When it comes to…

I have decided that when it comes to Cub Scouts, and Scouts too to some degree, people in the Church do things because they just do them. They act often without much predicated thought put into it. I will focus on Cub Scouts in this post as that is where most of my clout hangs in my scouting volunteerism, but the ideas I am about to lay out here apply across the board to some degree or another.

My thinking here is that the mentality simply needs to change. We get too relaxed and comfortable in our efforts to volunteer that we forget that there is a “best job” that needs to be done. It is the Cub Scout motto to “do your best.” We teach the boys that from the time they get their very first Cub Scout book. They have to regurgitate that back to a leader to earner their Bobcat Rank before they can do anything else as far as rank advancement. The Cub Scouts learn it. They even do a good job with applying it. The problem I have is, what good is it when we ourselves, as leaders, are not practicing what we teach?

The getting too relaxed and comfortable in our efforts reaches across several areas of Cub Scouting:

  1. Training
  2. Current manuals and documentation
  3. Following the guidelines
  4. Following the rules
  5. Adequate orientation

I have come up against a lot of resistance as the Cub Scout Pack Trainer with individuals over the years who do not want to get trained. They simply drag their heals all the way. I understand, the training is not particularly fun. What I do not understand is that now that we do not need to attend an in person classroom training session, people still cannot make time for it. It does not take that long to do. The online training is actually a bit more thorough in my experience as I have done both for all of my positions. I retook it online to refresh my memory when I was recently asked to be a Den Leader. It had been a couple of years since I happened to sit through the Den Leader training in the classroom. There are disadvantages to the online training courses, but that is where your Pack/Troop Trainers come in and the District/Council people are always willing help answer questions. You are never alone in Scouting.

The fact remains that there is this elephant in the room and it is not going to go away. Training is required. Individuals agree to be leaders in the Scouting organization in the church, but they somehow feel that they do not have to do the training. Some of them flat out refuse to do the training. They somehow feel that their status as a Church member exempts them from what are Boy Scouts of America rules. I can assure you that it does not.

I am not the one extending these “callings” obviously, but I am the one in the Cub Scouts that gets to clean up the “volunteer” unwillingness train wreck. I have heard a lot of excuses over the years from both Boy Scout and Cub Scout leaders. Here is the best part, none of these excuses have any significance to me as a parent. As a parent I do not care what your excuse is, my child is being directly impacted by your lack of care. Quit making excuses and think about the children and “do your best” for them. This is not about you. This is about them.

You may be a volunteer, but so are the majority of the other Scout leaders in the Boy Scouts of America. The leaders in Packs all over the country inside and outside of the Church are volunteers. We are all in this together. Suck it up and do what is required. You agreed to do whatever is required when you accepted (volunteered) to do this. You could have said, “no.” Your acceptance was not a conditional acceptance. It was an “I agree to do my best.” Guess what, you best is not your best unless you are fully trained. Every boy deserves a fully trained leader. That starts with you.

One of my biggest pet peeves over the past few years has been hearing, “This is not my life. There are people that make this their life and I am not going to do that.” You know what, I agree with them entirely. This is not my life. I am not defined by Cub Scouting or even Scouting for that matter. It is not who I am or what I am or even who I am going to be. It is, however, what I am volunteering to do and what my children are involved in it. It is what we choose to do as a family. If you are a volunteer leader, it may not be your life but it is your responsibility. Make every effort to “do your best.” Do not cheat yourself by making excuses and do not cheat the boys by not following through on the things they are entitled to in the program. If you are a volunteer in the Scouting program, it is your responsibility to make sure you are the best volunteer the Scouting program has seen. You owe it to each of the boys in the program. If you cannot do that, then let someone else take your place. Do not allow the train wreck to continue.

Let me just emphasize that the training is not hard. It will not embarrass you. It is not team building exercises. It is simple. If you are a Cub Scout leader, as of this post (Februar 7, 2013), your only requirements for being fully trained is Youth Protection Training (YPT) and Leader Specific Training. You have to have YPT to register as a leader and before you can meet with the boys. Your Leader Specific Training is specific to your position you are about to take on and a little general information about how the Pack and Scouting functions. Why would you not want to complete that before walking in the door to meet with the boys?

If we do the training, some of the other things on my list can be avoided or minimized to some degree. The training is so important. It is so simple to do but it is so important in the smooth function of the Pack and Dens. It is so important in making everything run smoothly.

