Scoutmaster Podcast 265

I'm Mike Hodder and I'm an assistant cup master with PAC 41 in Columbus Ohio. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me.

And now the old Scoutmaster, The park ranger, comes into a campsite and he looks around and he sees one scouter sitting there and he says: hey, what happened to all your scouts? The scouter looks up and he says: well, this morning a bear came into the campsite and took them all away, Good Lord. The ranger looks at him and says: just imagine what will happen if that bear is left alone with all those scouts.

We have to find them right away. And the scouter looks up at him and says why?

I mean, the bear got himself into this mess on his own, So he's going to have to figure his own way out. Hey, silly bear.

Hey, this is podcast number 265.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look at the mailbag, Let's see. Matthew was very kind to leave a five-star review of my book, The Scouting Journey, on Amazon. He said relates an amazing story of the life of a 30-year veteran scouter.

I must read for any new or old scouting volunteer. Well, thank you, Matthew. I certainly appreciate that Heard from brother Mark, who is a chaplain to Scouts Canada, the parish of St George of Forest Hills in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, And is also known as the Northern Dancer. He said: I just wanted you to know how much I've appreciated the site and more especially, your excellent, excellent work in maintaining the same.

Well, thank you very much, brother Mark. Always nice to hear from our fellow scouts up in Canada. Matthew Goldemann from St Augustine, Florida, wrote in to say: bring back Brick Mason. I've been going back and listening to some of the older episodes and was listening to a podcast with Brick Mason. I feel like it's been a while since he's been on. You're right, Matthew, It's been a while since we've had an episode of Brick Mason.

Let me look in the archives and see if there's one that we haven't broadcast yet and we'll see if we can get him back on the podcast. Matthew went on to say: I have just finished the scouting journey and you did a great job on the book. I can't wait to read the others now.

After reading the book, the blog post and the podcast, I think I'll be ready for working with Boy Scouts next February. I'm passing on my Cubmaster duties after three awesome years next month, before the next school year starts And my son starts his arrow of light year in the new Cub Scouts program. Thanks for all you do. I'm always glad to have something new to listen to on Mondays.

Well, thank you, Matthew. I really do appreciate everyone who gets in touch.

Now, if you get over to scoutmastercgcom, you'll see in the bottom right-hand corner a little link to our live chats, and the chats are live on weekday mornings mostly. They've been very popular for the past several weeks and a lot of our frequent fliers- I call them- A lot of people check in almost every time we have a chat.

This past week we had several people sign on for the first time, So let me call their names. Anthony Crosby is in upstate New York, where he's a Cubmaster. Les Arsenal is in Kirkwood, New York, and he's currently the scoutmaster Troop 83 and Conklin. Ed Milius is an assistant scoutmaster with Troop 61 in Valrico, Florida, and Robert Williams is a new scoutmaster- Congratulations, Robert- With Troop 15 in Sherman, Texas. Dave South is with Troop 242 in Savage Maryland, where he's an assistant scoutmaster, and Steve Jackson is a crew advisor in Rola, Missouri.

So thanks to all those folks who checked in. Watch the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed for announcements when we'll be having a live chat.

Come on in and say hello Now before I go any further this week. If you're a regular reader and listener, I need you to help me out here. What I need you to do is go to scoutmastercgcom, click the support link at the top of the page and consider becoming a scoutmastercgcom backer. This is our funding scheme.

Okay, this is the way. This is the way we stay afloat. It's kind of a voluntary subscription payment. You can choose any level that you like, and I set up deals where you can get an autographed copy of one of my books for becoming a backer. The funds that we get from this go towards the expenses of producing and publishing the blog post, the podcast, and the folks that make this voluntary subscription payment by becoming backers Keep them freely available for everybody else.

And I want to take a moment this week to personally thank Brian Jennings, Darwin Bromley, Robert Williams, Dwayne McCoy, Donald Fowler, Shannon Kastner and Mike Cotter, who all became backers since our last podcast. So you can join that group by going to scoutmastercgcom today, clicking the support link at the top of the page, and I'll be sure to thank you during our next podcast.

Well, in this week's podcast we're going to be talking again about the Scouting Source Code. This is the second installment and then I also have a couple of quick email questions to answer, So that's going to take up the remainder of the podcast.

