Summer camp and how to entice older scouts to participate in the summer camp experience.
- Super high adventure base in association with your good friends at NASA
Transcript:
One of the problems with summer camp for scouts that have gone a few times is the lack of merit badge choices.
Scouts that attend camp every year can get about 3 years into it without hitting this problem. The first year, everything is new. They are immersed in a new scouting program to show them how everything works and the camp, and then a couple of merit badges.
Second year they hit the ground running and take the core basics. They will take swimming and first aid and usually archery among the badges offered.
By the third year they have filled in their scheduled with things that are interesting and probably a couple of badges that are not ideal.
This brings us to year four. If they start the program at 11, they are about 14 when they hit this roadblock. Scout camp isn’t as cool as it once was. They’ve been to the circus and they’ve seen the elephants and pretty darn tired of the clowns.
Camps have seen this problem and tried to adjust. Our own home camp of Onterora offers a rotating schedule of over 100 badges and has brought in some high adventure items including ATVs and climbing walls.
In my troop we go to two camps, Onteora, our home camp in Upstate New York and Goose Pond, which is in the Pokanoes in Pennsylvania.
In fact, this dual camping experience is part of our problem, as enthusiastic scouts start by taking advantage of both camps, and burn through merit badges at an alarming rate, reaching the threshold a year earlier.
By doing this it starts to chip away at our youth leadership in camp. Instead of having 14-15 year olds running the summer camp patrols you start to see 12-year olds running the patrols, which is a lot to ask of younger scouts.
There are choices however. With the offerings at some of these camps you can sell a high adventure week to the older scouts filled with ATVs, whitewater rafting and mountain biking, and craft it in such a way that all the boys stay together for all the adventures. But it would require someone to put together an enticing program to sell.
Another option is to simply try out a new camp. This option would give all the scouts a fresh camp to explore, but if you are like us, and have a site you go back to every year it may mean loosing your coveted space, unless you can ask around to other similar sized troops and simply flip reservations for the year, as most troops go to different places.
Take what you like and leave the rest, and as we say in Woodbadge, feedback is a gift, leave yours below in the comments, with the hope we can all learn together.
I’m Scoutmaster Dave, and this was Summer Camp for advanced scouts.
