5yearscouter

lets see, friday night people come straggling in at different times, everyone is on their own for food, and we might have a simple family campfire, no program. Saturday am is usually a fairly quick breakfast, dens eat together. Then we gather for a flag ceremony, announcements, questions and answers. go over camp rules etc. We usually have a hike planned, or maybe a bit of a hike to a fishing spot. so we might make a mini first aid kit, a simple survival bracelet, or just go over some leave no trace. then we hike for a bit. fish for a bit. back to camp for some free time games, lunch with your den. afternoon activities are usually a bit of rotation, so there might be a leatherwork bracelet or some knots (or knots with long licorice sticks), tour of the nature center, some kind of simple team building game, some kind of belt loop thing like marbles in the dirt or kick ball. Then we usually make a group afternoon snack like smores, or smores taco/burrito things, or homemade ice cream in the coffee cans you roll back and forth. Free time games after that with strategically placed football, kickball, rope, Kuub, bocce ball, croquet, badminton, whatever is appropriate for the area we are camping in. sometimes it's like a big park with a built in playground, sometimes it's a bit more wooded and rougher ground. One year we had a quite involved scavenger hunt with prizes that the kids could work on all weekend if they wanted to. Dens might get together to practice a skit or song for the campfire. take down the flag, we eat dinner pot luck style the pack might pay for hotdogs or hamburgers sat night with a campfire program, skits, sogs. sometimes we retire some flags with the last of the fire which is why we usually do smores earlier in the day, also easier to do with smaller groups around a smaller campfire, rather than everyone at the big campfire. Sunday we meet for flag, quick scout's own service (optional), coffee, we try to do a big breakfast, mtn man breakfast, pancakes, whatever. each den brings some stuff to share, pack pays for a main thing like pancake mix and syrup which is cheap in bulk. we put all the campstoves together and cook until everyone is full. then it's clean up, pack up and head home. sometimes we do a short hike, or play some games, but most parents want to leave early and get out of dodge. when we have too much down time, someone always gets hurt. unLuckily the last time it was my own son who got the broken arm. so we do try to keep them busy enough with appropriate activities available, cycling thru things with short times to coordinate with scout's short attention spans, keep them out of trouble but having fun.

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Or see if some of them would be willing to help out another den that might meet the same night if you guys all meet at the same location.

You could use Quicken. every scout gets an account, transfer money back and forth that way. or use excel. but a software I do not know of. there is scout account tracking on troop web host as part of advancement, calendar, website features but that is for scout troops not packs.

Most of the places around here in AZ say NO to hammocks in the trees, especially the scout camps.

The bold certainly seems the case in most troops. My 17 year old son is the later version. He's served in positions or the fun of it, and for the personal motivation to see others learn more and do more. He just stepped up with just over 6 months left before he turns 18 to serve as troop instructor because he has seen scout skill proficiency take a nosedive, and watched the troop instructors who know just enough to be dangerous about some subjects (like a couple of weeks ago demonstrating ax useage he about had a coronary that someone was going to remove a limb from a body rather than a tree branch). He's been very active in OA ceremonies, den chief, summer camp volunteer staff and paid staff, trying to ensure everyone in the troop learns what they need to know AND advance as well. He's actually been kind of bummed about earning Eagle. To him, true Eagles are the 2nd type, they are in scouting for the scouting and Eagle is not their goal but they usually earn it anyway with a bit of extra effort (like the Eagle project and maybe a couple of merit badges they have to push themselves to complete). Yet our troop is full of boys who are earning Eagle like it's a check box on a college application, they are in it for the potential scholarships and prestige and it makes him sad. He wasn't sure if he wanted to get his Eagle if he was going to be thought of as being "just like them." As for servant leadership in the workplace, my husband works for a huge worldwide computer company and that is their new buzzword. The thought is that if you as a manager help those "below" you to grow in their postions, they will become a better asset to the company. Along the way, they realize that you can form a tight knit team that works well together, and on the move upward for the manager, he will often pull the rest of his team upwards with him, where they follow him upward to bigger and better things in the company. Who knows how well it really works on the corporate level, but it certainly can't help to have managers who are looking out for their team and helping them to grow--it should make for a better company to work for, eh?

