How long does an unapproved council merit badge counselor stay listed in Scoutbook?
Example 1: MBC changed to expired?
Example 2: MBC is not renewed at recharter?
For registration expiration, the sync process allows for a lapse period, usually 60 days. So expiration + 1 days will still be listed. Expiration + 61 days with no renewal will get delisted.
If YPT is expired on the counselor, they are delisted immediately regardless of registration status. Ed later clarified that in this situation, the counselor is hidden in search but not disconnected.
If merit badge approval is adjusted, that is also immediate.
I presume there are methods to immediately delist someone, but if not, to get someone to not show on Scoutbook immediately, expiring the position won’t do it due to the lapse period, but they can be unapproved from all merit badges and that’d be immediate.
By immediate, I mean 24-48 hours because of overnight sync processes.
1 Like
I believe that if the MBC Registration is manually expired by the council (i.e. before recharter), the ScoutBook registration is expired on the next update to ScoutBook (usually overnight.)
That is the behavior I have seen when we have had to remove a counselor.
Greg
MBCs that have YPT expire are not removed from Scoutbook. They are hidden in the MB Counselor search results but their connections remain in place and they can still approve MBs. The day after they complete YPT, the MBC will appear in the MB Counselor search results again.
When an MBC drops a MB, MBC connections for that badge are removed.
When an MBC position is ended, all MBC connections between the MBC and Scout are removed.
1 Like
I’m wandering a bit off topic here, but I wanted to ask a related question, and thought it might be germane to this discussion.
Is there any recommendation for how MBCs can “archive” the scouts with whom they are working for when this occurs? We’ve had a couple of “unintentional expirations” of MBCs (e.g. through incomplete MBC list uploads) that have broken connections, and required counselors to reconnect to all of the scouts again. Other than keeping a separate offline list of the scouts, their units, and the unit contact so we can ask to be reconnected, I haven’t found a good way to prepare for this. When everything was on blue cards, I used to keep an Excel sheet with names, units, parent contacts, and tracking of the requirements in case a scout lost their card (and so I knew how many scouts I was counseling and didn’t overcommit too badly). I had stopped because I was now almost exclusively using Scoutbook for tracking all of these.
It happened en masse recently for a number of counselors (including me) who are also scouters in our troop, apparently due to an incomplete MBC upload file. Some of us have gotten re-added, but the council staff are juggling a lot of chainsaws, so getting the MBCs back into the list has been going in fits-and-starts as folks discover that they were dropped and are able to reach out to council about it. I’m not sure how many folks outside our troop were impacted.
Again, wandering further off topic, but maybe, as a Scoutbook feature, MBCs have a lapsed MBC registration, but continue to be registered as scouters in another role, can retain their MBC connections in the background (similar to YPT-lapsed counselors) for some grace period, so we can reach out to council to get the error corrected, without having to reconnect everyone? I’m not sure what an appropriate grace period might be, and I don’t know that it will be relevant once councils go away from using upload files and store the information directly in ScoutNet/its successor. Just a thought to make things more smooth for scouts and counselors in the interim by minimizing impacts from data entry errors.
This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
