United Way to redistribute funds (Boy Scouts lose funding)

News Gleaner (suburban Philadelphia) ^ | 7/7/04 | George Tomezsko

[RonF]

You'll have one hell of a time getting the Councils split again. That means adding some overhead (another SE, more DE's, etc.), splitting up the Council camps (do you still have all the camps that came into the Council from the merger?), etc. National will be very resistant to split the council and grant new charters to both.

In our Councils, both had a strong group of volunteers. This caused some friction ("This is the way we did it in WSC/TWC"), but at least there were people willing to work for the kids. I am informed that TWC had some money problems, but that would be mostly due to the income levels in their area. People gave what they had, but they didn't have a lot.

Also, when they merged the Councils, they realigned the districts so that TWC was all one district, and the other two districts split the old WSC territory. The only groups of people working together at the District level who hadn't before were the people in the old WSC district that got divided up between the other two WSC districts. There was some complaining about WSC dominance, but that's died down.

What is causing controversy now is an in-house issue. We have one close-in camp with no waterfront used for weekend camping and training. We have two summer camps, one 3.5 - 4 hours away and one 5.5 hours away. No one wanted to see the camp they and their dad and their kids went to close, so we've been running both. We've tried doing it simultaneously, we've tried doing it with split sessions, but it's just not workable. It wears the staff out. And the soccer moms are complaining about driving their kids 3.5 hours to the closer camp for Cub Scout Adventure Camp (4 days, 3 nights). The pros and cons go on and on. A new proposal for dealing with the camps is coming up, and it's going to be a mess. Lots of emotion will surface, plus the ambitions of people who want to be seen as finally having solved the problems. Although I am usually in line with the professional and volunteer Council staff, if the new proposal that's coming up is what it's rumored to be, I'll oppose it and tell Council that I'll take my kids out of Council for summer camp.

One of the driving forces is that our camping numbers are down. Part of that is the drive to the camps (although we use the one that 5.5 hours away). But for my money, the biggest part of that is that in suburbia, there's just a lot of other things to do in the summer, and parents don't realize that their kids need to be torn away from the tube and the video games and even the organized sports, even if the kids bitch and moan about it. But too many parents these days want to be their kids' friend, not their kids' parent. And they're all entertaining fantasies about their kids earning athletic tuition waivers (I refuse to call them scholarships). God forbid they study enough to earn a real scholarship, though. When you've got kids who are afraid to go on a weekend campout, and are homesick their 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th year in summer camp, there's a problem.

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