Scoutmaster Podcast 92

And now the old Scoutmaster Man. I can't talk. That's a Yeah. No, Go ahead, say a tongue. Sorry, Mark, He was on the tip of my tongue. Yeah, I got my tongue over my eye tooth and I couldn't see what I was saying.

Hey, really, it's alright, I can talk. This is podcast 92..

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green.

So this week is our monthly Scoutmaster panel discussion And I'm going to be very brief in the introduction here. I just want to take a look in the mailbag real quick. Walter wrote in- not Walter Underwood, the other Walter- and said I'm sitting on the train listening to podcast 91. I'm laughing out loud. Needless to say, the other writers are slowly moving away from me.

Well, that's one way to have a little privacy on the train. I love your humor and I love the sound effects. Thank you for the Brick Mason episode. Thanks, Walter, for another vote of confidence in getting back in touch.

So far, you and I like the Brick Mason episodes. That's about it. Tom Dewey wrote in on the blog about podcast 91. He said I thought you made your point very effectively that Scoutmaster conferences and boards of review are a conversation with the boy that can lead to his development as a scout. Some are put off by the new black and white rules and the guide to advancement that are in stark contrast to the way that things have been done in their troop for a long time. I hope that they won't be too resistant to change.

Thank you, Tom. During the discussion that we had this week, one of the things that we were all reflecting on was how important this new guide to advancement is. You're going to hear about that in just a moment.

There's been a lot of action this week over at the blog and on Facebook and there's some more things to discuss. Some of that I'm going to hold over until next week because we have a great Scoutmaster panel discussion with our first call-in question. If you want to call in with a question to our next discussion, just email me. Let me know. We'll have all the different ways you can get in touch towards the end of the podcast. Let's get started.

Shall we Time for another Scoutmaster panel discussion?

So this week let's welcome our panel members: Larry Geiger from Vera, Florida. Hey, Larry, Hey Clark, I'm here.

Tom Glard from Tolahoma, Tennessee- How are you, Tom? Hi Clark And Walter Underwood all the way out there in Palo Alto, California.

How are you doing, Walter Howdy? All three of these fellows are experienced Scoutmasters and we're here to discuss some things I think you'll find helpful in your work as a scout leader. There are three new publications that have come out of the BSA recently. You won't have to go digging for these documents, folks- All of the things that we discussed during this podcast. There'll be a link to a PDF version of the document on the post at scoutmastercgcom.

So the first one is the new youth leader training guide: Introduction to leadership skills for troops- ILST. Do you guys remember that as being called YLT at one point?

The last version was TLT- troop leadership training- Okay, And right before that it was youth leadership training And then right before that it was JLT- junior leader training. I got a good look at the new training syllabus And I generally liked it Well. I read through it and it's almost exactly the same as TLT, As far as I could tell. It had the edge section and it had the other sections. It's just fleshed out a little more.

How about you, Walter? What did you think? It's a lot easier to work with than TLT, because there's more stuff there And I like that. There's some alternatives for the games.

So if you do it twice a year, you don't just run the same games into the ground. I felt like it stopped halfway, though The reflections are things like: tell us some examples about servant leadership, And it never says: what are you going to do, Right, And we just, you know, and our funny, it's right.

When this was published, we had put together our own from bits and pieces of former trainings And we went pretty strongly towards here, to responsibilities, What are you going to do towards goals, And it does feel kind of like the parts you know this and the positions, responsibility stuff and the new guide to advancement. They're like they're not talking to each other because this doesn't quite support that. These feels like it needs another good round of work.

On the training, What'd you come away with, Tom? In general, I liked it a lot. I'm like Walter.

We've been looking for something and I was going through and taking some of the stuff from the old JLT that had the video clips and the role play and all that stuff and trying to put stuff together and incorporate, edge and incorporate the methods of teaching, and then this pops up and it is a lot better than the TLT. Like Larry said, it gives you a little more in-depth stuff.

