Scoutmaster

The Scoutmaster Newsletter

The Scoutmaster Blog is nearly four years old. I have published just over eight hundred posts viewed by about 500 readers on an average day.

Starting in August I will also be offering a bi-weekly email newsletter that will feature posts from the Scoutmaster Blog, information for Scoutmasters and others involved with Scouting and an occasional great deal on books or gear that I have found helpful to my role as a Scoutmaster.

If you'd like to sign up to receive the newsletter use the form in the top right column or this one:

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The Scoutmaster Newsletter
Look for the first edition in August

A bi-weekly email newsletter of opinion, know-how and comment with some great book and gear offers.

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BSA Licensing

The Boy Scouts of America has launched a comprehensive licensing program. Any Pack, Troop, Crew or Council must purchase any item bearing a BSA trademark from an officially licensed vendor.

From the BSA Licensing Opportunities website:

"For some, this will be a significant change in the way products, like T-shirts or patches, are purchased. In the past, you may have simply given a BSA trademark to a third party for reproduction, and while this third party did not have authorization to reproduce the trademark on a T-shirt or patch, the third party may have created a product anyway. The National Council’s clarification should help you to understand that, in the future, you should use only BSA Official Licensees to produce products bearing BSA trademarks."

According to the website protected BSA trademarks include " ... just about any mark that reasonably relates to BSA or its program ..."

If I am reading this right I can no longer have our Troop t-shirts printed by the same local business that has produced them for us for a dozen years or so unless they obtain a license from the BSA, a process that begins with a $250.00 application fee and ends with the supplier paying royalties to the BSA for each of the products they produce.

"Official Licensees are contractually bound to and regularly monitored by the BSA to ensure that they adhere to product quality standards, maintain levels of insurance necessary to protect the end user in the case of product failure, and abide by a code of conduct that compels them, among other things, to provide acceptable working conditions for those producing products bearing BSA trademarks. Products that do not bear the Officially Licensed Product seal are not produced to BSA standards, and therefore are not authorized by the Boy Scouts of America."

I can understand that the BSA wants to control and protect the use of trademarks and the goals of the program are laudable. I also understand that this will add, at a minimum, two or three dollars a piece to the tee shirts we buy and force us to send our money outside our community.  That a percentage of these dollars will go to the BSA for royalties is, I suppose, fair and reasonable. I fear the cost in goodwill will be much greater than the rewards.

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A bi-weekly email newsletter of opinion, know-how and comment with some great book and gear offers.

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Worth the Effort and the Time

This weekend a young man I know is getting married. He's a great guy whom I have known and worked closely with  for many years. These days I don't get to see enough of him but we can usually pick up where we left off pretty easily - he's a good friend. It seems like only a few months ago he was a twelve-year-old Scout. It was a joy to watch him grow up from the perspective of a Scoutmaster.

This weekend I'll be attending his wedding in my other role; as his father. Like most parents I will wonder how this all happened so fast but I won't agonize over whether or not I missed out on watching him grow up or whether I was around enough.

In the midst of the best and the worst of our time together in Scouting I sometimes wondered if it was all worth the effort, the time, the frustration. In the end would it really matter? If you are sharing Scouting with a son or daughter as one of their adult leaders you will probably ask the same question on occasion.

I can tell you it does matter, it was worth it. It was a small price to pay for having the relationship we have now and for the experiences we shared.

Old Scouts - Young Scouts

I've hung in there long enough to enjoy watching some of my old Scouts grow up and journey far into adulthood.

Scouts from my first few years as Scoutmaster are now approaching forty years of age (!) and have families of their own. My own son will be getting married in a few weeks and it all seems like an impossibly short time has passed since we were all camping together.

My wife and I go to weddings, get birth announcements and otherwise take note of various milestones in the lives of our old Scouts. We are deeply appreciative and touched to be a continuing part of their lives.

Sometimes I feel incredibly old and irrelevant. But soon I am back with my young Scouts watching them pass through the familiar experiences of life as an eleven to seventeen-year old. The first camping trip, the first week away from home, that year where they seem to grow an inch every month, watching as they discover greater confidence and skill. All of this make me feel much younger and relevant.

