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 a Scout who has earned some merit badges and they are listed as complete and approved. Unfortunately, because the Mom checked off individual boxes before it was complete, they are stuck in my needs approval list. I thought that marking the merit badge complete would have deleted them. Now it looks like he needs to still complete those merit badges even though he was already earned them. How can I delete what she entered? This will keep happening every time he earns a badge and I don’t want to keep having to do the work twice.
Side note: Our troop has asked parents to not enter items on Scoutbook right now because there are so many bugs. The last Court of Honor was a mess to figure out because of discrepancies. We don’t need the extra confusion of several people entering stuff. Just the leaders are entering things for now. Thanks in advance for any tips!
What’s wrong with marking the individual components Leader Approved? It won’t alter the approval status of the overall badge, nor the date the badge was completed. That’s likely the easiest way to remove these items from the Needs Approval list. Approving the overall badge does not, as you already discovered, automatically approve the underlying elements. I don’t know why, specifically, but I do know that this is the way the system has behaved for as long as I’ve been using Scoutbook.
It seems fairly inefficient to do this. That said, in principle you can go to each requirement individually, remove the date completed and save, and the completion for the requirement should disappear.
There is no programmatic method to prevent parents or scouts who are connected to their accounts from marking things Completed. The BSA decided to assign all parents irrevocable Full Control permissions, which under the Scoutbook permissions structure includes the ability to mark items as Completed (or to Leader Approve them if the parent is also a leader). The only way to address this decision by the BSA is a combination of unit-level policy and education.
Based on prior posts in these discussion groups, it appears that the official position is that marking an item as Completed is analogous to “ready for testing/review”. I don’t believe that the nomenclature is well chosen for that purpose, and have suggested that it be changed to reflect the intended use. In addition, it has been recommended that marking a rank, merit badge or award as Completed should not cause that item to appear in the scout’s “brag wall” on their dashboard, if the intent of Completed is merely to indicate the scout is ready to be tested on something.
I should also add that this Scout now has an award that lists the parent as the leader who approved it, although she is not a leader and Scoutbook does not even show that she would have this permission! It’s just bizarre. I tried to override it and save it with my name, but it still shows her. Better to limit access until Scoutbook behaves better.
The date that the MB was completed (i.e. counselor dated blue card) was 7/6/19, which was manually entered. On the 20th of August, our Advancement Chair marked the MB as Completed and Leader Approved because she had the signed blue card in hand. Those are just tracking dates that can be used to audit who marked the requirement/award/badge in what status on what date. Then, after it was actually presented to my son, the AC marked it as Awarded.
I found another parent listed like that. Neither of them are listed as adults with our troop. We also have old leaders that are not on our roster but still show that connection. They are pending because they didn’t join Scoutbook so those I don’t worry about as much.
Found where to update! It worked! She is no longer listed as Edit Advancement under his name. It is still showing she can edit like in that last picture, though.
Just some additional clarification on Wendy’s last post.
Typically parents who are not leaders in a unit cannot approve any advancement. Due to COVID-19, there is a temporary waiver in place for Cub Scouts that allows parents to approve advancement. Scoutbook has been updated to permit this approval for Cub Scouts only.
There’s also a “clear old connections” option if you go to the scout’s profile and then their connections list. I had a few scouts with old scout leaders still connected and showing advancement permissions, even though they didn’t show up in my connection manager. I’ve gotten into the habit of double checking and clearing them a few times a year.