I think It gives you times, it breaks things down, but I liked it enough. I hit print on the machine and I've got a copy of it now. High praise indeed. We're going to attempt this one next month.

I do have to say we did use the old videos and our guys loved them. In fact, one of the new- after the two guys fighting inside the tent which just cracked them up, Take it to the tent- is one of the new sayings from our leader.

Did you know? All those clips are on YouTube. It's maybe where we got some of them. I found all of them on YouTube and that's how I was going to use them was off of the YouTube stuff. I've got the DVD that has all of them on there. One thing about this thing: and they've gone back to saying no, we actually need to get the leaders together and call it a course.

It actually says in here about this course. I saw in the introduction too. I saw some pretty good explanations of the relationship of the Scoutmaster to the youth leaders, emphasizing that any youth leaders that have been through the training should be right up front in presenting. I thought that was pretty positive. When we do youth leader training with my troop, we use an amalgam of a lot of different things.

What about you guys? Start with you, Larry, Do you have a syllabus that you created?

Okay, I have my own. It's made up of doing district JLTs and then TLTs and then a whole bunch of other stuff over the years. I like to do at least one session a year.

I like to find a really nice conference room with nice chairs and we go somewhere and have a nice lunch and in the morning about 10 o'clock we stop and we bring out all the drinks and it's kind of like a business seminar. I do the whole thing during the day for the scouts.

But then we also- like the last one we did was more outdoor. We were in a park, we had a building, but I didn't do it. The other guys, the new guys, did it, but they did a lot more outdoor stuff and they did some of the game type stuff.

Tom, what do you guys use generally as a youth leader training tool? Do you have your own thing that you kind of made up, like Larry?

Or We had been using the canned national, the JLT, and then we started sharing. There was another district was doing one that they had made, so we started sharing in with that and they were putting that on.

Then we sort of got a little lax and we were basically trying to do something internal and it's not working out like we had hoped. So we're trying to go back to something with a little more structure that we can see where we're supposed to be headed instead of sort of making it up, and I sort of like that a little bit. Walter, you said you guys were in the middle of kind of working on your own deal.

Right, we've followed the outline of the troop leadership training, TLT, but mostly with material from JLT courses and then with some extra bits. I thought it was interesting that they listed the responsibilities of adult leaders, because we did that.

We said here's what you can and again a step further, what you can expect from the adult leaders. I think we'll pull in a bunch of stuff from this. There's other sources too. There's some great leadership games, training from the UK Scouts in the UK that we've looked at.

I think this has kind of got good bones, but we'll flesh it out a little differently. If we had 20 Scoutmasters here, they would all say that they have almost a unique approach where they cobble something together with different things that they've used in the past.

It starts getting stale if you use the same thing every year, So you have to start mixing it up somehow And I don't know. That's where you use your older Scouts that have been through it.

You use them for staff and then more involved trying to do that, But it just takes a lot of effort to do that. Most of you will know, if you've been reading the blog and listening to the podcast, that within the past month or so, the Boy Scouts of America has also put out a new guide to advancement. We're not going to try and pick apart the whole guide to advancement and look at everything, but I'm sure it's something that we'll be spending some time on during these discussions. One of the things that changed, through clarification and maybe a couple of subtle changes, was the positions of responsibility section. But there was a couple of statements in the guide that cleared up a lot of common misconceptions about whether or not you could hold two leadership positions and double it up, or whether if you weren't a leader for a couple of months, if that kind of exed out some of the past stuff you'd done. We never understood how people it just I don't know.

We never did that, We always. If they skipped a month or two, that's fine. They pick it up and it counts. It starts counting then, but we don't make them start at zero again. It's always been time and grade. I mean, serve for six months is served for six months, whether it's three here and three there, And if it's two at the same time, it's still Well.

What if your troop decides to have three month terms and you need six months and you never get two in a row? That just doesn't make any sense.

