I am confident you invested greatly in the program in good faith.
It's hard to learn of problems with something we deeply invested in. I've been there. It took me years to work through this struggle and come to these positions.
But I find there's an excellent case that BSA can do much better. And it must, or it's going to collapse within 10 years.
The good thing is "do better" is right in front of us. It means catching up with international peers, adopting lessons learned from and norms in our own society, and eliminating irrational deviations from longstanding notions of what Scouting is.
Today's reality is that 90% of BSA's high schoolers are stuck in its middle-school program. They aren't getting age-level programming.
BSA has never strongly denied this. Instead, it acts as if handing the reins of its middle-school program to high schoolers constitutes age-level programming for high schoolers. It does not.
It even further muddies the water, recommending mixed-age patrols. Yes, for real, your freshly crossed-over 10 year old is supposed to be in the same patrol as a 17 yo high-school senior. That is weird. But BSA thinks it's appropriate.
To be clear, I think cross-age-band interactions can have value, but they must be optional, and they must never displace age-level programming. I have separately proposed a new position called Guide. It is a position of responsibility where any youth may elect to help with any younger program. This is a service role, not supervision, not displacing younger youth from owning their program. This replaces Den Chief, Instructor, Junior Asst. Scoutmaster, and Troop Guide.
But importantly, and to reemphasize, Guide must be OPTIONAL. Scouting in no way depends on cross-age-band interactions. They are a value add when they work well. But the BSA view on these interactions resembles a fetish and lacks a rational basis.
The spring membership numbers reveal this. Mid-spring is when the lapsed members from the prior year finally get dropped. Spring 2020 was before the pandemic had any real effect on membership (main recruiting is in the fall), so that is when LDS's withdrawal became apparent.
Then spring 2021 is when we see drops and poor recruiting during the pandemic.
Since then, membership has been largely flat, possibly declining modestly (hard to read precisely).
> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually…
Fellow Scouter here. Lots of Scout units in the USA have cell phone bans. That’s such an obsolete policy. We need to help the Scouts model good choices, and that doesn’t happen when decision opportunities are removed.
Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.
Texas is a big state. It’s lazy journalism to generalize the state as droughty, which is implied by that sentence.
Lake Texoma has been hovering by the “full” mark pretty consistently for over 55 years. Recently, its water level has significantly declined to—wait for it—100% full!
If you monitor water maps, the east half of Texas’s water supplies don’t often get far outside of “full”.
Let me know how that goes.