Scoutmaster Podcast 273

I'm Justin Feld. I'm a Scoutmaster with Troop 89 in Downersgrove, Illinois. This edition of the Scoutmaster Podcast is sponsored by backers like me. Thanks for everything you do, Clark.

And now see you. Scoutmaster Jake and Dave are going on a scout camping trip and they get their tents set up. And Dave's kind of new to all this.

And he looks at Jake and he says, well, I guess the tents all set up and we can get in. He says no, no, no. Jake says no, we still need to put the ground cloth in the tent. And Dave looks around and he sees that there is another piece in the tent bag and he says, oh, this one here. And Jake says, yep, yep, that's the one.

And Dave says, well, I can take care of that. Where's the grinder?

Okay, go back and listen to it again if you have to.

Hey, this is podcast number 273. Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look in the mailbag. Oh, there's one message in the mailbag this week from Beth Ann Kim.

Now, a while back, Beth Ann got in touch with me and she asked me to help her get some answers to a couple of questions for her, because she's working on a project for Scouting University involving CubPacks, and so I talked about this a couple of podcasts ago and posted a survey on the site, and Beth Ann wrote in to say thanks. It helped with my project immensely.

I've received about 50 plus answers so far. By far the biggest problem in CubScoutPacks is, unsurprisingly, having one person do too much, and the variety of responses and ways it was stated is very helpful because it shows how many ways this can end up happening. The other common answer was: having one family in too many positions is a problem as well. I hope you and your scouts have a great time at summer camp.

Well, Beth Ann, thank you. I hope you have a great summer too, and you know, hey, it's June.

People are either off to summer camp or getting ready to go to summer camp or recovering from summer camp at this point, so things are a little quieter, but Beth Ann's survey got me thinking about a couple of things that I want to share with you a little bit later on in this podcast. Before I do, though, we had one live chat session.

This past week turned out to be a pretty busy week for me personally, and then our power was out for about almost 36 hours here, so I had a bit of a break from working on the blog and the podcast and things. But in addition to the frequent flyers that show up at our chat sessions, we also heard from Andrew Rimes, who's a chartering organization representative in Moreno Valley, California. I post when the chat is live through the twitter feed and the facebook feed. Keep an eye on those. Come to scoutmastercgcom, sign in and join us on these live chats. Everything- the live chats, the blog, the podcast, all the stuff that we're doing- is here to help scouters, and I'm honored to hear from scouters all over the world who say that they do find it helpful.

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I want to talk a little bit about some thoughts that came to me as I was reading the responses to Beth Ann's survey that I mentioned earlier, and I have one very brief email question to answer and that's going to take up the remainder of the podcast. So let's get started.

Shall we Scoutmaster ship in seven minutes or less? So I mentioned earlier- uh, in an email from Beth Ann Kim, the cub pack survey that we did over the past week or so, and you'll remember that Beth Ann told us that by far the biggest problem was, unsurprisingly, having one person do too much and not delegate their responsibilities.

And there was another common answer, which was having one family do too much. You know, having a husband and wife be the cub master and the committee chair, for instance. That people keep mentioning those two things in this survey indicate to me they're pretty common problems and my experience corresponds to that.

You know, I've seen that happen before and I want to spend a little time today talking about how I would fix those problems if I were king. I'm not king, I'm not going to be king anytime soon, but just by way of observation and maybe encouraging some thinking about this and maybe even people acting on this advice.

You know, here's what I think. I think that the organizational structure that we apply to the different age divisions in scouting- and when I talk about age divisions so we're talking about the big age divisions- are the cub pack, the scout troop and the venturing crew- correct, and within the cub pack there are other age divisions. You have tigers, wolves, bears and Webelos.

So the organizational structure that we employ, that divides those age divisions up into separate units administered by separate committees, ends up creating, I think, a kind of perpetual emergency for cub packs and that perpetual emergency colors. What happens in the other two age divisions and the source of that perpetual emergency in cub packs is the fact that we encourage scouters to follow their children up through the various age divisions and that creates this vacuum in the youngest age divisions where we're continuously scrambling for volunteers, and leaves the least experienced folks at the youngest age divisions. To my mind, the families and the cubs in those early age divisions would really benefit from somebody who has a lot of experience with scouting. Imagine what would happen in our school system if we had teachers follow one group of students all the way from kindergarten up through their phd program.

That would mean that every time we have a kindergarten class we have a brand new teacher and we'd never give that teacher the opportunity to get good at teaching kindergarten because the next year we'd move them on to the first grade and then they wouldn't get very good at teaching first grade because we'd move them on to second grade the next year and so on and so forth. Now, if you think about it, that is the expectation that our organizational structure creates for our volunteers.

You know you end up volunteering at whatever part of the program you end up volunteering for and then follow your son on up through the various age divisions. And because of that it's really kind of uncommon to find a volunteer working with a cub pack who has much more than five or six years experience with cubs. And if they have five or six years experience with cubs it's never in the same position. They've probably changed at least twice and many of them three or four times, not all. But many of the scouts who do have a long tenure in cubs are get kind of worn out because they have to plan and present the program and scramble to qualify and train new key volunteers to replace the ones that they lose every year because those experienced volunteers move on into a scout troop.

