Scoutmaster Podcast 97

And now the old Scoutmaster. So it was a year or two ago that we were on a canoe trip with the Scouts- Gorgeous weather, beautiful conditions, just it was on this lovely river And unfortunately we got stuck- And it's not very common to get stuck on a canoe trip, but it was the weekend And we couldn't get out until Monday morning when the banks opened. Yeah, Hey, this is podcast number 97..

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Hey, as promised, we've got three members of the National Advancement Committee for an interview in this podcast. The National Advancement Committee produced the new Guide to Advancement and the new Eagle Project workbook that has been published this fall.

And what I wanted to do is I wanted to get a few members of that committee together so that they could discuss the way that this kind of thing happens. You know we're unit level volunteers- We have.

You know we're Scoutmasters and assistant Scoutmasters, committee people, Cub masters and Cub committee and all you know- and venturing people and everything. We're pretty concentrated day to day and week to week on our Scouts, working with them.

You know, we probably understand something about how a district functions and we understand how a council functions, but how does our national organization function? How do things like the new Guide to Advancement come into being?

Well, this podcast should give you some answers about that. What you'll find is is that the people who are on the National Advancement Committee are volunteers like you and I. They have broader interest than you and I as volunteers because they're looking at the program from a national level. Hopefully, what you'll find is what I found in speaking to them. They're pretty down-to-earth guys.

I mean, they are just, you know, very experienced scouters who who dedicate a lot of time on our behalf and the behalf of our Scouts, and they put really valuable tools like this Advancement Guide into our hands so that we can directly affect the program with our Scouts, And that's the way that it works. I was very excited to speak with them and I was very happy with the result. I hope you are too, And that interview is going to take up the remainder of the podcast.

I also want to note that you know, last week I said that this interview was coming up and I solicited some questions, and all the questions I received I really appreciate and I was able to fold some of them into the interview. Some of them were really specific policy questions that I want to save for another time.

And when you listen to the interview towards the end, you're going to find out how you can get in touch with the National Advancement Committee, and there's also going to be a link in the post that contains this podcast to an email address so you can send your questions directly to the National Advancement Committee. How about that?

I think we had best get started, shall we?

So joining us today on the Scoutmaster Podcast are three members of the National Advancement Committee. Steve Bowen is out in El Centro, California, and Steve is Area 6 or Western Region Program Support Chairman. He's also a member of the National Program Content Committee. He is a team leader for the Merit Badge Advancement Activities for the upcoming 2013 National Jamboree. He's also earned this Distinguished Eagle Scout Award and the Silver Buffalo.

How are you doing this evening, Steve? Very fine. Thank you, Clark. And Wayne Huddleson is in Omaha, Nebraska, where he is a National Advancement Committee Eagle Rank and Palms Specialist. He's also a Silver Beaver recipient, and Wayne was involved in something many of you have seen, and that was the Union Pacific Railroad Locomotive that was set up and had the Special Paint Scheme for the Centenary.

Wayne was part of making that happen, So we owe you some thanks for that, Wayne. How are you doing? Glad to be here, Clark. Finally, Dan Maxfield is in Fresno, California, where he's the Council Vice President for District Operations, the Area Vice President for Council Support on the National Commissioner Support Staff. Dan was also part of the editorial team that produced the 2010 Centenary Boy Scout Handbook and he's also a Silver Antelope recipient.

So good evening, Dan. How are you? Great tonight and glad to be here with you, Clark.

Well, I want to say I really appreciate you guys taking the time to do this as a part of what you do for scouting, And the reason I asked you to be here was to give scout leaders an idea of how things like this new Guide to Advancement happen. This fall, the BSA released a significant new resource for us volunteers, and that is that Guide to Advancement replaces the publication that used to be called the Advancement Committee Policies and Procedures Manual, and it features some significant changes and clarifications. One of the things I'm really interested in is how things like this happen.

How do you end up on the National Advancement Team? Well, this is Steve. I'll start off. The previous Advancement Committee was one of many national committees and the new Advancement Committee has actually kind of evolved back into a full-time committee because Advancement is something that goes on all the time. But people were asked to be on that committee who had backgrounds in different special areas, maybe some previous Advancement Committee work, but generally they were selected from across the nation for their different expertise in different fields.

