National Council
Update from Area 6 on Training Online
Michael A. Crothers, Area 6 Training Chair, which is over Crossroads of America Council, reported this morning that:
On Monday morning at 8am Central BSA’s Information Delivery Group plans to start an upgrade to my.Scouting. As a result of the installation ELearning training will be unavailable for most of the day Monday August 10. Please pass along to your unit leaders that they will be unable to take YPT or other online courses on Monday. This announcement has also been posted on the myscouting.org landing page.
But here is the Good News: After we complete this work on Monday then volunteers will be able to take online courses from the new my.Scouting in his/her MyDashboard. There will be 4 new tabs in the MyTraining menu selection.
- The first one highlights the 3 Youth Protection Trainings available. And when you click on the Take Course button it takes you to the training.
- The second tab “Training Center” allows you to take all online trainings.
- The Requirements tab lists each of your positions and the trainings required for each position
- And the Completions tab will display all training you have taken.
As a reminder in addition to council and district training chairs, all commissioners – as well as unit Key 3 0 have the ability to input training in the Training Manager Tool.
Pack Membership Coordinator Recruitment
This is the time of year that it is so important for a pack chairman to recruit a pack membership coordinator.
One of the hardest parts of recruitment is explaining the nature and duties of the position. Units that have had the luxury of having one parent assist in year one and then do the job in year to have the advantage of on the job training.
For most other packs, most of the training has to be done using other resources: classes, literature, or on the job experience.
BSA has put together a wonderful website for all packs, troops, and crews to be able to use for different recruitment purposes. There are even YouTube videos for the membership coordinator to learn their job. This is different than the usual E-learning process because there is no login required.
Take a look at this website to find out what you can do to improve your recruitment this fall.
How Do I Add or Remove Merit Badges for Counseling
UPDATE: 11/5/15: District is working at updating its list of MBC’s right now. If you see the draft and find that you are not included on it, please read this article about why and how to proceed.
For all of the blog’s information about Merit Badges, click here.
If you want to add or subtract from the Merit Badges that you counsel, please complete this North Star MBC Drop/Add Form. The form must be on file for all counselors. It is required along with the Adult Application.
Please have your troop’s Merit Badge Counselor Registrar contact the District MBC Registrar Mike Yates with any questions about a counselor’s current registration.
The District records are the authority on who is properly a Merit Badge Counselor. Troop registrars are for the convenience of the troop and its members to have a sole point of contact who is familiar with the system.
When a Merit Badge Counselor turns in his or her Drop-Add Form, please encourage them to offer their services to the District or Council, not just your unit, especially if they offer a rare badge. They will not often receive many calls.
For recent history on the MBC registration process and why changes have occurred, please read this blog article. To see options for bringing counseling into the 21st Century, read about the BSA’s acquisition of Scoutbook.com. Regardless whether your unit uses Scoutbook.com or not, it has some invaluable tools for Merit Badge Counseling that are not available elsewhere. Encourage your MBC’s to enroll. Their list of badges offered will then be added to the District list.
If you are retiring from serving as a MBC for the new year, make sure that the District MBC Registrar Mike Yates is aware. Your Troop and Crew leader, committee chair, and chartered organization representative were emailed his email address in October 2015.
If your troop does not have a person listed on your troop’s roster as the MBC registrar, please contact your Troop Committee Chair for more information.
Making My.Scouting.Org Useful
Over the next several days, BSA is going to continue moving more and more of its access to ScoutNet database for its volunteers from myscouting.scouting.org to my.scouting.org.
One of the most important benefits of the new system is that it delegates more control over data to the volunteer corps.
This means that it is important that each unit be aware that it can update information. Once aware, the unit needs to update the information.
To begin the process, you need to know your username and password. It is the same one that you used on myscouting.scouting.org. (If you do not have an account there, you will need to register there first.) If you have never logged in to my.scouting.org, you will have to complete the registration transfer process first. Once you are logged in, continue with the instructions below. (For a slightly older video showing the process, click here.)
