Tidbits from Course Directors Conference

[Sentinel947]

Hey all, 

I attended a Course Directors Conference recently. I'm a backup course director for a NYLT course in 2019. One of the Pros from Irving was there so I was able to ask some of our favorite topics of conversation. I've figured we mostly had answers to these questions, but it's good to hear it straight out of the horses mouth so to speak. I've summarized his answers below. 

I was impressed by him. I was surprised National sent a pro from Irving out to Midwest on a Saturday, and he was at the event all day,  and being available for 1 on 1 face-time. He had some real enthusiasm and energy.  He was unapologetic about the changes to include girls, which was mostly preaching to the choir at a NYLT/Wood Badge CDC at this point. He said there have been about 40,000 girls into Cub Scouts this year. I'm not sure how that lines up with other numbers being reported. He also mentioned the program as "Scouts BSA" a few times, so I'm not sure when that nomenclature is going to take over. 

Q1. Asked about how the BSA decided on the two year separation rule in the recently updated YPT. 

1 a.: Said the rule was created based on data provided by law enforcement, schools, incident reports from councils and information collected during calls to the Scouts First Hotline. I figured that was the case, so I'm glad there's some statistical backing to it. 

Q2. Changes to Wood Badge Syllabus, will those of us who took WB21 be expected to retake the new course? 

2a. No. The changes are an update to the WB21 course, not a total rewrite. The material in the current WB is still useful and valid training, they're just tweaking it a bit. 

Other interesting tidbit is that there is an updated version of the "Time to Tell" videos in the works. I remember watching those back in 2005. He stressed to  us that the next big focus of YPT is preventing Peer to Peer abuse between Scouts. National is pretty concerned about it. Most of our training and discussion about YPT focused on that peer to peer abuse aspect (maybe because we've had over a decade to figure out the whole adult to youth protection aspects of YPT.) 

Overall, the CDC was well done, and since it was my first one, I found it informative and helpful. I'm not sure I'll feel the same if I have to keep going to more of them in the future. 

Edited October 7, 2018 by Sentinel947