So let's get started, shall we

Now? Last time, in podcast 264, I told you about a recording that I found online And, as I said last time- and I'll say again, if anybody can help me do a better job of making an attribution of who made this recording and where it was made, I will definitely mention on the podcast. But I found this recording of Greenbar Bill Hillcourt online in the Internet Archive And my guest, my best guest, is: it's made in the later 1980s And it's about an hour long. He sits down and discusses and just has a discussion with some scouts who are interviewing him and tells a lot about his life story and his involvement with Scouting. And we started last week looking at this as a way for us to figure out the Scouting Source Code.

And I introduced that idea last week and I'll repeat it because I think it's important: What has to be present in what we are doing for us to be able to call it Scouting, If that's the source code, the DNA of Scouting, the molecule of Scouting, the elemental things that need to be present for us to be able to say, yeah, we're doing Scouting. And last time we listened to Bill talk about how he received a copy of Scouting for boys when he was 10 years old in 1910.

And then he became a scout and then a patrol leader some years later. And then he was chosen to attend the first World Jamboree and then attended the second World Jamboree where he decided to become a journalist. And shortly after that Jamboree decided at the age of 25, he was going to do a world tour of Scouting And he ended up working at a scout camp in New York.

Now Bill was interested in learning about the BSA supply division. He was involved with the Danish Scouting and they said: you know, when you're over there, find out what you can about the supply division. After his work at the camp concluded, that summer the same person who got him the job at camp managed to get him a job with the folks in the supply division in New York City And we'll let Bill tell the story from there.

Happens, and sometimes it is for the very best that you will, you will have because a big box of a single flagpole stays so down. And both two- both bones in my right leg and some of the bones in my foot- I was on torture. Then I came into the New York Boy Scout office to pick up my mail because I didn't know what kind of another dress I would have. And one day, when I had picked up my mail and was standing outside the Boy Scout office waiting for the elevator, a fellow came out. He had a cane. He was going to take the same elevator that I was going to take, And in those days you have to wait just as long for an elevator as you have to today.

So we got to talk. He pulled to be the first Chief Scout Secretary of the Boy Scouts of America, the MC West, and one who had established the whole movement in the United States on who's foundation is still going forward. And we got to talk about my experience with American scouting. He showed a special interest in it.

So I went to my little room and I wrote an 18 page single space memorandum about everything I experienced in New York. So if you're interested in the history of the BSA and the history of scouting, you probably already know who James West is.

He was the first national scout executive And I want to recommend a book to you- and I'll link it in the post that contains this podcast- If you're really interested in the history of that period of time in scouting, there's a great book called The Scouting Party that really delves into that. But rather than concentrating on scouting history, we're following this trail of the scouting source code right.

So Bill gets his job in the supply division and then he has this accident. Ben sounds really he kind of blows it off a little bit, but it sounds really serious. I mean, he breaks two bones in his leg and crushes his foot and he runs into West at the scouting offices when he's there to pick up his mail. Pretty serendipitous thing, They ride in an elevator. West is talking to him.

He says: well, I'm pretty interested in your opinions on scouting. And Bill takes him very seriously, writes an 18 page single space memo And West is impressed with this And listen to what happens next. And he called me into his office and said: I'm very much interested in in your memorandum. As a matter of fact, I've had it demographed and sent out to some of the members of the executive board. I'm very particularly interested in what you are complaining about.

If you say the American Boy Scouts are not usually the patrol method, which is the most important part of scouting, And you're suggesting that Holy was handbooked, What should it contain? So I sat down on the road in Mount Lionville, but Holy was handbooked.

West called me into his office again and said: would you be interested in writing it? I said certainly I would be interested in writing it, but my English isn't that good. Then he said something that I always liked informed you.

For any person in this world who has an idea, you can get a hundred to put it in final shape, So why don't you try it? And then I sat down and I wrote an outline and finished up the outline and wrote the whole book And we discovered that my language was exactly the language of a 13-year-old American boy at that particular time. And since that was the audience that I was aiming for, The book was printed exactly the way it was written there. It was very So.

Then I really got myself stuck, because then he just decided: well, if we are in trouble about boys life because we are right in the middle of the depression there, we have to get more boy scouting put into boys life. So let us put something in about patrol leaders. And that's when I got the idea.

Or take the patrol leader's pets, which contained two green bars and then adding Bill to it, That's how I became Green Bar Bill. You know, two ratio, boys life 1932..

