seattlecyclone

I don't have retention statistics at hand. I get the sense it's quite high though. Our membership pyramid is a bit different than "most," I guess. We have no Lions, one Tiger den, and two dens of each other grade. First year Webelos are the most numerous age in the pack this year, with Bears and second-year Webelos right behind. Some kids join in first grade, recruit some friends to join them for second, and generally stick around through the rest of the program.

Our pack generally takes a break during the summer. There was nothing on last year's calendar between mid-June and late August. It doesn't seem to have any negative impact on enrollment. We have about 90 kids year after year, and often have to refer some prospective families to other packs in the area because any larger would be unmanageable.

Yep, all fine questions. What are the risks inherent to a two-night camping trip that are not present for a one-night excursion? How much extra would it cost to add these additional risks for two-night trips to the insurance policy? Why was the potential benefit to the program considered not worth this cost, and who made that decision? As a simple parent of a Cub Scout who has been on a few great two-night trips with my kid and has been looking forward to more, it's not at all clear to me how this rule makes Cub Scouting better.

Rules that nobody is interested in enforcing, for decades on end, are effectively meaningless. So...does this "clarification" signal that people will now become interested in enforcing this rule, or is it actually true that nothing has changed here?

My son's pack has been doing multiple two-night outings each year for decades. I find it hard to believe we could have kept that a secret from our district and council leadership for that long, and AFAIK nobody has told us to stop doing this before. It therefore seems far from universally understood that this rule has been in place this whole time.

That does seem to be Baumol's effect in a nutshell, yes. Every year that inflation exists and Congress doesn't increase the minimum wage it's true that minimum-wage workers fell behind a little bit. However on the other hand it seems that median-wage workers' wages tend to trend upward in CPI-adjusted dollars. Over time those wages have tended to be able to purchase more goods and fewer services. Whether wages in general go slightly up or down in inflation-adjusted terms is not the main point here however. The point is that all industries are trying to attract labor from the same human population. The industries that are able to reduce their labor needs year after year will generally be able to see slower price increases than industries that are unable to do this.

The CPI has increased 1.8x in the past 25 years. That's far from the only measure of inflation though. College tuition has increased more than 3x over this time period, while other things have increased slower than the CPI. Discrepancies of this type are described by the Baumol effect. Service-heavy industries such as universities and medicine (and Scouting administration) increase in price faster than overall inflation. The average college lecturer is teaching about the same number of students as decades ago. Their productivity hasn't increased much, but their pay needs to keep up with wages offered in industries that have increased in productivity through greater automation, else college professors would leave to go write software or manage a factory or do something else that has benefited from these productivity gains. Same goes for Scouting. Have technological advances allowed one district professional to manage significantly more program activities than decades ago? If not, you should be unsurprised that this cost has increased faster than the CPI. This goes double if the number of Scouts has decreased over that time. While certain tasks do scale with the number of youth served, there's a certain amount of fixed overhead as well. All of this isn't to say that we shouldn't examine council spending with a critical eye to judge whether they're a top priority for our charitable dollar. We can and should! Just don't be surprised to find that there's no more "fat" to cut than there was in our youth, and costs have increased faster than the CPI anyway. Labor (people) increase in cost faster than things do.

I remember regularly stopping at McDonald's on the way back from Scout trips in my youth, and I could buy a cheeseburger for 89¢. I haven't been back to McDonald's much since, but we stopped in at one again on the way back from a recent outing with my Tiger Cub. A simple cheeseburger was $2.29! What happened there? We all know what happened. Inflation. Everything costs more than it did when we were kids. This should not be a surprise.

The problem of course is that every once in a while that father figure takes advantage of the situation and exploits the young person seeking guidance. Given past events and current litigation, I totally understand why the BSA would want to have strong rules prohibiting such one-on-one conversations from happening under their aegis, even though they're a positive thing over 99% of the time.

My gut feeling would be that the garment is an official uniform component and a lack of one authorized patch doesn't entitle you to wear a bunch of unauthorized ones. Would the Uniform Police be cool with it if I put a bunch of wacky patches all over my tan uniform shirt and wore it that way to Scouting functions, so long as I removed the purple fleur-de-lis first? That said, I've never even been part of a unit where the leaders even expected the members to wear the officially-required pants as part of their uniform. Policing the officially-optional uniform jacket would be the last thing on anybody's mind.

I recently unearthed my box of Scouting memorabilia from when I was a boy. Included was a copy of the official insignia guide, (copyright 1986, printed 1993). The publication had this to say about jackets and jac-shirts: That's all it said about that. No pictures or diagrams or anything. So at least at that time, there were various types of jackets that were considered an official but optional part of the uniform, and a certain limited set of patches was officially approved for wear on the jackets.

Thanks for the helpful notes everyone! I'm definitely open to being a den leader, though if there's another willing parent in the den who has been a Cub Scout parent before I'd be happy to defer that responsibility to them because they'll probably have a better sense of what to do. The pack's new parent orientation is in a couple of weeks and we'll see what comes of it. I like FireStone's viewpoint of uniform and insignia as a conversation starter. I'm not interested in being ostentatious with it or anything; it's all about the kids, and if I can use my experience as a positive example all the better.

Interesting. I figured there'd be some rule against wearing a uniform that was discontinued before any of the youth in my unit were born; would be less "uniform" looking that way. But if it's allowed...well, a Scout is thrifty and buying new clothes unnecessarily is bad for the environment, so I may just keep the old one.

Nice to be here! I just enrolled my son in Cub Scouts for the fall when he starts first grade. I was a Scout myself as a boy, earned my Eagle award some 20 years ago. I tried my old uniform shirt on and it still fits! But then browsing the web I learned the uniforms have been redesigned a couple of times since then. Oh well. Looking forward to going on this journey together with my son, and helping the pack go however I can.