Talk to the District person immediately! Your advancement chair should know who that person is, but if not, go up the chain. The proposal should show what you proposed at the beginning. That is approved by the org you are doing the work for, the unit, the scoutmaster and the district person's signature is next. Get all of those signatues done and go to district eagle counselor for assistance!! Do not change anything until you talk to them and see if they will sign what you have so far and allow you to go forward from here. There is a place for the district to make suggested changes and they may have suggestions of change. There is also a suggestion that for any big changes in your project (like fundraising, which requires a fundraising application approved by district) you contact your coach, district Eagle counselor, and the org you are doing the work for.

Wow I feel Deprived now, Since Every place we go we have to stay on the Paved parking Areas..and Our State Parks don't afford Off Roading Experience. Granted Texas does have a few potholes You should get off the beaten path with your scouts more. Our state parks are mostly big RV parking lots, so we don't take the scouts to those except way once in a while. I don't like camping in a big gravel camping area with the sound of generators all around. Dispersed camping areas, national parks, even private land around someone's remote cabin can make for some great scout outings. Most of our forest service roads have no pavement, I didn't think TX had paved over everything!?

Or we have that uniform "rule" that says you shouldn't wear just one part of the uniform, so nobody thinks it's ok to just wear the scout neckerchief.

If one car breaks down and you have 8 on the trip, you have enough coverage to shuttle the boys to the destination while the broken vehicle gets towed. If a bus breaks down, a commercial bus the passengers wait on the side of the road for many hours waiting for the company to go and get another bus, if one is available, or they'll arrange for transportation because that's part of what you pay them to do. if you are the only bus, you have to call all the parents to come and get all the scouts and transport them somewhere while you figure out the towing and repair for the bus It takes the issue of a broken down vehicle and multiplies it by a factor of 10 for cost, how long standing by the road and frustration rating. Passengers should not ride in a 5th wheel. It is not safe. Most of our places we camp involve driving an interstate highway to get to a 2 lane hiway, then to a gravel road with sharp turns and then some mud if lucky some cinders. Depending on weather that may be dry and nice or muddy and yucky. Busses aren't meant to go on the stuff past the 2 lane highway level/surface-city streets. A bus on gravel roads sucks for traction, the little ruts in the road are magnified exponentially to shake the fillings loose in your head.

What people tend to forget is that there is a place for all the arts and crafty things in the lower ranks. I try to always explain it to the tiger and wolf parents that 1. schools nowadays are doing less and less glue, cut, color, crafty things and that 2. these types of things increase the boy's manual dexterity which will allow them to do more intricate things as adults. Of course so many adults don't have jobs or hobbies that involve cut, glue, make things anymore. But even if you are typing or cooking meals you need to be able to use small motor and large motor skills effectively. Used to be everyone had a kind of crafty hobby things somewhere in their life. I made sure my sons both know how to do leatherworking, crochet, sewing(still working on that one), woodworking from big to small, rockets, models, all sorts of things that help them to learn how the world works as well as develop all parts of body and brain.

That sounds like a really really BAD idea....be sure you check insurance costs, I don't think it's as low as you think it is to get the necessary coverage for a bus full of youth. And if you are renting this out to drive other people around, that means you are a commercial bus operator, which may require quite a few city or state permits, as well as storage facility for the thing.

If anyone else has suggestions I'll take em. Tomorrow night is school open house, but I don't have the bodies to cover all 13 schools. If the parents agree we'll send home flyers for a scout open house/roundup sometime before the end of the month. School start Monday.

We live in the big city of phoenix, but are the only non-LDS unit within a huge chunk of city. We cover 13 schools for actual recruiting, and get kids from dozens of other schools. There are 3 extra large packs out further west of our area, which is the only other option for non-LDS youth in our area. In 25 years of being here, and since I've been here for over 8 years, we've talked to Co options but they are really next to nil. Our primarily land area we recruit from has no veteran's groups, vfws, american legions, 2 churches that we have already talked to and the Kiwanis. There are businesses like grocery stores, gas stations, savers/goodwill, tire store, walgreens, cvs,. There is a Bechtel office across the street from the school we meet at, but the DE just laughed at me when I suggested that as a possible CO. We do have meeting places--we can use literally any of the 13 schools we recruit from, for free any night of the week, weekends we have to pay for custodians to show up so we don't do that. We do have a fire station community room we can use for meetings free as well, but again, not on weekends. So weekend mtgs are at a leader's house or the park. My oldest is working on his Eagle project at the school this week (gets us on good graces with their new principal), school starts next week. And then I'll be contacting all parents for a parent meeting and a discussion of recruiting. I think we need to take the middle of the road tack--recruiting--but act like recruiting to make a whole new pack--with all new leadership. If it takes off, I'll do all training and get em started and they'll have to spread their wings to fly. If it doesn't take off, we'll discuss what to do next. It should be easier than this, but I know sometimes it just isn't.

