HELP! Does your pack cover more than one school?

[Sparkie]

Our pack (i'm cubmaster) recently had a situation where a cubmaster at another school quit his position, transfered over and told everyone else to transfer over with him (total about 10 boys).

 

Unfortunately, my council did not jump on this fast enough (they have their own issues, and i lost my DE!) to save that pack. However, they are going to try to re-organize it.

 

My problem is, our committee chmn. wants to consider their school calendar when planning events. Five com. members have come to me complaining about this, and are embarassed to bring it up at a com. meeting because the ex-cubmaster is there. We are chartered by our school OPT. The other school is in ANOTHER sch. dist., and has a combined year round program and traditional program.

 

So my question is, do you consider other school calendars beside your own when planning? As it is now we work with our own school calendar, coun. calendar and a specialty school (for the deaf) who came to us with their own den and den leader.

 

Thanks for your thoughts!

 

Sparkie

Go White Sox!! (This message has been edited by Sparkie)

[Twocubdad]

I think you have to consider the other school schedule, but that doesn't meant you have to accommodate every break and holiday. You didn't say how many boys you have in you Pack in total. Are the 10 new boys a small minority or do they represent a big chunk of the unit? I think that makes a difference.

 

Ninety percent of our boys attend the local public school, but we have 3 or 4 boys in each of 2 or three diffrent private schools. Obviously we can't accommodate all those schedules, so we go with the majority.

 

Be careful that some of the parent's aren't basing their judgement on a feeling that the new boys are "interlopers." Someone signed their transfer application so they are equal members in the pack.

[SR540Beaver]

Our pack pulls boys from three different schools. It is not a problem for us since all three schools are in the same school district and have the same schedule. We rotate our pack meetings between all three schools. A side note is that the district had kept trying to start a new pack at my son's school the past several years. Each time, they did not get enough boys to sign up to start a viable pack. The boys who signed up went to the pack that had kids from the original two schools. After several years of this, the majority of the boys in the pack are now from my son's school where we didn't have enough to establish a pack.

[Laurie]

Yes, we have 6 schools represented in our pack, 4 of those the public schools. About 99% of the boys are from the public schools. We are a large school district, we have varying calendars, and my big idea at the end of last year was to accomodate those who were complaining about scheduling. Well, we changed a few events, and guess what? The complainers did not come, nor did many others who would have been there. I'm new to this, but the reality is that you won't please everyone. If you use the school calendars, there are still sports and music lessons and family events and so on. Where do you draw the line? What I would try--and I have tried--is to see what those families coming into the pack think of this idea. Ask them straight out, no promises, but don't avoid it. Heading into this year, as we were ready to plan our calendar, I asked all families to please share their school calendars with me so that we could try to avoid as many conflicts as possible. Not one family responded. My thoughts on this year are that they had the opportunity to give input, were asked to give it, did not give it, and now we simply go ahead with the calendar using what info we do have. Hang in there! And let us know how it works out.

[mschwartz]

Our town has three Packs, and we divvy up the town roughly using school districts. So our Pack has students from two public schools and at least three private/alternative schools. Given that variety, we don't even try to integrate school calendars into Pack activities; in fact, we run into more problems with townwide sports events (the Basketball Banquet was conflicting with our Blue & Gold Banquet, so we moved it!). The Pack has been around long enough (pushing 50 years) that we have a pretty good schedule worked out, and we tell parents WAAY in advance when different activities are going to be held. It's working well - we have great attendance, and >70 boys in the Pack this year.

 

Good luck!

Marietta (and I'm going to ignore that White Sox postscript, hailing originally from Minnesota... ;p)

[packsaddle]

After my stint as CM, a similar situation arose that nearly killed our pack. Don't count on a DE for anything. That said, we have multiple packs drawing from the same multiple schools. Big time competition. The schools don't have similar event calendars. We try to conform, when possible, to all but we go with the majority where there are conflicts. 'Majority', in this case, is the largest number of boys committed to participating in an event, not necessarily the most from any one school.

 

Go Braves! ...just had to get that in.