Scouter99

I've never understood the don't rock the boat mentality that your SM has surrounding letting boys like this continue; the victims leave and most often the bully ends up leaving too, now you've lost both (and I've watched it happen in my troop, too). Your SM knows, the CC knows and is 75% of the problem. She's throwing her weight around so you basically have to make a decision: (a) your son makes the clean break and stops trying to do this with one leg in one troop and the other in another, or (b) you find a bigger fish than mama CC and that's the COR and Institutional Head of your chartered org, sit them down and explain what's going on, and ask them to intervene. It's basically a choice between whether or not you want a fight. If not, then your son needs to stop fooling himself about being able to keep attending the old troop, and invite his old friends to the house for sleepovers etc if he wants to keep touch.

If they're intrigued by the idea that it's their gear, then they can rent the storage space.

Ew-wee. Good afternoon, happy Friday, welcome to our very mundane discussion of a mundane topic, complimentary Valium is by the coffee pot. Yes, we all know that Venturing and Exploring/LFL include females. They're a very tiny group and the politics of the wording of the aims/mission/vision isn't the topic of the discussion thus my ill-developed perspective. But, yes, your take on the use of that phrase is a better analysis.

You can carry databases over, but it can be unpredictable as to how it will go. For example, VB is the only forum I've seen with this comments feature, so how would another forum import them? Delete them altogether, or read them as replies? I don't think any software could be reasonably expected to receive a database as large as this one, either. That's why I say just keep this as a read-only archive and start fresh.

I think that's a PC way to say "boys" not girls (and of course not atheists and formerly homosexuals). I think it sounds wishy-washy, but I don't have a problem with its exclusionary nature because, yes, BSA exists to instill certain values to a certain segment of the youth population. That does not mean that the people involved in BSA (that's us) don't care about girls, it means we've got a certain amount of charity time in our lives and we've got a passion for this group.

Tonight, I pulled up the Aims & Methods of the BSA. Publication 521-042 (under Hispanic resources for some reason) lists the Aims, which are: Character, citizenship, and fitness. These are achieved by the Methods: Outdoors, advancement, ideals, patrols, uniform, association with adults, leadership development, and personal growth. Evolved over the years, but familiar to us all. The aims are what we're trying to bring about in boys, and the methods are how we do it. But listed in various places is also the BSA's mission statement; for example, on the cover of "Selecting Quality Leaders" in asbence of the Aims, and in the Guide to Advancement above the Aims and Methods. It is: "The mission of the Boy Scouts of America is to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Scout Law." To me, the mission statement seems to be at odds with the aims. The 3 aims basically line up with "physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight" but the mission statement sets a single goal of ethical and moral choicemaking. Its premise is the Scout Oath which includes 3 things, but the missions statement's phrasing disregards 2/3. In my opinion, the mission statement is 1990s corporate doodoo and its existence alongside Aims muddies the water--aim and mission are the same thing. Worse, its wording ignores the aims, narrowing the focus to just one aspect of the aims. The outdoors, uniform, patrols, and advancement have nothing to do with producing young men that make ethical choices. The issue is further confused by its placement in various publications without the Aims, or above/in front of the Aims giving it a clear priority over the Aims. What do you all think? Am I overthinking it? Am I wrong? Am I right? Is it somewhere in between?

When were you a scout? Two 1975 dollars is equivalent to $8.42 today. That's more than my troop charges.

While we're on the subject, is there a council map anywhere? The closest I've come is USSSP and that website makes my brain hurt.

SMF is a free, open source forum software, it stands for Simple Machines Forum. http://www.simplemachines.org/ It works out of box, the development community updates it and release custom add-ons that install with the click of a button. I've been using it for 6 years and I've never had one thread disappear, the messaging system has never crapped out, etc. etc. "Archive" means close this forum, change its address and link to it from the new forum. Invision Pro Boards is also a good for-profit forum system.

I didn't say 700 records is a problem. You don't want the BSA to hold 700 records, you want them to hold a record on every person that ever joins. Let's start today: That's 3,000,000 records. This year my council added 3,000 youth, let's be generous and say every council adds 1000, that's another million every year. How many adults register for a year never to be heard from again? There's a million more. Every Tiger has to have an adult partner. Who is entering this data? Who is updating it if indignant volunteers don't have 5 minutes to fill out a sheet of paper? How long will the record be there? 20 years? But then you don't get your youth records like you want. 50? 100? What system will they be kept on? A custom system? A custom system to be maintained across a century? A proprietary system? A proprietary system that will be supported in 20, 50, 80, or 100 years? You want it to be electronic and thus presumably more secure than a stack of papers on a desk. Secure like Target? or secure like Nieman Marcus? or secure like the South Carolina Dept of Taxation? or secure like our debit cards? or secure like Apple? You want it to check backgrounds periodically. So, you want BSA to buy or create a system that interfaces with 50 state criminal agencies, 50 state social services agencies (many hold separate databases for child abuse/neglect which do not overlap with criminal BG checks), federal agencies, and the territories. You want this impossible effort in order to accomplish that which is already accomplished by the paper form. You want all this because you cannot believe that when you join another unit you have to apply to it. Like BD, I am not saying that the system we have is the best in the world, but your complaints are over the top and your "solution" addresses personal problems. As for your personal outdated info, the failure in the system is that when you moved, you didn't do your due diligence and call the council to update yourself, and/or that your unit did not do its due diligence and update you at recharter. Creating a vast national database will not fix that problem.