Scout Unit Leadership Structure

BSA Scout Troops, Packs, Crews and Teams are currently administered by separate committees under a chartering organization. (Chartering Organizations are the entity that 'owns' the unit such as a Church, Civic Organization or similar group). Scout Units, even under the same chartered organization, are required to have separate administrative infrastructure. I think that this tends to make Units into islands that makes sharing resources difficult.

The United Kingdom's (Great Britain) Scout Association has a much different structure that bears some examination. (Don't plotz on me and scroll down to the comments yet! I am not making a blanket endorsement of the UK Scout Program. Doubtless they have their shortcomings and difficulties.)

UK Scouting is administered as groups of different sections (Beaver, Cub and Scout) rather than fragmented into separate units. Scout Groups are administered by a Group Scout Leader who oversees the leadership of the various sections.  Group Scout Leaders and Section Leaders must maintain appropriate level of training for their role.

I think that the UK group Scouting structure has some advantages. Units assembled into a group can readily share expertise, equipment and resources. A more formalized leadership structure may initially seem restrictive but it has a much greater potential to assure program continuity.

 BSA Unit leaders have no formal oversight other than the Committee Chairperson and Chartered Organization Representative. These three roles have no compulsory training requirements so volunteers may take them on with little or no understanding of the job. Much of the time the relationship between these three roles misunderstood and mismanaged for years. As there is no oversight their is no authority empowered to resolve disputes within a Unit. Many units are significantly weakened by squabbling leaders.

Adopting a 'group' model is gaining support on the BSA Innovation Engine (note that presently only Scouting Professionals can actively participate in the Innovation Engine).

How to Save the BSA

What follows is my three point plan for reversing the membership decline we have witnessed for the past ten years. This is written with the clear knowledge that it represents one point of view (your plan may differ) and is purely an exercise in seeking resolution to some difficult problems.

1. MEMBERSHIP STANDARDS
Allow chartered organizations to determine the suitability of Adult Volunteers according to their organizational goals and reading of the Scout Oath and Law. The GSA has already got this figured out.

2. TRAINING - MENTORING VOLUNTEERS
Rewrite training materials to include more 'why' with the 'how' . Institute a five year plan that culminates in requiring key volunteers in units to hold training certifications for their position. Reform the Commissioner service into an intensive program of targeted mentoring for volunteers and useful annual assessments of units.

3. RESTRUCTURE UNIT INFRASTRUCTURE
Make provisions for associated Packs, Troops, Crews and Teams to operate from one committee under the chartered organization. Reassess the responsibilities of Chartered Organization Representatives and Unit Committee Chairpersons to clarify their relationship with Unit Leaders.

In my experience boys never become Scouts or leave Scouting not because they find the basis of the program uninviting, they find the presentation of the program lackluster, overheated or grossly misdirected.

The fault is not with the youth, it is with us adults. We don't need new uniforms, new youth programs or other broad changes to the structure of youth involvement. We do need better trained, prepared and experienced adult volunteers.

The parents of our entry-level Scouts are between 25-35 years of age. I have had many of them tell me that they are disturbed by the BSA's stance on religion and sexuality. No doubt these will be divisive issues for some time to come.

By allowing Chartered Organizations to determine who they think is an acceptable adult leader within some broader language from the BSA parents can choose to associate themselves and their sons with units that reflect their values. They already do this with Churches and Schools, isn't Scouting broad enough to provide some choice in the matter?

I don't expect a call from Texas asking me to come down and strighten things out, but if they are interested I do have a plan.

BSA Hispanic Recuitment Emphasis

This article in the Chicago Tribune reports on the progress of Hispanic recruitment efforts in the Windy City;

"You can feel, I would say, awkwardness on both sides," said Roberto Colón, a former Eagle Scout in Puerto Rico who coordinates Latino recruitment in Chicago. Directors hope to add 2,000 families in the region as part of the national effort to reverse a membership decline from 4.8 million boys in the 1970s to 3 million today.