So this team gets together and then what kind of information or statistics or input do you use to put together something like the Guide to Advancement? Well, this is, Dan, The process that the National BSA uses now on anything like this. The way they're developed is through a committee structure that includes a lot of folks from around the country. At any given time that could be 50 to 100 folks- and those folks are surveyed through email and phone conversations.

Data is collected, it's collated and then a smaller group of folks will take all that data, formulate something that says: well, we think this is maybe what's the result of that data, and then put that back out to all of those folks and say: is this what you told us? Get some input, refine and develop that down to something that then everybody tends to buy in or agree on after some discussion and interaction over time and then that becomes the product. But I should point out here that the material is written by a small group or a single individual, and in the case of the Guide to Advancement, by a single individual, simply because there's a need for a continuity of voice and content, and a committee trying to write something like that would not have that characteristic.

So typically something like this today is being written by one individual, with constant guidance and interaction from a group of folks. You're soliciting opinions and information from volunteers like me. You betcha, It's not done in a vacuum. In other words, No. In the case of the Guide to Advancement, there were over 50 volunteers around the country that gave ongoing input, plus about 50 professionals that gave feedback into this whole process as well. But it's important to understand once a viable draft is developed.

This goes to health and safety, it goes to special needs, it goes to legal and all the different departments within the BSA to make sure that all of the opponents of the Boy Scouts of America are in accord and in agreement, so that there's a one voice coming out of this thing. Clark, I'd like to add something. This is Steve Over the years and Dan and I were on that Old Advancement Committee for about 15 years apiece. A lot of things came up repeatedly The same problem in Eagle Appeals or a Board of Review or something like that. A log was kept that picked up these problems and that became another resource for developing this new guide to cover all those little issues that just kept being problems. That actually comes from the field.

In our discussion before we started, you guys mentioned too that committee also answers Eagle Appeals and things like that. So you're dealing with direct things on an ongoing basis. Absolutely correct, This is Wayne. One of the things that you see and you've mentioned in some of your other podcasts is some of the changes. Things to the project forms and things like that were in response to some of the problems that Steve's talking about, where he was taking months to get approval for a project or things like that. That seemed excessive.

You see some clarification in the guide now in those areas. This is Dan.

I would add to that as well that we teach classes at FilmWant during the summer and we teach classes at the sea base during the January timeframe. That's a little commercial right there in case anybody's interested in signing up for those, But at those classes we interact directly face-to-face with volunteers from the field and they tell us this stuff and we kept this information from them and we have a lot of face-to-face discussions that give us a good sense of what's out there in the field and how do they feel about it.

About how long did this whole process take, would you guess? I'd say it took about a year.

Do you guys agree with that? This is Steve.

There were some changes to the guide in 2009, but they just weren't what was necessary, and so a whole new guide was developed. Chris Hunt at the National Office has really been the torch bearer for this. I would say, like Dan says, a year, maybe probably two years, if you think all the time that was kind of built in re-evaluating the previous document. It was a full, solid year of direct writing and interaction.

We had a preliminary draft in January, so actually a lot of work had gone on before then. How did you resolve debates or questions that may have been a bit of a problem or there were different opinions.

The thing is that when divergences of opinions would come in- and many cases Chris Hunt, whom Steve alluded to a moment ago, would simply call those people directly and say: look, here's what you said, why, and would get their input and interaction and would give him the feedback from some of the rest of us that he was hearing and say: well, look, this is what I'm hearing from others. Are you in agreement here or is there a major disagreement?

Or can we resolve this? And more often than not, most of it was resolved simply that way.

One or two things were fairly contentious and I think eventually Chris had to simply say the majority believed this. So that's what I'm going with. This is Wayne, and one thing to keep in mind is it's intended that this document's a living document. Another reason for it being on the internet is you can see this thing change or be updated as conditions warrant. New information comes in, that gets considered and things like that. We don't anticipate going 10 years before changing it again.

