How Big Should a Troop Be

Life has been trumping blog lately, but I am finally back on it.
A few weeks ago we had a meeting with the Charter Organization and one of the questions that came up was, "How long do you think it will take you to build up to a full troop?" I really didn't know how to answer that.
We have five boys starting this new troop, thats the 'full' troop. I told them we were hoping to grow by five to ten boys a year, but you never can tell. We also have the fact that we may have some boys join then decide they don't like scouting, or how our troop runs. The numbers could be fluid for awhile. They seemed satisfied with that answer but it got us to thinking.
How big do we really want to grow, and how fast do we want to get there?
As of right now, five is perfect for us. We are all new to Boy Scouts, the boys and the leaders. None of us have any experience past Cubs, and Cub Scouts is nothing like Boy Scouts. Five is a good workable number to learn with.... for now. We discussed this for hours and never really came up with a number that we wanted to shoot for, 20?, 30?, 130? Right now we're comfortable with five !
I think the bigger concern for now is how 'fast' we grow. Three years ago our Cub Pack had 13 boys returning, our open house goal was to recruit ten new boys. With the size of our town that seemed pretty optimistic, I was just hoping to get new boys. When open house was over I had 52 new applications. While this might seem awesome, it was anything but. Not only were we not prepared to take on this many new kids, the church basement where we met was not even close to being big enough to hold everyone in separate dens without disturbing the others. The Bear den now had twenty two boys in it, which we were going to have to split into two different dens. That led to the biggest problem, parent involvement. Where we used to have parents hanging around watching and trying to help when ever they could, now we had a pack of parents that never even got out of there cars. We did eventually get things straightened out with the pack, but it took us a better part of the year, and we lost a few Cubs just from the confusion and lack of organization.
This will not happen with the troop!!!!
If we gain 5,6 10 kids a year we'll be happy, if we don't we'll still be happy.... but wondering why. If by some chance we get 52 new boys next year, we'll be ready for that too. I hope the troop will grow slowly and steadily, but I think the troop will grow at whatever rate is comfortable for the troop.

Either way.... the Troop should be as big as it is !!

Why a new Troop ?

  That was the question I had at the beginning of this journey. When the subject was first raised the answer was simple. One of the churches in town wanted a way to get more involved with the youth in town and they decided that the BSA was the best program for them. Reason enough to start a new troop? Sure, I think any reason to get more kids into a great program is reason enough to do it.

  Reason enough for me to raise my hand and say "ooh, ooh, pick me, pick me" ? Not by a long shot!! Between work, paramedic school, Cub Scouts, a wife and two kids, call me selfish, but I need a better reason than that to add more to an already full plate. I needed a reason that wouldn't have my wife looking across the table, with that look only a wife can pull off, saying "you already don't have time to do the things you're supposed to be getting done". (Never fear, my famous rebuttal to that is "Well I can always quit work")

  So, I started looking for a better reason. I wanted to see if this town could actually support two troops. Council says that the town is big enough for 3-4 troops, but thats council. We have 427 boys registered with the school between grades 6 - 12. The existing troop has 12 scouts, with 9 of those showing up consistently. Of the eight Webelos that we crossed over last February only one is still with the troop. By those numbers I would say that the town could without a doubt support another troop.

   I have the Kool-Aid house in our neighborhood. All the kids in the neighborhood hang out in my yard, playing any number of games or just tormenting each other....or me. I decided to go out one day and ask some of the older kids what they thought about scouts. Their answers were brutally honest, from "they're to geeky" to "its boring", "they don't do anything", and my favorite "ummm there's no girls".

   My next stop, the existing Troop. Even though they and our Cub Pack charter through the same church, there is almost no contact between the two groups. About the only time we see each other is Scout Sunday, and Crossover. I went down one night before their meeting and told the Scout Master that we were tossing around the idea of starting another troop, and wanted to know his feelings on it before he heard it somewhere else.

