a bit of hot cocoa, cookie and a candy cane--add in a cheap christmas craft out of construction paper glue and stuff. you can charge like $10-20/hour in nicer areas, but at least $5-10 most places. If they won't pay $5 for an hour, they are just gonna leave the kid home alone anyway. you may be able to put up a flyer up at the closest/nicest elementary school in the area. you'd have to guarantee a certain number of adults and older boy scouts to supervise, and a contigency plan and collect contact info and signature from parents that if they don't show up by X time the police will be called and a late fee charged. See if the church would support that kind of thing sent out to their members.

Just look for burbs that don't have christmas tree pick up day, or bulk pick up right after christmas for people to put their stuff by the road. Some big cities have drop off locations where people can drop their tree, but if they don't have the transportation to get the tree there, they might pay you a few bucks to do it for them. You might do ok with christmas tree delivery now that I think about it-- if you have a lot of people who want a live tree but can't get them home cause they don't have a truck or a truck big enough. but I don't know how that would work exactly. you'd have to find a couple christmas tree lots that would let you hang out and offer your services. I know walmart type place would be best, cause the trees are cheapest there, so the extra cost of a few bucks to get the tree delivered to your house --it would have to be we follow you home, paid up front, we only deliver the tree to the doorstep kind of service. Might spend more on gas than you'd make on delivery.

Christina, we say they are VolunTold to show they were told they have to volunteer.

It says I don't have at least 10 characters in this post! My pack is in West Phoenix. Not a bad part of town, per se, but students qualify for free and reduced lunches at about 85-95% at our schools. We've had to fight the packs from the more affluent parts of time from taking all of our sales times at our local Fry's grocery store. The council arranges with the grocery store corporate office to have the store fronts available to pack and troops on certain weekends. Then council has units sign up for all the time slots thru them. Which means every fall I'm waiting and watching until the store sign ups start so I hopefully can snag some store time for my cubs at the store that is RIGHT THERE by where we meet across the street. We got like friday night, saturday and sunday morning so like 9 hours total, and all the other time slots for the two weekends were snagged by units that are 10+miles away. They've learned that our store is good with donations, sales are not all that good, but used to be we'd get $600 a weekend in donations money just having a cubscout sitting there asking everyone to buy popcorn and a small donations can sitting on the table. Used to be also that you could reserve a store based on how close your pack meets to the store, and how many cubs you have--which at least guaranteed we'd have some time at "our" store. The packs from the wealthier areas have more scouts and they could use more places to sell at, but they also charge more, have more $ in the bank, and it hurts if they are taking away the money we need to actually provide scouting to our boys rather than money to send leaders to wood badge. know what I mean? Without those popcorn sales times at Fry's, we've really struggled. We have a couple of gas stations, a couple of churches, dentist office, pediatrician's office, no big stores except ones where corporate has decide that if they open it up to cubs they'll have to let every non-profit have time in front of their store so they don't let anyone do it. There just aren't any other types of businesses to sell at. Finding other fundraisers to do instead of popcorn is a good idea, but again, if you don't have a place to sell those things, your sales will suck. door to door sales you have to have a really kick butt product. Painting house numbers on the curb I've seen do well in new neighborhoods or very old neighborhoods. christmas tree hauling away would work if you have access to vehicles and a place to dispose of them. My boy's troop sells flag subscriptions to make a LOT of $. But again, it's in a nicer area, more people with disposable income to spend $50 a year to have a flag put up at the home or business 8 holidays a year. and you hve to have a place to store the flags and vehicles to deliver them. We are still looking for that perfect fundraiser. Right now we are trying to sell enough popcorn to get uniform shirts for 4 cubbies that need them(probably used on ebay but still parents can't afford it so you gotta do it). Then the next goal is enough to pay for $2 per boy for awards every month for the rest of the year. then we'll see if there is any to help offset the cost of daycamp. So far we haven't met goal #1 yet.

do not give them worksheets. they'll go home and do webelos pins as if they are homework assignments which takes ALL the fun out of scouting.

Owl training does not just cover the oudoors webelos badges, Owl training is often taught in conjunction with Introduction to Oudoor Leadership skills which covers camping and boy scout outdoor skills a bit more. I will say that if you are in a LDS troop, you are probably NOT taking the boys camping at all as a den/patrol, so you don't really need OWL if you know how to teach the knots, fire building, camping stuff.

Realize that part of what the care and keeping of the grand canyon is safety of visitors, with tens of thousands of people visiting every day, without access to bathrooms, without trash pick up, etc that could get very ugly health hazard fast. In addition to the risk for the stupid idiots who decide hiking the canyon without any water is a good idea because it's cool up at the top--even though it's probably 100 at the bottom. Civil disobedience to enter the canyon by those who would CARE for the environment, sure, you'll take out everything you take in and leave no trace; but as we know, most people are not like that, are they?

It would have taken longer to break all the links or make all the reservations services "unavailable" for all the things you can get a permit for online-- than it took to just take the site offline and plug in a redirect to the dept of the interior.

Brew, they are closing the roads up to the canyon. you can't get a permit (even if already approved like ours) to backpack into the canyon. All reservations will not be honored, even prepaid tickets to get into the park. There isn't a fence around the place that can be totally locked down if you are going to hike around the canyon but they are certainly trying their darndest to keep everyone out.

We do the grand canyon veteran's day weekend in November. Hopefully it's figured out by then!!