I'm IH. We are the Parents of chartered org. As soon as a new scout joins, their parent becomes a voting member. So I can call a parent meeting now, to vote to continue or fold. or I can call a parent meeting after a trial of recruiting to vote. Which would you want to do? Most likely I'll call a parent meeting to discuss and plan recruiting. If nobody shows up that will be great fun.

I'm pretty sure that the $ will be taken out of your scout account and the boy registered with the BSA if you use this option and choose to accept the application. As long as you can opt out of doing so, it's ok. In some places everyone knows everyone and the person seeing the application would know Joe and his kid already unless they were new to town. Or If you can set it up to allow the application to be submitted online, but they aren't approved until you click a box to approve them, which you'd only do after they came to a meeting and paid registration and dues to the unit. If it stays where each of those parts, accept application and approve application are allowed to be under the control of the unit, then it would probably be ok.

yeah I'm trying to figure out if I care ENOUGH to do this again. My boys are off to the troop, they are 13 and 17 now. I don't need a pack. Existing boys except 1 have never been in a large pack. closest other packs are 50-80 scouts. There is benefit in a bit smaller pack being available for some scouts. IF we kept all 7 and got the new 5 who are interested in joining, we'd have 3 in each den with 4 in webelos. So. 1. We could fold now and not recruit in August. That is super duper negative thinking and is just giving up. I hate to just give up after putting in so much time to the pack, buying camping gear, building up a small bank balance, and such. 2. I could do recruiting in August with help of my troop friends and then if we don't get enough bodies to do all the jobs, and then send everyone on their merry way. This is at least "do my best" kind of thinking and then if it doesn't work at least we tried. or 3. I could do recruiting in August with help of my troop friends, might keep a few people who didn't answer the negative den leader guy who tried to call everyone, and find there are enough new people to make it a go. We went from 3 in July2005 to 16 in Sept 2005, and then double the next year and then staying at around 8-9 in each of 5 dens every year after that tile I left. so I know it is possible. But is it naive to be that positive thinking? Do I really want to try that hard? Would you try that hard? Which one would you do?

yeah I'm trying to figure out if I care ENOUGH to do this again. My boys are off to the troop, they are 13 and 17 now. I don't need a pack. Existing boys except 1 have never been in a large pack. closest other packs are 50-80 scouts. There is benefit in a bit smaller pack being available for some scouts. IF we kept all 7 and got the new 5 who are interested in joining, we'd have 3 in each den with 4 in webelos. So. 1. We could fold now and not recruit in August. That is super duper negative thinking and is just giving up. I hate to just give up after putting in so much time to the pack, buying camping gear, building up a small bank balance, and such. 2. I could do recruiting in August with help of my troop friends and then if we don't get enough bodies to do all the jobs, and then send everyone on their merry way. This is at least "do my best" kind of thinking and then if it doesn't work at least we tried. or 3. I could do recruiting in August with help of my troop friends, might keep a few people who didn't answer the negative den leader guy who tried to call everyone, and find there are enough new people to make it a go. We went from 3 in July2005 to 16 in Sept 2005, and then double the next year and then staying at around 8-9 in each of 5 dens every year after that tile I left. so I know it is possible. But is it naive to be that positive thinking? Do I really want to try that hard? Would you try that hard? Which one would you do?

