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4 Historical MBs Brought Out of Retirement for 2010


BrentAllen

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reeddma,

 

As with most things that you would like to know, it's a waste of time trying to track down the information on the BSA National website. The best source of information on merit badges is usscouts.org . As a district merit badge counselor coordinator, that's the first place that I check for merit badge information. Below is the link to the historical merit badge program:

 

http://www.usscouts.org/usscouts/meritbadges.asp

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it's a waste of time trying to track down the information on the BSA National website.

 

This is generally true in my experience as well. It's just not organized conveniently to get to where you want to go. In this case, though, it's even worse than that. The data just isn't there, according to Google. But it is official.

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We brought this up at our Committee meeting tonight (I sent out an "Anybody interested?" e-mail two days ago) and managed to get adults on board to be counselors for three of these merit badges. I guess I'm learning morse code and semaphore!

 

One of the men who volunteered to do Pathfinding (he already does Citzenship in the Community, so its not much of a stretch) popped over to the council office to ask some questions about the program ("do I have to fill out a whole new adult application again to do this badge, or can I just fill out the easy paper?"), no one there had any idea what he was talking about. Way to be about ten miles ahead of the curve here guys.

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Does anyone know how we could advocate to keep these badges beyond 2010? Would a letter to National do? Who would we send it to?

 

I think these four should stick around and would be a great addition to the existing BSA merit badges.

 

Also, for anyone who's read "One Second After" by William Forstchen - knowledge of Signaling could be very important if electronics go down.

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One of the best ways to see these four badges carried forward is for a lot of Scouts to buy into the program and earn the badges. That gives us a base for asking for them to be continued.

 

Had National wanted to give this program a fair shot, it would have been announced in October or November with a January 1st startup. Not announcing it until January 12th put councils and districts behind the eight-ball by having to play catch up with setting up procedures on recruiting merit badge counselors. Some councils still are not aware of the program.

 

I agree that Signaling would be a great skill for BSA to keep in the program. My Native American heritage makes me encourage smoke signals be included in the requirements.

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Yuck. That's a messed-up rollout.

 

diogenes, I think I'd still go ahead with it. It sounds like they are still working out the details, but the program will happen more-or-less as described. Looks like it may mostly have to do with BSA Supply and making sure they actually have merit badges on hand?

 

The program is still listed as official on some council web sites (for example, http://advan.counciltraining.net/sites/default/files/2010_Historical_Merit_Badges.pdf), and it was announced in the ScoutingMagazine blog.

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