Tatung42

Thank you. This post is good materials for an interfaith service, but unfortunately, it is not what I am looking for. The Worship book from Philmont was about 25 pages long and had all Protestantism based material.

This document was an amazing resource for finding material for interfaith services. I had the PDF bookmarked, but the link is now broken. I guess I should have downloaded it. And nothing shows up when I google search it. https://filestore.scouting.org/filestore/philmont/pdf/ProtWorshipBook.pdf

I was just having a conversation with another scouter, who asked me why we were not traveling to camp in a convoy. I told him that even though our Troop normally does it that way, it actually specifically says in the GTSS that caravaning is not allowed, so on outtings where I am supervising, we won't do it. He said back to me back "ya right, show me where". To my shock, when I tried to looked it up, I couldn't find anything, even though I swear that it was there in older editions. Am I just imagining things or was it removed? Old posts like this one, even quote exact parts of the GTSS that I was looking for: And if it was removed, why? I think that 99% of the time when a driver gets lost, it is because they were not too sure where they were going, and they were just planning to follow the car in front of them. I always provide directions to drivers and stress to each driver that they need to know where they are going, without the aid of their GPS assisted navigation (which might not work when their signal is weak).

I had this same question about 5 years ago. When BSA's documentation has conflicts, I think the G2SS should trump everything else. In this case, the age sheet says it's okay for wolf and above to paddle on "gently flowing water", but the G2SS says no, so I would use the the G2SS.

I'm not going to lie. When I clicked on the topic, I thought it said "CHP arrests camp buglers". 🤣 On topic, you have to be a truly despicable person to steal from a scout camp. I am glad they were dumb enough to get caught.

This is a good change with Packs bridging earlier and earlier. We had a 5th grader join us in December, and he enjoyed his few months with his Den, but then all of his Den-mates bridged to scouts BSA in February. He was not able to go with them since he had not earned his AOL and his 11th birthday is not until Aug.

Not my troop, but I just heard this bizarre story from a Scoutmaster (lets call him Dave) asking for advice. I am not really sure what to tell him. Here is the back story, the past Scoutmaster of the troop (lets call him Bob) stepped down around 5 years ago when his son aged out. Dave took over as scoutmaster and ran things a little bit differently (or maybe a lot differently) than Bob. This disconnect caused some bad blood between Bob and Dave; however, eventually Bob went away, and Dave has been running a successful Troop since then. One other thing to note is that Dave's troop operates essentially without a Chartered Organization. The CO doesn’t provide the troop a meeting space, storage space, funding, or support in anyway. In fact, Dave doesn’t even know who the old COR was. So fast forward to now. Bob, after many years, has apparently decided to be vindictive. As far as Dave can tell, Bob talked to some people at the CO, and somehow got himself installed as the new COR for the troop (Bob is not even a member of CO, but I guess technically that doesn’t matter). Now as the COR, Bob is doing everything he can to make life difficult for Dave. For example, Bob has been refusing to sign any new adult leader applications for the troop. Bob also signed himself up as a committee member, attended the Troop Committee meeting, and then kept interrupting the meeting with all the things that Dave is doing wrong. They had to meet again the next week in secret so that Bob wouldn’t come. Bob is also sending emails directly to newer parents, slandering Dave and trying to get them in his “camp”. So what to do? The “right” answer is to talk to someone as the CO and tell them what is going on. But no one in the troop even knows anyone at the CO, and no one really wants to invest the time in making connections with them, when they do nothing for the troop. Dave, the committee chair, and most of the committee seem in favor of just dropping the CO, and then hopefully finding another CO that will just be invisible like their current CO used to be (or even better, actually support them). Unfortunately, with Bob in the picture now, there is concern about the CO not wanting to “give up” the troop. Would anyone at council help?

My understanding is that in the past, we had neighboring Packs all trying to recruit from the same elementary schools while at the same time totally ignoring some schools, so Council decided to intervene and tell Packs that they were only supposed to recruit from specific schools. And now Council is changing up all the schools to try to get more numbers in the struggling Packs.

My big concern: Many Packs in our area basically went inactive during COVID and now are emerging with only a handful of families left. At the same time, we had some Packs “do their best” to keeping scouting going virtually, and they still have healthy numbers. Council says that they need to boost the number of scouts in the struggling Packs, so they decided to redraw the recruitment boundaries. Now, the struggling Packs are supposed to be recruiting from elementary schools that have historically been easier to recruit from and produced many new scouts, and the successful Packs are supposed to be recruiting from elementary schools that historically have been hard to recruit from. I see where Council is coming from as they don’t want to have Packs completely dissolve. But I just don’t want to see these struggling Packs get 30 new scouts and have 90% of them quit within three months because there is no program. I would rather have the scouts stay interested and engaged in the a more active Pack.

