CM vs. DL

[ScoutNut]

If 50% attendence is not good enough for you, what percentage will be good enough?

 

75%

 

100%

 

What happens when a boy shows you his work, but it is not up to your standards?

 

What happens when a boy manages to complete all of the requirements for his Rank Award, but does not meet your arbitrary attendence requirement?

 

What happens if a boy completes requirements for a Belt Loop that their parent signs off on, but that you can not verify?

 

 

[PACK15NISSAN]

Okay ScoutNut, let me answer you questions one by one.

If 50% attendence is not good enough for you, what percentage will be good enough?

75%

100%

75% is good enough, in a month that we have 5 meetings (4 den and 1 pack) 60% will be satisfactory as long as they are maintaining 75% during the rest of the months. 50% wouldn't be a passing grade in school, nor would a 50% attendance allow them to move on.

What happens when a boy shows you his work, but it is not up to your standards?

I don't have standards as far as work is concerned, as a previously mentioned as long as they did their best. The only standard that I would consider is if they did not do what the requirement asked.

What happens when a boy manages to complete all of the requirements for his Rank Award, but does not meet your arbitrary attendence requirement?

First of all my attendance requirement is not arbitrary, in fact in is a requirement to obtain rank. If a boy manages to complete everything but that, then he has not completed everything. However, as previously stated, I will present options as to making up time. I will also give extra credit for Pack activities and camping that is not required.

What happens if a boy completes requirements for a Belt Loop that their parent signs off on, but that you can not verify?

I don't have suspisions that people are cheaters, I will take parents word on work that can not be verified. If it does become an issue that I or others believe they are not actually doing the work then I will discuss with parent(s) that they be more diligent in documenting (pictures, samples, etc.) of work done.

You act as though I pull this attendance idea out of my bum, but is very clear in the rank requirements for both the Webelos Badge and the AOL. If they are not in attendance they cannot pay den dues, or participate in den projects, therefore they are not active. You may like what I have to say, but you must admit that based on the guidelines that I am correct.

[ScoutNut]

This is not school or work. This is Scouts where we are competing for a boys time against every other thing under the sun.

 

Your percentage is indeed arbitrary because the BSA requirement states "good", not 75%.

 

 

[Lisabob]

have to agree with ScoutNut here. I would urge you to re-think your approach to all of this, which at this point sounds fairly directive and punitive (you'll require "make up" and "extra credit" sessions? C'mon, this is cub scouts, it should be fun!) If attendance is weak, that's often a symptom of a program issue. People who attempt to compensate by mandating attendance "or else" are rarely successful in achieving their aims.

 

Instead of thinking about what you will do if/when attendance is poor, start from the perspective that the den will be having such a good experience that boys will hardly be able to wait to come to meetings! Then build on that. What can you do that will be that exciting? How can the boys take ownership of their den program so that they'll be invested in what you're doing and WANT to attend?

 

Start by thinking about positive ways to address this issue; it is amazing just how much that change, alone, can accomplish.

[gcan]

Wow, nissan, you sound like my old High School geometry teacher. I went in actually liking geometry, but because he was so hard-line

"my way or no way", I ended up hating it. Very few kids in my HS took 2nd year geometry.

 

Lets look at the requirement that seems to be causing so much dissention:

2. Be an active member of your Webelos den for 3 months (Active means having good attendance, paying den dues, working on den projects).

 

1-It does NOT say consecutive, for starters. technically it could be ANY three months, and you insisting the boy must earn a passing grade of 67% can and probably will bring up this arguement from his parents.

2-paying dues can be at any time of the month. Yes, they are due the 1st/last meeting of the month. Johnny's mom bought milk this week instead, can she please send it next month?

3-yes, 'good attendance' is arbitrary. Obviously a kid who shows up once a month does not have good attendance. But say you have meeting on Wednesdays, and Johnny spends every other Wednesday with dad, who doesn't bring him. Or pack mtgs are on Thursdays, same time as baseball, but he can always make den meetings and comes to pack events on Saturdays.

 

Someone else advocated being flexible- I wholeheartedly agree! these are KIDS, not Marines. Work WITH them, not in front of them. DOn't give johnny the Aquanaut badge if he didn't do the 100'... but try to help him get there.

 

If you withhold a Webelos badge from a kid that did everything BUT show up more than 67% of the time, you are gonna have one big old mess on your hands, and will ultimatly lose at least one scout whether you get overruled or not. And probably become infamous at council, too, but maybe that's just here in Jersey...

 

 

[PACK15NISSAN]

As it has been pointed out, perhaps I have come across a bit strong and dictator like. I will take the suggestions of the group in mind.