I guess, with the way that the internet has enabled a lot of this stuff, it's easier to get input now, it's easier to make the changes, it's easier to publish the changes. The downside of that is, like you say, it's easier to get input, and the problem is sometimes you get so much of it, you become overburdened, and that was some of the problems that the group faced too was trying to deal with so many opinions and so many places at the same time. The one thing that I absolutely was thrilled with as I sat and read the new guide was the emphasis of a proportional approach to advancement as one method of many in scouting. All of us have known for a long, long time that advancement is just one of the eight methods of Boy Scout program development.

Advancement is the one that everybody sees, I think, but there are so many other kind of subtle things which are part of the methods of scouting. So this is not the whole nutshell, this is just a portion of it, And this is Dan. I would point out that I absolutely echo what Steve just said.

But there was clearly a recognition on the part of the folk that put together the current Journey to Excellent program that we're now on, which to the point that it became a specific item in the Journey to Excellence criterion, because it's very clear over studies over time that when kids in a unit- whether it's Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Venturing, it doesn't matter- are having fun and they're learning something, they tend to stay longer in the program, and ultimately that is our goal, isn't it? The most problematic part of this sometimes is just getting it right, is getting that right balance: being able to run an advancement program and have all the other things happening at the same time without over-emphasizing one or the other. This is Ryan. Let me build a little bit on that.

One of the things I want to point out is, if we think back about what we do in scouting, what we want from scouting, we're really looking for excellence in character, citizenship and fitness. Even though they're earning these awards, what we're really hoping for is a lot of time of excellence by living by the Scouts of St Louis.

I think the guide is really going to help us reach those goals and I think it really helps. It really lays a very clear path on how to administer the advancement part of the program. The kids don't know how we're administering a program and what we're trying to, where our goals are.

All they know is, like Dan said, are they having fun, are they learning something? And oh, am I advancing because I get another patch to put on the uniform? And mom and dad are kind of thinking somewhat the same thing in some cases.

I mean, they're looking, hopefully that Johnny's going to become a better citizen down the road, but they don't realize all those other subtleties that we are ingraining in their children through the program, and so advancement is one of those little carrots, but it's not the whole salad. When you open the guide and you start reading, one of the first things that you come across is there is a list of 13 significant changes that were made.

I wanted to just bring up a couple that really came to my attention, because I think that they elegantly put to rest some issues that seem to come up time and time and time again on a unit level. The first is the concept of reasonable expectations, As it concerns active participation and fulfilling requirements for positions of responsibility.

There's now this really great three-step test to determining active for a scout rank. What fomented that particular change in clarification?

Well, I was just going to give a little history on that. First, because I think it's the old policies and procedures of advancement had a number of rewrites, but they were only segments that were rewritten, and we've tackled the active one a number of times over the years. The discussion then became we needed to look at the boys' life in general.

This age had other things going on, and that's where we seem to have most of our problems with appeals and boards of review was this very strict, narrow line of what active was, and there was this ongoing debate about the number of camp outs- a kid had to go on and stuff like that. So there's been an evolution of this to where we are today.

Well, this way, my understanding is a lot of this was driven by input from the field. We talked earlier about all of the surveying and stuff that was going on. You'll find units where they want to treat it like a sports program. You're either in scouts or you're not. You're either 100% with us or you're against us.

That's not the kind of program we want. We want an inclusive program in scouting, not one that excludes kids. They all got things, other things going on in life, just like we adults have other stuff going on.

We tried to make everything so it was a level playing field across the country. If we had some units that were saying you had to have 75% of your activities to be consider active and we had ones on the other part of the country that were saying, well, if you come once or twice a month or whatever, there wasn't a standard and so it wasn't a level playing field. Johnny, in one part of the country could not. Maybe it was 10 times tougher than somebody on the other side of the country.

That was one of our concerns and it was one of the debating points for years as to how do we keep a level playing field, and I think what we came up with was a very kind of honest compromise. I think it's brilliant. It seems also to have enough latitude, if a unit does have this kind of metric requirement, that they can use that to a certain extent. They also are required to look at the boys life outside of scouting and what is involvement and things there are.