The next thing on my list is making sure that every leader has current manuals and documentation. Notice I said every leader? That is right, every single leader. That includes your pack committee members, your committee chair, your cub master, and your den leaders. These people are vital to the function and well being of your Pack and Dens. These people must have every tool at their disposal that is current. They may not need to have every manual, but they need to have the manual that is relevant to them. They need to know and understand the program that they are volunteering in.

The policies for Cub Scouts as far as the program delivery method changed in 2010. This change meant there were new leader manuals. There are multiple manuals that relate to the various aspects of Cub Scouting.

It was believed that because the manuals were binder based and had individual sections in them that fewer could be purchased and they could be divided between the leaders. It was a great thought, in theory. Every single leader needs one section of the manual. The other sections of the manuals are useful to have if you have incidents where you might have joint gatherings and field trips between Dens. For example a trip to the library. Knowing that each group has something they need to accomplish at the library is good to know. You can only do this if you have something to refer to.

My opinion is, do not cut corners and make sure every single leader has a complete manual. As soon as leaders turn over or change, make sure that your new leaders have manuals. Do not assume that people will turn over their old manuals or that the old manuals are still good. Make sure that all manuals are up to date and current. Make sure that your new volunteer leaders have every tool at their disposal.

If you are a leader, make sure you have a manual that is current. It is your responsibility that you have current materials to work with. If you have a manual that is 10 years old, make sure that there is not a more current manual available. Things change in 10 years. Rules, policies, and guidelines change. Stay up to date.

It is also your responsibility to make sure that you use those materials. If you have the manuals and you never open them up and, heaven forbid, actually read them it does you no good to have them. Obtain them. Open them. Read them. Apply the information found within the pages. Pretty simple. Repeat if the manuals are updated. Not hard.

I am going to touch on the next two areas together. First I think that it is important to address where these two are the same and where these are different. This is where I think we get ourselves in trouble in the Church and the general mentality that follows. We need to ask ourselves that next few questions. What is a guideline? What is a rule? Are they different? Are they really the same? What are the hard fast rules and what are just guidelines that we can interpret according to our situations?

According to the dictionary, a guideline is:

guideline (noun):
1. any guide or indication of a future course of action
2. a principle put forward to set standards or determine a course of action

On the other hand, according to the dictionary, a rule is:

rule (noun):
1. the customary or normal circumstance, occurrence, manner, practice, quality, etc
2. a principle or regulation governing conduct, action, procedure, arrangement, etc

As you can see, there are some distinct differences between the two. What are they? They are subtle. A rule is a permanent condition and a guideline is a more temporary one. What do I mean? A rule is the normal condition that you live under all the time. It is what is always expected all the time. A guideline, on the other hand is something that is put forth to establish expectations for future courses of actions or standards. They are expectations. With a rule, it is typically hard and fast. With a guideline, being an expectation, there is wiggle room.

That is where I think that we get into trouble in our thinking in the church, we view everything as a guideline and nothing as a rule. We see training as a guideline and a very loose one at that. We see some of the guidelines as mere suggestions. Then we view the rules as nothing more as guidelines. I might seem harsh here, but it happens more than many people want to admit to. There are things that are non-negotiable and yet we go year after year and activity after activity without things being done and without things being done correctly because no one took the time to stop and take pause. Today, I am taking pause. I am getting this off my chest. I am trying to figure out in my head how I am going to approach this so I am no longer one of those people that falls silently into the same broken mold. I do not want to continue to add to the same train wreck. I want to be one that helps fix it even if people do not see immediately that it needs to be fixed. Honestly, a lot of people do not understand that things are broken or that the train is falling off the track.

I think that it is important that we quit accepting that things are always going to be okay and accept that things sometimes happen that are not okay. Bad things happen to good people. The news is filled with instances where good people have been impacted by bad things. The problems in the Scouting program are again instances were good people are impacted by bad things. Some of these instances could have been avoided entirely if people had been proactive instead of reactive. That is my stance and my opinion. It is truly sad that we have to pass reactive judgement on individuals even within the Church, but people lie. Good people still are not perfect.

When it comes to Scouting, the most important thing is the protection of the boys. Their safety should be first and foremost. We should not make assumptions that everyone is a child molester or anything broad like that, but we cannot assume that someone is not that. This is why the Scouting program has such hard and fast rules for youth protection. It is required. It is not negotiable. Incidentally, similar training is required for other youth programs that are not Scouting. It is universal training and no longer unique to the Scouts. This is an universal problem being addressed by an universal rule.