The easiest way to remove a youth member is to convince him to join another unit. then he's off your roster and someone else's problem. But yes, you can remove him from your unit, and he's in la la land with BSA unti he joins a new unit. Or you can report what happened to the scout executive and ask that he be removed from membership with the BSA and they'll consider it strongly and he'll probably be removed from membership as you request if it's a serious enough allegation

Yes, we have a sign in sheet at the door, they get a door prize ticket when signing in, for things like cookies, or a different necker slide, or whatever freebies or cheap but not cheaply made things we can find. Also someone welcomes the family at that table, tells them what the gathering activity is, and if there are any handouts about upcoming council, district or pack events or a pack newsletter or anything like that. We give a den attendance ribbon to the den with the highest attendance % wise every 3 mos. they hang it on their den flags. we also try to give out the cubbie teddy bear in a scout uniform to the den with the highest attendance, or the den who made the biggest gains in how many scouts are in attendance.

The LDS do somethig called 11 year old scouts. They are the bridge between webelos and boy scouts, sort of like a new scout patrol that meets separately from the regular boy scout troop. if you think of it as a patrol, it will make more sense, cause patrols can and should meet separately from the whole troop meeting thing to get stuff done and have fun as well as get them started on their trail to first class stuff. I don't think you can change that. the only change I could think of is if an 11 year old scout program was available within the existing troop, but I do not fully understand the structure to see if that would work in your area. Check with the scoutmaster, but usually the younger kids can just go in the church to a kid's room with toys and there may even be someone there to supervise. is it at your church or another one nearby?

I've see patrols organized a lot of time, since our old SM used to have the boys try to reorg patrols every 6 mos talk about no patrol unity.... The boys actually got together and outvoted the adults that they wanted patrols to stay together for at least a year, and then only fix patrols that were broken. So that's been better, lots and lots better. retention is up, but not so sure about attendance on outings, as they still tend toward ad hoc patrols. What we recommended the last couple times was for each scout to go sit by someone he wants to tent with, someone who goes camping on the same kinds of activities they usually do. and often they ended up in clumps of 4. Then to have those 4 make sure they were with people they'd want to hang out at mtgs with and then grabbed a few others. some of the social butterflies had difficulties deciding which group to go with. some of hte struggling non-social scouts grabbed onto to their best buddy for life and then the two of them went looking for kindred spirits. Most of the patrols are primarily aged based, where the scouts are the same age, enjoy the same sports, movies, games, songs, and are at the same maturity level. some scouts are up a year or two and some scouts are down a year or two based on who they've made friends with. that is one advantage of ad hoc patrols occassionally, the scouts get out of their comfort zone, meet someone new that's older or younger and may find a lifelong friend. I'd say if you were going to always do ad hoc patrols, to try to make the best of it, have the scouts combine the same two patrols on each campout. so the eagles are always with the mountain men to be the mountain eagles, and the dragons are always with the badgers to be the badger riders. As a matter of fact those patrols were ad hoc recombined patrols on several outings last year, and they are now recombined patrols due to loss/moving scouts/aging out, and the scouts are doing well in those 2 patrols that used to be 4 weak patrols.

we have a flag program that brings in almost 10k a year. They sell subscriptions to adults in the neighborhood around the scout hut, the scouts will go out and put out a flag in the morning on 8 holidays a year, then go back and take the flag down before dark. They charge like $45 or 50 the first year and $40 each year after that. The initial $ pays for a long piece of conduit and a flag. in the ground at the person's house they put a piece of PVC as a receiver with a red cap on it, wherever the homeowner wants the flag posted. draw a map of the yard to find the red plug. scouts take off the plug, unroll the flag and place the conduit into the receiver and salute the flag. The scouts get paid a minimal amount in their scout acct and the rest goes to the troop acct. Oh there is also a line for people to add a donation if they want, and there is often an extra $50 in the envelope when it comes back. The flags are stored in long coffin looking wooden boxes in the scout lodge that double as a long cabinet to do work at the lodge.

the above I tried to post several times yesterday but it wouldn't go thru. came back and it was saved so I posted it. for the write stuff ones in bear, combine the scrapbook, history of the area or pack, jot it down, go to the newspaper office, all those into one meeting and one outing--make a den newspaper and go to the newspaper office and see if they'll give you enough newsprint (or buy some) that you can cut up to fit in your printer to make it look like a real newspaper. pass it out to the whole pack about what the bears are up to, picture of the whole den, history of something or other, upcoming events, whatever. make it fun or don't do it. Since the new cub scout resource book came out I have had 2 dens use the Bear pages very strictly, right out of the book, lots of things sent home as homework, lots of sitting down and working activities for the den meetings. Both dens started with 8 and ended with 2 scouts. They were bored to tears! In the same time period, dens who used the resource book, plus the old program helps, and some hands on activities from old pow wow books, the ones who searched thru all those resources for adults but only stopped at the pictures of things to do or things to build ad ignored most of the words except a few silly songs or skits--those dens started with 8 and went UP in size (stopped them at 13 and those 13 in one den crossed to boy scouts together). Sure maybe it was totally the personalities of the people in the den and the den leader, or maybe not. Both sets of dens had similar numbers of adhd boys, and involved or not involved parents. I really think that new resource needs to go away. who wants a theme of responsibility?Even boy scouts have better themes than that. when the same thing can be taught with a theme of Hometown Heroes with a focus on fire and police and first aid? they are adding those as ideas for pack meetings, but it needs to go all the way back down to the den level.