Well, now it's very clearly spelled out and that's one of the things I think it's very positive in the new guide. That's good. There's been a lot of talk back and forth about another section and that is meeting unit expectations, Because the guide mentions unit expectations a couple of times and it's been widely interpreted as being some of those metrics that a lot of people use to apply to Scouts for being active or serving actively in a leadership position. When I say metrics, I mean make at least 75% of meetings or 10% of outings or whatever people come up with, Something I've never been too fond of and I was wondering what everybody's thoughts were about that.

Was that? I think that's a mistake. I'm not actually going to work against where they want to go, but that's my opinion.

I think some people are going to read that and go: oh well, our unit doesn't have any. They're going to start writing policies and, like you said, that can just go on forever and I think it's a mistake.

But Can't you get the youth involved and ask them what their expectation of the job should be? The adults have an expectation, The youth should have an expectation.

Where is the middle ground here? Wouldn't that be a good idea?

Well, that's part of the mistake to me is they don't mention the Scouts. In my opinion, if they elect a senior patrol leader and six months later, when they have another election, if he's still the senior patrol leader, then that's it.

As I said in one blog post, if they come to me and say a Scoutmaster says, well, we've got a problem. The two times that's happened to me they've said: well, we think we ought to do this.

I said, well, it's your troop. And they go and do it and in both situations they did the right thing.

I think I just don't see it being up to us. They elect the guys. I dealt with this once. We had someone who was a scribe and just didn't show up to the PLC meetings to take notes, and that's pretty much not doing the job. Back then the only thing I could find was that the Scoutmaster should remove a scout from the position if they're not filling the responsibilities, and that was on an FAQ about that on the scouting site. That's a mess.

How long do you wait until you remove someone? I think this is clear. You say you have to tell people the responsibilities at the beginning or you don't get to measure them on those expectations at the end of their term.

That's completely fair and it's really a lot like jobs where you say here's what's expected and if you settle that reasonable expectations in your troop, I think that's a healthy thing to get going. If you have unreasonable expectations, well, people should.

I think Larry probably found the one element in that section that seems to be missing and that is: what part do the scouts have in making those determinations? In the language that they use just seems to put it all in the lap of the Scoutmaster. That has a possible negative effect, let's say, depending on the Scoutmaster.

But I think, Tom, you had it just right. If we're going to set reasonable expectations, are we just going to set them and show them to the boys or are they going to be part of making that up Somewhere else?

In there? It says you can't. You can't block items at the six month period.

You can't say, oh, you weren't here so you don't get credit. Well, isn't that part of a possible Scoutmaster conference intermediate, to talk to them and find out why aren't you here? I know that's part of the senior patrol leaders duty also, but you can sort of intervene and, like you've always said, they're going to be more down on themselves and you could ever be, But just sort of find out what the deal is.

What I think is important is there is a language in there- is that you can't ambush a scout If you haven't done your job and you haven't kept up with them and talked to them and had an ongoing conversation with them. You can't get to month number six and say, oh, by the way, I didn't tell you this but you really didn't qualify on that. The third publication that we've seen in the past couple of months- that is new- is a revision of the Eagle Project workbook. Walter, you've got some special interest in that. You did a blog post for us about it.

What is your role there? That makes you interested in the Eagle Project workbook?

Well, I've been invited to be part of the district advancement committee so I can approve Eagle Projects. I've approved a whopping three of them so far, but as soon as I was trained they changed the rules.

It's great to have everything in one place and to have it so clear because it was spread out everywhere. And the other thing is that there's a real change towards the adult. Leaders are now. Their job is to really assist scouts who are working on Eagle and not to put up roadblocks.

We're not asking them to be perfect, We're asking them to improve towards being responsible citizens, and I think it's a great change in focus. I have one big like about the Eagle Project workbook Locally here.