Now things have been this way for ages and ages and we just think it's normal and maybe we don't sit back and look at it. But I think you'd agree with me that it's kind of nutty, you know, I mean, and it creates a lot of difficulties. And what got me thinking about this was finding out most other scouting organizations use a very different structure for age divisions.

Rather than having distinct, separate units for cubs and troops and crews, they have what they call a scout group that administers all the age divisions, so their packs, troops and crews aren't separate and walled off and have their own committees, and really a lot of duplicative effort. When you look at it, they're all in one big group.

Now that doesn't mean that all the age divisions meet together at the same time and share all the same volunteers. No, you have specialists in each one but that. But you have a group committee and group leadership that helps ease the transitions between the age divisions and share the experience of all of the volunteers between the age divisions.

Now going back to the answers: in this survey one person doing way too much was a very common answer as to a mistake that cub packs make with our organizational structure, creating this deficit at the lower age divisions. That means that the most experienced person in the cub scout pack- let's say that's the cub master or the committee chair- and the demands of the program- keeping things moving right, making sure things are planned and making sure things are happening well- that's always going to take first priority.

So involving new people takes a bit of a back seat to that and it takes a lot of energy and that's when the cub master or the committee chair ends up taken on way too many responsibilities, because you know they sit there and they think, look, i if i could get somebody to do this, but it's going to be harder to get a new person, get them trained, get the paperwork filled out, get them involved, then it is for me just to do this myself, and it makes perfectly good sense and, been there, done that. I have several scars that i could show you.

So i don't want to in any way fault the people who end up in that position. Okay, because we create that with our organizational structure. It's not their fault.

Now some folks in cub packs hit on what they consider to be a good answer- and that was reflected in the survey results too- and they began involving more and more people, and that's almost always the parents of the cubs. The parents that they're involving may know a lot about scouting and they may not, usually not a whole lot right, and they do their best and they have hearts of gold, but they often end up causing more problems than they solve and as this is happening, the most experienced scouts are getting ready to abandon them, you know, to move on and that's handing the new folks even more responsibility and the whole cycle kind of begins again.

So if you're listening to me and you're an overburdened cub scout volunteer, it's not really that you're doing something wrong or you've failed. It's that i think. At least the organizational structure has kind of failed you. There are a couple of other things that happen too because of this structure.

It complicates the transitions between age divisions and we have two major transitions. We should have three major transitions, but that's another story because we don't really have a transition point where scouts become venturers. That's all really muddled. We'll talk about that some other time.

The two major transition points that we have that i want to talk about right now are tigers to wolves and we belongs to scouts, and it's very difficult to keep track of the numbers here because they aren't often published, certainly not on a national basis, and we may not really be paying very close attention to them on a local basis. If you've been around for a while, we all know that we lose a pretty shocking percentage of scouts between tiger, cubs and wolves and between Webelos and scouts.

Now some of that loss is definitely accounted for in the developmental cycle that our scouts are going through during those years from Webelos to scouts. Usually they're transitioning out of an elementary school into a middle school or an intermediate school situation and that transition and what's happening to children that age anyway, is going to be a factor in whether they stay in scouts or not.

But i think there's a percentage of the attrition that we see there that definitely are owing to this organizational structure. When we're talking about the transition between tigers and wolves, i think the problem there often is the kind of difficult cycle we have with tiger den leaders, and that is because who ends up being the tiger den leader?

Most of the time, in my experience, most of the time it's a brand new volunteer right, and you know what a tiger den. That's pretty intense. That's some very intense time kind of overlay with that intensity, the fact that you have your child involved in it, it's really kind of amazing, isn't it, that people actually survive.

But generally we have our least experienced volunteers in that role trying to figure things out, trying to present a program and deal with boys that age at the same time. That's a lot of that's some pretty heavy lifting and in my experience at least, i know there's going to be exceptions to this, but in my experience at least, people do one year of tigers and they are done. Man, they want to move on and a lot of that is because they've had a reasonably pleasant experience doing it. But they've also been really challenged because this is all brand new- let's keep talking about this new tiger den leader for a moment.

So we bring this person on, we get them to volunteer, we get them training and the training for them is going to be very focused on what they need to do to work with their tiger cub den. It's not necessarily going to give them a very good overview of scouting and the older divisions and how this all works together and how it's all connected.

So it's perfectly understandable that, because they are focused on the program that they need to present right away, most cub volunteers don't have a good understanding of the continuity of the program. Very few, if any of the other adult volunteers in the pack that they're working with have this overview, because they're all really focused on what needs to happen next.

And as people begin to understand the continuity of the program, well, what do we do? We move them out of the pack so that experience is lost, because now we wall them off into a separate troop somewhere and because of our organizational structure- troops and packs- you know, some of them are very well connected and some of them work well together and do things together, but that is the exception to the rule.