 

I just don't understand why people keep making the suggestions that I be flexible on the attendance requirements, but yet stand firm in other requirements (Aquanaut for example). If I understand what is being said, that doing your best is sufficient in incidences where the guidelines allow for some play ("good attendance" does not leave a lot of interpretation). However, it is not where the requirements are black and white.

 

You people are the kind of hypocritical, beaurocratical idealists that have no sense of reality that have made this great country a shadow of what it once was. This do your best and you will always achieve, give him the award anyway because he tried, it's not his fault so don't penalize him, there are no losers in life kind of attitude is what gives us the lazy, whinny, unrespectful, ungrateful, tolerant to everything under the moon people we have today that are tearing true American values down to replace them with something that includes everyone.

 

Citizenship is very important to a scout, so let me give you a quote from the Declaration of Independance:

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

 

This does do mean that everyone will be happy all the time, it is okay to upset some one, to hurt feelings, and deny them something they want but did not earn. This applies to children too, don't be afraid to say no just because you don't want to hear them cry. Those who this is addressed to know it, and they are the ones in the mall whose kids run around disrespectfully to and fro, bumping into people, and pitching fits because they can't have the toy they want and hitting mommy in the face, and then finally getting that toy.

 

[Lisabob]

For goodness sake Nissan, thanks so much for the complement. Remind me not to try to offer you input in the future when you ask for it again. Lighten up!

 

For what it is worth, while you can't understand why people are telling you that the aquanaut requirements are not flexible and yet attendance is, I personally can't see the logic in going the OTHER way as you have. My thinking is that the Aquanaut has very specific black&white requirements (swim 100 yards - not swim "some" or swim "with good form") and so these requirements are not open to interpretation of the sort you indicated. On the other hand, the attendance requirement is DESIGNED to be flexible and yet there, you've decided to draw your line. Illogical.

 

When your boys cross from Webelos into Boy Scouts, you and they will discover that in Boy Scouts, one of the sacrosanct principles is that adults can neither add to, nor detract from, the written requirements for a rank/award. Seems to me you're playing fast and loose with both ends of that, adding to the rank advancement for webelos, and detracting from the aquanaut. Doesn't work that way.

 

I would suggest that you have a lot to learn about how the BSA program - at all levels - operates. Being a martinet and then insulting the patriotism, intelligence, and generosity of people who attempt to help you, just isn't going to get you very far in a volunteer organization.

 

 

 

[PACK15NISSAN]

Since you still seemingly haven't caught on LisaBob, let me spell it out for you, the Aquanaut comment was designed to show people how their logic and reasoning is flawed.

 

I agree that if the requirements say to swim 100 feet, then the boy needs to swim 100 feet to have met the requirement, very clear cut we can all agree.

 

Now to address the real question, if a boy only comes half of the time is that good attendance? No, it's not. I would not be good attendance in school, at church, or on a sports team (where I am at, missing half the practices would either get you no playing time or cut from the team), to say it is good enough for scouts is obsurd. Scouts should have pride in themselves, not feel that they will except lower standards than any other organization.

 

For you to ASS_U_ME that is adding or taking away from the requirements is insane. I simply took the requirement for rank as it is clearly written and intend to enforce it, unlike the spineless others who will give a boy something he has not earned to spare his feelings. The taking away of the Aquanaut has been addressed, it was simply an example, proved by the fact that I did not pass a boy at summer camp who swam 80 feet.

 

You and many others seem to dance around the requirement that states "good attendance", not "bad attendance", "some attendance", "occasional attendance", or "convienant attendance". The only thing I have done here is to simply assign a numerical defination the word "good" that is exceptable based on the surrounding world of school, work, sports, and every where else. This is in fact very logical, your arguments on the other hand are emotional and lack reason.

[Lisabob]

The problem with applying a numerical definition to attendance is that it is not what the actual requirements say.

 

The reason people "dance around" as you put it, is because we all know from long experience, that when it comes to cub attendance, family circumstances are very often unique and so no hard and fast rule applied across the board works. And incidentally many of us are also aware that in January of this year, the BSA specifically prohibited boy scout troops from applying any percentages to attendance for rank advancement purposes. WHatever we may think of that prohibition (and there was/is debate), it is clearly spelled out. Consequently it seems you are holding your Webelos II boys - soon to be boy scouts - to a standard than the BSA explicitly prohibits for boy scouts.

 

However, I wish you well and I'm done responding to you in this thread. If you think you can do what you're suggesting and make it work, obviously you're going to do just that. For the sake of the boys in your unit I hope everyone else you're with agrees and this problem never actually manifests itself for you - because if/when it does, it is going to be one ugly mess.