One of the things that it specifically mentions in the guide is that the purpose of Starlife and Eagle Scout requirements are to develop an impact are you having on their lives in the program at that point and they may have absorbed the ideals of scouting and are off now as captain of the football team and are leading the debate team at school and doing all kinds of things that are character building and citizenship and fitness building- all the kind of things we're hoping to develop in these young men. One of the things we discovered, Clark, was that there was just too much arguing out in the field over what constituted active anyway, and no matter what we said year after year after year, we would continue to discover that units all over the place were saying: well, you have to be at 75% of the meetings, 80% of the outings, you have to wear your uniform 69.2% of the time and you better not miss any courts of honor.

And we were having to argue with people everywhere. And so in this case, what we kind of in effect said is: we don't want to argue about this anymore, it has to be reasonable.

And so what's going to constitute reasonable? You units out there go ahead and say whatever you want, set up whatever standard you care to set up, but when it comes to the board of review, the board of review is going to determine what's reasonable based upon the guidelines in this book. And if it gets to the national level and to the the ego issues, folks, and you've set these things that are outlandish and unreasonable, we are going to overturn you.

So just understand that There's a similar set of standards that apply to evaluating positions of responsibility. The guide talks about positions of responsibility.

I think. Is that the same as leadership positions?

Is that kind of interchangeable, or is there a difference there? Well, this way in. The actual requirement for ego rank reads following positions of responsibility.

A lot of people say leadership, but you know the real strict reading of the requirements. That's the terminology they use, so that's why we used it in the guide. There are some jobs that really aren't leadership jobs. As scribe, librarian historian- I mean historian- doesn't lead the boys into the woods.

He does a job and so his responsibility is, whatever the definition and the job tasks are for the historian. So if he does those jobs- that's why we use the word responsibility, because that's his responsibility rather than a leadership role. When you talk about positions of responsibility and evaluating them, in the guide, again you've given a very clear path for volunteers to use in making those evaluations and it involves, again, a reasonable standard.

It involves the scout having to understood and agree to that standard and then the ongoing mentoring and discussion process that needs to go on between a scout and a leader as he is fulfilling that position of responsibility. Is that a pretty accurate?

Yeah, and we wanted those unit leaders to talk with those kids, not just say: here's the job, go do it and in six months I'll tell you whether you passed or not. We want those unit leaders to talk to those kids and work with them. If the kids 14, he may have a different capability of fulfilling that than a kid who's going on 18 in the band, on the football team and in the debate team and active in his church. And leaders need to be able to sit and talk with those kids and deal with the reality of their lives.

So you guys were seeing that misunderstanding of that, or how did you come to address? There were a number of appeals, for example, where a boy would be in a position- he'd be 17 and a half and 17 and nine months, let's say, and he just finished- he thought he'd finished his six months in a position of responsibility and the Scoutmaster would say, well, he didn't do a very good job, so I'm not going to count that now.

He's only got three months before he's 18, so he can't do it over. So he gets kind of ambushed trying to eliminate that stuff. Right, you got to talk to the kids in advance.

How are they doing? It's just like a job review at work.

You know they don't wait until the end of the year, until you get into a good job and you don't get your pay raise. They pay every month, and I think that's an important distinction.

I think we've kind of defaulted to calling everything a leadership position when actually the language doesn't call anything really a leadership position. We talk about leadership, we foment it, we mentor it, we want it to happen, but these are all positions of responsibility. Some of them involve leadership and some of them don't. Absolutely correct, and that goes even- you will see in the redefinition of some of the terminology in the new eagle project workbook that that's even the case. We continue to call that a leadership project.

Well, okay, but is there more going on than just the exercise of leadership? Is that all we're expecting from the boy?

Well, no, it isn't. So.

Is that one of the aspects of it? Well, absolutely, it is showing that through all of these other things we've asked them to do, tasks that we've asked them to do that we call responsibility positions. Over time that he's actually learned something and he can show us that he's learned it. But there's way more going on in that project that purely the exercise of leadership. And in fact in the guide there's a specific section that addresses the responsibility and leadership issue.

