Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
I have two Bear Scouts who completed their application, appeared in Scoutbook but without any parent connected to their profiles. The two children are:
SB USER ID 12596794
BSA #14430838
SB USER ID 12596798
BSA #14430889
The parent who should be linked is the mother, who was on the youth application:
Parent: BSA #: 14430834
The two youth currently have no parents connected to their profile in Scoutbook. When I search for the mother in Scoutbook > Profile > Add Connection, no records are returned.
Can you help fix this problem so that I can connect this parent to her two children in Scoutbook?
There is a known issue with search in Scoutbook. The developers are aware and working on a fix. Until it is fixed, the best solution is for parents to login to Scoutbook with their my.scouting.org ID and password then navigate to Administration → My Account → My Connections and click Connect to your Scout as Parent/Guardian near the top of the screen.
The parent will be asked for the Scout’s BSA Member ID, last name, and date of birth.
Would you provide a link to the known issue with Search in Scoutbook? I have noticed in the past few months that Search has returned zero results on people whom I know exist in the system. It would be good to know the extent of the problem so that our unit can communicate to our parents.
Also, we have parents who just can’t/won’t login to Scoutbook. The consequence is that the parent does not get connected to their Scout in Scoutbook and then they miss all the emails that we send. We have compensated for the issue in the past by manually entering the parent, but Sam Houston Council has advised against this because that creates a duplicate record which they cannot merge with the original one.
However, the consequence of a parent not receiving important information vs. Council having to deal with duplicate accounts (not really my problem) usually wins out. I would like a third opinion on how to handle this scenario until the bug gets solved. Thank you.
Sorry, I’m confused. How do I confirm that a parent is in Scoutbook and is receiving emails from our unit if they are not connected to a child in Scoutbook? What screen would that be? The parent does not appear in the Pack Roster or in the my.scouting.org unit roster either. I only know the parent’s BSA number because Council shared a screenshot with me from their system.
@ShirleyHou Jacob added a connection on the Scout’s Connections page.
If you go to the Scout’s Connections page, scroll down until you find the name of the adult, then click on it. The you can change the connection type to parent / guardian.
EUREKA! I found the parent in the Connections page and changed the type to Parent.
Thank you so much, team! I work in corporate IT myself so I know a bit about how much work it is to keep a system going. Thank you for your service.
Before I close out the thread, would someone tell me if this error happened because of a glitch, user error, or something else? Normally youth show up with parents who are automatically connected. If I know the root cause, I can prevent this from happening again.