"You have to build a lot of trust, and that's the hardest thing for the Anglo society to understand," Colón said. "They say, 'Go in there, talk to them for 10 minutes and let's go.' It doesn't work that way. ... It takes time."

Yet time is a rare commodity for many working-class immigrants. Their long hours in low-wage industries contribute to historically low rates of English proficiency and low participation in civic groups such as the Scouts, studies have shown.

Nearly three of every four of the state's 725,000 Mexican immigrants work such low-skilled jobs, according to a May report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Through Spanish-language marketing and other efforts, the Scouts try to get around such hard realities. For example, parents without child care are urged to bring the whole family to meetings and camp outs, and low-income families are offered financial aid for uniforms and camping trips.

To avoid questions about Immigration status, Colón and other recruiters emphasize that a Social Security number or other government ID isn't required when they carry out mandatory screening of volunteers that is designed to protect children from potential predators. Neither do they ask the Scouts about their Immigration papers.

When, earlier this year, our Chief Scout Executive announced that the BSA was going to 'reinvent itself' to appeal to Hispanic youth I cringed a little.

I ran a weekly after-school Cub Scout program for three years in a school with 80% Hispanic children.  I learned that most first generation Hispanic parents don't see a lot of value in Scouting. The reasons could be more complicated but I think it boils down to two or three things. In Mexico Scouting is reserved for the elite classes and our immigrants consider Scouting kind of stuck-up and elitist. Most parents work every waking hour at two or three jobs and whatever side work they can get - they simply don't have time to volunteer. Most Hispanic families are tighter than Anglo families and sending their boys away camping is a confusing concept, these folks don't go camping for recreation. Finally what you don't know you fear. A bunch of men and boys in uniforms looks kind of militaristic.

Our little town has welcomed many immigrants from Mexico over the past twenty years. They are an important, vibrant part of a community that is more welcoming than most. I have had several Hispanic boys join our Troop but never for more than a year or two.

Former BSA national president and World Scout Committee Chairman Ray Cronk claimed "We either are going to figure out how to make Scouting the most exciting, dynamic organization for Hispanic kids, or we’re going to be out of business,”

I am concerned that our national leadership is thinking very simplistically and will be tempted to alter the program radically to attract Hispanic boys. If our national experience reflects my local experience these efforts will not go very far in bolstering membership.

The Case for Working With Your Hands

Scouting's vitality springs from experiential, hands-on experience rather than academic abstraction. Scouts actually do things rather than study how they are done.

As an artist and tradesman I have had a long acquaintance with the benefits of working with your hands. i haven't any formal education past high school and have had to find my own way. One of the things I most value about Scouting is the emphasis on learning by doing. I see this as increasingly important in an educational system that has dismantled most of the experiential opportunities that existed when I was in school.

Matthew B. Crawford lives in Richmond, Va. His book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” will be published this week by Penguin Press. He writes intelligently about the visceral and important education afforded to those who work with their hands. Here is an excerpt from an essay published recently in the New York Times:

The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.” ...

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work ...

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft is available at Amazon

Membership Declines While Ratios Remain Steady

The BSA's annual report for 2008 shows that membership numbers are continuing to decline as the ratios of Scouts to leaders remain steady. The table below reports membership changes from the past four years and analyzes the sizes of units and leadership ratios.

I am counting on more mathematically talented folks to check my work and the assumptions I draw from the numbers.

