swilliams

The LDS Church has revised it's stand on same sex couples being apostates. They've also said that they understand that being gay isn't a choice, and that if a member is gay, that as long as they are not sexually active (with someone of the same sex, of course), that they can be members of the church. So... I'm a bit puzzled as to why BSA's acceptance of gay leaders and youth was seen as 'not standing on principle', and why it was an issue for the Church. If it wasn't the acceptance of gays, then was it the acceptance of girls? We're to believe the Church doesn't see women as inferior. The Church also hosts several events where all youth are invited. So perhaps it wasn't the inclusion of girls after all. Or was it? The main issue, it seems to me, is that the Church was viewing the BSA as part of a priesthood program. Since women don't hold the priesthood, I can see why the addition of girls would cause a problem, but I also see it as problematic that the Church leaders are saying the BSA abandoned them. The BSA program was never set up to be the activities arm of the priesthood. Just my $.02 as a (non-practicing) Mormon.

You've just found the solution to the BSA's woes, lol. In all seriousness, though, I've been pushing for our middle school to allow the troops in town to reach out to all potential scouts through either the 'Friday Folder' emails or the PTO. There's also something called 'Enrichment Day', and while it's technically for exploring types of jobs, if they'll let the color guard of the high school take a slot, I don't see why not scouts.

Okay, on reflection, my post about not willingly working with the OP wasn't very scout-like. Rural has it own set of strengths, you need to look for those. My neighbor showed me how to gut a deer (Wilderness Survival?). His nephew - yes, many of the people in the town are related - showed me how to make an excellent jerky and mix meats for hot dogs (Cooking?). This summer/fall, we joined a friend in harvesting her garden and canning (Gardening). How to develop leaders? The point here is that regardless of where in the world you are, there are going to be folks who can have a positive impact on a scout. It's up to you to find those strengths in people and outwardly recognize them. Catch more flies with honey, yes?

A bit? Sorry, but as someone who lives part of the year in a very rural area which, if one were being nasty, could be described that way, I would not voluntarily choose to work with someone who had such disdain for those he/she was purportedly trying to help. Seriously, OP, you need to do a LOT of self-reflection before trying to lead anyone.

I only got through 12 minutes before stopping (had to get my daughter from swim practice). As soon as I heard “home-based, church-supported”, I cringed a little. Everyone will start with the best of intentions, but without a more concrete structure or plan I don’t see busy families creating something that will last longer than a few months at most. Granted, there may be more laid out that I didn’t get to, but if that first twelve minutes is really all there is to it, I don’t see how it’s that much different than what a lot of us do with our kids on a regular day-to-day basis.

Troop stayed at $100. Many of our parents don't care to be involved beyond coming to a COH and dropping their kid off for meetings and camping trips, so most of them have no idea that National raised their fees. We're looking at a spring fundraiser to offset the increase, but nothing is set at this point. Crew stayed at $125 for current members, and is $150 for new members. We only have one new member who hasn't been involved in the past. Other new members are sisters of existing crew members, so they were aware that the crew charges a bit more - mostly to offset the more high-adventure-type outings and to try and purchase our own supplies, rather than share with the Troop that's chartered by the same CO. (Here's a good chuckle. We were in the attic of the church rounding up gear for a backpacking/canoeing trip, and the Troop has index cards tied to the drawstrings on the tent bags. They say things like "missing 2 tent pegs" and "rain fly missing", but one merely says "Stinks". Haha. No wonder the girls want their own gear.)

Had to laugh at this, particularly since our Venture crew girls were giving me the stink eye as I had them collect more and more dry grasses. They were using a striker, and still barely managed to get the twigs going before the grass ran out. As leaders, just like scouts, we learn best from watching others who are more experienced. Anything I might manage to do well is something I picked up from other scouters. That makes it tough for those who don't have the advantage of having a strong unit with experienced leaders or those who weren't scouts themselves. For units that aren't getting outside or who aren't as youth-led as they could be, it would be great if they could learn from watching others. I would love to see some combined outings, similar to having different troops at summer camp, but not huge gatherings like jamborees. That's something unit leaders might be able to accomplish. National isn't going to pay us any attention, but our DE's should, and they could help make that happen.