That's a 4.2, 3.4.6, how about that? But many suggest the requirements should be called for a position of leadership rather than simply responsibility. But taking and accepting responsibility is a key foundation leadership. That's one of the ways the guide explains that. You did bring up the numbers there, Wayne, and I've had a couple people kind of roll their eyes at the numbering system.

Why is the numbering system there? Because that allows us to know exactly where we want to go in a section to look up something and if we want to change something, we know what section is in and we can change that and relate it to where else it might need to be changed by a section number. As opposed to page 39, paragraph 2, sentence 1, word 6. It's an easier definition system of where stuff is for reference purposes and for change purposes, because you can expand all of those sections with the number of digits and things that are in there. That was one of the frustrations of using the old advancement committee policies and procedures guide. Was that reference to a page trying to figure out if you found exactly what they were talking about.

So yeah, and then is this thing evolves on the internet in between printed copies. You know if you might add enough to something that it's going to force some text over into a different page.

So if you tell people it's on page 15 but looking on the internet it may not be on 15 anymore, it might be on 16, but it's still under section 4.1.1.0. So there's also some clarifications about boards of review.

I think there was a couple of procedural changes, slight procedural changes and clarifications there. Can you give me kind of an overview of that?

The first thing that that occurred there- that's that's new- is it says that a boy must be granted a border review when the requirements have been met or when he believes they have been met, and that's a huge difference from what we've had before. That was one thing. And secondly, the uniform issue was clarified big time in that section because there's always controversy over that and I hope we put that to rest.

And then we clarified the issue of what do we do when a unit leader or the unit committee chairperson won't sign a boy's application, because that had always been a problem and that became what we call now a disputed circumstance issue. And the reference issue about what references are required and how are they handled was cleaned up big time.

Has the guy been out yet long enough to see its effect with appeals and things like that? This is Steve. I don't know about appeals, but I was at a training session up in Utah and they were already using it and referring to it and many of them new things about it that I didn't know.

I mean, it was very well accepted and these Utah councils are big councils. Most people there that came up afterwards said, boy, this is sure made our job easier.

And we were hearing- at least I am, I'm hearing- from folks as I talk to them just in one place or another that they're reading this over now and it's making so much more sense and they're really delighted with many of their clarifications. The totality of this thing doesn't come into absolute implementation until January 1st, and so those that are picking up and using it now are doing so at their discretion, because they can but they don't have to. We had roundtable Tuesday night and the district advancement chairman was talking to everybody about the guide and she was very, very positive about how it was going to make a lot of people's lives a lot easier. And one of the things we're really trying to do is get this out to not only the unit leaders but to the parents and everybody that's involved in the program.

You know everybody needs to read this and understand it. Everybody thinks they know what advancements about, but this is the thing that helps them really understand what it's about. I noticed the difference between this and the document that it's supplanted. It kind of, in the title, implied that it was just for the advancement committee, but this is truly written for everybody to look at. The advancement committee has a cub scout person, a venturing person, a boy scout specialist, a merit badge person, an eagle person, a disabilities person, a training person. I mean, they're all at the same table.

And when this book was produced, one of the things that Chris Hunt specifically did was went to the professional in charge of the seat scout program and said: look, we need to make this one voice. How is this supposed to read? And look. And they did that.

And he went to the special needs people and said: we need to make this one voice so that everybody understands and we're all on the same page. What should this look like and sound like?

And that's what they did, and that- that's exactly what Steve was alluding to- is that we now have the capability of bringing all those folks to the table so that we come out with with one package and one voice, as opposed to this discontinued product. Well, another, another, another very positive thing, though, is with all these same people at the table, now you begin to really focus on making the program development.

You know, from cub scouts through weeblows to boy scouts to venturing to make you may, you may have a continuum. That's going to be a little easier to little easier to establish, and, along with the new guide to advancement, there is a new Eagle Scout project workbook and there's some new language in the guide to advancement that pertains to some Eagle Scout stuff.

What were the principal things that you hope to clarify and change in what we were finding out, Clark? In many cases around the country, this project was being turned into a master's thesis, and kids were coming to the council office and turning in a binder that was four inches thick and that this stuff had been gone over and seen, inspected, as if they were doing a doctoral dissertation, and- and at the beginning, even before that, in case after case after case after case, in district after district, all over the place, kids would come to a district committee to review their project proposal that we called it in those days.

