Thank you. We seem to be in the minority but our experience is that they stay very separate, to the point of making extra work for camp staff. Others talk about what great scouters they are. I don’t know if their program even follows the guidelines that ours do but there appears to be no oversight from council about what they do. One difference pointed out by another non-Mormon scout family in Utah was that they don’t adhere to the two-deep rule of supervision.
Me again,
If they aren’t following the 2 deep leadership principle, then they should be warned about that by Council. If Council is run by predominantly LDS, then they need to elevate the issue to Region. That is absolutely unacceptable.
Cheers,
SZ
We seem to be in the minority but our experience is that they stay very separate, to the point of making extra work for camp staff.
I appreciate what you are saying. I was just putting in some positives, because I tire of reading all the negatives.
Because LDS units are integrated into the overall church program, there are problems. In our area, CA, they wanted the boys back to go to church on Sunday. So they left Camporees Saturday night. The Camporees officially ended Sunday night. The officials were often generous enough to have award ceremonies on Saturday night so the LDS could participate.
The Church growth was rapid in CA, so the LDS units were often new and inexperienced. The LDS boys wouldn’t win many awards at Camporees and got discouraged. So they (with the help of the district) had more district training and a pre-Camporee for the LDS. Gradually the LDS brought there skills up and began to compete well. But I am sure that extra Camporee was easy to misunderstand and get offended by. As far as I could tell, there was always a good working relationship between the locals and the district. It requires good support for the district, however.
In church organizations, there is a continual turnover in assignments. Two years might be a typical time for a typical assignment. That is not good enough for Scouting. In our area, however, some individuals became identified as good Scouting people and get that assignment almost permanently, sometimes as an added assignment in addition to something else. That works better.
In some ways, the LDS units have been out front. The LDS started a Vanguard program in 1928, and the BSA patterned the Explorer program after this in 1933. The Varsity program was started jointly by LDS units with BSA participation. It was finally adopted by the full BSA in 1983.
So there has been accommodation and give and take along the way.