Dear Troop 455 scouts, adult leaders, and parents,
The upcoming March recruiting event at Bert Adams will be led by Anderson Smith Cote and Mr. Anthony and will be a Webelos-oriented event. Webelos from Pack 17 will join us and be exposed to some activities we do in our troop. The April wilderness survival outing will be led by me and Mr. Brooks.
The main thing that I would like to talk about is what differentiates Boy Scouts from other organizations. Youth leadership is an important benefit of what our program offers. Our troop is youth-led. Youth lead means that the scouts oversee the outings and meetings with the support of the adults. Adults are there to support youth and make sure our program is safe. One of the things that make Scouts different from other organizations is that this program allows scouts to fail and enables them to learn from their mistakes and not fail the next time around.
I have seen good youth leadership demonstrated in the PLC and older scouts in the past few months. On outings and at meetings, I am very happy because the older scouts are mentoring younger scouts with skills and advancement extremely well. This is the direction I would like the troop to keep going in. This relationship reinforces the way scouting is supposed work.
In the last 3 years, our troop has recovered from a lack of older youth leaders. That was a time when most of our older scouts left, with the exception of Steven Compton and Lawson Crutcher and few others, and did not support the troop. This caused a void in older youth leaders giving our troop an unbalanced ratio of older to new scouts. Right now, we have reestablished a good number of older scouts, a majority of them being on the PLC. It is key we let the youth leadership do their job and not let adults interfere with this learning process.
Looking forward to seeing you at future meetings and outings.
Sincerely,
Jack Murlin