They would be turned down and they would come back and say, well, you got to fix this. And they come back and they'd say, well, you fixed that, but you didn't fix this, and they turned them down again.

And then they'd say, we'll fix this. They'd come back and, well, you fixed this, but not enough. We wanted more.

And what we were finding was that even before a kid got a proposal approved, he'd already been through four, five or six of these things and in many cases it was just turning kids off and they were saying, to heck with it. We had to take this process and re-grab it back and say, wait, this is not a master's thesis, a doctoral dissertation, you're not becoming an engineer.

This is just a little thing for a kid to go out in the community, display what he's learned in the Boy Scouts, exercise some leadership, learn some processes about how to put things together and organize and direct people, and then, once they see I finished this and we wanted to put it back on, that perspective and this that was coming to us from the field in overwhelming voice: this is too generic, too simple. People don't understand it and they're turning it into something it was not intended to be. Please clarify this thing and streamline it, and that was what was intended. One thing that I had when I read the new project manual was the differentiation between a project proposal and a project plan.

Yeah, I've been fighting with that for quite a long time and I was so pleased to see that somebody finally saw that and set it out so that a scout didn't have to, as you said, have a dissertation level project plan all sorted out to the last penny, to the last nail, before his project got approved, that he needed to propose the project first and then develop the plan. Right, and the concept of this- putting this preliminary proposal together- was simply: does this thing have a shot at being completed and being something that we want to be an ego scale level kind of project that's going to fulfill the objectives of this thing?

If the answer is yes, then let him go. You don't want this project to become- I mean, you want it to be a positive memory for the kid, not something that was such a tough thing to get through that he regrets having to put all that effort into it. He wants to remember it in a positive manner and be able to do it at a scale that matches his abilities.

I think it was you that said it, Dan, an expression that goes out in the community and is an expression of what he's learned as a scout. Were there any other things about the new project workbook or the ego process that changed significantly or clarified? You may have picked this up already or not.

I'm sure you have but notice that once the boy has had that initial first section signed off and then at the end there's the completed plan, the completed write up, that section in the middle, that actual plan piece, he doesn't even actually have to do that if he doesn't want to. Did you notice that? I had a little back and forth with a friend of mine about that. We looked at it. He was a little put off because he thought that it was going to kind of lock them down into having to fill out this long form type of thing.

And I said- you know the way I'm reading this. He can do whatever he wants in the way of expressing his plan. Nobody can force him to do anything above and beyond about what's described here. He can take any form that he wants to use.

If the boy chooses not to do that section- the actual plan piece- because no signature is required there and he comes to a board of review without that and the board says, well, we don't really understand what you accomplished or how. In your final write up you don't really tell us how this was accomplished or how much money you actually used you gave it back to, or how many kids you actually had to employ and what difficulties you had. We think we're missing some stuff.

Can you explain that to us? And the boy can't explain it. He may have a problem at his board of review.

So that's there as an ability for him to work out the nuts and bolts if he needs to, and then actually have something to take to a board of review later to support what he wants to tell him. But he doesn't have to do that. We didn't require it. Clark, that's very clear on the front page of the final plan. It says specifically in there that the final plan is a tool for your use and it's not approved or signed.

So it's really important that people read that front page. A lot of times people flip over the front page and start reading the inside and getting to work.

It's like: well, read the front page. Another big change in this is the concept of a project, alex to have one. It's just another resource for the boy. It can be the person who is the eagle project signatory approval person, but it doesn't have to be- and, again, the coach doesn't have to even exist either. But it's one of these things that we are suggesting is another resource for the boy.

I think a lot of people were using an eagle advisor type of thing, but it's nice to see it more formalized in that way and to encourage a scout to go ahead and find somebody to help them out like that and see. That's one of those subtle. Other methods of scouting is quality adult association. One of the little subtle things I'd like to note is when it talks about project approvals.