I was seriously surprised that a troop is trying to be formed in my parents’ town. My initial thought was much more aligned with what others have posted above. With what my mom was saying, I got the impression that even with a robust church program, there were still enough families that want their kid to potentially earn Eagle, that it was worth the effort. (Of course, that brings up the issue of earning rank v. experiencing scouting, but that’s another topic, to some degree.)

Background... I was raised in a long-standing Mormon household. As in, I have a great grandfather's journal about living in Illinois during the Mormon persecution, another grandfather who was part of the Mormon Battalion, and other ancestors who travelled with the handcarts from NY to UT. I was talking to my mom recently. My parents live in a very tiny town smack in the middle of Utah, with a population that's 99.5% Mormon. (My guesstimate. Point is, very little religious diversity.) Mom is on the city council. She said they're looking into who could be a CO for a BSA troop because there are more than a few scouts who won't be able to make Eagle in time to beat the LDS withdrawal, and others who are going to be 'new' scouts who had brothers or cousins who earned Eagle and want the same thing. When the church first announced it was going to start its own program, I had thought this would be the case, but I just wasn't hearing anything from any of my relatives. Or anyone else for that matter. I decided I had it completely wrong, and LDS youth were going away for good. Now that things are wrapping up for the LDS scouts, I'm seeing what I thought I would be seeing last year. Families who value scouting and still want their sons involved. Of course, it still remains to be seen what percentage of LDS families end up sticking with scouting, but if that tiny, very Mormon, population in Utah is an indication of what other towns are thinking, my theory (guess, wild estimate?) would be that we'll see 1/4 to 1/3 of the LDS scouts return and/or join up.

Don't want to hijack, so I'll start another thread, but I have a little bit of insight here.

Slightly less than the rumored $70-100, but that’s a significant jump. Ouch. That’s an increase of about $2,000 for our troop, assuming council dues stay the same. Meanwhile, our fundraising numbers are down for the fourth straight year.

Unfortunately, no. Because we don't use Scoutbook (we use Troopmaster), I can only view items on Scoutbook. The good thing is that the MC for the COH is a super bright kid who understood my instructions to ignore the merit badges with an 'R' next to them when creating the program, and add in the list of merit badges and awards I emailed him last night. My daughter asked me this morning if fixing the BSA software would be considered an Eagle project. The project of the century, haha.

AGAIN! The software is doing it again. I can’t even. I work 50+ hours a week. I don’t have time for this nonsense. On top of that, all of the merit badges listed in the file from our last COH have disappeared. I double- checked in June, after uploading the file, and everything seemed fine. I can only see which merit badges a scout has from the Scoutbook site. IA won’t load the scouts’ approved/pending/started info. So o now I can’t update flags in Troopmaster, and can’t manually enter the missing merit badges. What a mess (which is not what I really want to call it).

I'll have to ask our Committee Chair. A scout came to the last committee meeting to give us his Eagle proposal, and the CC brought it up then. It seemed to me like it was a new requirement, but I couldn't say for sure. We had always gone with two adults on Eagle projects, one with YPT, and one was always a parent.

Gave this some thought last night after my last post. This fee increase has the potential to be an enormous hardship for my family. I guess we'll explore financial aid first, but from what I've seen from both BSA and other financial aid programs, it doesn't usually help quite as much as we've needed. Still, we won't go anywhere. My kids like scouting too much, and I like what they gain from it. We'll just have to find a way to work it out. At the same time, I'm worried about our Troop. For the last five-ish years, we've had scouts from two towns. The second town now has it's own Troop that has been doing well, so we don't have any incoming scouts from that town anymore, and our incoming group is already smaller than even before the towns combined. After this year, eleven of our 44 scouts are aging out - a full quarter. If the financial end of things further restricts the number of scouts coming in, my youngest isn't going to have anyone to be a leader to. Not sure he'll get as much out of scouting at that point, so I may revise the 'not going anywhere' in a couple years' time. We'll see. Daughter's Crew is doing well, and is based in an affluent town. Any fee increase might affect them less.