I frankly find the idea that these and other topics are disappearing by accident highly suspect. I'm not typing my full response a third time for Smoking Man to delete again. So, in 5 words: The problem is selfish adults. Archive this forum and install SMF. It's free, it works, maintenance is done by a development team.

Well, that's my point with the BSA policy you linked, which clearly states that all unit FBs must be public pages, not private groups. Our group is also private now. I can delete negative comments all day long, but that doesn't stop the boys from seeing them in the interim. The parts about email and PMs/IMs is just as well-intentioned but misguided. If a person wants/needs to know what I said to a scout in an email, I can pull it up for the or the scout can. If a false accusation is made, it is dead on arrival for the same reason. FB messages in particular cannot be deleted. It isn't a matter of principle for me that I don't copy-in another adult or parent, there's just no need, so I don't unless I want to make sure the scout gets the message before a certain time and think I can achieve that by including a parent. The BSA's stance is nonsensical because it treats emails and FB messages--which are retrievable forever--differently than telephone calls, which can never be retrieved. Or (serious question) is it also the BSA's opinion that if I call a scout or a scout calls me I'm supposed to hold until their mom picks up on the other handset? So, for example, when a new scout takes on the position of responsibility that I work with, then I send him an email with his responsibilities, and what specific things I expect him to do over the next 6 mos. I copy in parents, the SM, and the SPL because they also need to know that. But 3 weeks later when I need to tell the scout "hey, make sure you do X this week" or tell the SPL "hey make sure Johnny does X this week" I don't copy in anyone--there's no point.

We had a public FB page for about 5 minutes until "friends" of half the scouts who were tagged in photos showed up to post "fag" this and "loser" that.

Actually, it is possible that you may have as many BSA IDs as you have interactions with the office. If, for example, you donate money and you're entered apart from your existing ID, a new ID is generated. The person who reconciles those errors picks which ID to keep when merging the records--if they're ever reconciled. You say there's no reason to waste time every time a person's role changes, but you're arguing something that doesn't happen. A person's role within a unit can be changed with a mouse click at recharter. Your complaint about your info's security doesn't make any sense. It's more secure on a piece of paper in a filing cabinet than in a database. You're asking BSA to keep a database of every person--youth and adult--that ever signs an application forever. In 67 years, my unit alone has registered at least 700 youth (probably more like 800 since scouts who join and drop between recharters don't appear on the rosters), I haven't counted the adults. The idea that BSA should keep the personal, advancement, awards, etc. records of all these people sounds convenient to you because you're so busy that you can't fill out an application once every 4 years, but it is, in the wide view, ridiculous. I don't think you have any point about our pants. The highest profile scandals occurred before the era of state or national databases (which is why BSA created its own, ahead of the curve, not behind), and most had no criminal records, anyway, again because in that era charges weren't often filed. You want the names run periodically, but the idea that a person could get arrested and convicted between BSA checks without getting removed in the first place is silly. The same effect is achieved by requiring a person to fill out an application, anyway.

I don't send friend requests to scouts (because I'm in a position of authority and I feel that could make a scout feel like he has no choice in accepting) but if a scout sends me a request I'll accept it. Except not, since interactions on FB are public, except for private/instant messages which are no different than a phone call.

People are good enough at making their own excuses without help from me. Our monthly dues are due on the 1st of the month, we expect them then. The boys have no trouble bringing in their money without the aid of time machines, PayPal, or Square and without excuses precisely because the collection of dues in part instills responsibility.

There's Camp Seagull in Arapahoe, NC. http://www.seagull-seafarer.org/

With BD on this one. Why? You'r enot concerned sending your kid into the woods, onto the water, across the country, or into a meeting with me, but Facebook? Woah, woah! Not Facebook! That's silly. There's nothing about FB that's different than real life. I don't send friend requests to any scouts, but if they send one to me and the kid isn't a jerk I'll accept it.

So you don't like your SSN sitting on a desk in the council building, but you would like it to be in an online database. Let's think about how many Russian high schoolers are breaking into your council building as opposed to how many are busting into every database they run across.

Exactly.

That's what we do--what headache? Boys get behind a month or two, but we have never had the headache of "this boy owes us $100, should we add $50 more?" Reinstatement fee? Give me a break, is this auto insurance we're talking about? Like I said: There's a book with all this basic stuff in it, it's worked for 100 years. Follow BSA literature and collect dues monthly or weekly in small amounts. Families who want will pay up front anyway, families who must/want will pay monthly.

The earliest reports (the only ones I read) said he was dismissed because he proactively said he did not believe he had a duty to God and that he is gay.