Our Eagle Project workbook that was distributed by the council had a whole bunch of stuff folded into it, But now people can't do that. I was surprised to hear that because we never- the our council never- did that. We always went by that booklet and I was surprised to hear that I generally don't use the workbook, I show it to the scouts. Basically it's a list and my scouts have written their Eagle Projects like an essay and everyone's different. All the same things: the signature page, the approval here, the list, that's all there. But they've kind of written it up their own way generally and I really like that.

Walter, in your opinion, does this take away the ability of a scout to do whatever he likes in the way that he presents an Eagle Project? I think the new workbook gives the more guidance on what to do and it focuses it that your planning is really part of your leadership as opposed to getting an approval, because the planning is now evaluated by your board of review.

So most of the project workbooks I've seen have write ups which are in the form requested by the workbook but are separate. So there's a binder which has the workbook pages, signatures and then separate pages which correspond to the parts of the workbook.

So, Larry, if I understood your objection properly, it was that if everybody was required to use the workbook unchanged, that it would kind of restrict scouts from making these kind of work of art project proposals. Yeah, that's kind of how I read it. It said that you had to use each page exactly as it has to look, exactly the same as it does in the. There's a line in there that kind of says that- or I interpreted it that way. My interpretation is what Walter just said would not be accepted.

Now I'm not trying to contradict him, I'm just saying that's how I read that one line in there that said: you must use this book of these pages, these blocks, exactly as they are, like that. Did your council or your district have their own Eagle Project workbook?

No, Walter, did your district or council have their own Eagle Project workbook or an amended one? Our council, in fact, has not had their own workbook and it's really fairly close to the current process- a few tweaks, but we're actually pretty close. Like I said, we had one that got amended and it was pages and pages of stuff and it was presented to our scouts as the official Eagle Scout project workbook.

Obviously, you guys haven't had that problem and I think that's where that language came from, Larry- that they didn't want anybody to alter the workbook before it got into the hands of the scout. Yeah, well, that's okay.

On the formality side of the thing, I think it is okay to copy, and because you're not going to be able to. You're not going to be able to put everything in all the words in those little blanks, so you need to put it in a notebook.

But what? When you are the district advancement chairman and you start getting all these crazy, crazy notebooks without any kind of standardization, you forget whether it's got this item in it or whether it's got that item, whereas if you sort of standardize in your head, you go, okay, there's that one, there's that one, and you know, you can remember that all the pieces are there and it's a lot easier on him who has to see we do 25, 30 Eagles a year is all we do, but in our district- but for a big district you could do a lot more probably. On page 2 it says the official fillable pdf version can be found at: although it is acceptable to copy and distribute the workbook, it must maintain the same appearance, with nothing changed, added or deleted.

So it appears to me that you take this workbook and either through the pdf or through a copy, you write in: exactly it's got this page with the proposal, the little boxes, it's got materials or things in the little explanations with the parentheses around it, all that stuff. I kind of have a problem with that, but that's me so I just don't think they don't want you just to adulterate it in any manner. Add and subtract stuff like what Clark's group has done.

I think the Scouts can still basically get in whatever they want. Walter, what other changes did you see in the Eagle Scout process?

I think there's interesting that the project workbook is not a source of a way to reject people, things like not delaying to get to a reference. There's just a lot of little things throughout it and an explicit process in case Scoutmasters refuse to sign things. You can go ahead and get a border of view if you've ever encountered that, like somebody get very doctor narrow about something, seem to be deliberately wanting to hold a Scout up for some kind of administrative reason. I did have a Scout join my troop five years ago from another troop because he was receiving that kind of bogusness and he finished his Eagle in my troop.

He was not going to become an Eagle Scout for whatever other reasons which I have never been able to figure out, and so he came to our troop. You know, fill out your plan and we'll send it to the district. And he did it, did his project, did a good project finished it, it was fine, but somebody had to be in there, bonnet over in that other troop, and I never talked to them. I didn't want to know what Larry just described.

I think you mentioned in the post that you wrote for the blog, Walter. You talked about obstruction of Scoutmasters. That sounds about right. That's certainly what it sounds like to me.