You know there are steps you're supposed to go through. You get the unit leader, the unit committee, the beneficiary and typically a counselor or district approver. But from time to time scouts jump the gun and they get ahead of the game and they get going on their project and maybe even get it completed. There are talks about that.

We need to give some consideration rather than just saying, well, you didn't get approval, you got to do it all, you got to do a whole different project. You got to look at what the kids done with the project and perhaps consider leniency there rather than just an arbitrary no again and again. What I've come across in the new guide to advancement of the new Eagle Scout materials is kind of- it's kind of- reminiscent of the baseball role of a tag: always goes to the runner when in doubt. We trust what scouts are telling us and we look for ways for them to succeed rather than ways to fail them. That's the theory. Don't throw up barriers.

Help the kids. This is a process of coaching, mentoring and helping, not sticking your leg out to triple. I'm going to be, I'm a unit level volunteer. I have a question or a difficulty or problem of some kind. I look at the new guide to advancement, I look at over pretty carefully, but I'm not really finding the answer that I want.

What do I do next? Call your unit commissioner huh, Dan, I'd say so.

So I I start going up the trail, I get to the unit, commissioner, and- and he's looking at it to- and we're not really able to get a final idea of where to go forward. Then what?

What are we up to? Your district advancement here?

So, if there, if we, if we exhaust all the resources that we have in our district and our council on some question. Where do we go next? There's a place to ask questions of the advancement committee on the national website listed in the guide to. I was just looking for it. I thought it was right in the front. It's advancement and it says it's on page six of the guide.

It says suggestions, questions and comments to the advancement team. It's advancement dot team at scouting dot org. Make sure that it's posted on the blog in the post that contains this podcast. And once again I would. I would point out that even these, these advanced, these unit level folks can come to film on during the summer or the sea base in January and take the advancement mechanics of advancement course and and we'll tell them all the stuff they need to know there too and they can talk with us direct.

We've even done a few special classes that and when we can get a group together. Is there anything that I've missed that you think people ought to know about this new guide to advancement, Clark what?

One of the other things that I think we're hoping as a result of the product of this new book and the new eagle project workbook is that there's enough clear information and enough clear determination of what's supposed to happen and how councils can focus on the issue of advancement and units can focus on the issue of good program with advancement built in, and they can stop spending their time writing documents about how to do all this stuff. I'd like to add one thing to it just: you gotta make sure that you do good advancement records. If there's one thing that we aren't able to fix in this guide, it's shabby records or non-existent records or problem records. And if I could stand on the soapbox and and beg everybody to do one thing is to really address their record system, because all this is great, but if you don't have records, it's going to pay the price down the road.

Now I want to tell you how much I appreciate the work that you guys did, along with the rest of the advancement team. I hope you're getting a lot of pats on the back about this, because I can imagine you know a year long process was probably pretty trying at times, but I think it was so well worth it and we it'll be a little while before we see the full effect.

It really is going to help scouts- that's what I think, and I really appreciate your involvement in it. Well, the guy who really needs a pat on the back and he won't take. It is Chris Hunt. He did a yeoman's task here, putting all this together and getting it straight lined, and he's a very good writer, and I don't think any of this would have been possible without Chris's efforts and I echo that.

And then also thanks to you, Clark, for trying to help us spread this message. It's just incredibly important and it makes life so much better as a scout leader. When you have these things nailed down. It just makes life much, much easier and you can actually do what you're hoping to do.

Gentlemen, I want to thank you once again for joining us on the Scoutmaster podcast. I think we just started to scratch the surface of the usefulness and the scope of this new guide to advancement and the new Eagle scout materials.

I think it'll make scouting a lot better for scouts out there and really do appreciate your work. So, Dan out in Fresno, thanks for having joined us. Thank you for inviting me. Steve out there in El Centro, thanks for being part of the discussion. Thank you very much for having us. Clark and Wayne in Frosty, Old Omaha, Nebraska, thanks, thanks again for joining us.

Thank you, Clark, it's really been a pleasure.

So before we go, let's hear from our founder, Sir Robert Beaton Powell. Sir Robert, I highly recommend the scoutmaster podcast.

Good luck to you and good camping, why? Thank you, sir, until next time,