In my district, we only have one pure girl troop left. From what I know, they are struggling (granted that with COVID, I would guess that it would be hard for ANY new troop to get established in these times). Even with great adult leaders, the youth leaderships are inexperienced and still developing, so the program is a bit rocky. It makes it hard to keep scouts in the troop interested and engaged and makes it even harder to recruit new scouts. Many of the girls that initially joined have either quit or have moved to a “linked troop”. Now onto linked troops… Our four large boy troops all have established a female “linked troops” associated with them. However, all four of these girl "troops" are just operating as a patrol within the boy troop. In fact, one of the troops just elected a girl as the SPL of the entire troop. The “Scoutmaster” of the girls troop just acts as the ASM for the girl patrol. All of the adults see no issue with operating the troop in this way even though it is clearly against the guidelines of how linked troops should be operated. In fact, some of them flaunt what they are doing at district and council meetings. They see the separate gender troops as just a steppingstone to keep those who don’t like change from becoming too distraught. They genuinely believe that policies will change within the next few years and that troops will become coed. I think the exact phrasing was “once the conservative old farts realize the world isn’t ending because we have girls in Scouting, troops will be fully co-ed, so why not just do it now.” So, I guess questions that I have: Does anyone have examples of successful new girl troops that are actually operating independently? Are the boy troops doing girls a disservice by offering the fully coed program? Do you agree that policies will change soon and that troops are going to go fully coed in the near future? If nothing changes, how are the struggling girls troops supposed to improve their quality of program so that it is on par with the girl patrols in the boy troops? Should adult leaders share some of the leadership to help things get off the ground?

All good information from others in this post. One "conditioning" item that I would recommend is that you have to get in and out of the war canoes very often. Having all the scouts and especially adults being able to get themselves into the canoe on their own without needing someone to help pull them in is really helpful. Picture three 120 pound scouts trying to pull their 250 pound scoutmaster out of the water over the gunwale into the canoe... A good way to practice would be to find a swimming pool where there is about a 2 foot distance between the pool water level and the deck. Make sure that everyone can pull themselves out of the water and onto the pool deck. Some of it is related to strength and weight, but there is also a lot of technique to it as well.

A scout in my troop came up with one of the more interesting eagle project ideas that I have seen in a while. Our district advancement chair rejected the idea saying that it is not appropriate for an Eagle project. I guess he will just end up building a bench like everyone else... His Eagle project plan is to hold a live esports tournament for the community playing a game called Fortnite. He put together one of the best project plans that I have seen for an Eagle project, taking into account all aspects of holding the tournament including physical arrangements, marketing, schedule, rules, fundraising for prizes, etc. He plans to show leadership by having a group of older scouts on his planning committee and delegating each scout to be charge of one aspect of planning and/or carrying out the tournament, while he oversees the entire thing. Scouts in his entire troop will help with actually running the tournament. His project coach is the vice president of the esports club at our local university, which has over 300 members. Members of the club have expressed interest in coming to the event to host workshops on how to improve at Fortnite. He is also making arrangements with a local twitch streamer (who is also an Eagle Scout) to be the announcer for the tournament and to stream it. It is just really sad, because the scout is very passionate about the project. Most of the Troop committee feels that even though it is a really unique idea for a project, it certainly would fulfill the purpose of an Eagle project. The project would give the scout an opportunity to plan and develop a project, give leadership to others, and provide a benefit to the local community (although some like our district advancement chair might not understand that).

I can't give you any advice on the right way, but I can unequivocally tell you the wrong way. In my troop, if the scoutmaster has a service project that he is personally in favor of, he will just schedule it, without consulting the SPL or PLC. He then will "require" everyone to be there by threatening to not advance them in rank if they don't show up. Also the service project will be on a day that already has another troop activity scheduled, and that activity was planned by the PLC and has been on the troop calendar for the past 6 months. Yeah...my Troop is a 9 on the 1 to 8 ladder of youth leadership!

I have always discretely tipped my ranger/island mate/interpreter/etc. However, last year at Northern Tier, they specifically said no monetary tips in the introduction presentation. Instead we bought him gear at the trading post.

We are getting to the point where the motivated girls who joined in February 1st are starting to earn first class and need leadership for star and beyond. Has it been answered how the 18 year olds with the with the Eagle Scout extension can earn their leadership requirements? Scoutmaster-approved leadership project could work for star and life but are not allowed for eagle. Possibilities I see: Allow them to serve in a youth leadership role even though they are no longer youth. Count adult leadership positions like ASM towards their rank advancement even though they are not on the list of positions of responsibility required for rank advancement. Force the scouts to join a Venture Crew and serve in leadership there. 1 and 2 are clearly bending the rules. And 3 maybe not be practical if there are no crews nearby. Also we need to sort this out within the next 5-weeks because these 18-year olds are on the clock (need to start star leadership before Oct1).