Have you seen that? Experience that? But I know that there there can be a cult of Eagle, which is something wrapped up that's far beyond.

You know, this is a step towards the rest of your life instead of the pinnacle of everything. Anything else about the Eagle process or anything you saw that you'd like to discuss. Larry mentioned or somebody said something about. It describes in more detail and it really does. I like that.

Yeah, I think it's going to clear up a lot of problems. The whole new guy- I agree with you, Tom.

Well, fellas, we're going to turn to the telephone. Joining us is David shoot, and David has a question for the panel. Welcome to the Scoutmaster podcast, David, thank you.

Where are you in Scouting, David? I'm in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania and what's your role there? I'm the committee chair with 59.

I also serve as a unit commissioner for our district as well, and you had a question that you wanted to see if we could help you out with. Yeah, my question is: I took over as committee chair back in January and our committee was very inactive when I started and unfortunately that meant Scoutmaster had to do practically everything.

And as the current committee chair, I'm trying to help him out and I want to do what I can, but I don't want to overstep my bounds. So I was kind of wondering where the Scoutmaster's responsibility ends and the committee takes over.

Well, we've got three guys who've been in that role for a while, so who'd like to begin? Okay, that sort of sounds like when we first started the troop, I was basically it and I couldn't wait to get out of that position, out of trying to do stuff.

But right now it's it is a committee chairman and all the positions and I just sit back and do my my report when asked and basically don't talk about anything anymore. But it took time to get there, went from an inactive footing.

It did take about how much time, would you reckon, Tom? About a year. It took about probably a year for the committee to really start getting going and for me to be able to really start backing off quick. Larry, you had something to add there. Number one is finances, obviously, number two the committee chairman's responsible for administration and the Scoutmaster's responsible for the Scouts. The committee's responsible for advancement and boards of review, the Scoutmaster's responsible for Scoutmaster conferences.

The Scouts put together an annual plan, the committee with the Scoutmaster and the committee approves it and agrees to support it and fund it. You know, as you go down that list and start breaking things apart, there's some things that fall pretty clearly on the committee that the Scoutmaster shouldn't even really have to worry about. Like Tom said, the finances and the reservations and the transportation coordination, advancement, the advancement chairman- that should not be an assistant Scoutmaster or the Scoutmaster because committee members have to do board.

So once you start kind of pulling it apart and the committee chairman begins to take ownership of that, eventually it should should just kind of fall out. Hopefully, for me it's. It's like our church, the Episcopal church, the, the priest is responsible for the spiritual life of the congregation and the vestry is responsible for the money and buildings and other stuff, and it's like that where the Scoutmaster is responsible for the scouting life of the troop and for working with the boys and the committee is responsible for all the temporal aspects of it.

Are we getting anywhere, David, is that helpful? Yeah, yeah, that's helpful. You sound like you have a Scoutmaster who was very involved, is very involved and has been used to doing a lot of things.

Is he being resistant at all to? Yeah, he's being quite resistant, actually, you know he's.

He was a Cupmaster, you know, for several years before this and he's only been Scoutmaster now for two years. So when he was Cupmaster he's used to doing everything.

And when he moved up to the Boy Scout program there was nobody to fill those roles, so he was doing it. And now it's like, you know, I actually have to tell him.

You know, hey, that's, you know, not your job anymore, and that's what. It's kind of tough, you know. I don't want to step on his toes too much, but I don't want him to overwork himself either.

I've managed to recruit about five or six parents this year and that's one of my problems is I want to make sure that the parents have stuff to do, because if you don't give them stuff to do, then then the parents are going to think, well, they don't really need me, and then next thing, you know they're not going to want to be committee members and help anymore, and then I'm going to be back to where I was right. Does he?

Is he running the advancement? Yes, he's pretty much doing all the advancement. We do the border reviews, but everything else is pretty much done by the Scoutmaster.