District Training: Merit Badge Counselors
Merit Badge Counselors are a unique animal in scouting. They often focus on working with only one troop or crew, yet they are members of District Staff. District Staff is a group that serves all units in the district. So, Merit Badge Counselors are under the auspices of District and not their home units.
The significance of this is that it is District’s job to maintain an adequate roster of trained and qualified Merit Badge Counselors. To do this, we ask each Scout Troop and Venturing Crew to have an adult leader responsible for maintaining the unit’s roster of Merit Badge Counselors. Then that registrar should be in regular contact with the District Merit Badge Counselor Registrar Mike Yates. Mike maintains the official list.
This week I am sending out a request to all merit badge counselors enrolled but who do not have their Merit Badge Counselor Orientation completed. This email will point out the need for training and offer them various dates and times to complete the training. Council offers the orientation the first Thursday of every month at 7:00 p.m. We will offer the training at Roundtable in August, too. Unfortunately that means that it will be offered at exactly the same time.
We are currently planning the upcoming District training schedule. Merit Badge Counselors will be one of our primary points of emphasis.
If you would prefer to offer a Merit Badge Counselor training within your own unit’s meeting schedule, we will be happy to assist you in setting that up. This is often the best way to recruit new counselors: have a parent-training session covering YPT and MBC training in one sitting.
There is no online training for this training yet.
Please review your unit’s Merit Badge Counselor training status at my.scouting.org. Encourage your counselors to be trained. If you expected someone to be a Counselor but they are no longer registered, refer to this article for more information.
Informal Minutes of June 2015 Committee Meeting
I was not appointed as the Committee’s secretary, so I did not take notes with an eye to that thoroughness. Nor was I a participant in each break-out session. With those warnings, I will highlight some of the discussions from the Committee Meeting.
Steve James, the District Chair, opened the meeting and emphasized that District needs to be focused on membership recruiting for August 27, 2015. He said, “We are in All-Hands-On-Deck mode. We need all Packs, Troops, and Crews to be part of the process.” Steve introduced our new District Executive Cornellius “Con” Sullivan. Con rapidly covered the points about our Council-wide Back to School Night that Darin Stendl, Con’s supervisor, had covered at the May Roundtable. Jump to the link for a detailed report. The most important part of the presentation for this report is that the marketing campaign’s call to action for the general public is “Sign up at your local elementary school.” This means that we need personnel at all of our District’s elementary schools.
During his presentation, Con emphasized that we have nearly 43 elementary schools to cover at sign-up night, while we only have 35 chartered units and 18 Cub Scout Packs. There is no way that the Packs can man all of the elementary schools. Con also underlined that there is a Recruiting Rally at Victory Field in downtown Indianapolis on the evening of July 16, 2015. (Literature about the campaign is available on the Council website, too.)
In Darin’s earlier presentation he had emphasized that the call to action does not emphasize Cub Scouts. It is a general call to join Scouting. This means that Troops and Crews could receive new members, too.
Con reported that North Star District’s Cub Packs are encouraged to participate in a District-wide Pack Overnight Campout on October 17-18, 2015 (I will need to review my notes to double check dates) at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Other weekends and campsites are available if Packs have fewer conflicts, but IMS is being pushed for North Star. IMS is close to home and exciting. Race cars and another race themed aspects will be emphasized through the weekend.
After Con’s presentation, there was a general open discussion of some of the logistics. One issue brought up is that customarily Packs collect the initial dues from new families on sign up night. Council then asks for a check from the Pack to Council to cover the new recruits’ BSA dues. This lead to some surprise and frustration. In addition, there was confusion about how much BSA dues the Pack should collect the first night to be considered a completely “registered scout.” Con did not have the answer at that time. These topics would be addressed in more depth later. For the duration of the meeting, the Committee agreed to take the issue under advisement and focus on the immediate mission of recruiting. At the meeting Con promised to clarify a few of these issues as quickly as possible.
This morning, he emailed me some clarifications. Read the rest of this entry »
Recruiting Boys by Camping
One of my regular refrains about recruiting is borrowed. “Get ’em in a tent, and you got ’em.” Boys of all ages want to camp.