Our moving out of state cubmaster thought the den leader was going to step up as CM or CC. However, this den leader does tend to be a debbie downer person, so we were afraid of him being very negative about the situation. Let's see the unit commissioner assigned to our pack is new to our area. He was pushing hard for us to find a new CO. Having been in the area for 25 years, the pack has btdt. Kiwanis has not very many members and don't have a meeting facility for us to use, they get together about once a month at a local restaurant to talk. The 2 churches in the area want us to pay more $ tha we have to use their facilities, and otherwise dont want to give us any attention. We have been with a PTA for a while in the past and CO with the miliary base before that, but those opportunities are no longer possible. UC and DE are beating the bushes to send us new members. We recruit from 13 schools of about 800 students each, so there are lots of opportunities. when I handed off the pack I had built it from 3 boys to 45 ish. Im not sure I want to do that again myself, but I know it's possible. The troop my boys are in pulls from 5 other packs in the area. They also compete with 2 other troops in the area. Most of the boys come from 2 very large packs to the west of us by about 15 miles. There has been negligible support from the troops to the packs and is an area that needs a lot of help. I have one past den leader and 3 or 4 boys scouts I can call on to help with recruiting, which includes my 2 sons. But they will not be able to be there every week to run things. Our funds would go to the council to be held for the pack in case someone re starts it in the near future. since we are chartered to the parents, the $ will not go to the CO/parents.

Well the den leader didn't get ahold of everyone and reports upon further examiation that he didn't get ahold of everyone basically just called a few in his den and he thinks they should just move to another pack.

I wear all of my parent pins for both of my boys on a lanyard around my neck. I wear it with my uniform any time I wear it. It has a name tag i the center of the lanyard, a cool cub scout neckerchief slide, since I don't wear a necker as COR, and I have my silver whistle and spark plug award on it as well. I get a lot of comments. Interestingly enough I've never lost the backing on any of those parent pins over the years of wearing them there.

We only had one boy in our troop attend Jamboree. But oldest usually works at summer camp in N. AZ. This year we was not going to work at all but he was begged to please work the last 3 weeks of camp in July because they were short staffed due to staff leaving to work or participate in Jamboree. They also wanted my 13 year old to go up as CIT even though they aren't supposed to take youth as CIT <13 years old because they were so short staffed and camp staff knows him from years he's gone up as a camp commissioner's kid.

Sorry in advance, this is long, but I felt the backstory was important. My pack is self chartered. It was at 40ish scouts when I gave up my position as committee chair in Feb 2011 to move to boy scouts with my youngest and take over troop committee positions. I was happy to pass everything off to new leadership after being a primary pack leader since 2005. I remained in my COR position pending my name off all the financial records which never happened before the stuff hit the fan. We lost cubmaster who quit in the middle of the christmas party. I wasn't there, but his complaint was that he was doing everything. The new ComChair called me that he wasn't going to recharter the pack; I talked him into sticking around and stepped up to make sure the recharter was completed (with 24 scouts who were paid up, but probably 10 of them never showed up in January). I helped make sure the derby happened, recruited a new cubmaster, new den leadership to replace those who bailed with the last cubmaster, attended more leader mtgs, pack mtgs and such to keep things chugging along. kept most of those til May, then stuff hit the fan right at recruiting last August --a whole den moved to be part of a big pack taking Com Chair. And Our cubmaster passed away in August . again blows to membership and retention. So we went into August 2012 recruiting with about 4 scouts. We recruited enough leaders to have Tiger, wolf and bear dens (no webelos) of 4-6 scouts. we rechartered 14 in Dec. I did way too much stuff last year, which was hard with my committments at the troop level. But by the time you get a den leader and asst in each den, cubmaster, and asst cubmaster that is most of your committed parents in a very small pack--, I taught the others how to do stuff (awards, campsite reservations, etc) but mostly they just did minimum things and wouldn't take any real ownership. Well, this August we'd be at 7 with a couple people moving including the cubmaster says he's being transferred out of state 1st of August.. We have interest forms from 5 new scouts that want to join in August; we'd probably get more at recruiting, but you never know. The dad who has been den leader thru all of this found out the cubmaster is moving and called everyone to talk about the coming year. I know he's tired of the turnover of leadership. I know he's frustrated. He reports to me that everyone wants to either quit or give up and move to a different pack. I know he doesn't want to do this without help. They'd like to dissolve the pack and divide up the $ to go to each boy's scout acct that transfers to another pack. This pack is over 25 years old, so we aren't just a flash in the pan. So, What would you do if you were COR of the Parent's Group that charters this pack?

gsdad, It was Camp Mataguay in California