[click23]

This is taken from the "Advancement Committee Policies and Procedures", it is the "law" when it comes to advancement in scouting.

 

"For the boy to receive maximum benefit and growth from his advancement, the adults standard for completion of any requirement should be based on the Cub Scout motto, Do Your Best."

 

"No council, district, unit, or individual has the authority to add to or subtract from advancement requirements."

 

Here are my thoughts.

 

The requirement is to swim 100 yards, but if a scout can only swim 75 yards he has not met the requirement. But if has taking swimming lessons, or has been practicing in his neighbors pool for a month, then I would say physically that is all he can do, and that he has done his best, and would have no problem signing it off. The way I see it, this is not subtracting from the requirements, if the scout truly doing his best can only 75 yards, he has done his best to swim 100 yards and that is all that is required.

 

On the "active" issue. By setting a standard for participation for active you are adding to the requirements. Lets say that a boys mother is very sick and about to pass away the night of the last meeting of the month, and he had already missed one meeting because of a birthday party, but attended the other two meetings. Are you going to tell me that you would not give him credit for being active because he was his terminally ill mother?

 

I know that is an extreme example, and you would say that something of that nature would be allowed. But if it was allowed under you 75% rule, then you have to start excusing this and that, but not something else. That can be a very slippery slope, and can only lead to upset adults.

 

I believe that the BSA as far to many rules and regulations for us volunteers to be making up our own.

 

 

[pixiewife]

The point that most everyone is trying to make is that "good" is the subjective part of the "good attendance" requirement. In cub scouts, when something is subjective the RULE of "Do Your Best" applies. As we all have stated one childs best and another childs best are not the same, and this also applies to attendance. Everyone has stated circumstances, real and hypothetical, that have made your arbitrary definition of good attendance seem, well, arbitrary.

Your job as DL is to guide the boys through a program that teaches them many valuable skills and lessons. This program has been put in place for a very long time. There is a reason the program is subjective in many areas, because it lends itself to ALL boys of ALL backgrounds to be able to have a level playing field. The playing field is set by them alone, by doing THEIR BEST. The playing field is not set by one person with an agenda of being the authority that everyone will obey or else.

This is not a military academy. It is unconscionable to me that your goal in Cub Scouts is to rule with an iron fist, and show boys that there is no room for growth and development in life, if you don't get it right, right now, too bad for you, you are out of luck. When I look at the boy from my den who had a pretty crappy time of it at home, I knew that if I punished him for his spotty attendance, that was due to no fault of his own,that I would just be another adult in a long line of adults who let him down, and made him feel unworthy. He did HIS best to come to Scouts. Not his Dad's best to come to Scouts.

If you are running a quality program, then attendance issues will only be due to no fault of the boy. Punishing the boy for no fault of his own, is not what Scouts is for.

[funscout]

As others have pointed out, there are a lot more organizations besides scouting that are competing for our children's time. We lose many boys from scouting due to parents forcing their kids to choose between sports and scouts. If we can help the parents out, attendance-wise, then we stand a better chance keeping those boys in the program.

 

When I was a DL I was very flexible about attendance, so I ended up with 11 boys still in my den by the time they finished Webelos 2. Some of my boys missed every Den meeting during a specific sports season, but then were back at scout meetings as soon as that season was over. I kept the parents informed of what their child had missed so he could make it up at home if he chose.

 

I also tried to schedule den meetings for times when the majority of the boys could make it. One year we had 2 den meetings on week nights, and the third on a Sunday afternoon. That way the kids who couldn't attend on weeknights still made at least one den meeting a month. During Webelos the parents requested fewer meetings (more sports conflicts were arising), and they liked Sunday afternoons, so we went with 2 Sunday den meetings of 90 minutes each.

 

PACK15, I'm sorry you are feeling "picked on." Try to keep in mind that typing is not as effective a way to communicate as talking face to face. It is so easy for all of us to misinterpret each other on these forums.

 

I guess you can just feel good if you know you are "doing YOUR best" to help the kids "do THEIR best."

 

I can relate to having parents push through awards for their sons, even though the boys didn't earn them. In my Pack, our biggest offender was the CM. We knew his boy didn't really earn all the awards that Dad (who was also DL) said he did, but it wasn't worth the fight to challenge him. Now, several years later, the former cubs have absolutely no respect for their former CM, and yet they are proud that THEY really did do the work to earn their awards. The person I feel most sorry for is the former CM's son. Just imagine what a shock this boy will get when he has his first job and actually has to DO the work.

 

Good luck finding meeting times that work for the majority of your boys, and remember to choose your battles wisely. Even though my fellow leaders and I were disgusted with our CM, he did do a good job with everything else, so it was only his own son who was hurt by his "cheating."