Okay, does he have? Is he doing the outdoor coordinator?

Is he scheduling all that? And doing all that, making reservations?

Okay, you're the committee chairman. You need to rest that away from him.

You need to just say: look, I've assigned Joe and Joe's going to be advancement chairman and he's going to schedule board review and here's his helper. And when you need a Scoutmaster after a conference, you need a board review.

You send the Scout to them and you know you need to, as much as possible, just step on his toes, because don't, like you said, the only way for your committee to really take over, because if you let it keep going, one day he's going to quit and then you don't have either again, you're stuck and it's going to take a little bit of a firm hand if he's resistant. But you need to take the checkbook away, the advancement records away, the you know, the scheduling you know and and the Scouts need to be talking to that outdoor coordinator about their calendar and the Scouts need to be talking to the advancement person. You may actually end up stepping on his toes slightly, but long-term that's really the best way to go.

Ok, so if I understand this right, then the Scouts should be coming directly to committee members then, because I was the way it's been going lately is they go to the Scoutmaster and then he comes to us and tells us: you know, I need a board review, or the Scouts. The Scouts go to where they need to go: to the council or the advancement chair. They go see the treasure if they want to turn in to check. I mean, mom and dad can do that, but the Scout can bring money to the meeting Scout can go see the treasure if they're at the meeting. One of our rules is: the Scout always calls for a board.

Now the new guide to advancement says that the Scoutmaster has to make sure that the board happens when it's needed. But you know, it's great practice for them to learn to call and make those calls and one of the official duties of a Scoutmaster is to delegate. If you look in the list, it's delegates.

Well, it's an awful lot like the senior patrol leader. It's not letting the senior patrol leader do stuff and when he doesn't delegate he takes the opportunity of leadership away from somebody else.

So this guy is sort of taking all these people and pushing them aside a little bit. David, have you and your committee done any of the training stuff yet? Yeah, all of my committee is trained. Several of them have been around for a couple of years as parents and and we're on the. There were two or three that were on the committee already and they have the committee challenge.

I think is what it is, the training, and I have taken that twice now. I took it online and then I took it.

We have a once a year. We have a program that they call it University of Scouting, where you actually go and it's like a day of classes and I took the hour and a half long person to person version because I wasn't satisfied with the online version. I wanted to ask some questions and it still leaves me wondering.

You know, a lot of these roles are still kind of left vague and you guys have cleared it up a lot for me. Let me pose this question: everybody, he's got a good trained committee. He's holding back a little bit.

What do you tell the Scoutmaster fellas to kind of calm his nerves a little bit? He needs to delegate to the committee, just like he delegates to the scouts.

Are his scouts running the meetings and the camp outs? David, That's. That's a whole other thing. There he's. When I, my son and I, joined this troop about a year and a half ago and he told us he was going, the troop wasn't being run boy led before he was going to start running a boy led and he's made some strides towards it, but we're only about halfway there.

At this point he's still pretty much, you know, much to my dismay- telling the senior patrol leader: this is what we need to do and this is what you need to do, and not really letting him do the planning. And I'm kind of gritting my teeth at that, because it's you know he's only been at this for a little more than a year.

They're trying to change this, so I've kind of got to have. Yeah, the delegate thing is obviously an issue for him. Tom and Walt, we're all in the same boat. When somebody volunteers, it's like: go dude, yeah, run, run as fast as you can. The other way is there.

Is there any way that you can go ahead and already have a plan where you assign these people these tasks and don't ever get him an opportunity to do any of it in the first place? I can try and come up with something like that. It'd be very tough. He's at every single meeting, just about.

So it's not like you know. Okay, do you have committee meetings during troop meetings? We don't currently. We are talking about doing it.

Currently we have one committee meeting a month and it's on the second Sunday of every month and our troop meetings are on Tuesdays. Yeah, move your committee meeting to Tuesday and he gets five or ten minutes and then he leaves. He goes back to his business over there with the scouts.

