training percents

[GernBlansten]

In our unit, 100% of direct contact leaders are 100% trained. However, council lost all the records so 0% are trained according to their records.

[GMitch]

Lisabob, I agree, both the District and the Council here have not done the best job at keeping records. However, as a CR and MC who is over training with both our Troop and Pack Committee, I do not find it that difficult to send copies of the training cards or certificates to the District as I get them from Scouters for our unit records. Am I doing their job for them? Probably, but that beats having some Scouter in the unit not have his training recorded.

 

Also, the numbers I gave of 54% Troop & 40% Pack leaders Basic Trained for our units were not only direct contact leaders, but all leaders registered. If National is at only 29% for direct contact leaders, I would bet that percentage of Basic Trained registered leaders is close to half that.

[Eamonn]

A very long time ago! As part of my Cub Scout Trainer Wood Badge Ticket (Yipes!!) I said I was going to going to make a list of what training's the Cub Scouter's in our tiny District had taken and what training's were needed.

While I never had a ticket item that stated it, my personal goal was to shoot for 100% Trained Leaders.

I should maybe mention that this was before Scoutnet. At that time I was the District Cub Scouting Training Chairman.

My first port of call was to visit the Council Registrar. She provided me with a list of every Cubmaster, Assistant Cubmaster, Den Leader, Assistant Den Leader and every name that was on a Packs charter. It was a very long list!!

It soon became very clear that some of the names were just there in order to ensure that the charter made its way to being allowed to go through. In fact two Packs that I had nothing to do with had me listed as a Committee Member!! Some Packs had people who maybe at one time had been active, but were just kept on charters for some unknown (Unknown to me anyway!!) reason.

Once a charter goes in, it seems that it isn't changed until the Pack recharters the next year, so changing it just doesn't happen!

It didn't take long for me to see that my goal of 100% was more than just wishful thinking.

Going over the charters of all the Packs, it became clear that many of the leaders who were trained were not listed as being trained.

I returned to the Council Registrar asking for an explanation, she explained that she had never been given that information. I explained that each and every training has a sheet where the attendance is listed and this sheet (It has a number which I can't remember!) is turned into the Council Service Center after the training's. She had no idea what I was talking about.

I went to the SE and asked him.

He said that he seemed to remember seeing such a form, but had never seen it used! He sent me to the DE who had Training as a responsibility.

He was a new DE, he sent me to the Field Director who sent me to the Council Registrar.

Seeing that I was getting no place fast I mailed out a paper asking all the Cubmasters and Pack Committee Chairs to list who was trained and what training's they had taken, I got answers from less than half the Packs.

A few months later the DE who was assigned to the District I served was working in the Service Center on the Annual Spring Clean Up Day and she found a file in an office drawer that was marked Training, inside was a lot of the Training Attendance Forms. - No one seems to know how they got there and a lot that should have been there were missing.

I ended up badgering each and every Pack, by grabbing hold of them at R/T meetings or visiting them to get the information.

About 76% of the Cubmasters were Trained.

Less than 50% of the Den Leaders were Trained.

I gave up on the Committee Members as so many of them were just names on paper.

I was silly enough to think when I wrote this as a Ticket item that it wasn't going to be that hard!!

At our last District Committee Meeting in April, the District Training Chairman brought the subject up. - I didn't want to upset him so I wished him luck and didn't mention what I'd gone through.

Eamonn.

[evmori]

When I was a SM, 100% of our direct contact leaders were trained within one year of signing up. If they didn't attend training, they were not on our next charter renewal.

 

Basic training for the position you sign up for should be required. You complete your application, get a training schedule, attend training & your application is processed. Don't attend training, your application get put in File 13. If trained leaders was as important as people say it is, training should be required.

 

Ed Mori

1 Peter 4:10

[Lisabob]

I had a good laugh reading your post Eamonn! About a year ago I tried to get the records for just our troop updated. Now we have probably 35 adults registered so that's no small matter, but I was astounded to discover that, despite a firm expectation that ASMs and SM will be completely trained within 18 months, many of our long-time ASMs were listed as "not trained."

 

So I started asking question. And the answers I got were all over the page! One problem is that some folks had taken the training so long ago that it has changed names several times since then. And they couldn't remember exactly what it was called back then.

Another problem is that some didn't seem to remember what they had done to start with. I had one gentleman who was not sure whether he had taken WB. He thought he probably had, but he couldn't remember. (I'm thinking that means he probably didn't)

 

More recently, the people who handle our troopmaster and internet recharter process told me that they couldn't find the right codes in those systems to correspond to some of the older trainings that our longtime leaders had taken, so they ended up listing these leaders as "untrained."

 

Red Beads indeed! I can't fix these problems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Lisabob]

Now, here's why I even care. In looking at membership retention numbers for the district it has come to our attention that there are three places where lots of boys dropped out of scouting last year. One is in the Tiger year, or right at the beginning of the Wolf year. The second is in the transition from Bear to Webelos I. And the third is in the transition from webelos to boy scouts. At a recent district meeting, somebody asked whether leader training is in any way correlated to retention trends.

 

Being a numbers person! I offered (bad idea) to have a look.

 

What I found, based on admittedly suspect data culled from council records, was that there are some clear trends in a few places. For example, of the 10 units with the highest # of dropped tigers, 9 either had no TDL at all or had an untrained TDL. The average # of dropped tigers in units with at least 1 trained TDL was about 2 boys lower, than in units without any trained TDL. This does suggest that having a trained Tiger TDL is important.