The hard and fast rule in Scouting is that all contact leaders in the program must be fully-trained. Oh boy, there we came full circle back to the big elephant in the room again. I am sorry, I did not want to bring him back up again, but you see, he never went away. If you are not a direct contact leader, you still need to be fully-trained as well but at least here in the Council we are in you get a tiny amount of slack. That will change and the goal is still 100% trained for everyone across the board. Immediately before you ever meet with the boys you are supposed to have YPT. To force this issue, they require that to be completed with registration. However, that is not enough. That registration should be completed and turned in before that leader ever meets with the boys. There is a proper order and process. This is for your protection. This is for the boys’ protection.

That is what it clearly states and you agreed to when you volunteered to do this. You just made yourself out to be not so “honest” if you are not following the rules. This is not hard. Accept your “calling.” Fill out and submit your Adult Application that same day. Go home and immediately do your YPT training and email a copy of your YPT certificate to the person responsible for submitting the application to the Council. You’re done before the ink has dried on the paper and Council has received and processed the paperwork on Monday morning. The key is to get the person who is responsible for submitting the application to do their job and do it immediately like it supposed to be.

Now, you are not done so do not relax too much. You need do your Leader Specific Training. It will take you about an hour. I told you it would not take you very long. If you are diligent, you can get it done in an hour. Set aside one hour in the week between now and the first meeting and get it done. You are officially trained. You can officially meet with the boys and you have your elephant escorted from the room. Well almost. Depending on what your volunteer position is, you might need to complete one more piece of training in the next few months. Notice I said few, not year. You do not have a year. You have approximately 3 months. You need to step on it. If you are in certain positions you also need to complete some Outdoor Training that is specific to which unit of Scouting you are in. That will take you a little bit more time. You can handle this. You agreed to it when you accepted the volunteer position. You will make it work. If you cannot, you need to figure out how to or let someone else take your place because this is what the job entails. This is not optional. The Church has said it is not optional. Get it? Got it? Good.

The final point I want to touch on is that of adequate orientation and how important it is. So often in the Church we turn over new leaders and that is all that happens. One leader leaves a position and they are done and a new one comes in and they start over. We essentially have to put a new wheel on the cart by recreating the wheel. There is no hand-over of information, materials, or supplies bought with unit budget, etc. When you are talking about things like activities that have been done, activities that have been planned or talked about, or supplies that have been purchased for said activities this might be important especially with the limited budgets that many of the Church units operate under. This is especially important when you are talking about ranking information of the boys involved or special circumstances. No one should ever be so done that they walk away without passing on their wealth of knowledge to the next volunteer in their position. We are all volunteers. We all have to work together to keep the wheel from going flat. You do not need to hand over every single little thing you have ever done, but be helpful. Compile a list of helpful information. Include informartion such as: how many camp-outs did they do, what where the dates, who attended; how many service projects did you do, what were the dates, hours done, what did you do, who attended, and how did the boys react; which merit badges have your worked on, which ones are still being worked on, and which ones are planned; etc. The list should include anything that would useful to the new leader to help them plan. You should certainly pass on the Annual Plan you already have. If any supplies were bought with the Unit Funds, pass them along. They were not yours they were the Units anyway.

When new leaders come in, it should not be assumed that they will know what to do. They should be oriented. All appropriate leaders should have a meeting to help orientate that new leader. This should be done immediately. Scouting and Cub Scouting is an overwhelming calling. There is a lot to do. There is a lot to learn. There is a lot to take in. There is so much information out there. Some of it is out of date but still available. Some of it is out of date but still usable if adjusted to the new guidelines. So please make no assumptions that a new leader will know what they are doing. They will feel clumsy and lost for a few meetings before they have firm footing. Established leaders should help them gain that footing as quickly as possible by holding new leader meetings. Leaders should meet together often to help stay on the same page with what is going on.

The biggest thing is that if you do your part and “do your best” then others can do their part and do their best. The Scouting program works when everyone pulls their own weight. No one person can do it themselves. The boys are supposed to be leading a lot of it, but there is a lot that goes on in the background that the boys do not know happens to make it a smooth and well oiled machine on the front end. It only works that like when people quit making excuses and they carry their own weight. Everyone has to do their part. When someone does not keep track of which boy is advancing, the boys quit progressing properly. When someone does not keep track of training, the leaders quit progressing toward their training goal. When a leader does not know what they are supposed to be doing, they do not do it. The list can go on and on.

(Disclaimer: This opinions are mine. They are not those of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or the Boy Scouts of America. I speak for myself and these are my opinions on things through my own observation after reading and personal experiences.)

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