bourne

Hi SWScouter! You wrote: "...no offense, but that's just a darn lousy attitude. Have those leaders who gripe about the training done anything about it? Well, yes, they go do training with outside agencies. We use the local ambulance services EMT class, the University's outdoor club's leadership and basic skills class, the local paddling clubs for water safety certifications, and so on. The reason is there seems to be a greater value in receiving training for actual certifications by outside agencies. Most of the BSA training is designed fairly well. Look at the syllibi for the different courses. There are some things that can be improved but in general the courses are pretty good. Hmm... maybe in your council. My experience has been the opposite on both fronts. I've looked at the syllibi and I've been to several training events. "The problem tends to lie with the people doing the training. ... They are our fellow scouters in the district or council that are giving their time to help us. ... So to say the training sucks and not do anything about it really is a lazy, I don't give a crap attitude." Wow, it just seems like no thread around here is complete without some anger and blame to go around. Seriously though, it's this kind of institutional attitude of "blame the volunteers" that makes me want to leave scouting altogether. I've got better use for my volunteer time than to be yelled at. Anyway, It's not that I don't care. If I didn't care, I wouldn't even bother posting here, right? My purpose was to help answer the question of the original poster, with regards to "being too busy" from my perspective. As to what to do about it, my answer would be simple: start by outsourcing training to real agencies with real experience and real certifications. That's the only way to build up any real experience. Complaining about lack of volunteers with experience won't help. And of course, every unit has their own internal thresholds as to what training/experience they expect from their scouters. To be honest, my troop is probably higher than average. But if the real problem with training is just a lack of experience among instructors that's a pretty straightfoward problem to solve.

Beavah, as usual, is entirely correct. The issue with BSA training isn't the actual amount of time it takes. The problem is that a good bunch of folks, me included, just don't feel it's worth their time. Thus the "I'm to busy for training" bit is really just a polite way of saying "You know, I don't think this is worth my time." Lots of other organizations have worthwhile training. In our unit, the same adults (and some scouts) that pay hundreds of dollars for a SOLO WFR class or EMT-B cert are the same ones that tell the story of "that awful BSA training" for years. It seems to me like BSA could almost do better outsourcing the training.

Interesting discussion. My experience (as someone who's only 19) has been that not only are all of hops_scout's points true, they're generally the norm. My question back to all those who advocated total supervision as the solution is how does that teach your kids to make the decisions they'll face when they turn 18 and leave for the real world? To me it seems like a temporary solution. It'll work until (1) they get smarter than you or (2) they leave home (forget college, think library and school). In my experience, the only way to do this is is to educate and prepare. Start by supervising and guiding. Allow apprenticeship of decisions. Occasionally allow failure but always correct. Allow them to solo when ready. After all, you're not really going to go to their dorm room to read their email and chat logs, right?

With all due respect to Eamonn, I'm going to gently disagree with his post. There are some very good reasons to set limits on troop size. The biggest that I've noticed over the years is that it depends on what the adult leadership is comfortable with. There are plenty of troops that run with only two active parents and less than a dozen scouts that don't actively recruit, don't seek new leadership, and when all the scouts move on, the troop folds. Since this is scouter.com, I'm sure somebody with more spaghetti on their uniform than me is going to complain that they've "failed in their mission", but the truth is simply that they were running the program in the way that worked for them. I'm involved with a troop of about 40 kids right now. We've been as high as 55, and at the time it was the view of the chartering organization that we wouldn't allow the troop to go much higher than that. The biggest reason being that neither the adult leaders or the chartered org were interested in running a "mega-troop", because the logistics of camping with so many people are absurd and doing so requires fundamental changes to leadership on both the adult and scout side that we weren't willing to make (SM's job would change to just overseeing other ASMs rather than interacting with scouts, etc). We've also had "hiring freezes" a couple times, where we didn't accept new scouts or transfers until Crossover time in May. These were usually due to safety concerns. Having a scout join in the middle of a pretrip sequence just doesn't work. Over the years we've realized that whenever we go over our capacity, we tend to have problems. We have more accidents, trip logistics become more difficult, we also tend to lose scouts because they didn't get the type of attention from their PL and the scouters that they would if we were a smaller program. As it is, it doesn't seem to matter how many new scouts we recruit per year - for these reasons we'll always drop down to around 40 scouts the following year. The bottom line is that every troop has a finite capacity. Exploring the limits is a far better thing to do than to pretend they don't exist.