	2005	2006	2007	2008	Change	%
YOUTH
Tiger Cubs	243,609	247,017	241,851	231,471	-12,138	-5%
Cub Scouts	834,562	819,882	800,729	798,060	-36,502	-4%
Webelos Scouts	667,153	634,962	645,406	636,104	-31,049	-5%
Total Cub Scouts	1,745,324	1,701,861	1,687,986	1,665,635	-79,689	-5%
Boy Scouts	879,789	860,675	851,572	844,939	-34,850	-4%
Varsity Scouts	63,637	62,161	62,016	60,940	-2,697	-4%
Total Scout/Varsity	943,426	922,836	913,588	905,879	-37,547	-4%
Venturers	249,948	244,266	254,259	261,122	11,174	4%
Total Scouts	2,938,698	2,868,963	2,855,833	2,832,636	-106,062	-4%
UNITS
Cub Scout Packs	51,469	51,077	50,780	50,213	-1,256	-2%
Venturing	20,117	19,920	19,920	19,998	-119	-1%
Boy Scout Troops	42,811	42,269	41,947	41,628	-1,183	-3%
Total Traditional Units	122,582	121,530	121,034	120,262	-2,320	-2%
ADULT LEADERSHIP
Cub Scout Leaders	493,165	480,457	480,316	470,400	-22,765	-5%
Boy Scout Leaders	520,591	519,557	524,962	528,534	7,943	2%
Varsity  Leaders	23,380	22,799	23,356	23,392	12	0%
Venturing Leaders	63,821	63,500	65,645	65,621	1,800	3%
Council Leaders	45,269	43,638	43,829	44,406	-863	-2%
Total Leaders	1,146,226	1,129,951	1,138,108	1,132,353	-13,873	-1%
Unit Ratios
Scouts per Troop	20.6	20.4	20.3	20.3
Leaders per Troop	12.2	12.3	12.5	12.7
Scouts per Leader	1.7	1.7	1.6	1.6
Cub Scouts per Pack	33.9	33.3	33.2	33.2
Leader per Pack	9.6	9.4	9.5	9.4
Cubs per Leader	3.5	3.5	3.5	3.5
Venturers per Crew	12.4	12.3	12.8	13.1
Leaders per Crew	3.2	3.2	3.3	3.3
Venturers Per Leader	3.9	3.8	3.9	4.0

Leadership ratios and unit sizes have remained steady as membership has declined.

I am curious that the ratio of Scouts to leaders is basically half of that as Cubs per leader. Although the decrease in Cubs and Scouts from 2005-2008 is about the same the ten year trend (below) represents that we have lost twice as many Cubs as Scouts. I wonder if the leadership ratios are a factor?

There also seems to be a retention problem in Cub Scouts as they approach Webelos. From what I have seen there is a fair amount of attrition from Tiger to Wolf and from Bear to Webelos. I can't find any numbers for the Webelos to Scout transition. I can extrapolate that since there are  twice as many Cub Scouts as Boy Scouts we are only transitioning half of the boys who join Cubs into Scout Troops.

Here is a look at the ten year trend showing a net loss of 16% but a more shocking loss of nearly a quarter of Cub Scouts while Boy Scouts shows the lowest losses.

	1998	2008	Change	%
Tiger Cubs	304,346	231,471	-72,875	-24%
Cub Scouts	1,006,497	798,060	-208,437	-21%
Webelos Scouts	861,144	636,104	-225,040	-26%
Total Cub Scouts	2,171,987	1,665,635	-506,352	-23%
Boy Scouts	945,583	844,939	-100,644	-11%
Varsity Scouts	77,859	60,940	-16,919	-22%
Total Boy Scouts	1,023,442	905,879	-117,563	-11%
Venturers	188,010	261,122	73,112	39%
Total Scouts	3,383,439	2,832,636	-550,803	-16%

I know that our Troop has had to extend a great deal of effort to recruit Webelos and other boys to become members. The 'good old days' where we could expect eight or ten new members from local Packs are over.

The ratios of leadership indicate that Troops are top-heavy with adult leadership. Cub and Venture leaders have about twice the number of youth members to care for. It would seem to me that Troops should detail a number of their leaders to work directly with Packs to support their program and help to increase retention and transition.

Memorial Day

Bittersweet with admiration and regret we remember those lives that were offered to protect us and our country in the imperfect and barbarous practice of war. Whatever it is in humanity that reduces us to resolve conflict through war may it soon yield to more peaceful means.

Many servicemen and women have suffered on our account and the least we owe them is a few moments of contemplation of their great sacrifice.

Listen carefully to Samuel Barber's transcendent Adagio for Strings. Familiar yet never trite Barber's work perfectly captures deep sadness rising to a poignant cry of mourning, nobility and promise. For me it expresses the appreciation and grief Memorial Day represents. 

The rendition below was played  as a tribute to those who lost their lives in the attacks of  9.11.2001.