BWCAfan

With just personal gear and no water, I would like to see that pack weight under 25#. You can save weight on clothing and raingear, really pay attention to weight on everything. Cut out things like an individual first aid kit, any eating equipment other than a plastic spoon and an empty cream cheese container for an eating bowl. The advice to go on a shakedown and leave anything that doen't get used is good. When backpacking you have to really think about how to get the maximum utility from every item that each person carries. Be brutal; if it isn't absolutely needed, leave it at home.

I am calling around to find a troop that has agood Vanturing partol, since that is what my son (and I (if my screen name doesn't show it)) really likes to do. I feel very bad about leaving behind the remaining scouts because they could get so much more from the program, but maybe if several boys leave at once (and we are going to send a letter to each commitee member with our reasons for leaving)it will sink in to the commitee that they need to do something. All of the boys that are thinking of leaving are Star or Life, so they have gotten to the point where they want more responsibility, but the SM won't give them any. It also turns out that the Venture coordinator is the DE and he and I know each other from some work several years back, so if he asks why we want to change troops I will update him on the situation (I will try to keep it unbiased). Any hints on how we can avoid falling into a troop with the same pattern again. In the current troop, the SM talks a good line about how much input the boys have, but it never happens. Anybody have criteria on how to choose a good 'boy led' troop?

I attended SMF last year and it was after that that I started getting into confrontation with the SM. He is very autocratic and leads everything, when there was a 'planning session' he put up a finished calander for the boys to look at and said that this was what they would be doing for the rest of the year(no discussion allowed). He has changed menus for the boys without talking to them, put his own son as ASPL when he needed a service position, etc. We have a storage garage that the CO bought the materials for (built as an Eagle project) that we share with the CO, where the troop trailer is kept. During the winter he put his own trailer in there, blocking the CO from accessing their snow removal equipment. This peroson used to be a drill instructor in the military and he runs the troop the same way. There is only one way..his way and there is no discussion allowed. This is not the way that SMF taught me and when I started bringing it up we started clashing, to the point where it has blown up into confrontation. I would like to find a way to remove this person from his position, but he has several personal friends on the Commitee, so that won't happen.

Thanks Bobwhite, I figured that I would hear from you. I need to seperate the issue of myself and the SM from the boy issue, I think. The SM made the inference to my wife and I (with the CC in attendence (for once I did something right)) that he can make the decision unilaterally. Remember..he says he runs the troop. I figured that the Commitee had to be invovled there somehow, since dismissal is a pretty harsh penalty. I guess what is really getting to me about this is that there was never any indication form the SM that there was any kind of a problem (and he just went through his SM conference for his Life rank 4 weeks ago), and now he is going to toss him. Seems very arbitrary. I am going to look into switching troops since I think that I may have poisoned the well at this one. There are about four families that are thinking of going with us, so I am not alone in my issues with the SM.

This is my first time posting, up till now I have been a veiwer (who has learned a lot). We have a situation in our troop that involves the scoutmaster, myself and now my son. I have had friction with the SM over the last year on how he is running the troop. Several times he has said, "this is my troop and nothing happens unless I say so". It is the total opposite of the boy run troop. The rub comes in when he yelled at the SPL and my son (quatermaster) for removing some of his personal gear from the troop trailer (where he stores it). At the end of his "chewing out" (which I heard from a distance), he said to my son "I have had a lot of complaints about you and we are going to have to deal with it". When my wife and I later confronted him about this he said the my son was "bullying and disrespectful" and he was thinking of throwing him out of the troop. We had never been contacted by anyone about any type of a problem with my son and he could only come up with two instances (one of which was horseplay I think) over the last 12 months, that supported him. I think that the SM is trying to attack me through my son. My question is: in absence of a written troop policy, what would be the normal steps that you would take to throw a boy out of a troop? Are there procedures that should be followed?