So in the cub pack generally- and i'm just trying to observe and be objective here, and if you're a cub scout volunteer, don't think that i'm talking down to you or or saying that you're not a good person or anything like that. Okay, this is just observational.

So what we end up with in cub scouts is our least experienced volunteers where they're working with their own children- more about that in a moment- who don't have a really good understanding of the full continuity of the program because they don't often get to work with volunteers at the troop in the crew level. And this creates that kind of perpetual volunteer emergency at the cub scout level and it really complicates the two important transitions that i talked about.

And this kind of stratification of our volunteers right follows into the scout troop and the venturing crew and it stratifies our effort because we have different ideas of what's important right now. Those ideas usually correspond to what our sons need at the time.

This stratification happens in troops all the time because scouters with younger boys involved with the troop write to me and say: look, you know, this whole troop is all about the older guys. They're all working on eagle and our younger guys are kind of like left out in the cold and they don't got a whole lot of attention. And the older scouters write to me and say: the volunteers that came up out of the cub scout pack are want to do a third year of Webelos and we're having a real problem getting them to transition into the troop.

So this stratification of of focus comes along with the idea of parents following their boys up through the different age divisions. And i've got to tell you once again: cub scout friends, you know i love you, right, most of the adults over time who have left the cub scout pack moved on into the troop, become committee members or assistant Scoutmasters or taking on one or other position of responsibility with the troop. They kind of get out of the cub scout pack. They wipe their brow- that was hard- and they find out that the scout troop is a lot easier on adults most of the time.

Okay, so we've described all the difficulties that are caused by our present organizational system. So let's take a quick look at what the possibilities are and what the rest of the world uses and that is the group concept. It eliminates a lot of the difficulties i've been talking about. If we had cub scout packs, boy scout troops and venturing crews working very closely together, all under the same steering committee with their separate subcommittees to take care of their separate concerns, with volunteers dedicated to the various roles involved in the age divisions that had the benefit of each other's experiences, we wouldn't be continuously scrambling to fill positions at the cub level and we'd ease the transition points and we'd eliminate this kind of stratification of interest on the part of a lot of our volunteers. In scout organizations that use this group concept you can end up having people who are the corollary of tiger den leaders doing that for 8, 10 or 12 years because that's where their skill set is, that's what they're most interested in. They don't feel like they have to follow their children through the age divisions because their children are not getting separated from them by going off into another group somewhere.

They're all part of the same group. The folks in the cub age divisions know the folks in the scout age divisions who know the folks in the venturing age divisions, because they're all part of the same group. And when we do bring in a new volunteer.

Rather than putting them in one of the most intense situations, right like being a tiger cub den leader, we can kind of ease them in and they have the benefit of a much larger group of volunteers who will help them and support them, make things work for them. I would think we would want our most experienced scouts working with our youngest ages and their families, helping them understand and contextualize the way scouting works. I mean, being a tiger den leader is an intense experience because boys that age pretty intense to work with families that age pretty intense. But it would be reasonably light lifting for me- and it's not because I'm anything special, I just have a lot of experience.

I think as a tiger den leader I could help parents get involved without frightening them away by asking too much, and I'd be able to give both the tigers and their families some context about how scouting works and what will happen in the coming years and I'd have some objectivity that a parent being a den leader would not have. Not because they're bad people, it, they just wouldn't have it because they have a child involved.

So anyway, I don't know what you want to call that, maybe a rant. I hope I wasn't too ranty because I think it's a pretty valuable idea. It's not my own by any means.

I mean it's just the way the rest of the world organizes scouting in groups rather than separate units like we have. And when you look at you know what are kind of the perennial difficulties that we have in our different age divisions and you look at the group concept, is that group concept would certainly mitigate, if not eliminate, a lot of these difficulties if we adopted it in the right way.

So just food for thought.

And, uh, I really like to hear you, I think I'd really like to hear your reaction to the to that idea.

Email, that is. Folks, and here's an answer to one of your emails. This question came in since the last podcast. Somebody told me that the whole thing with the weeblows transition is changing, uh, and that weeblows are only supposed to visit one troop.

Can you tell me whether this is true or not? Aha, well, that really doesn't sound right, does it? That would be a pretty big change.

So we know that there are often a lot of rumors floating around and mishap apprehensions about what's happening and things that seem to take on a life of their own. So here's a very simple approach that you might find useful. This is the one that I use whenever somebody tells me something that they represent as being a bsa policy, for instance.

You know the thing? Things are going to change and weeblows are only going to get to visit one troop. I asked them to show me the resource that explains that policy in writing.

Now, if they can't show me where it's written, then I kind of have my answer: it's a rumor, it's an urban legend of scouting. Okay, there have always been, and likely will always be, folks who play whisper down the lane with things like this, and about eight times out of 10 if it doesn't sound right, then someone simply got the wrong end of the stick.

So my very simple advice to you: when you hear something that doesn't really sound quite right, ask whoever is telling you to show you where it's written, and if they can't, well, then you have your answer, don't you? Hey, you can get in touch with me with your questions and ideas, and it's pretty easy to do, and I'm going to tell you how to do that in just a moment.