 

Not one pack in the whole district has all of their Webelos DLs trained. In fact, fully 1/2 of the packs don't even have a registered Webelos DL, despite having webelos scouts on their rosters! Perhaps because of this the webelos #s (which are our biggest drop point) don't show a clear correlation with any leader training stats.

 

I also found out that about 1/3 of the packs don't have any registered Tiger DLs despite having Tiger Scouts. I would have thought that the UCs might have caught this sort of thing - having dens of boys with no registered den leaders - when the recharter paperwork was being processed?!?

 

In terms of overall training percentages, I found that we're evidently close to the national norm, but on the bright side, looking at all units, primary program officers (CM, SM, Adviser, Coach) are about 62% trained.

 

What to do with all of this?! Probably nothing, realistically speaking. There might be some talk about changing how we approach training. Will it happen? Who knows!? I suppose I can at least say I looked at how training impacts membership though.

(This message has been edited by lisabob)(This message has been edited by lisabob)

[Gunny2862]

Remember MY elephant?

 

One meal is/will be training for adults.

 

Currently the SM and CC and a number of Committee members who were prior SM's (here or elsewhere) are Trained.

All others, percentages run short of 10%.

As a whole at or just short of 25% Trained.

 

Continuing to eat...

 

one bite at at a time...

[John-in-KC]

Lisa,

 

Things which can be done for low/no effort:

 

1) DE annual service calls to the IH/COR. Talk about how training is part of Council's support to the chartered partner. Are the units taking advantage?

 

2) Ask the DC to send the UCs out and discuss this informally with CCs and Program Officers.

 

3) Re-look your training frequency. Is training convenient to the student? Lowering barriers is part of the process.

 

Thoughts, good lady. Have a good Scouting day

[Bob White]

Your council has a form requiring the name of the course they took? That is unique.

 

Usually the thay ask "Have you taken basic training and when". The answer is either yes or no and a year.

 

Since many councils gave local names to the training it would be impossible for national to have all the diffrent names in their data base so they use the current terms but it applies to all past training.

 

Yesterdays, Cub Leader Basic, Scoutmaster Fundamental, Cornerstone, or Scoutmaster Basic, would be the equivalent of todays NLE and Job Specific Training no matter what the name or when it was taken. So a YES works for any of them.

 

 

 

 

[Beavah]

Yah, I got a good chuckle out of Eamonn's post too, eh? Been there, done that.

 

IMO, the BSA doesn't have accurate trainin' records anywhere, so anybody reportin' 29% is a good laugh. Most council registrars just have never considered it part of their "real" job to enter that stuff, and most district trainers haven't been aware of any efforts to record that stuff. Nationally, 14% of the population is mobile each year, so it also doesn't take much time for people to become "disconnected" from their prior trainin' records. Plus these days there's plenty of people who take trainin' outside of their own district/council.

 

What'd be more interestin' is feedback on how helpful trainin' was, or somethin' like Lisabob's study on whether trainin' makes any difference at all in terms of program quality. My guess is da answer may range from small effects at the early Cub levels to no effect at da upper levels, just as Lisabob's small study suggested. Mostly, though, it's just a proxy measure for level of commitment.

 

Beavah

 

[eisely]

I agree with the other posts that suggest that the national figures are low because of poor record keeping. Given the various ways in which the records can error in under stating, I think it highly unlikely that the available information includes names of people as trained who are not trained. The most likely way for that to happen would be for some adult to lie about the training in which he or she has participated.

 

I was at a meeting just yesterday where this was discussed. Every district and every council has the same problem. I think one of the causes of this continued poor record keeping may be the way that BSA records membership. Many, if not most, adult leaders are not aware that they have an assigned membership number. In our meeting yesterday I suggested that we should start asking for that information on the registration forms for all our training events. A baby step perhaps in the right direction.

 

Our troop has canvassed the adults twice in the last five years to find out what training we have all acquired. And we do a pretty good job at record keeping.

[infoscouter]

Lisabob - part of the phenomenon you encountered comes from those who do the paperwork not putting in the right codes when registering new folks or re-chartering. It's easy to recruit a Tiger leader and put DL on the form instead of TL. Some people truly don't realize there's a difference. So the pack ends up with Tigers, but no TL.

 

And what do you do when you recharter in February? The TL is still a TL, so you don't change the code to DL. When June rolls around, and they become the Wolf DL, no one goes back and updates the records. That may happen when the unit recharters, but often when the DL becomes the WL, no one bothers, because again - what difference does it make? The WL may actually have gone to WL PST, but if s/he is still registered as a DL, the leader appears to be untrained.

 

Next there's the issue of Cub Position Specific Training. As you know, a TL is supposed to attend Den Leader PST when s/he starts working in a Wolf/Bear den. Some do, many do not, and so show up as untrained - because there's a separate code for that training.

 

Additionally, a few years ago National changed the standards for what Cub Scout leadership was required to charter a pack. It used to be that if you had a Tiger Den, you couldn't recharter w/o a Tiger Den Leader. Ditto with a Webelos Den. Now all that is required to charter is a single DL.

 

Finally, now that Fast Start, NLE, PST and YP are required to be listed as a trained Cub Scout leader (see the latest issue of Scouting) our percentage is going to drop even lower. Who actually sends in the date they did Fast Start? Unless it was done online and that record actually gets uploaded to your council's records in ScoutNet . . . well lets just say my level of confidence in the electronic records is not high.

[erickelly65]

Your council has a form requiring the name of the course they took? That is unique

 

Not really...my council does the same thing as part of unit recharter each year. We are required to complete a roster of our leaders including a CV of their training. I find it somewhat annoying as it doesnt seem to ever be used and every year all you get is a "Blank" form and to start over with rather than a list of your leaders and their training as understood by Council for you to edit.