He proceeded to explain to me that there wasn't enough interest to support two troops. He then went on to say we didn't have enough experience to run a successful troop, much less start one from the ground up. (I almost gave him a point on that one) He said he'd been the scout master for 18 years and the he can barely hit 50% retention with the first years. I was just about to tell him that maybe his program needs a little work if his retention was that bad, but I never got a chance. At that point he decided that he'd talked about it enough. He came straight out with "Do what you want. You'll never make it, because I have the feeder pack".

   See.....Now I'm Mad...Maybe its just me, but you will NOT call my kids your feeder pack!

   Very calmly I said " Really.... Iv'e had these kids for four years, if it comes down to it, who do you really think they're going to choose to go with? For that matter, I can start a new Cub Pack easier than I can a new Troop, and I guarantee every leader and every kid in this pack will come over to the new Pack."

  That night I called Matt and asked him what he thought about starting a new Boy Scout Troop, and we've been working on it ever since.

 Looking back on it, I liked the idea of a new challenge. I also knew I wanted a Troop for my kid to be in. One that would teach him more than how to set a tent in his back yard. A Troop where right or wrong, the scouts made the decisions and learned from the accomplishments as well as the mistakes. But, I think for that first week or so ... it was mostly out of spite, not only for being told we couldn't do it, but the way I was told we couldn't do it. Before I even talked to him I had already made up my mind to get this fire started, that night just fanned the flames a little hotter. 

   Why a new Troop?

    For our Kids !

Strip away all the council politics, troop competition, and parent problems, all thats left is to help these kids to become independent, responsible, morally correct adults. If you can do that, even if for only one kid, then it was all worth doing!

A new beginning

Well, this is the first post for this blog, actually my first post for any blog. I have no idea what I'm doing so it will not only document the start of our new troop....but hopefully will improve my blogging skills at the same time. (We can only hope)

I have been the Committee Chair for our Cub Pack for the last 4 years, my son right now is a first year Webelos. I started out as a Tiger Den leader, but that didn't last long. As recharter time rolled around some guy I'd never met showed up at one of our meetings, told us he was the District Director and proceeded to tell us if we didn't change some things the pack would not be able to recharter. So, long story short.... we were volun-told to take over the pack and straighten it out or find another pack to meet with.

Four years later, having learned a lot about Cub Scouts and how council works, we've grown from 13 to over 60 scouts. Which brings us to the big question, "We want a new Boy Scout Troop. Can you start one up?"
I tried to explain that I know Cub Scouts.... Cub Scouts are not Boy Scouts....I know nothing about how the  Boy Scout program runs....NOTHING! Two totally different animals. And, while I love the program and know the ins and outs of council.....I'm not a good front man... I would be a terrible Scout Master! These people will not accept no as an answer. About a week later I get a call from the DE wanting to sit down and talk. Figuring we did something else council didn't like, I went to the meeting. Not only did we not do anything wrong... He said he's had calls about a new troop and they pointed at me and that he'd like to add his finger to the pointin'.

So... We're starting a new Troop. I can't be the Scout Master so there was only one logical choice.. Matt!
He is our newly appointed Cub Master. He's great with the kids, and runs the local 5 star mentoring program.
When I asked him what he thought about starting up a new troop he was all for it as long as we did things different from the way the other troop operates. Like me, he also had one major problem... Boy Scouts are different than Cub Scouts. Together we know absolutely nothing about running a Boy Scout Troop!

After several meetings with council, the help of four other local Scout Masters, and a lot of lurking on the PTC Media web site (thanks Jerry, Steve, Shawn, and many people on the forums), we've come up with a battle plan. Its taken us a little over half the year, but we finally got here.

We presented our plan to the people that brought this whole thing about in the first place, and they not only loved it, but argued about who gets to charter it. They wanted it chartered through the Methodist Church, while at the same time they thought it would be great going through the American Legion. (Most of them being members of both).

We are using the old troop numbers, Troop 548 (which went under back in the late 70's), and we are chartering through the American Legion AND the Methodist Church.

Whats left to be seen is whether the kids or us will learn more !!!!