And then, having written the handbook for patrol leaders and writing sift for patrol leaders and boys life, it was logical that I should write the Scoutmaster's handbook. And then eventually we got to the point of getting into photojournalism in boys life with a photograph of scouting skills and scouting activities and patrol life and so on.

And that led to the writing of the Scout Field Book, The first book we had completely illustrated with photographs, And then eventually to another edition of the Scoutmaster's Handbook and then another edition of the Scout Handbook. The peculiar thing was that the Scout Field Book was supposed to have been the Boy Scout Handbook for 1935.

But the supply division head decided: well, the one we have is still selling, all right. So that was held off for a while until we finally got it printed in 1944. That was the Scout Field Book, Still the best looking book we've ever had, And at that particular time all of the books about the Boy Scout- the Handbook for Boys, the Handbook for Tourism, the Handbook for Scoutmasters- were Bill Hillcourt's book.

So for almost 15 years they went along just on the voice of Bill Hillcourt. And when I got the distinguished eagle that was exactly what they said in that one: That Bill had been the voice of the Boy Scout for America for all these many years.

So not only does Bill write the Patrol Leader's Handbook, but he goes on to do like the Grand Slam right: He writes the Scoutmaster's Handbook and the Scout Handbook and then the Field Book. And the publication of Field Book is delayed. But it was intended. That Field Book was intended to be the new Scouting Handbook. And if you have a copy of that Field Book you'll understand why Bill thought, even 50 years later, that it was the best looking book that the BSA ever published. It's full of photographs and illustrations and it's a totally hands-on book.

If you can find a copy of it- and it's really not that hard to do- if you look on eBay you might have to pay a few bucks for it And I have a copy of that book. That copy brings up my own very, very brief and really unremarkable Green Bar Bill story, because I attended the 1989 National Jamboree and I had a copy of the old Field Book with me. I figured I brought a lot of stuff to swap.

I had a couple of copies of the old Field Book and I said, well, maybe I'll swap a copy, but I had it with me. I learned that Green Bar Bill was going to be there and that he was going to sign handbooks and I said I want to get him to sign my old original copy of the Field Book.

So I stood in a very long line and when I reached the table where Bill was sitting he saw the book. He looked at the guy who was helping and he looked up at me and he said: well, that's a tufa. And he signed the book with both his Green Bar Bill signature and with his longer signature.

So he signed it twice. That was the tufa part I faintly recall. We had a short exchange and whatever we said is lost to memory. It was a brief encounter but I still have that book.

But anyway, I want to stay focused on what we're up to here and that is the scouting source code, The things that make scouting work, the DNA, the molecule of scouting. We ought to know what that is right. We ought to be able to say what that is, And Bill's story is all about that source code. Like I said, last week we learned how he became a scout, how he ended up in America, and this week we see that his understanding of scouting on an elemental level led him to become the voice of scouting in the United States for many years. But that's not the end of the story, because Bill will talk about what I'm calling the scouting source code in the next installment And for that you're going to have to wait and we'll pick it up next week.

Email, that is, folks, And here's an answer to one of your emails. I heard from Robert Williams and he's with Troop 15 in Sherman Texas And he wrote to say: Clark, I just found your site and podcast a couple of weeks ago via Facebook and benefited greatly. I'm relatively new as a Scoutmaster- I'm about six months on the job- And you've helped me understand a lot about how troops should operate and you've really challenged and changed my thinking in several areas.

Here's my question: What are the BSA's policies regarding parents and family members attending a troop or a district or council camp out? I've seen a couple of events that said that only registered scouts and scouts could attend.

Is this permissible, or are parents always allowed to come on campouts? I was also curious as to whether youth protection training is required for unregistered parents or other relatives who may wish to come on a troop camp out.

Do you have any recommendations on how to handle this? Well, Robert, thanks for getting in touch, And of course what we do is we go right to the resources and we look at the BSA policy.

So let's look in the guide to safe scouting and we find this: How about campouts? Who needs to go on campouts?

Well, the guide to safe scouting says: quote: two registered adult leaders, or one registered adult leader and a parent of a participating scout or other adult, one of whom must be 21 years of age or older, are required for all troop trips and outings. And that's the guide to safe scouting. It's right there on page two.

And then on the tour plan form it says: at least one registered adult who has completed BSA youth protection training must be present at all events. So that's the baseline. Oh, that's what the BSA policy says.

So let's take a look at your questions. Is youth protection training required for unregistered parents or other relatives who might be on a scout camping trip.

