Too Many Troops?

[NeilLup]

Let's see. Some rules of thumb.

 

A community of 12,000 people. Say 2000-4000 of those are children.

 

Of those, half are girls and not eligible so 1000-2000.

 

Assuming age is distributed pretty evenly, each year group would be about 50-100 boys. The realistic targeted Boy Scout age boys would be about 150-350.

 

Assuming a density of 25% which is neither great or terrible for Boy Scouting, that would mean that in the community, you have 40-85 boys who might reasonably be expected to be be Boy Scouts.

 

If the total membership of the current units is in the 85+ range, it may be tough for the new unit. If it's in the 40 range, then there is probably plenty of reasonable opportunity. Somewhere in between, then it's somewhat in between.

 

If it's a community with a high LDS (Mormon) population where the youth are required to be Boy Scout members, then the numbers get skewed toward the high end.

 

So what, may I ask are the statistics in your community? Is it a young community with lots of kids in the high end of the range. Or is it an older community with very few kids. How many schools are there? How big are the current units?

 

These are the questions that the district asks before trying to start a new unit.

[GoldFox]

In our case it wasn't a lack of youth per see. When and where they were originally chartered their was plenty of youth for them to get a good Troop going. The problem is that they moved after they were chartered because they didn't like the area and didn't want any potential problem boys in the unit.

 

The real problem is the new SM was fired from his old unit. He was trying to run it like Webelos 3 and some of the older boys, who knew how is was supposed to work, pushed back against this. He made their life so bad in the unit that they quit. Then he started to single out boys who he felt were problems - on meds, etc. and tried to get them to quit too.

 

[shortridge]

This is a fascinating topic. I've been very interested for a while in the "units-plus-one" idea of success for a district (and thus for a DE).

 

Neil - I'm curious where your rules of thumb come from, particularly the 25 percent membership rate. I ran the numbers for my county/district, based on Census population estimates. There are 28,000 youth between ages 5 and 18 in my county. A 50-50 split between boys and girls means 14,000 boys. A 25 percent membership rate equals 3,500 Cubs and Boy Scouts, and there's no way we're meeting that.

 

There are just under 15 troops in the district; I'm not sure how many packs, but I'll assume two packs per troop (a very generous measure). Again, being generous, I'll assume an average troop membership of 30 and pack membership of 40. That's only 1,650 boys. So there'd be plenty of room to, say, double the number of units without tapping out the available pool of boys.

[NeilLup]

Hello Shortridge,

 

Actually, your percentage of 12% is probably a lot more realistic for Boy Scouts particularly when one considers older boys (i.e. the percentage should be the number of Scouts divided by the number of boys 11-17.) The percentage of Cub Scouts is a bit higher, probably typically in the 20-25% range. However, there are very general numbers and vary greatly from one area to another.

 

That isn't saying that one can't do a lot better. But if you contact your local council, you can find out what is typical for the districts in your council and for the councils in your area.