When I was a Cubmaster, the most common questions the Cubs asked me was “When is the next campout?!” This was not really a question, so much as a barely contained exclamation on bouncing toes. They were fairly ready to explode. When the answer was anything other than “tomorrow” they nearly burst like a balloon, looking completely deflated.
The same excitement exists at 11 years old. By the time they get to 15 or 16, they still love tents and campfires. Now the emphasis is less on being outside where they can run and now about time spent together around the campfire. Stories, gossip, favored games, personal challenges, and complaints of the day become a greater bonding experience.
Knowing that boys want to camp at all ages, even if the reasons for enjoyment change, what can we do to improve our recruitment?
District Training Status
One of the key duties of District is to encourage units to improve their programs in order to make the scouting more inviting to boys. BSA offers training for each position in order that adults can better understand the duties that they have accepted. Training is required for Rechartering.
Council records training records to be able to find out where training needs to be encouraged.
Among our units district wide, our training rate looks like this (if you are registered for more than one position, you can be trained and untrained simultaneously, appearing on this chart for each):
The pattern is clear. Units in Zionsville and northern Pike Township tend to have adult leader ship rates well over 50%. Moving toward the south and east, training rates plummet to the point where some units have no properly trained leaders.
New Guide to Safe Scouting (2015) Announced
BSA has announced the latest revision to the Guide to Safe Scouting (2015). This important document should be included with your scouts’ medical forms on every outing. It is available in PDF format for easy upload to mobile device (particularly when out of cellular range) or on the web, where it is updated quarterly.
This Guide is more than just the policies and procedures of the BSA. All scouters pay a small fee to BSA every year to contribute to the BSA insurance program. As I understand it, BSA is “self-insured.” This means that the BSA keeps its own pool of funds to pay on insurance claims made by Scouters and Scouts over the course of a year. The Guide to Safe Scouting not only serves to educate Scouters on how to run a safe program, but provides an outline of practices that the insurance will cover. In other words, by outlining “best practices” for scouting activities, the Guide reduces the risk that harm will come to our youth, but if harm does come while using best practices, the insurance covers the claim.
Each year, BSA studies incident reports from units, scout camps, and other sources. BSA identifies activities that have unusually high rates of incidents. The types of incidents are then considered for a re-write in the Guide.
Consequently, scouters who are familiar with each year’s revisions to the Guide to Safe Scouting are more likely to avoid problems areas. Often the issues revised in the Guide do not filter down to revised training as quickly as we would like. The Guide’s revisions then help scouters be current even before they have sat through a class.
How do I Register as a District Scouter?
With the influx of new Adult Applications for District, many people have questions about what a checklist of task are to be properly enrolled for District. Here is as complete a checklist as I can determine, based on my experience in the past 45 days.
- Adult application with all questions answered (according to recently cherry-picked Council Director of Field Services Rob Hemmelgarn, this is a Spring 2015 new point of emphasis for BSA) and both Applicant signature lines executed (i.e., (1) criminal background check authorization and (2) promise to abide by BSA policies and procedures).
- District Position Description. In the blanks on the form, all district positions will need to be written out in longhand. No unit codes apply, so you can ignore the key in the instructions.
- For District Committee positions, the title used should be “District Member-at-Large.” The actual district position is assigned by the District Chairman and not through this application.
- For District Commissioner Service positions, the title should be “District Unit Commissioner” or the specific title accepted. Later adjustments will be handled in a different manner by the District Commissioner.
- Signature of supervising District Officer.
- In the case of applicants for all District Committee positions, the application must be signed by John Wiebke, as 2016 chairman of the District Committee. John will be at the District Committee Meetings on first Thursday of each month and will be signing applications at that time. At other times, you contact John directly to arrange Committee applications processing.
- In the case of all applicants for the District Commissioner Service, Jeff Heck must countersign the application. All Commissioner Service applications should be sent to Jeff directly for him to process.
- District Position Description. In the blanks on the form, all district positions will need to be written out in longhand. No unit codes apply, so you can ignore the key in the instructions.
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