Yeah, I don't know what we'll do if it's that high. We're a family of five, and all of us are in scouting. Hubby just agreed to be an ASM for the troop, as nearly a quarter of our scouts - and therefore their dads - will age out after this year. Our troop pays for adults, or at least they have. I don't think our troop can absorb that cost if it tops $50. Maybe our crew and our troop can split my registration cost, lol. Then you have the new cash-grab requirement that all Eagle projects must have two registered adults present. Prior this, we were debating having the Eagle candidate's parents register. Might have been a tough sell, even before the increase. What a mess.

Ordinarily, we upload all the advancement after the COH, but that's next week. His appointment at council is today, I think. The good news is, it was working at 7:00 this morning when I logged in to try again. The bad news is, the scout starts school earlier than that, so I don't know that he'll get my email in time to print this before heading up to council for his appointment. I'll call them today and let them know what happened, and will attach his Advancement History now that it's complete. I would hope that they'll accept it from me, if he doesn't have a physical copy. The Eagle coordinator (not sure that's the exact title) at council is one of scouting's gems, so it will probably be okay. It will be a very sad day when that person retires.

Yes. Not only that, but I'm trying to enter a handful of merit badges for a scout so he can finish his Eagle application, and can't enter any of them. I keep getting an error message, and the forum "help" has stopped replying to my request for help. In addition, NOTHING shows up when I try to view his current badges. Nothing under 'Started'. Nothing under 'Pending Approval' and nothing under 'Approved'. And that's after waiting 15 minutes for the page to load. I will be showing up at council tomorrow with a handful of blue cards and they're going to have to enter them. Edit: I get the list of merit badges, but when I click on any of them it says "Checking Advancement Status" underneath, nothing happens for a few minutes, then above the dialog box it says "Error".

Thank you!! Part of the problem was the browser I was using. It didn't show the box next to the scout's name, so I had no idea what to do from there. It's done now!

Well, someone from the Scoutbook forum answered my question, but I can't try to follow heir instructions. I'm at work now, and Scoutbook has decided the version of Safari on my 2 year old iPhone is too old to work with their software. Ugh. Whatever happened to backward compatibility? Two years isn't that ancient. (Sorry for all the complaining. I'm on my 19th consecutive day of work, averaging 10.5 hours a day, with over 12 hours yesterday. I'm tired and grumpy, and don't have time for software that is over-engineered without being helpful.)

It only takes reports directly from Scoutbook, but all records have to be sent to council through the site. It's a PITA. The old site was fine. Bare bones, but really, do we need the ability to make sub-groups of leaders online, or have an activity calendar?

Does anyone have experience with the new Internet Advancement 2.0? Our troop uses Troopmaster for record keeping. So far I've been able to upload our court of honor report into Internet advancement with no trouble, but now I want to manually enter to merit badges for a scout who's working toward eagle. In searching for help, I've found plenty of sources that state you can enter information manually but nothing that shows you how to do it. The user interface is so horrible. Nothing is remotely intuitive.

Given the amount of griping from him last year about having to hand write... Sounds like I have to find a scout who knows more about mail merge than I do, lol.

I bought some of the perforated blue cards from the scout shop and figured I'd pre-print some with scouts' names for our Scoutmaster to take to camp. Well, the only template I can find anywhere is one that prints the entire text. The blue cards from the shop already have some of the text on them, so if I use the pdf I found online it will print over what's already there. Does anyone know whether a template exists that works with the cards from the scout shop? Why does BSA have to make everything so dang user UN-friendly?

It's been years since we got rid of the dumpster. I have no idea if that same bear is still around, or not. We do have a color-phase bear that circles around from time to time. I came face-to-face with him; within about 20 feet. (That's the second time I've been so close to one.) Because it was twilight, and at that point I didn't know black bear didn't have to be black, I actually thought this cinnamon colored yearling was our distant neighbor's Rhodesian Ridgeback at first. NOT!! The other time, the bear was right in the woods outside the garage. Again, under 30 feet. Feet, not yards. That time our bigger dog was out with me, and he's the one that alerted me to the bear. He started to chase it, then the bear turned back toward him for a second or two. This is in the north-central part of PA. While I didn't see it, there was a black bear that came through our yard here in NJ. Our next-door neighbor let us know. Even in this suburban location, they've been sighted. Then there was that incident a few years back where the college kid was killed by a black bear in NJ. Near my parents' house in Utah, they had a deer attack and kill a small dog. Stomped him to death. Wildlife can be both fascinating and scary.