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.
When checking on OA eligibility and Camping merit badge camping nights, it would be ideal to have a way to designate that a campout is a tenting campout for camping MB. The other option would be to have a separate event type for cabin campouts. The hope is to generate a report that shows each Scout’s camping nights within the last 2 years (OA) and total camping nights with Camping MB rules.
In our old system, we had two separate campout event types to allow us to programmatically calculate OA eligibility camping nights or camping merit badge camping nights. This allowed us to have fields for “Camping MB Camping Nights” and “OA Camping Nights” on each Scout’s profile page. This made OA elections much less time consuming. As it is, I’ll have to grab the physical Scout books for every youth member in the troop, which seems onerous.
I have come to the conclusion that life is better if the scout records his/her camping nights. At SM conferences, I ask them to show me the logs in their book and get them to catch them up then and there. I’m really quite finished thinking we leaders need to be bogged down with these minutiae.
That’s what we’ve been doing. I’m the main SB-dude in our Troop; I tell the Scouts to come see me when they get something signed off, and I touch base with the other leaders about camping attendance. Otherwise, I try to grab a couple handbooks every few weeks to make sure what’s in Scoutbook matches what’s in their physical handbooks.
Silver linings, though, I have to say that the new COVID contract tracking requirements from our Council and the new activity logs have made a huge improvement for us for keeping up with activities.
