Scoutmaster Musings

A local youth camp had some oak trees taken down this spring and cut to firewood lengths. At our troop committee meeting on Monday, a request to have the wood split and stacked before their first week of camp was presented. First week of camp starts this coming Monday - not a lot of time to organize and do the task.
I volunteered to find out what scouts would help and then determine if we could help out or not. Before I tell you what I did, how do you think this 'should have' been done? How should I have found out which scouts were available and then contact the camp to let them know if we could do the work?

Well, I was in a very tight time crunch. I had to get this done in two days so we could do the work on Thursday. I thought I would use the patrols like a phone tree. I sent an email to all patrol leaders telling them about the work to be done and asking them to get a list of available scouts in their patrol back to me. I then called each patrol leader to let them know the email was in their mailbox. I wound up leaving messages for most scouts.

It worked great. By Wednesday noon, I had gotten word back from all eight patrols and we had nine scouts and two adults that would be doing the job.

But, I overstepped my role in the troop. I should have contacted the Senior Patrol Leader directly and discussed the project with him. If he felt the troop should and could do it, then he should have contacted the patrol leaders. The results would have been the same, but their would have been more more scout leadership going on instead of an adult running the show.

I'm still learning. In a crunch, I have to take extra time in deciding what scouts can do instead of me or other adults. Adults are needed to drive and ensure safety - pretty much everything else can be done by scouts, sometimes with adult guidance. Next time, I plan to do a better job.

The wood splitting went great. The two adults split and the scouts stacked about 3/4 cord of wood. We didn't finish the job in our available time, but we worked hard and made a good dent in the task. More scouts would not have helped since the wood splitter was the bottleneck.

Scout On