You know 30 or 40 successful troops, I know really successful troops. The committee meets during the scout meeting and that people only make one trip and the Scoutmaster gets five minutes. He is not in the committee meeting.

He takes five, seven minutes and then he's gone. We have, we have always we have done two separate meetings, but I am. I am changing.

I'm trying to get it changed to the scout night also so that I won't have to sit in an hour meeting because I'm not doing anything, I'm just sitting there. So if I, if I have a place to go, then I'm going to go, so and then we get some other other adults that are sort of hanging around with that don't normally come to a committee meeting. We'll get some other stuff, but I don't want to be. I am right there with you, brother Walter.

What do you think right? We have our committee meeting during true meeting and it's really kind of a parent slash committee meeting. Lots of parents show up and if the, if the SPL needs to go address the committee about something right, walks over and does it. That would be the more convenient- I'm sorry, more most convenient thing is the committee being there for questions from the SPL.

I think you guys have all got the spirit of the thing just right and hopefully that's helping you out. David, yeah, it's a great help. Committee chairman, you do have a little bit of authority. I don't know if you have a commissioner, maybe you and the commissioner- I don't know about your chartered organization representative- if you would want to sit down with the Scoutmaster and say some things.

Like you know, this is how I'd like to do things on the committee and if you have that other person in the room or two other people, it's not the whole committee, but it doesn't become you and him. I don't know exactly how to tell you to do that where you're at. This could go a couple different ways. It could quietly start to change things and it could lead to a kind of a showdown too. Nobody wants to see that happen, but I mean, I've actually pulled him aside and had to talk with him about delegating his authority out before, and that was about three months ago- and he did let go of some of the stuff, but a lot of stuff he still hasn't.

So that's been. My concern is: I don't want to step on his toes and say: you know we're supposed to be, you know setting up the transportation, when it's really his job either.

I don't want to be taking work away from him, but now that I know that you know that's really the scouts- come to the outdoor coordinator and advance the chair and all that. The way it was explained to me was: everything flows through the Scoutmaster. That's how it's been running in our true the scout mat. Nothing funnels through the Scoutmaster, if at all possible. The Scoutmaster's job is to work his way out of a job. It's his job is to basically do nothing but Scoutmaster conferences and train the SPL.

I mean, if you've got enough guys that are on the ball, I mean you could have a scout be the treasurer. I mean there's nothing that says that an adult has to do that, an adult has to supervise it.

But you know there's nothing in the troop anywhere except driving and maybe using a credit card that the scouts themselves just about couldn't do. Now we don't always get quite that far into delegating, but you know I've always seen my job as Scoutmaster to get everything to the committee in the scouts, to where I have nothing to do but Scoutmaster conferences.

Now we don't get there and and the troop, the boys in the troop have, you know, over the years have had different levels. You know I've had guys that took almost everything. I don't know. That's kind of how I look at it as Scoutmaster.

How about you sit down with the fellow and say, look, you know we're both pretty new at this. I understand your dedication and your desire to see things happen correctly and and everything.

But you know we need to expand the role of the committee, not to take anything away from you, but to let you concentrate on the things that are most important to you. I mean that might be an approach that might help out. I found that everything that I thought was going to happen fast and making changes or looking at different ways of doing things took a lot longer than I thought.

Anything I thought: well, you know, in six months we'll pretty much have this by the tail two years later. We were still kind of working at it, but we had made some progress. Thanks for saying that.

Yeah, so true, so well, David, I hope. I hope we helped you out there a little bit.

You helped me out a whole lot and I think everybody here for all their help. I really do. It was great help. You're welcome.

Thanks for joining us, David, thank you okay, thanks once again for participating, fellas and thanks. Thanks very much for joining us, Walter.

Okay, Larry, thanks for joining us again. You're welcome, Clark and Tom. Thank you very much, Clark. Have a good time. Thank you for joining us and we'll see you next month.