Well, the answer is that one registered leader must participate and all registered adults have completed youth protection training. Right? There is nothing I can find that says youth protection training is absolutely required for unregistered parents or other relatives who might go camping with a scout troop. You also say that you've seen a couple of events that are limited only to registered scouts and scouts and you ask if that's permissible. And yes, it's both permitted and, to my mind, good practice to limit participation in camping to scouts and scouts. These aren't family events.

Okay, these are intended for scouts. Parents are always given access to observe anything that we do, And you find on the guide to safe scouting, page three, this simple statement: all aspects of the scouting program are open to observation by parents. But observing what's going on and participating in what's going on are two very different things.

So you asked for my recommendations on parents or siblings participating in scouting events. Now, there's no real policy on this, but there is common sense.

If parents and siblings aren't on a soccer team, they don't participate in soccer games as players or coaches, correct? And the same logic applies to scout camping trips. It's a scout activity for scouts, not for families or parents. You would question a coach's common sense if you allow the parents and siblings of the players on the field during a soccer game, And the rules would absolutely prohibit it. And you'd question a scouter's common sense if you made every scout camping trip into a broader family activity. And at the heart of this it's really not about safety or exclusion.

It's about scouts playing the game of scouting just the way players play the game of soccer, and preserving the conditions that need to be there to actually be able to play the game. On page 30 of the guide to safe scouting there's a pretty wise bit of advice It says. If a well-meeting leader brings along a child who does not meet the age guidelines, disservice is done to the unit because of the distractions often caused by younger children, and a disservice is also done to the child who is not trained to participate in such an activity and who, as a non-member of the group, may be ignored by the older campers.

So let's understand. Scouts go camping. It's when they go camping with their fellow scouts that the real work of scouting happens. Scouts are there in a nominal supervisory role to assure safety and propriety, and having parents or siblings around changes the dynamic considerably, just like it would if you said, hey, anybody can play on the soccer game.

So after that initial exchange, I heard from Robert. He said: thanks. I have a follow-up question.

Parents are always given access to observe, right? So if parents are not allowed to attend an outing because they're not registered, then they're not allowed to observe either, since they aren't allowed to be there. It seems to me that guides to safe scouting would require that parents could attend and observe any event, although they may not be able to participate in the activities.

Am I interpreting that right? Well, yes, I think you got it. As I noted, observing is not participating. If a parent wanted to observe an outing, that's one thing, but there's absolutely no reason they have to attend the outing as a participant. They can drive themselves to where the scouts are and they can observe.

So, returning to our sports analogy, do parents and families ride on the team bus and have access to the locker room and the sidelines? No, They make their own arrangements to observe the game and they're restricted to certain areas.

So what we don't want to have happen is we don't want our meetings or camping trips where we have parents or scouts who are just free agents with an all-access pass. Everybody has a defined role and a defined scope of involvement.

Now, most people don't understand this. You have to explain it to them carefully, And the sports analogy is the best way to do this I've come up with so far. Anytime we bring up policy and we refer to the resources, it's your job to make sure that I have it right. Just because you hear the sound of my voice does not mean that I have any special authority to make judgments about things like this. You need to prove these things to yourself. Get the guide to safe scouting and answer those questions right And see if I've got it right, And if I don't, let me know.

Let's just go back and review this very quickly. On any camping trip, at least one registered adult leader- all registered adult leaders- have youth protection training, So that person's going to have youth protection training needs to be there.

In addition, we need to have a parent or other adult. They don't need to be registered and they don't need to have youth protection training.

Now, I know a lot of people think that youth protection training is a real good idea for everybody who's involved with the troop to have, And I I heartily agree. But as a matter of policy, the way I'm reading it, I don't see that as being absolutely required. It's certainly a good idea, but not absolutely required, except from the one adult who is on the camping trip, who's a registered leader, has youth protection training.

Okay, As for the participation of parents and siblings and other family members on camping trips, it should be clear that when we're camping, that's where the real work of scouting happens, which scouts need to be able to play the game of scouting without a whole lot of interference or changing the dynamic by having younger siblings or their parents involved in their activities. And that's why you'll find a lot of times that district or council events say very specifically: Hey, only registered scouts and scouts are going to be able to attend this event. As always, check up on me, make sure I've got it right. But that's the best answer I came up with for Robert. If you have a question, you can get in touch with me, and you're going to find out how to do that in just a moment.